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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Thrive Technologies
Score 6.5 out of 10
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Thrive is an inventory management software offering from Thrive Technologies. It is built to help distribution and retail companies needing to improve demand forecasting, and it helps inventory replenishment functionality in ERP systems.
Anaplan revolutionizes the planning process by standardizing it, creating transparency in data, particularly in showcasing results to the management team. By replacing Excel-centric planning methods, Anaplan not only opens the door to handling larger datasets but also enables a more intricate level of data granularity at an accelerated pace. What sets it apart is its capacity to facilitate a seamless collaboration within a cross-functional model, accommodating diverse departments and business functions in a dynamic, real-time environment.
No solution is perfect, but I would say that Thrive is a particularly robust and complex solution that's intended to tackle major demand management and inventory forecasting problems. Smaller companies simply won't need a solution that's so all-encompassing. I would recommend waiting unitl you know that you need it before moving forward with a solution like Thrive.
The "new" UX front-end offers a lot of modern and intuitive features, but it lacks the ability to view multiple "tabs" of dashboards and reports. The "classic" dashboard had this feature but now with the UX, you need to be really smart about how to design a single page where the users won't get "lost".
Lacks the ability to "wrap text" (similar to excel) and auto-size grid rows
Although it's simpler than many alternatives, it's a highly complex system and at times we felt lost during the transition period.
We didn't get the results we had imagined when looking at their case studies and marketing materials. I understand many factors go into those things, and their case studies are not necessarily indicative of typical results, but your mileage may vary.
Inventory replenishment alerts about potential stockouts weren't always reliable.
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 a cloud-based planning and performance management platform that excels in its versatility and user-friendly interface. Designed to enhance decision-making processes, Anaplan offers a robust suite of tools for financial planning, sales, supply chain, and workforce management. One of its standout features is its real-time data integration, which allows users to make informed decisions based on the latest information. The platform's powerful modelling capabilities enable businesses to create complex scenarios and run what-if analyses with ease.The user interface is intuitive, making it accessible to both technical and non-technical users. Additionally, Anaplan's collaborative features promote seamless communication across departments, ensuring that all stakeholders are aligned and working towards common goals. The platform's flexibility allows for customization to meet the specific needs of various industries and business sizes. However, the learning curve can be steep for new users, and initial setup and configuration require careful planning and execution. Despite this, Anaplan's extensive support resources, including training modules and a vibrant user community, help mitigate these challenges. Overall, Anaplan is a powerful tool that brings agility and efficiency to business planning, making it a valuable asset for companies looking to enhance their planning and decision-making processes.
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.
1. Anaplan has separate 24/7 customer support channel to help with queries, 2. Customer Partner from Anaplan to support vendor with their queries like license purchase, use case implementation support, customer advocacy 3. Anaplan Learning Platform to help learning new product features free of cost and Yearly Anaplan connect across globe to share success stories of various companies.
The in-person training is simply not worth the cost. After a few weeks of playing in Anaplan, I went to the basic training and knew more than the person teaching it. a year down the road, I was the first person to complete the advance training, and again could have been teaching the class better than the person running the session. Spend some time on your own trying out different things and you will get all the understanding you need to be successful.
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.
Anaplan is what I would consider a modeling platform. It excels at taking a forecasting or planning process and systematizing it - and allowing for whatever nuances and granularity you need to perform that modeling. It is not positioned as "data collection" platform - which are typically designed to take data uploads from Excel to calculate basic opex and revenue models. It's much more customizable and flexible.
Abas ERP was what we had used previously, and though it did its job adequately, it lacked the forecasting, demand management, and inventory replenishment sophistication of Thrive. We reached a point where we felt it was untenable to supplement the previous system on our own which necessitated the switch to Thrive.
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
Speeding up the process of closing and updating the current month forecast
Reduced work on the preparation of reports and presentations. We used different Anaplan approaches with varying success, but the overall result was there.
It's hard to gauge, but the overall increase in process and algorithm transparency, along with data protection, has given an excellent platform for scaling up the company's processes.
