Anaplan vs. Oracle Hyperion (legacy)

With its versions and native time features Anaplan is well suited for all activities around planning in time and scenarios. Tasks involving calculating across multiple dimensions make Anaplan shine - the easiness to build complex calculation and present results on customizable pages. With its access restrictions it's well suited also for working with sensitive data (employee and customers personal data).

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.

• HFM is very powerful for financial consolidations .
• Hyperion Planning is used to project accurate planning and thus provide the benefit to organization to do allocations and driver based planning so that it can justify the numbers based on headcount, number of stops & Revenue and thus provide valuable projections and thus help reduce the expenses.
• Essbase is powerful engine helps provide analytical adhoc reporting for financial users . Performance of reporting and ease of use helps excellent customers experience when doing adhoc analysis.

Incentivized

• Ability to decide if to apply the formula or a manual input on front end for each line item
• Real Time Data Transfer across models. Currently Data is transferred using Processes across different models. Having a functionality to access data from any model in real time would be great

• Oracle Hyperion requires a lot of knowledge and expertise to be successful.
• The underlying infrastructure of Oracle Hyperion is complex and can be difficult to implement.
• Some of the Oracle Hyperion application servers only run on Windows. Windows can sometimes be unstable.
• Oracle Hyperion application server processes are dependent on each other and need to be started in a specific order. Therefore, if certain services die on one server, it could require all services/processes in the entire Hyperion landscape to be restarted in the correct order.

Incentivized

Anaplan is already an established market leader in enterprise planning area. Its flexibility to build multi-dimensional models, real time scenario plannings are proven to be the best features and successfully implemented by global organizations. Anaplan's ambitious product team is ensuring to roll out new features regularly based on customer/ partner feedback. e.g their new improved polaris environment has strong potential to build very large models without worrying about sparsity. The integration with other tools/technologies is being easier (e.g. cloudworks). Hence, considering Anaplan as a platform that has proved to be successful tool in enterprise level planning, its focus on regular feature enhancements and future release roadmaps I believe this platform has potential to evolve further along with our business processes and requirements

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

Unless a model is poorly constructed, the platform can accommodate tens or even hundreds of users without any impact on model performance. Dashboard pages load quickly, reports can be exported to Excel or pdf quickly, and integrations with other systems can be scheduled for quiet times of the day. Adding new use cases to the platform should also have minimal impact on performance if done in a careful way and following best practice principles

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.

Learning made easy . One of the best trainings i have attended. Training was very detailed training by the trainer, which helped me understand the basics of the model building. Level 1 training was easy and instructor was most helpful here. Level 2 training was challenging but was able to go thru due to understanding of the basics.

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.

Incentivized

Anaplan is not a point solution. Instead of having multiple systems that each do one business process (and can only do that business process in one way), Anaplan can do many different business processes for multiple business units. Sales, Finance, HR and other parts of the business can go to one place to get their work done.

Hyperion is easy to implement and maintain, low cost of ownership is also a great reason to select this product. Oracle's investment to keep the product innovations and improvements over the years is well appreciated by the users. The ease of managing integration with different business systems is also considered while selecting this product.

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

• You will see greater accuracy within your forecasts by leveraging Anaplan to look at historical values while including projections such as seasonality.
• You will save time, resulting in team members spending more time on value-add opportunities.
• You will have happy end users that have access to self-service reports, removing any bottlenecks through the workflow.

• We had to get the planning application designed correctly before we got a good ROI, but once we did it became well liked and highly utilized.
• It has had a very positive overall impact on increasing finance literacy across campus, allowing units a better insight into their revenues and expenses and the overall planning process.
• It has been an essential tool during a time where the campus needed to reduce it's budget by over 100 million dollars annually. Without this product, we would not have a way to identify, track and report on our progress reducing the budget.

Incentivized