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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NinjaCat
Score 8.0 out of 10
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NinjaCat is a reporting solution for digital marketing agencies. It allows users to track the spend and performance of Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Analytics, Facebook, and DoubleClick with call tracking in one interface, allowing users to monitor campaigns and deliver reports to demonstrate return on marketing investments. NinjaCat users can connect, clean, and transform marketing data in NinjaCat then ship it to any of the leading data warehouses via its API or code free replication…
Anaplan is great for enterprise clients that want to pursue a path of connected planning. If designed correctly, a data hub can be your central data repository which acts a shared dataset across your organization. From Marketing and Sales, to HR and Finance - Anaplan will be the one source of truth as individuals contribute to the business process.
NinjaCat has been great for getting clients quickly connected to popular advertising platforms like Snapchat, Facebook, and Google. It can blend data together easily to make overall data easy to access. The template designer is easy to use (though careful there is no auto save or undo button) and you can have a client ready report done easily with one of their premade templates or customize it for your needs. The fact that I can build any metric or pull in about any information with the Google Sheet data feature makes the product far and away one of the best products I've had the pleasure of using.
Anaplan has a very fast calculation engine which is able to model across multiple dimensions in real time across huge data sets. This helps in calculating complex scenarios instantaneously
Easy to maintain by business teams which reduces dependency on IT teams within the organization and also on external consultants
Advanced Tenant controls which allows administrators to manage security and access across various models
It automates Client Reporting for Digital Advertising -- it's time-consuming to set up, but once it is, you don't have to do very much after that.
Adding Data Sources to your reporting. NinjaCat integrates with most digital advertising platforms, in particular, Google Ads and Google Analytics.
It Manages Client Reporting in one place -- there's no need to send reports from different platforms and stitch the information together. NinjaCat pulls all the data and allows you to customize reports for your clients and send them concise data in an appealing format.
Anaplan is a very strong multi-dimensional modeling tool that provides a calculation engine to empower a complex planning process. It is fairly easy to learn for those with experience in similar tools, or excel. It forces structure and auditability that spread sheets do not have, along with extensive security capabilities
Anaplan is very usable from a user perspective. Anaplan's level 1 and level 2 training courses are great resources and I highly recommend any power users of the platform consider completing both. These courses showcase, and therefore unlock an understanding of the platform which allows for quick and easy, agile, and iterative front end design
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.
Support quality has dropped since Thoma Bravo has taken over. I think some serious re-focus needs to happen here -- part of the beauty of being in the Anaplan community was how involved you felt in it before. Before I didn't dread sending a support ticket, now I am starting to.
The platform is in-depth and thorough. The support team is amazing. The ability to do automations and data visualizations are fantastic. However, it does lack integrations fore taking data to the next step. Other platforms let you integrate Python and R scripts for organizing data or even forecasting. If NinjaCat were to add this, I think it would be a 10/10 and best product on the market
In my opinion, in-person training is always the best if you have the option to do so. This allows real-time interactions with the instructions, whereas the online training I took required me to write-down questions, email them, and wait for responses. This slows down the process, as you can imagine. That said, in-person training is an extra cost and it likely isn't needed for everyone. I would suggest selecting a small number of people to take in-person training and then having them act as mentors to the rest of your team. That way, as the rest of the team takes the online training, they have a resource to help them in real time.
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
The platform allows a flexible implementation mechanic to be put in place, since the possibilities and functionalities are vast and there are very few things the tool cannot do well. The solutions for the financial planning and the integrated business planning we put in place were easily adopted by the end users and their day-to-day work was made easier.
Compared to OneStream and Venna Anaplan offers a more modern look and feel of the platform. It is better situated and maintained in regards of platform updates as it's a full SaaS software there are never any issues with the system version as it's always automatically up to date with no backward compatibility issues. Due to the flexible nature of the modelling engine, it is also better suited to perform larger multi-department use cases, like IBP (Integrated Business Planning)
Google Analytics is raw data. Reporting has improved, but it is limited to the data available in Google Analytics Only. NinjaCat combines data across all the digital platforms you use. Acquisio and Kenshoo have similar capabilities on the reporting side but are cost prohibitive due to their pricing structure. You can't just us the reporting features of either of these 2 platforms as a stand-alone feature. NinjaCat does one thing and does it well -- Automated Client Reporting of digital marketing and advertising.
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
We've typically seen an average of 40% removal of time from processes using Anaplan an enabler
Though difficult to quantify, we consistently find our processes less error prone than in the past. Essentially, we've removed a previously "hidden cost" of risk due to poor data quality that was buried in our processes.
