Anaplan is a scenario planning and analysis platform designed to optimize decision-making in complex business environments so that enterprises can outpace their competition and the market. By building connections and collaboration across organizational silos, the Anaplan platform surfaces key insights.
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OrgMapper
Score 9.1 out of 10
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OrgMapper is an online diagnostic tool that analyzes and visualizes the human networks employees use to collaborate, communicate and exchange information over in order to do their daily jobs. It produces lists of key employees and network maps to identify communication and collaboration patterns, uncovering embedded organizational issues.
Anaplan is a great tool for complex modeling of the future. When you are planning your actions for the future, have multiple, disparate datasets to interact with, have dozens if not hundreds of stakeholders who must contribute and need to be guided via a streamlined workflow engine, require complex logic that can grow with your org, require real-time reporting, and you need it all in less than 6 months.
OrgMapper is especially useful in mapping the soft-relationships within teams and organizations: communication, cooperation, knowledge sharing, and information flows.
OrgMapper uses appropriate questions to understand the different aspects of networks in organizations. These questions are conceptually sound and appropriate and diverse. They are easy to understand.
There is a direct path from the survey to the visualization of data in network maps. Though having an official report is of great value, I rely on the ability of OrgMapper to translate raw data obtained via survey into actual maps potentially in real-time if needed.
I appreciate the use of modules like Knowledge Mapper or Team Mapper which pull together questions to respond to particular issues in organizations. This makes marketing easier and facilitates the decision making process on the part of clients.
I have found the technical support for OrgMapper to be helpful. I appreciate that the Maven 7 people like many of us users are all on a learning curve with regard to the translation of network science into practical usage. Thus, ongoing communication back and forth between we users and Maven 7 is helpful and important. I appreciate the inquisitive approach taken my Maven 7 and their dedication to resolve technical issues that arise.
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
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's usability is very good. Users can customize reports and make adjustments with very little training. They can quickly plan and collaborate very easily. Making large adjustments or creating complex functionality may require more experience or training but a lot of tasks can be completed by users with very little experience
Emailing out the survey to respondents can be a complex undertaking. Helping them gain access via their password can also take effort. The survey respondents must be entered by hand. I did not have a great deal of trouble doing this with 30 people. Questions are clear and understandable. However, if the context of the question differs from the normal way the question is used, this may present some difficulty to the respondents to understand and make sense of the question. Support here is important. It is extremely easy to select questions based on the identification of a focused challenge. Translation of the raw data to the visual map is done by the software and this is of great benefit and makes the product quite useful to me. Filters and the ability to manipulate the maps are also helpful though there is a learning curve to this.
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.
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)
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.
For our clients Orgmapper/the Network Approach has the potential to become a foundational approach to organisational transformation. It is early days as we are working in partnership with our clients to develop the best approach based on our explorations to date.
In some instances including Orgmapper in our offering has actually slowed the lead conversion process down - which has been good from the perspective that we are working larger propositions, over the longer term. So for Better Change - Orgmapper provides a significant uplift and complimentary capability to our core capabilities.
