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 SimplyComp (discontinued)
Score 5.9 out of 10
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Xactly SimplyComp is a sales incentive compensation planning application to support sales teams with accurate commission, and team performance tracking.
Anaplan is a great tool for complex modeling of the future. When you are planning your actions for the future, have multiple, disparate datasets to interact with, have dozens if not hundreds of stakeholders who must contribute and need to be guided via a streamlined workflow engine, require complex logic that can grow with your org, require real-time reporting, and you need it all in less than 6 months.
It's fine if your comp plans are really simple. It should have no problem multiplying ACV by a rep's BCR and maybe having a SPIFF or two. If you have accelerators, decelerators, complicated hierarchies, constant "exceptions to the rule", and need a platform to be flexible...SimplyComp simply won't be able to help here. Any "solutions" they implement will be short-term bandaids that will have to be addressed again sometime in the future
Reporting of financial statements is simple and easy to navigate.
Plans can be customized to meet multiple different types of bonus/commission schedules.
Salesforce integration further improves the automation of commission reporting.
Administrators have the ability to add/remove plans as needed limiting the need to work with a support person everytime a change is made to the commission plan. This has been particularly useful in our company as we are still trying to develop the appropriate commission plan structure so we are frequently making changes to the existing platform. Our administrator has had no issues making changes as needed and can typically get them done quickly.
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 platform is incredibly complex for non-basic commissions plans and setting things up is painful and time consuming.
Importing functionality is improving, but still subpar, requiring a lot of manual entry for customer plans.
The time lag to actually calculate commission (after a user clicks the "calculate" button) is long, leaving one sitting and waiting for the software to do its thing.
For our non-US team members, we wanted insight into USD and local currency commission. SimplyComp doesn't support this.
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
Anaplan's usability is very good. Users can customize reports and make adjustments with very little training. They can quickly plan and collaborate very easily. Making large adjustments or creating complex functionality may require more experience or training but a lot of tasks can be completed by users with very little experience
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.
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.
Our Implementation Consultant was fantastic. She made herself available, scheduled for in advance to accommodate our schedule, and was very helpful on our calls. She happily executed work on our behalf behind the scenes to help move our implementation along. The Customer Support team was mixed, as is expected with Support teams. Nothing horribly bad, but nothing to write home about. SimplyComp is a newest product for Xactly so everyone is still learning it
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.
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
The platform allows a flexible implementation mechanic to be put in place, since the possibilities and functionalities are vast and there are very few things the tool cannot do well. The solutions for the financial planning and the integrated business planning we put in place were easily adopted by the end users and their day-to-day work was made easier.
Compared to OneStream and Venna Anaplan offers a more modern look and feel of the platform. It is better situated and maintained in regards of platform updates as it's a full SaaS software there are never any issues with the system version as it's always automatically up to date with no backward compatibility issues. Due to the flexible nature of the modelling engine, it is also better suited to perform larger multi-department use cases, like IBP (Integrated Business Planning)
This is the first time I've used a software for commision only. I've usually just used Salesforce to calculate my sales numbers and then do the math myself. This is nice to know the exact number but I don't think a lot better
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
We've typically seen an average of 40% removal of time from processes using Anaplan an enabler
Though difficult to quantify, we consistently find our processes less error prone than in the past. Essentially, we've removed a previously "hidden cost" of risk due to poor data quality that was buried in our processes.
Positive impact is our reps are able to view their commissions much more clearly in SFDC. We are also able to calculate 95% of our commissions more rapidly (and have to spot-check the rest).
Negative impact was the onboarding process and "learning as we go" rather than having a set process document for getting us live.
