Anaplan Reviews

Anaplan is being used by the FP&A and Demand Planning teams for budgeting, forecasting, modeling and reporting. Having a primary data source that can be iterated upon several times by a different stakeholders for various business scenarios helps speedup the planning process. Anaplan provides the collaborative, flexible and secure workspace to update the financial business plans quickly to accommodate our rapidly changing environment, while addressing the data integrity issues. We replaced all Hyperion planning process and many homegrown & Excel based planning and modelling applications with Anaplan

Informed decision making and consensus among the organization as we trust in the numbers.

I work as a consultant implementing Anaplan [for] customers. I come across a wide range of different problems and different industries. I have been implementing Anaplan [for] recruiting companies, consultants, Media house, ferry companies, E-commerce FMCG and more...

Anaplan creates more quality in the numbers. Better quality better decision and money save[d] and money earned. Before we had 4 different forecast on sales no[w] we have one common that we all use and that is presented to the market. The time to update is decreased with days.

Anaplan is used across all of finance at our organization to change how we budget, forecast, and consolidate our numbers. It addresses business problems of lack of auditability, lengthened planning cycles, siloed planning, and long review cycles. Being cloud based and decentralized, it helps us as a multinational organization to collaborate effectively across the globe and enables quick reviews and changes to our plan.

Quicker scenario modeling and analysis.

My firm has successfully implemented Anaplan across many industries and use cases. Personally, I have implemented Anaplan for retailers to help facilitate project planning, financial planning, and assortment planning. Most implementations that I have worked on for Anaplan were assisting clients get out of unscalable planning processes conducted in Excel and helping them to transition to Anaplan's cloud platform.

Anaplan helps provide a centralized view of data that enables teams to more efficiently conduct their planning activities. Anaplan can also directly connect with the company's data sources and can integrate with 3rd party BI reporting platforms such as Tableau. There is also role based user access, which enables leadership to input targets that are then visible to the rest of the planning team making the planning process more streamlined.

Anaplan is currently being used by certain departments but has been expanding rapidly across the business. It is primarily used for Sales Territory Management, Account Scoring, OpEx Planning, HC Planning, and hierarchical metadata management.

Since planning and data is available in real-time, all end-users are able to quickly see changes in the data. This allows for more informed decision making and consensus among the organization as everyone is using the same dataset.

Anaplan is used across the entire organization. It has addressed a wide range of use cases, including but not limited to financial reporting, data integration between systems, forecasting, and budgeting. It has eliminated the need of a lot of large slow excel files and has allowed users from around the world to share and view data seamlessly.

It has allowed users to view data changes in real time and instead of waiting for an excel file to be emailed across multiple teams to have all the data in one single source of truth. This has allowed for quicker decisions, as well as quickly identifying any pain points or inconsistencies.

I helped Aesop for their FP&A using Anaplan. It's been used by financial department mainly. It helps the client to build a very flexible planning tool which collaborates historical data, revenue & COGS planning and expense planning including an independent model for workforce. It provides various views for management reporting and easily for end users to follow the process in their own area to complete the financial planning process.

Anaplan provides a very dynamic reporting system that people can focus on their own area.
People can easily review the data by different levels and different dimensions with scenario analysis, or even created the personal view for constant use.
It also provides the commentary function that users can review the feedback in app.

We have implemented Anaplan at one of the biggest telecom [companies] in the Philippines. Their Finance Department are now using Anaplan on their 18-months Rolling Forecast. The model is a driver-based forecasting with lower granularity of data. It also has data integrations from and to other models. It is now very easy for the team to manage and maintain different versions of their forecast which is their pain-point before when they are using spreadsheets.

It is indeed a solution to many pain-points of business processes.

My clients use Anaplan across many different industries (retail, architecture, tech, PE, real estate) for a wide breadth of use cases. Anaplan is flexible and robust as a calculation engine which I've personally implemented for FP&A reporting, revenue forecasting, recruiting, WFP and comp planning, as well as distribution waterfalls.

Anaplan allows financial analysts to move away from processing data each month and during forecasting/budgeting which can be extremely time consuming, cumbersome, and prone to human error, depending on the business'es process. With Anaplan, users are able to load data in or have the data automatically connected, trust that the calculations are reliable and standardized, so that the reporting and outputs are produced almost instantly, if not at a fraction of the time manual excel processes would take.

It is currently used by supply chain planning for planning repair parts. It helps in transparency and measuring performance which helps maintain desired inventory levels.

I work for a consulting firm that is an Anaplan partner. I have implemented Anaplan to companies for use cases ranging from Supply Chain to finance to even education. Most of my experience has been in the finance space setting up FP&A systems and predictive models.

It make real time updates so everyone can see the changes ASAP.

Currently we are in the initial implementation of phase 1 for Unum. This phase includes moving the following processes out of excel and essbase: financial planning process, monthly management reporting, risk based capital management, and expense reporting. Phase 2 will consist of bringing on our capital planning processes.

Anaplan allows UNUM to make faster Financial planning decisions by allowing the FP&A team to spin through forecasts and budget scenarios quicker. Thus providing leadership with the tools and information needed to set strategic direction.

I work at an Anaplan Implementation partner (Resource Torrent). Most of our implementations have been related to financial planning and analysis for small to mid size companies, most pre IPO. Anaplan is being used by FP&A only in most if not all our implementations and not by the whole organization. The business problems solved by Anaplan is alleviation of the reliance and management of large and complex Excel workbooks which are hard to maintain and even harder to update.

Reduced territory and account planning turn around times

At this organization, Anaplan is being used by the FP&A and Sales Ops departments. My experience is with FP&A. This organization was using Microsoft Excel for forecasting and Microsoft Access for consolidations. It was a very slow process to update the forecast. Anaplan allowed us to have all forecasts in one model (rather than multiple Excel spreadsheets) that can be accessed by everyone at once, and where the updates are flowed live to the financial statements.

Anaplan has helped us turnaround results and KPI reporting quicker which has resulted in quicker decision making with more trust in the numbers.

Our organization uses Anaplan across Supply Chain, Sales, Marketing, and Finance. We use Anaplan to help forecast sales from gross dollars all the way down to the standard margin. Anaplan helps us operationalize these forecasts in Supply Chain, and then realize these forecasts with our finance team. It is an extremely helpful tool for collaborative planning.

Before we used Anaplan, we stored data in spreadsheets. Each teammate had their own version of the spreadsheet and it was extremely difficult to know who's data was "correct." Now, all users have the same data in one cloud-based solution. This enables all of our business decisions to be data-driven and informed because we can actually trust the numbers in our forecasts.

We currently use it for Demand Forecasting, Rebate Forecasting for Gross to Net, and building P&L for inline portfolio of products. We have expanded the use in Supply Chain and Accounting reconciliation. It is isolated into Finance and supply chain for the current usage, but I hope to expand it to other departments. We have developed weekly and daily tracking reports to be used by sales team as well.

Our company moved completely from the standard locally stored data into Anaplan Cloud solution. It improved a lot the whole process of transforming source data into financial results. Many aspects of the daily job were enhanced - security, managing ability, accuracy, scalability, efficiency. I'd like to recommend Anaplan to all those people that need a solution having a database + calculation functions on big sets of data.

We have moved into Anaplan almost completely leaving behind Excel sheets and similar local solutions. It improved a lot in the company. What we are waiting for is to have more opportunities to connect Anaplan with other systems and solutions that would make it a great tandem solving many different issues.

Anaplan is being used by the Finance Team of about 35 professionals for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and visualizations. It's not yet being used by our Accounting, Investor Relations or any other team at the company. Its primary use case is a single-source-of-truth for budget, actuals and as a forecasting tool. It has really helped us get a handle on our financials.

It is used for our pricing model. Currently being used in only a couple departments. It is used because the large data we have is not easily used in Excel.

It is being used by the FP&A team. We use it to track headcount and SG&A. In addition to that, we also track technical income that allows business users access to update forecasts and budgets based on changes and trends made to actuals. Actuals are updated on a quarterly basis.

At Tableau, we use Anaplan for our Sales Planning function. For our company, this encompasses the functions of Workforce Planning, Territory Assignment, Compensation Plan Administration, and Quota Setting. Sales Planning was Tableau's first Anaplan use case, and since adopting the platform, we've also had use cases in Finance, Marketing, and IT. Anaplan helps us address both collaboration and version control issues. For some use cases, the key benefit is having a primary data source that can be iterated upon several times by a number of different stakeholders. For other use cases, the key benefit is having a significant number of collaborators, who can all rely on one single source of truth. Overall, Anaplan provides our company with the data integrity we need while still remaining flexible enough to update quickly to accommodate our rapidly changing environment.

We use Anaplan for financial reporting, planning and customer reporting.

Anaplan allows us to spend time on value added instead of spending time consolidating planning results in Excel. We can look at reviewing key trends. Forecasts are broken down into smaller tasks and distributed to the business resulting in less pressure on the FP&A team during forecast/budget rounds.

The reporting timeline is shorter as dashboards can be used for users to login and see their areas results which means we dont have to send out manual reports.

Anaplan allows very complex business modelling but without any of the complex language used in other tools and can be run by the users themselves. Results are recalculated on the fly with no wait time to run the recalc process.

Anaplan is used across the whole organization, at WW level. The key problem was to remove offline spreadsheets for sales quota planning, deployment, and ensure automatic, real-time coverage analysis for the sales teams.

I purchased Anaplan to perform complex modeling of potential changes to our sales incentive programs. In addition to our usage, our finance team is beginning to explore the use of the tool for sales forecasting. With a sales organization in excess of 5000 people, it is critical to be able to adjust multiple variables across lines of business and understand the impact on each of our operating areas. Anaplan allows us to model multiple "what if" approaches simultaneously, perform side-by-side scenario analysis, and convey to our executive team what the specific tradeoffs are between options. Our responsiveness has been accelerated by orders of magnitude, and our conclusions are rooted in data.

The corp FP&A team is using it for financial budgets. The revenue planning team is using it for revenue planning. One of our units is using it for demand planning. The customer service org is using it for returns modeling. It's primarily a finance footprint but that footprint is growing outside finance.