Anaplan is the best tool on the market for streamlining planning processes
November 05, 2021
Anaplan is the best tool on the market for streamlining planning processes
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan
I've implemented Anaplan at multiple enterprise clients for Sales Performance Management use cases. This includes territory & quota, sales compensation, and sales forecasting. The problems these implementations solve are numerous, but they always come back to the fact that Anaplan is built around the concept of Connected Planning. What this means is that companies, specifically Sales Operation teams, do not need to use easily manipulated Excel documents that are passed around the organization, altered and broken. With Anaplan, they are able to have a single source of truth while maintaining rules and making sure people only see what they are supposed to see.
- Scalability. SMB to Enterprise businesses can find value in Anaplan.
- Set rules. If your business has specific rules that need to be followed, Anaplan can set those rules, no matter how complicated.
- Automation. Use cases of all different shape and sizes can be automated by the use of imports and actions.
- New User Experience. Anaplan has launched a new user experience and while it looks better than the old UX, it has lost some important functionality.
- Anaplan Sales Team Over-Selling. The Sales Team at Anaplan will tell you that you can do whatever you want with an implementation team, but they need to better communicate that the best implementations are ones that are limited in scope for the first round so clients can learn how Anaplan works and better prioritize new requirements and requests.
- Better error logs. For people who do not use Anaplan everyday, the error logs that can appear due to bad client data are hard to decipher for the clients.
- Connected Planning. Allows different parts of the business and 1000s of users collaborate together in a single source of truth.
- Flexibility. Allows businesses to build very specific items for their specific use case.
- Allows for more intricate and regular sales forecasting
- Allows for rules governing quotas and assignments for Sales Reps
- Allows for snapshotting of specific data to compare performance
There are few, if any, products like Anaplan. The ability to do connected planning with a global team is invaluable. So many clients have previously used Excel and Access to run global corporations and the amount of errors that are caused by everyone having their own workbook and downloading it to their desktop is incredible. During requirement gathering sessions for Anaplan implementations, executives are routinely floored to discover how many people during annual planning in a manner that differentiates from what the company has laid out. They are then again floored when they learn that some people in the organization have to go through 100s of Excel files to consolidate them which leads to a number of errors. Anaplan does away with these inefficiencies as everyone works in the cloud and inputs automatically flow through to other pages and users.
Do you think Anaplan delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Anaplan's feature set?
Yes
Did Anaplan live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Anaplan go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Anaplan again?
Yes