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Anaplan

Anaplan

Overview

What is Anaplan?

Anaplan is a transformative way to see, plan, and run your business. Using its proprietary Hyperblock™ technology, Anaplan lets you contextualize real-time performance, and forecast future outcomes for faster, confident decisions. Anaplan enables connected strategy and planning across your enterprise…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Anaplan has been implemented in various industries to address a wide range of business challenges. Users have found that the software …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 45 features
  • Flat file integration (281)
    9.5
    95%
  • Forecasting (282)
    9.3
    93%
  • Scenario modeling (284)
    9.2
    92%
  • Management reporting (283)
    8.3
    83%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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What is Anaplan?

Anaplan is a transformative way to see, plan, and run your business. Using its proprietary Hyperblock™ technology, Anaplan lets you contextualize real-time performance, and forecast future outcomes for faster, confident decisions. Anaplan enables connected strategy and planning across your…

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.anaplan.com/pricing

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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PlanGuru is budgeting, forecasting and financial analytics software for SMB's, Nonprofits and the Accountants/ Advisors that work with them.

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Product Demos

Financial Consolidation demo

YouTube

Anaplan Demand Planning Demo

YouTube

See the Future Clearly by Planning Demand with Anaplan

YouTube
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

7.7
Avg 8.0

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

9.1
Avg 8.3

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.8
Avg 8.2

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

8.2
Avg 7.6

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

9.2
Avg 8.7

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

8
Avg 8.0

Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting

These activities are designed to assist with both data-driven operational, short-term planning and strategic long term planning

9.1
Avg 8.3

Consolidation and Close

Consolidation of data from multiple entities with currency management, reporting and audit trails.

7.2
Avg 8.0

Financial Reporting and Compliance

Financial statements and regulatory filings

8.6
Avg 8.2

Analytics and Reporting

Dashboards and scorecards for KPI monitoring and benchmarking

9
Avg 8.0

Integration

Ability to integrate with external applications.

8.8
Avg 8.3
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Product Details

What is Anaplan?

Anaplan is a transformative way to see, plan, and run your business. Using its proprietary Hyperblock™ technology, Anaplan lets you contextualize real-time performance, and forecast future outcomes for faster, confident decisions. Anaplan enables connected strategy and planning across your enterprise to move your business forward. Based in San Francisco, Anaplan has over 200 partners and more than 2,000 customers worldwide.

Anaplan Features

Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting Features

  • Supported: Long-term financial planning
  • Supported: Financial budgeting
  • Supported: Forecasting
  • Supported: Scenario modeling
  • Supported: Management reporting

Consolidation and Close Features

  • Supported: Financial data consolidation
  • Supported: Journal entries and reports
  • Supported: Local and consolidated reporting
  • Supported: Detailed Audit Trails

Financial Reporting and Compliance Features

  • Supported: Financial Statement Reporting
  • Supported: Management Reporting
  • Supported: Excel-based Reporting

Analytics and Reporting Features

  • Supported: Personalized dashboards
  • Supported: Color-coded scorecards
  • Supported: Cost and profitability analysis
  • Supported: Key Performance Indicator setting

Integration Features

  • Supported: Flat file integration
  • Supported: Excel data integration
  • Supported: Direct links to 3rd-party data sources

BI Standard Reporting Features

  • Supported: Customizable dashboards

Report Output and Scheduling Features

  • Supported: Publish to PDF
  • Supported: Report Versioning

Access Control and Security Features

  • Supported: Role-Based Security Model
  • Supported: Report-Level Access Control

Mobile Capabilities Features

  • Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
  • Supported: Mobile Application
  • Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile

Anaplan Screenshots

Screenshot of Platform: The Anaplan platform is a unified cloud-based solution that connects people, data and plans to enable complex scenario modeling and drive growthScreenshot of OpEx Planning: Review revenue-target-setting goals by brand, season, and capacity all on one, unified, highly-visual dashboardScreenshot of Supply Planning: Break down costs across assembly production to project profitability and align your supply chain to market opportunitiesScreenshot of Territory and Quota Planning: Keep track of sales goals and quotas across territories and industries to optimize sales performanceScreenshot of Headcount Planning: Easily align workforce plans with your strategic plans and quickly see where the best qualified talent resides to fit your organization’s staffing needsScreenshot of Marketing: Eliminate spreadsheets to drive efficiency across planning and manage budget against planned activity

Anaplan Videos

The Anaplan platform supports detailed hyperscale models that can see a business from edge to edge, and plan with signals down to the transactional level.

Watch Anaplan transforms the way users see, plan, and run their businesses, to move forward with confidence in a complex and changing world.

Anaplan Integrations

Anaplan Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android, Mobile Web
Supported CountriesAll countries
Supported LanguagesMulti-lingual support

Frequently Asked Questions

IBM Cognos Analytics, Oracle Hyperion, and Prophix are common alternatives for Anaplan.

Reviewers rate Financial budgeting highest, with a score of 9.6.

The most common users of Anaplan are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).

Anaplan Customer Size Distribution

Consumers0%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)0%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)10%
Enterprises (more than 500 employees)90%
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(479)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Anaplan has been implemented in various industries to address a wide range of business challenges. Users have found that the software replaces duplicate spreadsheets and simplifies reporting processes, resulting in one version of the truth. Anaplan's inbuilt version control and access controls have improved forecasting accuracy and simplified forecasting processes. It has also helped standardize forecasting and reporting approaches across different asset classes, benefitting functions such as HR, Finance, Accounting, and Management Controlling.

The flexibility of Anaplan allows users to customize the software to meet their specific business needs. It supports a multitude of use cases including financial planning and analysis, customer success, collections, capex forecasting, opex forecasting, headcount and personal spend forecasting, balance sheet forecasting, cash flow forecasting, P&L forecasting, collections forecasting, and management reporting. Multiple users can input forecast assumptions in real-time, enabling dynamic results. Furthermore, Anaplan allows for faster implementations by providing a single platform and source of truth for multiple planning use cases.

Anaplan's powerful calculation engine enables users to run multiple scenarios in seconds, facilitating what-if analysis and scenario comparison during budgeting and forecasting processes. The software is widely used in sales performance management for functions like territory management, account planning, quota allocation, and incentive compensation planning. In addition to its extensive use cases in finance and sales planning, Anaplan is employed across various industries including real estate development, insurance, telecommunication infrastructure, and banking. The platform empowers organizations by providing scenario planning and sensitivity analysis capabilities that enable informed decision-making. With its user-friendly interface and real-time calculations, Anaplan assists businesses in centralizing data and maintaining a golden source of truth for better planning outcomes.

Highly scalable and flexible data integration and modeling capabilities: Reviewers have praised the Anaplan platform for its highly scalable and flexible data integration and modeling capabilities, allowing for easy evolution from simple calculations to complex formulas. Many users have highlighted this as a major strength of the platform.

Real-time data capabilities enabling informed decision-making: The real-time data capabilities of Anaplan have been widely praised by reviewers for enabling informed decision-making based on up-to-date information. Several users have mentioned that this feature has greatly contributed to their ability to make agile decisions in a fast-paced business environment.

User-friendly interface contributing to high end user adoption: The user-friendly interface of Anaplan has been consistently highlighted by reviewers as a key strength of the platform. Users appreciate the intuitive design, which resembles Excel and allows for quick task completion. This ease of use has contributed to high end user adoption and overall positive feedback from customers.

Limited storage: Some users have found the limited storage in Anaplan to be a hindrance in efficiently managing their data. They have expressed difficulties in storing and organizing large amounts of information, which can impact their ability to effectively utilize the software.

Expensive: Several reviewers feel that Anaplan is expensive and could be more cost-effective considering its features and capabilities. This pricing structure may make it less accessible for smaller businesses or organizations with budget constraints.

Glitches with the interface: Users report experiencing glitches with the interface, causing difficulties in navigating and performing tasks smoothly. These issues can disrupt workflow and decrease efficiency for users.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(51-75 of 303)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are an implementation partner of Anaplan. We help solve our clients forecasting issues by developing models using Anaplan. The common issues in the existing forecasting are due lack of agility and pressures on margins. Lack of agility is mainly driven by speed and flexibility of existing models (Excel). Anaplan reduces the time it takes to forecast and increases the flexibility to forecast and analyse at a greater depths. Anaplan also allows users to focus and explore at various levels to provide better insights on profitability.
  • User Experience
  • Real time insight
  • Scalability
  • Business Owned
  • legacy workspace is currently restricted to 130gb. They have now built in hypermodels that increase this but comes at a high cost
Anaplan is a brilliant tool for forecasting for numerous industries. Specifically I have used it for Banking and Insurance in many user cases. The benefits were clear to see from moving businesses away from legacy systems such as excel to an intuitive tool like Anaplan. The product is constantly evolving over time with new features and an exciting roadmap ahead.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We help customers implement Anaplan across their organizations. We've really found the tool to be extremely flexible and able to adapt to many use cases.
  • Flexible
  • Easy to use
  • The structure it provides keeps planners in the bounds the corporate wants.
  • Better reporting functionality
  • more user-specific functionality
  • better collaboration in regards to in-tool communications
Anaplan is a fantastic planning software - it's a blank sheet, so you can really build any model you need. Anaplan has made good progress over the past couple of years enhancing the reporting functionality, but there are other tools better suited for data visualization. The other aspect of the software that is 100% custom (nothing out of the box) is workflow.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Anaplan is a highly versatile platform with the ability to seamlessly build for varied use cases, it also provides the data integrity and helps to maintain golden source of truth for large organizations. Drastically bringing down manual effort involved in business planning process and quick implementation cycle is its biggest win, which makes it the favorite choice for customer nowadays.
  • Business Planning
  • Single Source of Truth
  • Intuitive Data Reporting
  • Integration with legacy systems is complex and resource intensive
  • Highly complex models require performance and workspace efficient approach
  • ALM sync process involves movement of all changes together and doesn't support individual change release
Financial Planning, Sales Performance Management, Supply Chain Management, Headcount Planning
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Anaplan addresses a wide range of issues from financial planning to demand planning to sales performance management. In my current role, I am focused on financial planning across different institutions, though I have also used it successfully for sales performance management. It is a fully connected planning platform, which allows users to enter details concurrently and see results in real time.
  • Integrated Planning
  • Flexible Building
  • End user experience
  • License Management for large user bases (1,000+)
  • Syncing only certain features instead of the full model
  • Reporting on App Administration
Anaplan is well suited for most planning scenarios. I recommend its use for a wide variety of planning use cases - basically anything that is in spreadsheets can be built better in Anaplan.

That being said, Anaplan is not a data warehouse. I would not recommend using it to store or translate large sets of data.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases: Reserves Reporting, Forecasting, Cost Management, and planning. For all use cases, we had multiple spreadsheets that no one person fully understood. By implementing Anaplan we have removed duplicate spreadsheets, simplifying reporting processes and ensuring one version of the truth. We have also improved forecasting accuracy and processes leveraging inbuilt version control as well as general controls [functions] such as access controls and model deployment via application lifecycle management.
  • Multidimensional modelling
  • Forecasting and Planning
  • Realtime calculations
  • Large datasets
  • Flexible solution, can be adapted
  • Outer year modelling
  • Self documenting
  • Auditable
  • Application lifecycle management, controlled deployments
  • Sparcity- Anaplan should be able to discount unused cells from storage usage
  • Licence type management - currently difficult to keep tabs of this
  • More flexible pricing model
Any Financial planning and analysis model is suitable for Anaplan, therefore; most excel models can be captured in Anaplan. That said, excel is still best for any ad hoc analysis. If you are looking for a controlled and powerful rapid calculation environment then Anaplan is the way forward.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
Anaplan is relatively low cost platform which provided business a quick ROI.I am using Anaplan since year 2015 and switched my career to consulting, before year 2015 I used to work as a Head of Production Planning and Logistics for one of the Tata Group entity. I was responsible for end to end supply chain, production planning , distribution planning , after market and logistics planning. It was very difficult for me to do planning, budgeting, supply chain provisions in excel spread sheets at granular level of details, considering huge count of SKU's I was not able to create detailed rough cut /short term planning at product or product-customer level, because of which I always faced challenges while planning plant capacity, planning constraint based production etc. It was always difficult for me to commit production / distribution to sales team, impact on inventory carrying cost.From 2015 I have started using Anaplan and I implemented many end to end Anaplan models in the field of Production planning, inventory planning , capacity planning, S&OP, demand planning, supply planning for multiple global customers and I really can see my clients taking huge benefit out of Anaplan in terms of profitability or cost reduction. With proper planning process company can decide their strategy to make business more profitable.
  • Pre built stat forecast model
  • Budgeting and planning
  • Optimization
  • In Memory calculations
Anaplan is a very good platform for demand planning, supply planning, consensus demand planning and inventory planning and S&OP.

The biggest benefit of Anaplan is it helps to connect finance and supply chain planning on a single platform and it is highly customizable.
May 15, 2023

Anaplan, A Review

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I currently implement Anaplan as a partner consultant. I have been a part of implementations around incentive compensation, sales/demand planning, and fund & JV administration use cases. In each instance the solution was able to be handed over for the business to wholly own and maintain, highlighting the idea of 'business lead' connected planning.
  • Flexibility in how the models can be designed/work
  • Ease of new development, allowing the business to make changes or further deploy more models as needed
  • Allow for scalability as the solutions or business grows
  • Provide insights tailored to the various levels of the organization/leadership
  • Easier access to user activity metadata (tenant level reports)
  • More concrete product roadmap
  • More visibility / trainings into newly released features (outside of just the newsletter)
Anaplan is well suited in areas that have a disparate or intensively manual planning process across multiple parties/persons. It allows for flexibility within a framework that truly enables the business to drive efficiencies, consistencies, insights, and time savings across a multitude of use cases. Anaplan is not necessarily suited to be leveraged as an ETL tool, though data transformation can be done within the tool (albeit not exactly what it is designed for).
Anton Mineev | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Initially, Anaplan was used in the company for FP&A - budget and monthly forecast. Gradually on the basis of Anaplan these processes were unified, the connection of versions became stronger and new reporting was added (especially after the appearance of UX).Anaplan is not a full-fledged BI product, but its capabilities are sufficient for primary analysis and tracking model results.

As the product and its value were understood, the implementation of S&OP planning, marketing block and Cash-Flow started. In the end, Anaplan allowed some of the functions to be tied together, although there was still some manual input and planning outside of the system.

The main problems that Anaplan solved were:
  • Role model and data protection.
  • No need to bring different Excel versions together and update parts of them (consolidation)
  • A single approach and version of truth (some Excel is heavily tied to specific users)
  • Flexibility of the model (compared to other systems) - easy to make changes.
  • Primary & fast reporting.
  • Process work-flow - process and data status.
  • Speed of performance. The data from ERP is loaded into the system quickly enough and the model is recalculated instantly. A simulation environment was implemented for the CFO, where he could change macro parameters and analyze the data.
  • Flexibility and speed of setup. We don't have a large IT department to allocate and maintain servers. We didn't have several months to work out the methodology. We needed to implement several models using Agile and quick feedback. Anaplan allows us to maintain the highest speed of implementation and deployment of the solution.
  • It can be used in different cases: finance, logistics, marketing. Sometimes it may not be very efficient, but if you have licenses, the extra cost is sometimes negligible.
  • Multi-user reporting. You can make individual filters, but if you need different people to compare different versions, then you have to complicate the architecture and waste cloud space (not always efficient). This limits your analysis capabilities.
  • There is a lack of some visualizations. The addition of the bubble chart was very timely, but even years later Donat differs from Pie only in the presence of a "hole". It is impossible to make two Donat in each other for comparison. Sometimes there is not enough flexibility in text formats.
  • The basic integration tool Anaplan Connect has no visual interface and it is difficult to get adequate load logs with it. Its configuration is chosen from the general logic of the ease of working with Anaplan. You will probably need help from IT to set up the integration, access certificate, and so on.
Anaplan is great for financial planning and systematizing your processes after Excel. It will limit the freedom of individual participants, but allows you to build a central model and speed up your processes. At the same time, it will not make you hostage to IT and a one-time implemented model.
May 08, 2023

Anaplan Rocks.

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
  • Anaplan continues to innovate and does a good job of incorporating Anaplan customer and partner feedback into their roadmap.
  • Anaplan offers a flexible and agile product that allows plans to be agile and adapt quickly to changing business needs.
  • Anaplan continues to champion their community and hosts great events to promote knowledge transfers that benefit the entire Anaplan ecosystem.
  • Anaplan account executives champion their accounts and want to help them succeed.
  • Anaplan has a host of middleware connectors.
  • Management reporting in Anaplan has come a long way, but there is still room to grow here. Already leaps and bounds above where it was even the last year, but still not as flexible reporting as other tool built specifically for reporting.
  • Anaplan support is not always the most responsive.
  • Anaplan is inefficient with extremely granular data.
For any sort of planning, Anaplan is a must. Cannot recommend the product or company enough. Great product, fantastic organization. The first Anaplan implementation is the most challenging, but after that, when multiple models and use cases are achieved, the benefits continue to roll in. Anaplan is especially well suited for areas that are currently driven by disparate planning, and drives tremendous growth by giving end users a greater chance to plan together. We use Anaplan for financial, volume, capital, and workforce planning.
Kavin Kumar Lohanathan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Anaplan helps the client to do the budgeting and forecasting more efficiently. It helps in collaborating the users from a different department in one platform and also make it more real-time in nature. This helps our client to save more time. Also, Anaplan helps in simulations like creating more scenarios, doing what-if analysis, variance analysis, etc.
  • Scalable and user friendly (flexibile)
  • Real -time & Collaborative
  • Data Integartion
  • Advanced Analytics
  • Modelling & Simulation
  • Email auto trigger - Notifications
  • Reporting & Dashboard
Anaplan is a powerful planning tool and it can be used in the business processes like Finance, Supply Chain, Sales & HR.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We support our customers to implement Anaplan in different use-cases: FP&A, HR, Marketing, supply chain, etc. Anaplan is cloud based platform that supports users have one place for any EPM requirement that a company could have. The platform is very scalable, helping the users to have the same performance on simple Finance use-cases that generally require less amount of data to much more complex and high-volume data that a supply chain use case could require.
  • data integration
  • complex formulas
  • very good scalability
  • modular building: start simple, evolve to complex calculations
  • Reporting: cannot accept more than 3 dimensions in Rows/Columns area
  • Reporting: dynamic show/hide columns (for non-numeric line-items)
  • Reporting: difficulty to create flexible dependent filtering criteria (Filter A to show only values for Filter B and vice-versa)
Anaplan it's very good for use-cases where a lot of Excel are involved (especially for Budgeting and planning applications). Anaplan can deal with a lot of data and can summarize data very easily. As a multi-dimensional database, Anaplan deals very well with homogenous calculations across dimensions and it is a real scalable calculation engine. Users have similar performance calculations on models with 100 million cells as with 1 billion cells.
Having an "in-memory" calculation engine, the users can see the effect of the modifications without the need to push any additional calculation.

Anaplan is less appropriate for finance consolidation use-cases, where the "parent" calculation is not the arithmetic sum of the children. However, there are some nice tricks to implement in Anaplan in order to have different calculations at parent level than as child level
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Within my current role, I am the Director of Delivery implementing Anaplan at organization primarily within the Technology, Media, and Telecommunications industry. We also use Anaplan internally to manage several internal use cases related to running our business. Broadly speaking, we typically see our clients use Anaplan to optimize their planning processes by using cloud based platforms (such as Anaplan) to help connect business functions
  • Flexible
  • Data Processing
  • Customization
  • Integration
  • Current Date Capability
  • Native Workflow
  • Additional Integration Connectors
Anaplan is a great connected planning platform. It is well suited for multiple different use cases, including fp&a, supply chain, incentive compensation, marketing resource management, workforce planning, and territory and quota to name a few. Anaplan is not a data repository or a workflow tool and there are likely better platforms if those are an organizations primary goals.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Anaplan mainly for financial planning and performance reporting. The use cases are:
Sales planning,
Operational costs planning,
Capital expenditure planning,
Monthly rolling forecasting,
Budgeting,
Long range financial planning and forecasting,
Production of financial statements,
Performance analysis and reporting.

Mainly for financial planning right now but aiming to extend to other areas of the business such as Sales operation planning, Workforce planning, Inventory planning etc
  • Multidimensionality
  • Fast calculation engine
  • Realtime data
  • Flexibility
  • Connectedness
  • Agility
  • Rollback
  • Concurrency
  • Inbuilt AI/ ML
Fast calculation engine, multidimensionality, connectedness and real-time data not rivalled by any other tool out there. Very good at handling large data and good at integration with the not long ago inhouse CloudWorks. I have been using Anaplan since 2015/ 16 and much more better than other tools and Microsoft Exel I have used previously
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Company responds to calls for tender that can include a commercial proposal relating to the maintenance of equipment and systems delivered to its customers. In the case of a maintenance offer won, Company must initially design the associated equipment and maintenance plans, and then perform maintenance. Anaplan application aims at integrating all the functionalities supported by the existing Excel tools and all the functional requirements relating to process of costing, re-evaluation and control of maintenance solution, and thus streamline and optimized these processes.
  • Guidance to implement Best practice.
  • Provide expert solution to solve bottleneck issue.
  • Communicate Product update on timely basis
  • Currently freeze whole model when one user run any process. this can be improvise.
  • provide more functionality to use concurrent user selection based filter and update data without impacting size.
  • NUX bug should be fixed.
Anaplan is best use case for budgeting, planning and forecasting commission calculation, demand planning, financial consolidation profitability modeling, project planning ,quota planning ,workforce planning.
December 30, 2022

Powerful CPM Tool

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Anaplan is used primarily in sales operations, and partially in sales finance. We use it for the following sales operations use cases: sales forecasts, pipeline generation forecasts, territory planning, book of business planning, capacity and quota planning, account classification, etc. Sales finance is using Anaplan to track and analyze bookings (in-quarter and history) in multiple currencies. We also use Anaplan for technical purposes in sales operations: master data alignment, cross-system data hygiene and reconciliation, sales teams maintenance.
  • Phenomenal performance of multidimensional data structures
  • Easy data modeling
  • Beautiful data presentation and visualization
  • Smooth user interaction on a single planning platform
  • Clunky interfaces with source systems (although improved with Cloudworks)
  • Slow data loads
  • No drill down to source systems
Well-suited: aggregated forecasts based on predicted, precalculated potential outcomes, combined with management judgment at multiple levels, and the ability to come up with a collaborated consensus on a single transparent platform
Less suited: transactional and semi-transactional planning activities, such as account assignments, employee transfers, and promotions (especially in large volumes)
December 24, 2022

Anaplan for Business

Dennis Lucanas, CPA, Certified Master Anaplanner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Anaplan is a great tool for managing the fp&a planning process of our clients. It involves thorough manpower planning by position, employee, location, and by department/division. We also implemented sales planning with the use of salesforce data and other factors. It can be easily integrated into other database systems like Microsoft Excel, text files, and CSV files.
  • Financial Reports
  • User Management
  • Real time calculations
  • model size constraints
  • workflow capability needs to be updated
  • support
Anaplan is the best tool used for the forecasting and planning process. The system can handle a large amount of data for analysis without worrying about performance and downtime issues. Maximize the use of Anaplan in use cases where real-time and collaboration are of utmost importance like sales forecasting, manpower planning, and scenario planning.
Bikash R Shil | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We used Anaplan in financial planning, workforce planning, and supply planning. Few of the implementations have been transformational in nature, wherein we could successfully eliminate multiple tools/technology and bring the complete planning process into Anaplan integrated with SAP (for actuals) and Power BI (for reporting). The highest number of users in one model had been approx. 900 users who were performing planning processes, reviewing KPIs, and extracting reports from all across the world. We also developed Data HUBs for Finance and Supply which helped to implement strong governance in master data management and standardization of master data across business functions and zones. We also extensively used Anaplan Connect API for our integrations with upstream and downstream systems.
  • Multi dimensionality, easy integration with other systems help to establish connected planning at [an] enterprise level
  • Complex business logic including many variables can be modeled and results can be reviewed almost in real-time
  • Easily auditable syntaxes make it easy for all users to review formulas to drill down an output/value to track underlying business rules
  • Highly flexible and Scalable to expand or roll out models to different geographies or to add new features
  • Fast evolving and ambitious product development that includes more and more features
  • Very strong in developing a model in driver based scenario/what-if analysis
  • Considering a collaborative platform, workflow features need to be more sophisticated to handle event-based triggers.
  • ALM governance is tedious in multiple developers set up, as it does not allow to migrate changes by each developer rather forces to migrate at a model level that includes all changes by all developers.
  • Reporting ability is still limited, many times dependency on other reporting tools is unavoidable.
  • Time referencing (e.g. default today's date) is not possible without engaging an integration interface.
  • NUX pages are rich in features but building pages for DEV/UAT and PROD are not straightforward.
Any descriptive analysis that includes scenario analysis can be performed in the best possible way in Anaplan. To do drive-based planning, Anaplan will be best suited. To set up [a] connected planning environment across departments/functions with different levels of user access control features, Anaplan will be best preferred In any prescriptive analytics scenario. Anaplan is still at its very early stage and may not be the most preferred unless the model requires basic statistical models to deploy. Any use case that is purely for reporting which may include sending notifications based on certain events, Anaplan may not be able to provide a single solution.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I am a solution architect of Anaplan implementations for their customers. I work with clients to set a foundation and plan for the model builds, and then complete the implementation from start to finish, and provide support and enhancements moving forward. I Most use cases that I work with are FP&A or portfolio monitoring.
  • Scalability. Anaplan is designed in a way that allows for seamless growth as the dimensions within a model grow.
  • Flexibility. Anaplan allows you to model for almost anything you could need to.
  • Community. Anaplan does an amazing job of bringing all partners and customers together in order to push the product forward.
  • Reporting is Anaplan's biggest weakness, however they have improved in some aspects over recent years. Additionally, it is not meant to be a pure reporting tool and it does integrate nicely with other platforms better suited for it.
  • Formula editing. This has improved from 0 formatting previously to some now. Large models completely break and need to reset if a formula is incorrectly entered - this seems like something that could be avoided by not allowing the formula to be put through first
  • Workflow. New workflow functionality launching soon should hopefully solve for this. As of now, there is not much you can do.
Anaplan is well suited for any size organization that uses offline excel models to manage large sets of data and analysis. Excel allows for lots of human error, as well as not showing real time calculations based on other's edits. Anaplan allows you to perform almost any calculation you can in excel while forcing the model to be built in a structured and scalable manner. It also is great at intaking data from many different source systems and aggregating it in anyway you need to.
Moriah Reyes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We implement Anaplan for a variety of use cases within finance and alternative investments for our clients. FP&A, real estate, waterfall modeling.
  • Extremely useful for taking in multiple sources of data and manipulating it for your business needs
  • Useful for solving complex problems
  • Connected Planning
  • NUX is not yet up to par with the old UX in terms of some basic functionality or ease of user experience
  • The new modeling experience, while an improvement in many ways, still has small things that be kept be improved to ensure continuity and conversion over from the old modeling experience
  • It would be really useful to have some sort of Today function
I've used Anaplan to implement creative solutions to problems outside of finance. I used Anaplan to create models for clinical outcomes, daily tracking, used surveys to determine a tenant's expenses. Anaplan is super flexible in its capabilities and you can solve more than finance use cases using this tool.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Anaplan in my organization as a platform to support digital transformation for our clients. We help our clients implement solutions across all industries and use cases, frequently in financial transformation, optimization and reporting. Anaplan is the cornerstone of the systems we use to digitize organizations.
  • Standardization
  • Collaboration
  • Complexity Mitigation
  • Time-to-insights
  • Visibility
  • Integration Options
  • Technical Learning Curve
  • Pixel Perfect Graphics
Anaplan is built to handle complex modeling use cases. While Anaplan isn't great for one-off, one-time calculations, for standardized process, Anaplan excels and drastically improves time-to-insights.
December 15, 2022

Anaplan is great

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Anaplan makes the vision of connected planning truly come to life. It is a tool that is easy to implement, easy to use, and easy to integrate with other models as well as other cloud solutions. It is customizable so can be adapted for almost any use case. In addition, it is constantly evolving to keep up with the ever changing demands of its customers.
  • Connect Plans
  • Aggregate Data
  • Quickly calculate complicated logic
  • Advanced Reporting
  • AI
  • ML
Anaplan is well-suited for anything that involves planning. Anaplan, however, is not a data warehouse or an advanced visualization tool so it can be used as a compliment to other tools for customers that are looking for more capabilities in those areas.
Sai Bandaru | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Anaplan is used as part of sales, financial planning and connected planning systems. Anaplan makes business decisions easier by making it live for most business users involved in planning and as well the dashboards and pages make it easier for users to navigate thru multiple planning and pages. Anaplan drives collaboration within the company
  • Dashboarding and Reporting
  • Hierarchy creation
  • Deployment made easy
  • Scenario planning is made easy
  • administration by business users made easier
  • Tool Bar on Pages
  • Workflow capability needs to be updated
  • Managing Actions needs to be improved for developers and as well the size of the columns in actions sections needs to be flexible
Scenario-based planning is best in Anaplan and easy to learn development and managing the administration
Allan Mark Lumanog | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Anaplan in creating Financial Planning models for our clients. One of the key features of Anaplan is its accessibility. With a cloud-based platform, all you need is a browser and internet connection. Also, the anaplan community is really open to user ideas, making the platform improve in many ways. It usually requires more space when dealing with a large quantity of data. But with the new Anaplan Polaris technology, I hope it can help resolve to deal with such big data. The problem with sparsity, Anaplan is addressing this with the Anaplan Polaris technology and I am really excited to try it to our models and see what it can do.
  • User Management
  • Cloud Computing
  • Financial Reports
  • Security and Maintenance
  • Handling of Big Data
  • Bugs and Fixes
  • Support
  • Integration
Aside from Financial Reports, Anaplan can be utilized in so many ways. We use it also for transactional process and other business processes where it requires workflow and other approval process applications. It really depends on how you think you can help your client with their processes and come with different approach based on the client's requirements.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Anaplan to manage the the FP&A planning process. FP&A planning includes detailed people planning, Sales planning through cohorting and other factors, ZBB opex planning, and scenario planning.
  • Agility
  • user interface
  • Don't need to be a coder to build in Anaplan.
  • There is size constraints/limits. That being said, Anaplan is already addressing that concern.
  • Difficult to compare native versions. Anaplan has a workaround but it is not ideal.
Anaplan does Sales Cohorting very well. Allows use to build up complex sales plans based on user inputs and historical data. Able to easily compare performance of different cohorts and subsets within the cohort. Management reporting is easy to create and looks very professional in Anaplan. FP&A planning is done very well in Anaplan. Anaplan has the ability to aggregate date from multiple sources, provide summariezd reports with the ability to drill down to the detail.
December 09, 2022

Anaplan review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Anaplan is the current solution used for the commercial planning process. It allows to plan volumes, pricing and promotions (discounts/rebates/A&amp;P spend) and it allows to track the effectiveness of each promo with a feedback of actual data that are brought in at the lowest level of detail.<br>Another use case where Anaplan is used is for planning the NSV impact of NPI (new product introduction).
  • modern UX
  • on the fly calculation
  • short lifecycle implementation
  • in the new UX it would be great to have more flexibility in terms of layout design
  • multirole for user
  • admin cockpit to check performance of the model
In my experience as a consultant (in my previous job) and as solution architect in the current one), the ability to develop complex use case in a short amount of time is definitely what makes Anaplan unique compared to other tools. It is the go-to solution for any planning use case (finance, commercial, S&OP, ...) and, with proper design and integration, it can be used to have feedback on execution.
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