Anaplan beats Excel for complex modeling
May 17, 2017
Anaplan beats Excel for complex modeling
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan
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.
- Cloud based modeling platform that can be accessed from anywhere with leading industry-standard encryption and security.
- Speed and Power of Hyperblock calculation engine. It can calculate an enormous amount of data, an amount that excel would have no chance at processing.
- History/Audit Trails/Restore Points - every single change to the model is logged and a restore point created
- User-access controls
- Large up front cost compared to using an existing platform like Excel
- Learning curve for model builders
- Excel
In Excel, models become very complex and start to become handled and built in a hurried kind of slapdash manner – and it’s easy for them to become disorganized and have mistaken or errors. Excel is also very limited in its ability to perform massive amounts of calculations, it would actually be impossible to handle the level of granularity of our calculations – hundreds of thousands or even millions of cells per calculation when you consider the intersection of the data points for our lowest desired level of detail. Excel would never finish calculating a formula that can be calculated in 3-5 seconds in Anaplan.