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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Xactly
Score 8.7 out of 10
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The Xactly platform is a revenue intelligence ecosystem that by consolidating forecasting, incentive compensation, and sales engagement workflows into a single source of truth, provides high-fidelity visibility into the revenue lifecycle.
I evaluated oracle and xactly quota planning and territory management tools and both would not have been as seamless and quick to execute as anaplan has been for us. The flexibility that anaplan provides to our very complicated sales organization is incredible. If I were to …
Xactly, Iconixx, Callidus - each of these solutions did not allow me, the administrator to make dramatic changes to our plan. System wasn't as flexible as needed it to be. We are a high growth company and we need to make changes very quickly. Couldn't work with a system that …
I have been working on Incent since one year. I found it to be the greatest tool for calculating commissions. From credits to commissions to sketches, the system has it all, including the ability to conduct reports and statistics. It has a lot of features and customizations …
Xactly [Incent] Analytics reports are more advanced and easy to use. The interface is superior and allows for a deep dive into sales numbers and financials for the company. Other departments use Xactly [Incent] to help build cross-functional tools and databases, that can work …
Our organization went through a SAP ERP migration. We had access to their sales compensation solution "for free." After getting one look at it, we refused to go any further. Granted, it was multiple year ago but the program was light years behind. If I remember correctly, …
Once implemented and configured, its easy to manitain all under one roof. Also its robust platform is not very complicated to be maintained on an ongoing basis.
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.
Being that Xactly Incent is custom built to meet our specific plan requirements, it has been well suited for almost everything. One scenario where we could use some improvement is manager reporting. Better visibility into the roll up of any team goals and team actuals. Also some of the incentive payment information is a bit clunky. We calculate incentives each quarter on a YTD basis and then subtract was has already been paid. Sometimes this creates a shortfall for the sales rep that needs to carry forward. Reporting for this doesn't flow easily.
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.
When clearing out or deleting the data in Incent, certain areas allow deletion only one by one. Eg position, people etc. Would be great if this can be done in bulk.
Could improve in the style/view/functioning of Incent user interface
Can implement more features for end users interface to keep them more engaged and ignoring a feel of boring UI
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
Xactly Incent is a great tool for calculating commissions. The interface is user friendly and the system is set up in a way that allows for multiple setups for each commission plan. Over the last couple years since I have been on the commission team we have been able to optimize our plans to promote scalability. Our sales and accounting teams have become familiar with navigating the system which promotes transparency. From an audit perspective, Incent provides us with the reports and data we need to provide to our auditors.
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 devil is in the detail. It's not intuitive to use, also not for Sales employees. You need to train them. For superusers like me you need a lot of training to administrate the system. It has a lot of functionalities and complexity like staging and upload orders, reset triggers, updating & creating rate tables. A lot of formulars are necessary to learn.
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
Xactly Incent is always available, they have planned monthly maintenance on Friday nights but are very proactive to communicate it. Monthly maintenance is useful as they address any bugs and also are constantly upgrading the user interface to make it easier to use.
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.
Xactly is a very helpful tool ensuring appropriate and correct data is used when calculating commissions. The interface loads timely, but it is not intuitive to use. The learning curve to be proficient in Xactly takes a significant amount of time.
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.
They take the time to understand the system. They keep us updated on the status of our cases. Finally, their continued follow up ensuring the initial issue was resolved is very nice. They will not close the case out until they have confirmed that our issue has been completely resolved and fixed.
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.
Awesome product, easy to use during daily activities. Reporting and user experience are very well organised. The sales team also likes this tool for reviewing their commissions at any time, which provides real-time updates. For new hires or mid-hires, the commission calculation is working very efficiently. Every sales-side organisation must have this tool.Awesome product, easy to use during daily activities. Reporting and user experience are very well organised. The sales team also likes this tool for reviewing their commissions at any time, which provides real-time updates. For new hires or mid-hires, the commission calculation is working very efficiently. Every sales-side organisation must have this tool.
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
Xactly offers training on new releases on a monthly basis and training on basic principles regularly via registration. My experience with both is that they do not provide the in-depth knowledge necessary to truly master the system and advanced courses still do not go to the level needed to autonomously manage the system and plans. Professional services are a large part of any cloud based service such as Xactly and I feel a reliance on such paid consulting services is a great money-maker for Xactly.
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.
Go into implementation knowing how you will handle churn, if there are claw backs, treatment for every type of commission payment (i.e. new business, renewals, etc.) and know your average customer life. You'll also want details by customer for as far back as you can go (within reason).
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
Ignoring the contractual issues that we had, Optymyze is very different from Xactly Incent. I would say that both offer high degrees of flexibility, but Xactly requires greater technical knowledge to customize. Optymyze allows administrators to manipulate data in a way similar to Domo or Tableau, allowing someone who is less technical to customize it. Xactly's connect module, on the other hand, requires strong knowledge of SQL to be able to manipulate data. I've been looking to take the training for Connect, so I can't comment on the limitations or flexibility beyond that.
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
It's very flexible. In most cases it can be adapted to your needs by programming which may cost extra money. We have a lot of different complans and close to 1.000 employees using Xactly in EMEA. It's mainly used by Sales and Finance
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
I am not aware of the company investment, but the overall result is fantastic. Employees visibility to commissions and components of their commissions is great. They have much more accessibility to their numbers and better understanding of how commissions are calculated. They can also review commissions at their convince on the application.
There seems to be more employee engagement and satisfaction with the overall commission process and reporting with Xactly Incent.
