Anaplan vs Vena Solutions

• Allows the business to link different planning streams into one place
• Gives users a single source to view data, no more comparing offline templates in excel
• Intuitive new UX that allows us to be more customizable when tailoring to needs of end-users

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• Vena provides all the customizable flexibility and advanced calculation that you can squeeze out of Excel because Excel is used as the front-end. You can tailor the reporting and budget templates to your exact needs and leverage your existing Excel skills.
• Even though you work in Excel, the data is all controlled by a multi-dimensional cloud database. So your work is safe. Changes are auditable, and nobody has to rely on sharing Excel files between each other and tracking the latest version.
• Vena's workflow system can be extremely simple if that's what you need. Or you can build some fairly complex process flows for any task.

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• Enablement -- Anaplan should invest more in both its training capability and training content. Anaplan is not the most difficult tool to learn, but having more foundation in this area would make the ramp-up process significantly easier
• Storage -- Anaplan is not a data warehouse. This is understandable given data warehousing is not their primary value proposition, but many times we run close to the storage limits of Anaplan, and it would be great if Anaplan had different storage size options for its workspaces.
• User Interface -- Anaplan's user interface could be streamlined and improved to become more intuitive and accommodate more shortcut keys.

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• The tool uses at least four different query and data manipulation languages, once you get your data to the tool. All of which are proprietary, limited flavors of other languages (such as SQL and MDX).
• The use of a MongoDB back end has resulted in the ongoing use of floats for numeric data storage. This works fine if you are budgeting at a high level. However, if you are leveraging their transaction-level features, you will see divergence due to the inherent issues of floating point being unable to precisely represent decimal values.
• There is very little community documentation around the tool, and the documentation provided by the vendor is sparse, poorly written, and often out of date or just plain wrong. This extends to their sample code as well
• There is currently no direct way to feed data from your source system databases. The primary method is dumping data to flat files and either executing the uploads manually through the web UI or wrapping a java-based CLI with Powershell or windows batch for local execution. There is also a preview of a logic app if you have Azure as part of your infrastructure

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• Anaplan has been good to plan future fiscal years, by doing the planning in here and seeing the financial impact certain variables can produce it is easier to make decisions within the company such as hiring, eliminating certain costs etc., to achieve the financial results as set in the company goals.
• Dashboards have been really helpful for the financial executives as very specific data can be analysed and presented in the dashboards focused to specific financial teams, so it is easier to see the actual results and forecasts.
• On the negative side, since Anaplan is a complex tool to handle, it is better to have a dedicated resource or resources to the handling in Anplan. Regular business analysts could not handle their regular tasks and doing complex configurations in Anaplan without the help of well trained Anaplan resources, extra dedicated resources are needed to work with Anaplan.

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• From my observation, we did get a return on investment. We have FP&A tool first and foremost.
• We are dealing with 1 financial system to get data as suppose to several sources from before.
• For sure, Vena Solutions helped many finance teams domestically within our company with financial reporting.

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