Item: Anaplan
Rating: 10
Author: Brian Shepley

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As an Anaplan Partner, we work to implement highly successful Connected Planning Solutions at global leaders across myriad industries. Many of these companies will begin with a pressing use case, such as financial forecasting or OPEX planning, that stems from an overarching corporate objective. Once the first use case is rolled-out, companies find that having everything in one cloud-based system (vs. rogue Excel spreadsheets) creates synergies and increases productivity. This leads them to build additional use cases on the platform and allows them to truly leverage the connected planning ecosystem. As a partner, we help guide companies on how to build these additional use cases out as a 'honeycomb', to ensure they aren't building silos, but rather, a connected planning ecosystem.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Native hierarchies help ensure data integrity and allow for real-time "slice and dice" of data (vs. flat data in Excel or other EPS systems)
Real-time calculation of multi-dimensional data spanning billions of cells gives the user powerful forecasting capabilities
Features such as selective access to lists, user roles, and dynamic cell access allow you to ensure each user has access only to what they need, helping to ensure data security.
PlanIQ is a newer offering from Anaplan that helps augment the platform's power through the use of AI and Machine Learning.
Hypermodels allow organizations with extremely large data sets and complex use cases to build them out and scale them on the platform. The performance of the platform is top-notch, even when there are hundreds of gigabytes of data in the Hypermodel.

Cons

The UX has come a long way over the past several years and has added numerous great features. It can still seem a little sluggish at times when loading pages that have a large amount of content on them. It definitely helps to plan pages out and focus them on logical areas, instead of trying to jam everything onto one page.
The Polaris platform has great promise and allows users to remove the sparsity from their data to save space and improve performance when using large data sets. However, there are some functions and formulas from the standard Anaplan platform that are unavailable -- or need to be setup differently -- in Polaris. If a client is looking to implement on Polaris, they will want a strong Implementation Partner to guide them through the process and help them avoid speed bumps and road blocks

Most Important Features

Realtime multi-dimensional calculations
Strong ALM capabilities (important, especially for large-scale projects)
Hyper Models allow for very large models for very large data sets
The addition of PlanIQ providing the power of AI/ML

Return on Investment

I have yet to see an implementation of Anaplan where the client was unhappy about the endeavor or did not find significant ROI on the project within a year after completion

Usability

Anaplan has made great strides over many years to create a user-friendly platform that is also extremely powerful. With the improvements made to the UX over recent years, it delivers a clean, easy to navigate solution that most users are able to use with minimal training. They've balanced the power of real-time drill-downs, calculations, charts and graphs (that update as users make selections), with ease of use

Alternatives Considered

Anaplan has the best real-time, multi-dimensional calculation engine that I've worked with. This is core to creating a highly accurate forecast that provides the level of detail necessary to be useful to planners. Their addition of PlanIQ brings in the power of AI/ML to the platform, without the need to add an integration to another platform to fulfill that need. Finally, their addition of Polaris gives more flexibility for large models, especially large and sparse models.

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Anaplan go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Anaplan again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Compared with other EPS platforms that I've worked on or interacted with, Anaplan is by far and away the best. The biggest advantage is the real-time multi-dimensional nature of the platform. Most legacy platforms work in flat data and create 'faux' hierarchies, whereas Anaplan has native hierarchies that you can navigate on-demand. This gives the user a lot of power when it comes to forecasting across regions, products, etc. For instance, Anaplan gives you the ability to view data at a Regional level on one UX Page, identify outliers that may be affecting the forecast, and then (on the next UX Page) zoom down to the most granular level to investigate. The smoothness of that ability to look at data between levels and across dimensions is something I haven't seen in any other competitor to date.

Anaplan Feature Ratings

Anaplan Training

Training Types Used

Online Training
In-Person Training

In-Person Training

In my opinion, in-person training is always the best if you have the option to do so. This allows real-time interactions with the instructions, whereas the online training I took required me to write-down questions, email them, and wait for responses. This slows down the process, as you can imagine. That said, in-person training is an extra cost and it likely isn't needed for everyone. I would suggest selecting a small number of people to take in-person training and then having them act as mentors to the rest of your team. That way, as the rest of the team takes the online training, they have a resource to help them in real time.

Online Training

The online training package that Anaplan offers has become quite robust over recent years. It is quite user-friendly and comprehensive and is sufficient for training-up most users. However, it is useful to have at least one or two in-house resources who are trained on the platform to help those taking the online courses. This is why I recommend sending at least 1-2 resources for in-person training and leveraging them to help the rest of the team train-up on the online training program.

Using Anaplan

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar	None

Easy Tasks

Real-time calculations in the Anaplan processing engine mean that the user can input data or make selections and see the results instantly, including the updating of any charts, graphs or other visualizations
Dashboards allow users to slice and dice data instantly using selections such as region, product line, time period, etc

Mobile Interface Availability and Impressions

Yes - The mobile interface allows users to view pages on their mobile device. Model builders are able to tailor the pages to the mobile device and the platform uses dynamic sizing. I haven't had a lot of experience with the mobile app, but in my experience, it is great for collecting quick inputs from users, such as hours worked, or units shipped, or an adjustment to a sales figure. However, you wouldn't use it, for instance, to do reporting or any kind of complex decision-making.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

The future of planning is connected - Anaplan