Item: Anaplan
Rating: 9
Author: Brent Orr

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Anaplan primarily for demand and inventory planning of our physical product. It is used by sales operations, supply chain, and finance. However, since the initial application has been so successful we are now exploring using Anaplan in other areas: quota setting, sales forecasting, and call center management.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Anaplan allows data to be viewed and manipulated across multiple dimensions. Once you have the data in the system users can build virtually any model they want to evaluate and analyze.
With Anaplan our data is centralized and stable. We replaced a number of spreadsheets which resided on individual's laptops and were constantly emailed back and forth. Time spent validating and manipulating data has been drastically reduced - not to mention the errors that always exist in a spreadsheet.
Anaplan has allowed us to simplify our use of multiple hierarchies. Primary issues before Anaplan involved reconciling inputs and outputs that existed at different levels of a hierarchy and sometimes across different dimensions. In Anaplan once the relationship is mapped everything happens seamlessly.
In our case Anaplan and our use does not rely on our IT organization. Superusers build the models and dashboards for regular users and all of the tool and the data reside in the cloud. Data is always accessible and as real time as you can feed to the system. Changes are instantaneous.

Cons

Some functions I occasionally used in Excel are not yet available in Anaplan - SUBTOTAL and CODE primarily. Also the ability to highlight multiple adjacent cells and instantly see a sum, count or average.
We are on a prior pricing model with Anaplan and it makes it difficult to expand the use cases. I believe this is resolved in the new pricing model. Also, depending on the pricing, small tasks/projects may not be cost effective to move out of Excel and into Anaplan if the users are numerous and not already in Anaplan.
Extracting data out of Anaplan is not always straightforward. It is terrific for a user who has access to Anaplan but if a user wants to pull data out for another purpose or to share with non users it is limited. There are links to XLS and PPT but those only go so far.

Likelihood to Recommend

Anaplan is ideal for any process that currently uses Excel on an ongoing basis. It is also well suited for processes where the data is coming from multiple sources and needs to be "always on" and in a stable and accessible environment. Finally, in any planning environment where users are capable, and IT resources are scarce, Anaplan is like water to the thirsty.

If a user base is not that capable and/or the business needs or wants a prebuilt and 'canned' application Anaplan may not be the best choice. They have an app store with prebuilt applications for a variety of processes but they do require some customization to make it fit. It is not difficult but that is not what some want in a software purchase.

Anaplan Feature Ratings

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

I Enjoy My Job Again! Thanks Anaplan