Anaplan vs. Oracle Hyperion (legacy)

I've implemented a number of projects for Anaplan for Sales Performance Management use cases. It is obviously built for financial planning, but it allows for a lot of flexibility for territory and quota, ICM, sales forecasting, and other important use cases. Territory and Quota is very powerful in the tool as it organize complex assignment structures into hierarchies for easier analysis and reporting.

Well suited: For use in multiple offices around the world. I was able to obtain financial reporting data from 5 foreign offices and then consolidate their data with 3 domestic USA offices to prepare a consolidated financial statement. Less Appropriate: Translating the financial value for consulting services could be a bit challenging because that required human interaction and judgement. It would have been great to be able to set up some software to be able to interpret this and let it run for all future project work revenue projection.

Incentivized

• Anaplan removes the time consuming process of integrating the results of individual spreadsheets.
• Anaplan facilitates the standardization of assumptions across all sub-processes
• Anaplan provides full transparency of the calculations and source inputs
• Anaplan allows us to automate certain planning processes that would have been impossible when relying on the computational capabilities of an individual computer.

• This product handles budgeting by Employee and/or Position very well. It is highly flexible and allows Hyperion administrators the ability to develop a planning application that fits a variety of different business needs.
• It is great at calculating benefits using business rules to automate the population of these fringe costs in the overall budget planning process. This greatly reduces user error.
• It allows you to seed the operating budget based on changes to key drivers, such as percentage increases, flat dollar increases and more detailed changes using business rules.
• Allows visibility into the plans for each unit across the organization, rolled up into an overall budget for the campus.
• It handles the creation of budgets with multiple chartfield segments or dimensions, which most other budgeting systems cannot handle well. It can aggregate these very quickly.

Incentivized

• Some end users don't spend the required amount of time to familiar themselves with Anaplan.
• Auditability, while good in theory, can be lacking and clunky when needed.
• Model building can become convoluted over time, leading to confusion over the specific use of line items.

• One pain point for us is the consolidation and translation process. Needing to translate the data over and over again is frustrating and there is no visibility into how many users are running a translation. If multiple users attempt to translate the same data set, say goodbye to your performance but you have no way of knowing! (Unless you want to pull up a task audit which is not a very realistic expectation). It has the been the quickest way for us to bring the system to it's knees. The consolidation process performs in direct correlation to the complexity of the calculation/consolidation rules. So, while the product is extremely flexible, you still have to be careful how you design your rules and calculations to make sure that you do it on the smallest subset of data as possible to avoid large processing times. This makes sense, but requires some significant expertise that most organizations do not have in-house.
• The Hyperion Financial Reporting product is ridiculously outdated and clunky to use. The interface for designing reports is not intuitive, and not easy to modify once a report is built. I think there must be a strategic decision to move away from it and go to something more like Oracle BI because I just can't understand why in the world they don't update the reporting product. It also requires a significant level of expertise to be able to use. Not a great solution at all if you want multiple end-users to create reports in something other than Excel. Nobody except the HFM admin (which I used to be) in our company even touches this module.
• Another pain point is the amount of IT support that is required to run this thing, and again, specialized knowledge of Hyperion products and how they work is required for IT to adequately support it. This goes for application servers and the Oracle database that the applications are running on.

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

We're in the middle of the road because we are not sure that other products on the market fit the bill for what we need yet. Hyperion is expensive and burdensome from an administrator and maintenance standpoint, but it still seems to be the best solution for what we need. Show us an equally capable SaaS consolidation product and we'll talk again.

As a user it is a very simple tool, but at the same time with a very mature and powerful calculation engine. It is very easy to switch from excel or traditional tools with added capabilities of multi dimensionality and real time calculation engine to see quick insights needed to create plans and scenarios

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.

Incentivized

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 premium support team provides much needed dedicated customer service which we are after for what we have paid for this service. We are satisfied with the service and support and do not have any instance where there was an issue that requires escalation to get the right support team. Though the incidence of major issues that requires the premium support are less, we prefer to keep this as a safety net.

Incentivized

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

One key insight from implementing Anaplan is that success comes from focusing on designing the process, not just building the model. Anaplan is extremely flexible—there are very few planning scenarios it cannot support—but that flexibility means the project needs strong governance, clear ownership of requirements, and a well-defined data model. When those foundations are in place, implementations are fast, iterations are easy, and users can quickly see value.
In our projects, both Financial Planning and Integrated Business Planning models were adopted smoothly because we involved business users early, kept the model design intuitive, and leveraged Anaplan’s Excel-like syntax and user-friendly dashboards. The result was more efficient day-to-day work, reduced manual tasks, and increased collaboration across teams. In short: when you combine Anaplan’s flexibility with a structured implementation approach, adoption and value realization happen quickly.

Anaplan is more powerful than Pigment considering that it is an Enterprise class system and is able to manage bigger data sets. Anaplan allows for advanced scenario modeling and formula capabilities along with custom reporting functionalities. Anaplan has proven its capabilities and stability across various use cases and across bigger enterprises when compared to Pigment which is still in earlier phases of its development

I use Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Mangement because the company I work at requires me to use it in the Financial Planning sector as most of their data is stored in it. I am open minded and ready to use other performance management tools created by Oracle if my work permits.

Incentivized

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

• Anaplan's implementation led to a significant reduction in planning cycle errors and bugs, streamlining processes and improving overall accuracy in data inputs
• Standardizing the planning process and enabling cross-functional collaboration through Anaplan enhanced our ability to adapt swiftly to changing business needs, resulting in improved agility in decision-making
• The platform's capabilities, especially in Demand Planning and Supply Chain, positively impacted our ROI by optimizing resource allocation and solving complex business problems efficiently across multiple functions

• Oracle Hyperion allows us to automate and consolidate financial data that used to be performed manually in spreadsheets. From that perspective the ROI is huge.
• Oracle Hyperion functionality is extensive and allows us to perform most functions for planning, consolidating and reporting on our financial data.
• One negative with Oracle Hyperion is that it is complicated to implement and maintain. It takes expertise at all levels (infrastructure and management) to realize the benefits from it.

Incentivized