Endeca was a business intelligence platform for analyzing unstructured data, acquired by Oracle and since discontinued.
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Planful
Score8.4 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.
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Pricing
Endeca (discontinued)
Planful
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Endeca (discontinued)
Planful
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Required
Additional Details
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Pricing is highly dependent on the complexity and scope of the implementation.
Best fit for this product: - Advanced or Sophisticated Enterprise Search platform: If you spend effort on your search capabilities, Endeca is the tool. - If you are looking for capabilities to search and navigate similar to a relational-database system, then Endeca is not the best fit. - If you are spending effort to drive customer experience, especially around customer interaction with your web application, Endeca can help with that in a multichannel environment.
Planful is initially easy to setup and if a company is already using a mid layer to transform and standardise GL data, management reports can be set up in days, not weeks or months. Budgeting template setup does get some getting used to but the training provided by Planful is sufficient to get going and learn along the way. Building custom reports is straightforward and the interface is user-friendly, therefore the accounting team can get going without the need for technical specialists getting involved. Budget and forecasting is flexible and drivers of revenue and cost can be created in Planful and customised by Unit or Geography.
Provides exact, correct counts of items in its dimensions.
Allows for flexible, out-of-the-box boosting of content (based on combo of any/all of: user profile, date, dimension being browsed and search keyword).
It has a reasonably good admin interface for the administration of boosting/promotion rules for the business user.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
If the solution is implemented well and the business understands the purpose of the Endeca stack, it offers a great way for a business to explore and benefit from its existing data. From my experience, the Endeca solution has exposed data patterns to a business that were not thought about or explored before because of the lack of available tools to properly expose these patterns
Our new Comptroller understands the value of Planful, and we plan to utilize it further in the organization to enhance external reporting. Strangely enough, Planful had not previously been embraced by the former CFO, who argued that we were running two sets of books (of course, we were not). Fortunately, the before mentioned reconciliation of EBITDA to Net Income demonstrated that to the banks.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The system itself is very usable, and with proper training is very sensible in its organization and method of operation. There are some downsides in initial setup in the way things are imported (or not in some cases) in setting up properties and dimensions. Overall however it's amazingly flexible in terms of the content it can index and make available for search.
The tool is extremely adaptable, and it enables very quick querying to give us opportunity to gain live insights into the business. Given its adaptability, we are also able to create scenario analyses very quickly in rapidly changing environments. The formatting also enables us to provide this information in a very consumable manner.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I only give a 9 rating rather than a 10 rating because it seems that every day around 2pm we see a slowdown in the use of Planful. I have requested our internal IT department verify that it is not an internal issue and have been assured it is the tool. We have not yet reached out to Planful to do extensive research to solve this issue.
Again, the system is very reliable and, for the most part, runs very quick and smooth. When running larger queries, it does take some time, and during budgeting season our users experienced slower loading times, but nothing that raises concerns outside of normal network issues. Occasionally, as with any software we use, it will crash and you have to restart, but that does not happen very often.
Support has been very good, and the trainers for the various Endeca courses have all been very willing to help long after the classes have been completed, so in the instances where we're waiting on support from Oracle, it's often that the members of their training arm can help us out as well.
Sometimes we get great help when using Planful's support team and other times we don't. In particular, there is one person that often responds to our support tickets who is less than helpful, hence the reason for the 5 out of 10 rating. As a result, most of the time we reach out to our Planful consulting group as they provide faster and better support
The training is actually really good, and absolutely necessary - although this is software that has great documentation, the documentation itself is so vast, that it would be difficult to learn haphazardly, not to mention being incredibly time consuming to do so. Online training probably would have been fine except for the fact that having someone look over your shoulder to see where you're going wrong is helpful. This also allowed our team to sit in a single room and converse about functionality, etc. that would have been difficult to facilitate via an online class.
My team has attended training offered several times before/during the Planful Perform conference. This training has been extremely useful and we always learn something we didn't know prior to the training. The trainers are always very knowledgeable and more than willing to help each and every user after the training with specific questions regarding their environment. Planful also offers training and certifications on their training hub. I have completed a couple of the certifications. The courses are easy to follow along with and very informative. Additionally, Planful schedules webinars pretty regularly. They'll email their customers and allow you to register to participate live. They also record these sessions so you can refer back to them at a later date or if you are unable to attend at the time the webinar is offered, you can register anyway and get access to the recording. Their training has improved year over year!
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We did some online Q&A with the Oracle team, but I would definitely recommend doing an in person class if you have a large team that will be attending - there's definitely no replacements for a large class of technically oriented staff members who can drive conversation about specific topics that might surface.
Planful provides a lot of online training support. There's so many options for training. Admin Learning Courses, User Learning Courses. Plus they have several webinars devoted to the tool and the new features they release. New Releases can be practiced in a Sandbox Environment prior to going live in Production
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
There were some features we were hoping to get implemented in this particular release of Endeca, but were unable to facilitate those requirements due mostly to timeline. Having seen several other implementations, we will definitely have future iterations to add functionality and improve upon our implementation of Endeca. For the time being, we are satisfied with our implementation as it turned out.
After going through the initial implementation with Host Analytics and a re-implementation with Cervello (due to an ERP change, not due to a poor initial implementation), I've learned that you really must rely on your internal staff to bear most of the implementation burden. Use the vendor or partners for ideas and best-practice suggestions, and some of the easy-but-time-consuming work. Since you will ultimately be using and maintaining the application, you should be able to do most of it yourself.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Oracle Endeca was the best option that we evaluated by far. It gave us the most flexibility and ability to meet our objectives and had features that were not offered by the competing products we evaluated, but which we very much wanted, and this was why we decided to go with Oracle Endeca versus another platform
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Prior to joining the company, we tried to implement Vena but were unsuccessful. There we're a few reasons it didn't work out, but a lot of it related to the implementation team they provided. In just the first week with Planful, we achieved more progress than we did in several months with Vena.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
From our experience, Planful is only used in 2 overhead departments in our organization. We easily added another overhead department, but they decided against using Planful for their workforce and financial planning. Removing them from our environment was extremely easy.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It is a searching tool, and hard to estimate its impact on conversion.
It does its job regarding better searching; In terms of efficiency, it's hard to say: it has big learning curve. It requires a dedicated Endeca developer to work on it.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info