Anaplan Reviews

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.

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.

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.

We use Anaplan to set up our annual budget and do monthly projections. The model is used by 12 users in the department.

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.

We have two Anaplan instances. Sales Ops uses it to manage headcount and for capacity planning. They have users and viewers of their headcount reporting.

I manage the FP&A instance which is used to plan headcount, expenses, capex, and COGS. We also use it for reporting for various cuts of the P&L, headcount, and balance sheet. This instance is only being used by FP&A, but we hope to role it out to business partners later in the year.

Currently we are using Anaplan for Planning and Budgeting. We are looking to begin using it for a forecasting and consolidation of data (Data Hub) and performance reporting models. The main business problem it has helped us with is the consolidation and ability to report on multiple dynamic hierarchies across a wide range of businesses. It has also being the driving force for process change within our organization.

We currently use Anaplan for FP&A - essentially having modeled out entire business on the platform. We use it in most all planning and forecasting discussions. Because of its flexibility, ease of use and ability to scenario test, it allows us to quickly and accurately make decisions that have a financial impact that would otherwise take days or weeks to make.

We are currently in the process of rolling out Anaplan for sales forecasting to increase accuracy and accountability in our sales forecasts.

Lastly, we are in the early stages of planning to use Anaplan for our business intelligence reporting capabilities. It will be used as our one source of truth for business metrics and results - something we desperately need and that Anaplan will work perfectly for.

Our road map is to implement Anaplan globally to connect all departments and all levels of the organization for end to end planning, management reporting and analysis. Our initial phases focused on seamlessly connecting orders reporting and forecasting to revenue and gross margin forecasting. Anaplan allows all levels of the organization to have one version of the data and was the catalyst for rolling out consistent forecasting processes across all regions and functions. Anaplan will bring efficiency to our organization by eliminating shadow finance activities, improving data integrity and allowing consistent on demand analytics.

We currently use Anaplan as a quota and territory management tool focused around our yearly target process. As of right now we only use it for the US business unit. However we are looking to expand this use case to Canada as well. Our goal is to then add additional use cases such as Compensation and pipeline/forecasting.

Right now, we are using Anaplan for workforce planning modeling. We use the historic attrition and internal movement data to forecast future hiring needs. It seems that other functions in my company are exploring Anaplan but as of now only HR has implemented two models using Anaplan.

Currently we are using Anaplan for account ownership and territory planning. We are about to role out Anaplan for incentive compensation. Our current use saves us tons of time from our Excel planning and allows us to see the impact of proposed changes without trying to manipulate a large Excel file and worry about version control. An additional benefit from our implementation is quick and easy reporting on account ownership. Having incentive compensation in Anaplan will allow us to integrate the two instances and see the impact of account moves to compensation and vice versa see the impact to sales reps pay based on their books of potential compensation changes.

We use Anaplan to sync our data across demand and supply and then layer our financial assumptions to build out our financial forecast. Anaplan addresses business needs of synchronized, timely data tied to one source of truth, as well as scalability within the organization. Also relevant is the fact that it can refresh in seconds what would take Excel days or weeks to complete. The ability to build cube logic is great for financials requiring build outs of multiple SKUs, reorgs, etc.

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.

We use Anaplan within our FP&A oOrganization. The goal is to get to make this a robust tool and also have our deal desk be linked into the system to help with synergies. Currently, FP&A is the only team using the tool in the organization. The problem that Anaplan helps us address is getting out of Excel and being able to have a single place for our forecast to be held.

Anaplan is used primarily within finance and strategy for financial planning and analytical purposes. It provides the team with the capability to merge and work with operational data sourced from multiple systems into one world. Thus, not only are we able to dissect data with greater dexterity, we are able to utilize multi-disciplinary data in conjunction with Anaplan's forecasting models to plan with greater precision.

I've implemented Anaplan for two different departments in our company:

1. Sales Finance - Anaplan was used for weekly forecast process and I was part of the team that implemented Anaplan.
2. Business Strategy and Marketing Team - I implemented Anaplan for this team for our annual target setting.

Both experiences had positive outcomes and each model was implemented and currently being used.

Currently, Anaplan is being used to calculate incentive compensation and workforce management. It is being used to replace slow legacy and Excel systems. It is also being used as a data hub for current and future use cases.

Anaplan is currently used as our annual budgeting and monthly forecasting tool. The budget owners are given access to view their respective department budget. We also use the Anaplan Excel add-in function to help with the reporting aspects. Anaplan has reduced the planning/forecasting turn around time; increased efficiency, and most importantly data integrity (vs. previously done in Excel). It also provides visibility of the detail behind the budget/forecast.

We use Anaplan as a free-form modeling platform. It is an alternative to our old Excel based models. We are leveraging its ability to calculate massive amounts of data in a highly structured yet flexible model. It is currently being used to forecast future medical and drug claims to arrive at the total monthly premiums charged to our customers for the Retail ACA lines of business. We are currently building prototypes internally and looking to expand to other use cases.

We use Anaplan within sales ops and across our sales teams for territory planning. It is used by 3 members of our sales operations team, 5 region leads, and 15 team leads. We use it for "What-if" analysis in territory design. It allows reps to be able to see the impact of changes before they actually happen.

Currently Anaplan is used mostly in supply chain planning processes, but company is looking optimisticly towards implementing it widely in many other departments to make Sales and Operation Planning process more cross-functional. It has already been implemented in several countries, but not globally. Since Anaplan is mainly designed for planning, it is now seen as an addin for SAP APO, which is too complex to be operated by wide range of specialists across different departments.