Anaplan vs. Piano Analytics

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.

When it comes to web analytics AT Internet is well suited. We introduced AT Internet in 2017 after an evaluation project with other professional analytics solutions. Starting with our corporate website we quickly rolled it out to our customer experience platform, our webshops, and our corporate intranet based on SharePoint 2013. Especially the use in our intranet brought significant improvements over the standard analytics features SP 2013 is offering. The ATI tag systems with their flexibility allow us to include company-specific properties and thus making it possible for us to analyze our intranet usage on segments such as locations, branches, and so on.

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.

• A very strong, supportive team who are keen to develop the relationship and deliver business value
• Excellent 'real-time' data availability through rapid data processing
• Powerful tools for analysing content consumption and usage patterns
• A range of API options to deliver data in the format required
• A process of continuous evolution in the data tools provided

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.

• Integrations with outside vendors: there are many ways to integrate data from outside vendors, however you can't display this information in every application unless you create a custom field, which can sometimes be limiting.
• Access rights: there are two places to assign access rights and each place has slightly different functionality. You can get really granular with what each person has access to, but it is easy to miss a check box and have to go back and correct it.
• Visualizations across applications: there are some really cool visualizations in the oldest application they support that includes predictive traffic estimates, automatic multi-period variations, etc., that aren't available yet in the newer applications.

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

I gave this rating because I think that AT Internet is a good tool, user-friendly easy for onboarding and simple dashboards, however the majority of people use Google Analytics, especially media agency, it is easier for them to use Google Analytics.

Incentivized

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

Overall the experience is very good, it's quick, relaiable and does everything I would want. The only problems I have are matching the correct stats to what I want. It can be painful trying to find the right thing and the explanations are not always the clearest. That's the only issue i've found though.

Incentivized

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

I don't have any exemple in mind where AT Internet interface hasn't been available, i have always been able to use AT Internet when i needed it. The only issues to notice is that it happens sometimes that real time or D-1 datas are partially delayed.

Incentivized

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

All excel reports are downloaded very quickly, even if the query is more than 20 000 lines.

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.

I have not used the Support Team thereby I am unable to review how their Support Teams works. However, in an instance where I had an issue, my concerned department contacted their support team and I was provided with the solution of the problem I was facing within a short span of time.

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.

The in-person training unfortunately does not match to our expectations, was too much focus on digital basis and not on AT Internet functionnalties and how to use it. We paid for one day and only 15 minutes at the end was focused on our real needs in terms of media analytics.

Incentivized

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

No online training

Incentivized

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.

The support team helps us to implement AT Internet.

Incentivized

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

AT Internet shows a deep understanding of our business objectives and provide us with ideas on how to solve them. They grant us enough time to try their tools and to be sure the tools are helpful. The data we've got in the Analyzer was manually checked and it was completely correct. Their roadmap was clean and aligned with our strategy

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

Regarding AT Internet possibilities, it could be adapted to small or large organizations, easy to set up. We can add sites in makets that we launch e-commerce.

Incentivized

• 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

• Unfortunately, I do not have precise results to give, but the statistics provided by AT Internet make it possible to carry out in-depth analyses and to make good decisions.
• You just have to know how to find the information and interpret it.

Incentivized