Why Anaplan and the benefits my organization gained by using it
Updated December 09, 2024

Why Anaplan and the benefits my organization gained by using it

Vignesh Murugaiyan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan

We are using Anaplan since last 9 years, and currently 30+business use case model are in use. Before Anaplan, we had to consolidate 100+ spreadsheet from asset managers from various location to produce one top level report by Fund and Group, more time was spent on data collection, error checking, and reporting. After Anaplan, zero time spent for reporting as Anaplan is powerful enough to produce real time consolidated reports, one platform to manage 100+ properties.
Key use cases are below,
a. Real Estate Cashflow modeling - using Anaplan to underwrite new properties to see the ROI and budget/forecast the revenue/expenses for the existing 100+ properties across European
b. Expenses Management - using Anaplan to budget/forecast the people and non people costs(salary of the FTE\contractors and expenses such as Capex\Opex) for the 3 countries (UK, Ireland, and Canada)
c. Profit and Loss Statement- using Anaplan to set up the target for the Canada Market and forecast the P&L for the next 2 years based on the historical performance of the products.

Pros

  • Customer support is excellent. All clarifications related to products are mostly answered within few hours.
  • Continuous product improvement, such as simplifying the coding, new user interface, ease of managing users from Admin dashboard
  • Cloud-based planning tool, which provides users the flexibility to access Anaplan from anywhere in the world.
  • User security, which controls user access with read-and-write capabilities.
  • Rightly focussing on Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence to generate more accurate forecasting results.

Cons

  • I believe there is room for improvement when it comes to UI, recent NUX release largely covered most of the gaps
  • Some functionalities which exist in excel are not available and had to find a workaround which is not super complex.
  • As a cloud-based platform the developers, as well as the users, can easily access it from anywhere in the world.
  • Connecting multiple business processes helps to see what's happening in other areas and make decisions faster.
  • Governance over access of product/market, ability to control read access of sensitive data
  • Planning time reduced. Ability to what-if scenario plan adds more value to the business and helps planners come up with the best forecast.
  • Data consolidation time reduced to zero from a week.
  • One Single Source of Truth, one platform for all use cases and all user groups
  • Governance over user access and control is excellent
We have been using Anaplan more than 10yrs in our organisation, I have seen myself how Anaplan usage reached to 30+models from 1 model and seeing the demand within organisation to use Anaplan because of its capability and the positive impact. we have recently signed contract for another 5 years with Anaplan and having very good roadmap for the future years and strong inhouse team to manage the existing solution and implement new transformation projects.
We used to plan mostly in Excel spreadsheet, the problems we faced were data consolidation, slowness, multiple sheets, no real time reporting and access control. With the help of Anaplan, we were able to bring solution into cloud and connect team across various location to collaborate in real time and see the impact in real time to decide faster than ever before.

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?

Yes

Would you buy Anaplan again?

Yes

Anaplan is well suited for all the use case, solution can be customized/built as required as per use cases. Below are some scenarios I have experience implementing and using it,
1) What-if scenario planning: compared to other tools Anaplan takes less time to set up scenario planning
2) Forecasting demand based on historical data using Plan IQ

Anaplan Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
10
Financial budgeting
10
Forecasting
10
Scenario modeling
10
Management reporting
10
Financial data consolidation
8
Journal entries and reports
8
Local and consolidated reporting
10
Detailed Audit Trails
9
Financial Statement Reporting
9
Management Reporting
10
Excel-based Reporting
9
Personalized dashboards
9
Color-coded scorecards
9
Cost and profitability analysis
8
Key Performance Indicator setting
10
Flat file integration
10
Excel data integration
10
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
9
Customizable dashboards
9
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Report-Level Access Control
10
Responsive Design for Web Access
8
Mobile Application
8
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
8

Using Anaplan

900 - Various team uses within finance,
a. Revenue and Expense forecasting/Budgeting
b. Insurance Profit and Loss Statement
c. Real Estate cashflow modelling
d. Real Estate Profit and Loss Statement
e. Capacity Planning
11 - We have our inhouse Anaplan team to implement new anaplan solution and manage existing models. I believe for successful Anaplan Implementation, certified master anaplanner or certified solution architect to lead the projects from designing solution to go live, and Anaplan L2 or L3 certified team is required to do the modelling exercise and support regular BAU activities.
  • Expenses Forecasting & Budgeting
  • Insurance P&L
  • Real Estate Cashflow modelling
  • Rea Estate P&L
  • Capacity Planning
  • Underwriting Properties to see the Return on Investment
  • Driver Based Planning model for running various what if scenario's
  • Connecting various finance team and bridging most of financial data into Anaplan as single source of truth
  • We are exploring the use of Anaplan for our Call Centre workforce planning by using recent new feature- plan IQ based forecasting using Machine learning and Artificial intelligence.
we have recently renewed our contract for another 5 years and have strong feeling that will do the same after as well. We have been using since long time, growing from one Anaplan use case model to 30+ model.

Evaluating Anaplan and Competitors

  • Cloud Solutions
  • Scalability
  • Integration with Other Systems
  • Ease of Use
We were looking for one cloud based solution as finance strategic tool to implement across various business domain use cases, the solution has to be cloud based, ease of use, able to scale, less time to implement and secured solution. One solution for all the use cases, rather than having multiple standalone systems for every use case.
I think the selection process going to be the same, scoring the tools by the same metrics.

Anaplan Implementation

1. Having strong team with experience is mandatory for successful implementation.
2. I strongly suggest having inhouse centre of Excellence team if you have more than 1 model.
  • Implemented in-house
  • Third-party professional services
We started with third part professional services company for our first anaplan implementation and later created our own Anaplan centre of Excellence team consisting of 16 members with various skill sets(master anaplanners, solution architects, L2&L3 certified, and Data Integration specialists) to implement solution inhouse and manage existing models.
Yes - We started with phase 1, implementing the cost management model for UK market, later expanded to 3 other countries(Ireland, Canada and AI). We did the same every time, approached business problem one at a time which helped us faster and better solution implementation.
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled - We did not face much of issue with the change management, everytime change management happened, we had to take a step back and spend little more time to bring all into the same page.
  • First and the last, business requirement changes

Anaplan Support

1. Anaplan provides 24/7 customer support channel to help with queries,
2. Customer Partner from Anaplan to support vendor with their queries like license purchase, use case implementation support, customer advocacy
3. Anaplan Learning Platform to help learning new product features free of cost and Yearly Anaplan connect across globe to learn from the success stories of fortune 100 companies.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
We did not buy premium support, because we usually get the response to our queries within 2-3 hours, every ticket have been tagged to customer support executive to resolve within agreed SLA.
Yes - Yes I reported a bug very long back and was acknowledged/resolved in next release within a week time.
we faced this problem giving Anaplan access to external users from other companies. Since we use single-sign-on to login into Anaplan, external users had to have our organisation email id and system to login, but we were able to find a way to avoid that by using B2B accessing method and Anaplan team was much helpful advocating the possibilities.

Using Anaplan

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Data Loading and Reporting
  • User Access Control
  • Drill Down to detail
  • Management Reporting
  • Producing Audit report
Yes - We have tested the mobile interface, however we don't use it largely,

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