Item: Anaplan
Rating: 10
Author: David Edwards

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization is an Anaplan implementation partner, and we work with clients ranging across industries. We primarily focus on retail use cases, but we are expanding into tech, financial planning and analysis, and supply chain. Anaplan has helped our clients solve planning constraints within their sales, finance, logistics, marketing, and customer support networks.

Pros and Cons

Real-time calculation engine
User-friendly interface with customizable dashboards
Dynamic reporting that can be shared throughout an organization
Ease of use for developers (quick to learn and support)

Better integration with Microsoft 365 products
Workflow capabilities to allow simple adherence to internal processes
More options for sending notifications/emails to users by system-triggered processes

Most Important Features

User-friendly reporting and clean web interface
Ability to integrate with most other platforms
Fast calculation engine for real-time results

Return on Investment

Consolidated sales planning forecast across entire client organization
Reporting capabilities for executives to make decisions without input from direct reports
Automated data inflows reduced manual effort from employees

Alternatives Considered

Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management and IBM Planning Analytics with Watson

Anaplan is much more user-friendly to architect than Hyperion or TM1/Planning Analytics. By outsourcing cloud storage to Anaplan, much of the headache of maintaining internal servers is removed. The calculation speed and traceability of Anaplan's calculation modules are also significantly better than its competition. Auditing dataflows in Hyperion and PA is extensively cumbersome. The learning curve for Anaplan development is much more gradual than other platforms as well, so new support users can quickly pick up the basics of sustaining a planning application.

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

Microsoft Teams, Atlassian JIRA Align (formerly AgileCraft)

Likelihood to Recommend

Anaplan has an industry-leading calculation engine that provides results at a fraction of the time of most other planning software. For organizations that have complex planning processes, Anaplan can be easily customized to fit an array of forecasting processes and scenarios. However, given the cost associated with utilizing large amounts of data storage, Anaplan should not be used as a master data or ERP platform. Many organizations have tried this successfully, but the cost of storing excessive transactional data often outweighs the benefits of having all information in one system.

Anaplan as a solution to multiple industry needs

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan