Anaplan is a transformative way to see, plan, and run your business. Using its proprietary Hyperblock™ technology, Anaplan lets you contextualize real-time performance, and forecast future outcomes for faster, confident decisions. Anaplan enables connected strategy and planning across your enterprise to move your business forward. Based in San Francisco, Anaplan has over 200 partners and more than 2,000 customers worldwide.
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Infor M3
Score 6.6 out of 10
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Infor M3 is designed for medium to large global manufacturers, distributors, and after-sales service providers—delivering flexibility to manage mixed-mode and complex value chains. M3 is designed with industry-specific functionality and flexible deployment options, and presents a multi-company, multi-country, and multi-site enterprise resource planning (ERP) cloud solution platform.
M3 was originally developed by Intentia, which merged with Lawson (2005), and which in turn was acquired by…
Anaplan revolutionizes the planning process by standardizing it, creating transparency in data, particularly in showcasing results to the management team. By replacing Excel-centric planning methods, Anaplan not only opens the door to handling larger datasets but also enables a more intricate level of data granularity at an accelerated pace. What sets it apart is its capacity to facilitate a seamless collaboration within a cross-functional model, accommodating diverse departments and business functions in a dynamic, real-time environment.
Manufacturing: Infor M3 is designed specifically for manufacturers and provides robust production planning and supply chain management features. The software can help optimize production processes, improve inventory management, and automate purchasing and order fulfillment.Distribution: Infor M3 offers advanced supply chain management capabilities, including inventory management and order tracking, making it an ideal solution for distribution companies.Large Organizations: Infor M3 is a scalable solution that can accommodate the needs of large organizations with complex supply chain and production requirements. The software's modular design allows organizations to customize their implementation to their specific needs.Global Operations: Infor M3 provides multi-language and multi-currency support, making it a suitable solution for organizations with global operations.
Very stable product. Some of its weaknesses are also its strengths. The lack of web services seems to actually increase stability.
No software vendor in this space is perfect. Lawson does perform as advertised.
Again, a weakness of this (limited functionality) is a hidden strength as well. In software there is a complexity/feature tradeoff. Where Lawson lacks in features, it does give you a more simple setup for your organization.
The "new" UX front-end offers a lot of modern and intuitive features, but it lacks the ability to view multiple "tabs" of dashboards and reports. The "classic" dashboard had this feature but now with the UX, you need to be really smart about how to design a single page where the users won't get "lost".
Lacks the ability to "wrap text" (similar to excel) and auto-size grid rows
In any line of work, a tool that is flexible and would allow different departments of your company to easily interact and exchange valuable insights, is highly anticipated and needed. For me, what Anaplan provides to a business, be it a smaller one or an enterprise customer, is an easily scaling, agile planning and modeling platform that can meet almost any need and give a high-end solution to the problems any company faces on a daily basis.
There is a dependency in this rating - in that I find Anaplan extremely easy to use, but I've spent the necessary time developing a strong understanding of the platform. Once you understand how to use it, the platform is flexible, easy to use, and fun to use.
This is a highly configurable product. Where all available support provided by [Information] is very good and exceeds our expectations! The investment in this product by Infor continues to be significant and is showing results! Infor is going a long way and is here to stay! No doubt about that!
There are very few outages. Maintenance is scheduled on two or three Saturdays per month, so as not to affect businesses. When there is an outage, users are kept informed of progress to restore the platform and typically this takes no more than an hour. Anaplan customer support is very responsive if we ever have questions about platform issues
Everything is calculated in memory in the cloud. It's nearly instantaneous updates when you make changes. The only time things get a little slow is when you have a massive model with very intricate calculations...but "slow" for Anaplan is not what I would call "slow" for something like Hyperion. We used to have Hyperion calcs that ran for 60 mins before you could use data. The equivalent would be 60 seconds in Anaplan.
1. Anaplan has separate 24/7 customer support channel to help with queries, 2. Customer Partner from Anaplan to support vendor with their queries like license purchase, use case implementation support, customer advocacy 3. Anaplan Learning Platform to help learning new product features free of cost and Yearly Anaplan connect across globe to share success stories of various companies.
The support is satisfactory, given the large user base of the product. We had no issues to meet our reporting deadlines with Lawson. The organizational support team internally are well trained and hence only on exceptional basis issues are escalated to Lawson support team. We had no negative experience so far with the support of Lawson.
The in-person training is simply not worth the cost. After a few weeks of playing in Anaplan, I went to the basic training and knew more than the person teaching it. a year down the road, I was the first person to complete the advance training, and again could have been teaching the class better than the person running the session. Spend some time on your own trying out different things and you will get all the understanding you need to be successful.
Anaplan training materials are clear, simple, easy to understand and to follow. Visuals are excellent. The vendor is good at updating training materials in a timely manner and encouraging users and administrators to keep coming back to Academy site for refresher courses or new feature courses. I really like their interactive diagrams
Agile methodology and breaking the work down into sprints was very helpful. Implementation required a deeper dive into our data than expected for the consultants to be able to construct the data model. But once it was in place, the focus on knowledge transfer enabled us to be able to use the product effectively after the team rolled off.
Anaplan is what I would consider a modeling platform. It excels at taking a forecasting or planning process and systematizing it - and allowing for whatever nuances and granularity you need to perform that modeling. It is not positioned as "data collection" platform - which are typically designed to take data uploads from Excel to calculate basic opex and revenue models. It's much more customizable and flexible.
We have managed to leverage Anaplan for financial planning and forecasting across the business. It is now used by almost every department, with more than 50 users (but I know of companies that have hundreds of users) and still the platform is quick and reliable. It is easy to make changes to divisions and departments or add users and apply different user settings - the core part of the model is not affected and end users can continue their work without any disruption
Speeding up the process of closing and updating the current month forecast
Reduced work on the preparation of reports and presentations. We used different Anaplan approaches with varying success, but the overall result was there.
It's hard to gauge, but the overall increase in process and algorithm transparency, along with data protection, has given an excellent platform for scaling up the company's processes.
I wish Infor M3 (formerly Lawson Intentia) were more detailed. But, this actually may be a weakness of my employer and not Infor M3 (formerly Lawson Intentia).
