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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SAP Business Technology Platform
Score 8.5 out of 10
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SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is the company's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, that brings together intelligent enterprise applications with database and data management, analytics, integration and extension capabilities into one platform for both cloud and hybrid environments, including hundreds of pre-built integrations for SAP and third-party applications.
Anaplan is an evolution of classic EPM tools like SAP BPC. It is simply a much easier system to maintain and roll-out. Dashboards are very user friendly and the Excel add-in is just as powerful. Anaplan excels at connected planning where all models are connected and rolled up …
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 …
Jedox has limited the standard dimensions to 6 only in the financial workspace. If you need any other custom dimension, it has to be defined in analytical workspace. However, data interchange between Financial Workspace and Analytical workspaces are not real-time and rely on …
Essbase/HFM were hosted on-prem and required regular maintenance from the vendor. The tools were good at the simple tasks of consolidation and relatively simple allocation/calculations. Anaplan is a cloud-hosted platform that can be accessed almost anywhere with an internet …
Creating financial forecasts in Anaplan was a big improvement over doing the same activity in Microsoft Excel. The main difference is that Anaplan makes it easier to build models based on large amounts of data and to forecast concurrently with many users across your …
Anaplan vs Oracle Hyperion - Anaplan is far better calculation engine and way more modern. However, Anaplan still struggles to provide reporting, especially adhoc reporting in excel based off a data model.
Anaplan vs Pigment - Anaplan is a more proven product, however, Pigment …
Anaplan is easier to implement, easier to use, easier to maintain than these tools. It scales easily with the business. Workflows are easy to implement. It is easy to drill down and understand how the tool obtained a specific result, giving confidence in its calculations. …
Easy of use is Anaplan's main advantage. As Anaplan is code-less configuration, and the logic for model building is by far the simplest, it would make the learning curve less steep. This is very important when we are showing our clients that, their complicated planning scenario …
Anaplan is one of the only tools flexible to handle bespoke commission calculations. In addition to Sales Performance Management, Anaplan can be used to support other business functions, such as workforce planning or financial planning & analysis. Anaplan provides the …
Anaplan is a proven tool for scalable applications and is flexible to support multiple use cases. Its support is established and the user community is strong. Resources to support the product are readily available.
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 …
Anaplan and these other tools are very similar. I cannot say that I selected Anaplan over them as I have worked with and been involved with setting up a number of tools for clients. They all have their advantages and Anaplan is a very strong tool in the cloud planning space.
can be implemented across multiple use cases- also Anaplan is an enterprise solution. Had good reviews in market and also used by other competitors in industry
Both platforms are excellent but come with some challenges. They are often complex to configure and offer limited customization options. Their user interfaces are not very intuitive, and their reporting capabilities are somewhat restricted. The total cost of ownership is …
Out of the box Power Platform is more user friendly. The limitations with Power Platform is connecting to more solutions than basic SharePoint, SQL or data verse. When dealing with SAP data it is easier using BTP. approvals are similar in both systems without one being …
Oracle was at my previous company and SAP Business Technology Platform is at my current company. Both suites are a little difficult to use and have a large learning curve for accounting folks. Both need another app to read GL data and to upload journals. Oracle gave the ability …
We've done a little bit of development on AWS on their platform. It's good. It might be a little cheaper, but again, it doesn't connect as natively to SAP applications.
Uipath is more used in our org. SAP Business Technology Platform is relatively new to compare currently. Do not have exposure to answer this q fully at this point of time with me. Will possibly have more info later as we work more with SAP Business Technology Platform and have …
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).
If you want to use a well-designed SAP technology to shift into the cloud, you will be more than satisfied with the BTP services overall. There are some improvements for beginners to help them get a better overview of what to do and how to start with their account. My recommendation is to take a foundation training course from the SAP learning hub to prepare for the first steps.
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.
All the documentation around it is geared towards the enterprise use case, unlike some other hyperscalers' platforms.
The SAP Business Technology Platform is very good because it's got the SAP customer and their business processes in mind. Probably my favorite thing about it is how easy it is to get up and running with a new use case and how well it natively connects to an SAP solution.
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
The Automation Integration service has some outdated workflows
New services should be available as entitlements as soon as they are released for a particular region without having to buy them from SAP for zero dollars
Any subaccount should be able to change the IAS tenant. Currently, if you set it up for a particular IAS, you cannot change to another tenant and are required to recreate the services in a new subaccount.
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
I think its important to renew the BTP as it's the way to use SAP products in the feature. Java and R/3 systems are obsolete soon and you have to use the cloud products even to be in support and maintenance in the future. Therefore it's needed for every company to read into the BTP.
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
The development and deployment of applications require too many services. So, sometimes it is challenging as there are multiple services. The monitoring and logging mechanisms are not very apparent. This makes it difficult to choose the services required during design. Applications that use AI for eg., extraction or chatbots, are great use cases to build on BTP. Also custom applications that require a ERP integration but are not enhancements, are good use cases for development on BTP.
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 biggest problem we ran into was communication between SAP Business Technology Platform and onsite resources. Unfortunately our SAP Business Technology Platform and Cloud systems are under different customer numbers. I constantly had to open tickets under each customer number because I was unsure of where the issue lied. And having to create a dummy ticket for our ECC systems to open the ECC connections for another ticket under the Cloud customer is a pain.
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.
Training material in Developers Community or from Learning hub are really good... also most of the time we route through Discovery center... so materials provided by SAP is really good.
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.
Having a full cloud native environment for devlopment of microservices and digitals solutions while having standardized access to our core data on SAP via cloud connector is one of the main benefits of using BTP over others hypervisors. BTP is the standard hyperscaler as soon as something relies on data from SAP systems in our company now
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.
SAP Business Technology Platform is easily connectable using standard solutions to the onpremise backend SAP systems. Services can be linked with each other and with SAP systems in a managed and secure way, while with the other products getting the data, access and networking done is cumbersome. Also we can make sure to have all cloud environments in the same region using the multi cloud approach wich reduces latency problems.
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.
