JMP® is statistical analysis software with capabilities that span from data access to advanced statistical techniques, with click of a button sharing. The software is interactive and visual, and statistically deep enough to allow users to see and explore data.
$1,320
per year per user
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.
N/A
Pricing
JMP
Planful
Editions & Modules
JMP
$1320
per year per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
JMP
Planful
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Required
Additional Details
Bulk discounts available.
Pricing is highly dependent on the complexity and scope of the implementation.
It is perfectly suited for statistical analyses, but I would not recommend JMP for users who do not have a statistical background. As previously stated, the learning curve is exceptionally steep, and I think that it would prove to be too steep for those without statistical background/knowledge
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.
JMP is designed from the ground-up to be a tool for analysts who do not have PhDs in Statistics without in anyway "dumbing down" the level of statistical analysis applied. In fact, JMP operationalizes the most advanced statistical methods. JMP's design is centred on the JMP data table and dialog boxes. It is data focused not jargon-focussed. So, unlike other software where you must choose the correct statistical method (eg. contingency, ANOVA, linear regression, etc.), with JMP you simply assign the columns in a dialog into roles in the analysis and it chooses the correct statistical method. It's a small thing but it reflects the thinking of the developers: analysts know their data and should only have to think about their data. Analyses should flow from there.
JMP makes most things interactive and visual. This makes analyses dynamic and engaging and obviates the complete dependence on understanding p-values and other statistical concepts(though they are all there) that are often found to be foreign or intimidating.
One of the best examples of this is JMP's profiler. Rather than looking at static figures in a spreadsheet, or a series of formulas, JMP profiles the formulas interactively. You can monitor the effect of changing factors (Xs) and see how they interact with other factors and the responses. You can also specify desirability (maximize, maximize, match-target) and their relative importances to find factor settings that are optimal. I have spent many lengthy meetings working with the profiler to review design and process options with never a dull moment.
The design of experiments (DOE) platform is simply outstanding and, in fact, the principal developers of it have won several awards. Over the last 15 years, using methods broadly known as an "exchange algorithm," JMP can create designs that are far more flexible than conventional designs. This means, for example, that you can create a design with just the interactions that are of interest; you can selectively choose those interactions that are not of interest and drop collecting their associated combinations.
Classical designs are rigid. For example, a Box-Benhken or other response surface design can have only continuous factors. What if you want to investigate these continuous factors along with other categorical factors such as different categorical variables such as materials or different furnace designs and look at the interaction among all factors? This common scenario cannot be handled with conventional designs but are easily accommodated with JMP's Custom DOE platform.
The whole point of DOE is to be able to look at multiple effects comprehensively but determine each one's influence in near or complete isolation. The custom design platform, because it produces uniques designs, provides the means to evaluate just how isolated the effects are. This can be done before collecting data because this important property of the DOE is a function of the design, not the data. By evaluating these graphical reports of the quality of the design, the analyst can make adjustments, adding or reducing runs, to optimize cost, effort and expected learnings.
Over the last number of releases of JMP, which appear about every 18 months now, they have skipped the dialog boxes to direct, drag-and-drop analyses for building graphs and tables as well as Statistical Process Control Charts. Interactivity such as this allows analysts to "be in the moment." As with all aspects of JMP, they are thinking of their subject matter without the cumbersomeness associated with having to think about statistical methods. It's rather like a CEO thinking about growing the business without having to think about every nuance and intricacy of accounting. The statistical thinking is burned into the design of JMP.
Without data analysis is not possible. Getting data into a situation where it can be analyzed can be a major hassle. JMP can pull data from a variety of sources including Excel spreadsheets, CSV, direct data feeds and databases via ODBC. Once the data is in JMP it has all the expected data manipulation capabilities to form it for analysis.
Back in 2000 JMP added a scripting language (JMP Scripting Language or JSL for short) to JMP. With JSL you can automate routine analyses without any coding, you can add specific analyses that JMP does not do out of the box and you can create entire analytical systems and workflows. We have done all three. For example, one consumer products company we are working with now has a need for a variant of a popular non-parametric analysis that they have employed for years. This method will be found in one of the menus and appear as if it were part of JMP to begin with. As for large systems, we have written some that are tens of thousands of lines that take the form of virtual labs and process control systems among others.
JSL applications can be bundled and distributed as JMP Add-ins which make it really easy for users to add to their JMP installation. All they need to do is double-click on the add-in file and it's installed. Pharmaceutical companies and others who are regulated or simply want to control the JMP environment can lock-down JMP's installation and prevent users from adding or changing functionality. Here, add-ins can be distributed from a central location that is authorized and protected to users world-wide.
JMP's technical support is second to none. They take questions by phone and email. I usually send email knowing that I'll get an informed response within 24 hours and if they cannot resolve a problem they proactively keep you informed about what is being done to resolve the issue or answer your question.
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
In general JMP is much better fit for a general "data mining" type application. If you want a specific statistics based toolbox, (meaning you just want to run some predetermined test, like testing for a different proportion) then JMP works, but is not the best. JMP is much more suited to taking a data set and starting from "square 1" and exploring it through a range of analytics.
The CPK (process capability) module output is shockingly poor in JMP. This sticks out because, while as a rule everything in JMP is very visual and presentable, the CPK graph is a single-line-on-grey-background drawing. It is not intuitive, and really doesn't tell the story. (This is in contrast with a capability graph in Minitab, which is intuitive and tells a story right off.) This is also the case with the "guage study" output, used for mulivary analysis in a Six Sigma project. It is not intuitive and you need to do a lot of tweaking to make the graph tell you the story right off. I have given this feedback to JMP, and it is possible that it will be addressed in future versions.
I've never heard of JMP allowing floating licenses in a company. This will ALWAYS be a huge sticking point for small to middle size companies, that don't have teams people dedicated to analytics all day. If every person that would do problem solving needs his/her own seat, the cost can be prohibitive. (It gets cheaper by the seat as you add licenses, but for a small company that might get no more than 5 users, it is still a hard sell.)
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
JMP has been good at releasing updates and adding new features and their support is good. Analytics is quick and you don't need scripting/programming experience. It has been used organization wide, and works well in that respect. Open source means that there are concerns regarding timely support. Cheap licensing and easy to maintain.
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 GUI interface makes it easier to generate plots and find statistics without having to write code. The JSL scripting is a bit of a steep learning curve but does give you more ability to customize your analysis. Overall, I would recommend JMP as a good product for overall usability.
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 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 is great and give ease of contact, rapid response, and willingness to 'stick to the task' until resolution or acknowledgement that the problem would have to be resolved in a future build. Basically, one gets the very real sense that another human being is sensitive to your problems - great or small.
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
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
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
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
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
MS Excel with AnalysisToolPak provides a home-grown solution, but requires a high degree of upkeep and is difficult to hand off. Minitab is the closes competitor, but JMP is better suited to the production environment, roughly equivalent in price, and has superior support.
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
ROI: Even if the cost can be high, the insights you get out of the tool would definitely be much more valuable than the actual cost of the software. In my case, most of the results of your analysis were shown to the client, who was blown away, making the money spent well worth for us.
Potential negative: If you are not sure your team will use it, there's a chance you will just waste money. Sometimes the IT department (usually) tries to deploy a better tool for the entire organization but they keep using the old tool they are used too (most likely MS Excel).
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. More Info
