Anaplan user at two different companies
December 16, 2016
Anaplan user at two different companies
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan
Anaplan is currently used within Accounting/Finance to store all financials, markets, forecasting, budgets, actuals, and in the future to use it for reporting. We just rolled it out this fiscal year so things are fairly new. Currently everything is stored in Excel spreadsheets and this is just not conducive, prone for error, waste of time, and takes up too much time forming the report rather than doing analysis. Decisions or being proactive is all about speed, it's having a tool at your fingertips to correct and make better decisions.
- Reporting. Eliminates Excel spreadsheets, can also feed right from financial system into Anaplan.
- Stores a massive amount of data and can compress it in a report. You can create various reports while still exporting to validate a few things and import as well.
- Anaplan can be used as a forecasting tool, it can store actuals, prior year(s) actuals, it holds history and store information that many other financial systems can do - but the advantage is it has reports and can be the future tool that just doesn't house information but also allows you to utilize it to be proactive.
- Anaplan can store large amounts of data, therefore when building Anaplan it can be cumbersome. The organization will have to manage well the initial build and also modify it as they see fit, as this can only be learned through time and experience.
- If Anaplan has missing information such as new sku's not being able to easily add, it can make your forecasting by sku not balance. Also if there is no clear adjustment line, for example if it cannot disaggregate to a lower level and you need to allocate it this way you can spend hours trying to do these manually. Or if you want to just modify in one line adjustment and it doesn't exist and have to plug in one customer or brand, this can also be a situation where the number you are viewing is meaningless - it would be great is there was a place to see notes, who made the last change, what changes were done, or someone that locks it.
It was not my decision to implement Anaplan but being a previous user I can tell you it is a very powerful tool that makes you have it at your finger tips with amazing speed rather than just housing information. The difference is Anaplan is the next big thing and more companies that I know of are going or using it for the capabilities.