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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Workday Peakon Employee Voice
Score 8.3 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Peakon is an employee engagement application now from Workday (acquired August 2021) which emphasizes getting useful and actionable data from employee surveys, and with that as a goal includes features to ensure all employees are sufficiently included, that surveys do not induce fatigue, and that data is not lost from open-ended responses, all with the goal of ensuring that employees feel heard and are invested in their company.
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.
Peakon is a great solution whether you are thinking of pulsing your employees weekly, monthly, or even yearly. The solution provides great dashboards, easy reporting, on the fly segmentation creation, and ways to really dive deep into your people data. I think it's a bit expensive for very early-stage companies, so I would love to see them create a startup/early-stage version or pricing because it has become an invaluable tool for any size company.
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
Peakon looks beautiful and feels very light, which is comforting when you're (potentially) giving negative feedback and feel anxious. The emails are friendly and the survey is super clean.
The surveys are very easy to navigate. You can answer as many or as few questions as you like, skipping forward and backward, and choosing to provide comments when you want. It's low pressure and feels flexible.
The HR department is able to respond to your comments. You can then have a back and forth conversation while remaining anonymous. This really helps employees further explain and contextualize their survey comments without identifying themselves personally.
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.
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 training is great. I achieved master Anaplanner and on a consulting career path all through Anaplan forum. The training is very easy to follow and there are a lot of people who will help you on the forrum if you are stucked real simulation without the need to go to anaplan for some training
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.
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)
SurveyMonkey is a great survey tool that also allows responders to stay anonymous, but I think Peakon is more effective for corporate feedback. It offers more reports and analytics specifically for HR and feels more professional. We often use SurveyMonkey for more lighthearted surveys (e.g., what to eat for team lunch) while keeping Peakon for employee feedback.
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
Creating forecasts takes at least 1 week less time due to FPA not needing to track down and consolidate forecasts from the entire business. The department heads can log in and enter it themselves
Peace of mind knowing that every change ever made can be traced down to the individual cell level
No risk of spreadsheets with data not meant to be shared to everyone being sent out. Security provisioning is flexible and works 100% of the time
When we moved to WFH due to COVID, we use Peakon a regular basis to understand what employees are thinking. We lost the serendipity of talking to people during chance encounters in the office, Peakon has replaced those conversations.
We saw an incredible year in spite of COVID, while there are so many internal and external factors contributing to that success, we can see that having engaged and happy employees has an impact on our business. We also see what happens when they are not engaged or happy.
