Item: Anaplan
Rating: 10
Author: Patrick Desmond

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Anaplan is used as a solution to a myriad of pain points that exist within a firm's corporate planning cycles. The tool is extremely flexible and allows organizations to obtain forecasts and outlooks for almost anything in a much more timely, accurate, and detailed manner than old processes such as handing off excel spreadsheets around and organization to be updated. Anaplan is also much less error-prone since the manual manipulation of data is drastically reduced when implemented properly. Multiple-use cases have been addressed during my time from Biopharma, Technology, Manufacturing, Demand Planning, Workforce Planning, Revenue planning, all across the use case spectrum. These cases have been addressed effectively as well leading to major reductions in the effort it takes for an Anaplan customer to come up with a forecast.

Pros and Cons

Connectivity with other systems
Acting as a single source of truth for data
Powerful, Anaplan's calculation is very fast compared to a lot of legacy systems

More space at a base workspace level. 130GB just doesn't cut it for larger clients, I'm sure this has come up a lot
UX Changes such as on a worksheet the page selector at the top has to be driven by the primary grid which might be at a lower level and you are forced to use this.
Everything is custom so it can be quite tedious to build if you're not experienced.

Most Important Features

A good looking and slick in my opinion UX
Ease of use
Ability to do pretty much anything (within reason)

Return on Investment

Anaplan has been positive. On every project I've worked on, a lot of people on the customer side have been promoted who have worked on projects with me
Every project has reduced the time it takes for a customer to compile what they need by a significant amount
More free time for end-users to focus on more important tasks because Anaplan takes out the leg work in calculating a lot of the information they require for forecasting purposes

Key Insights

Do you think Anaplan delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

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

Anaplan from my experience seems most appropriate when customers are willing to change their current business to work best with the tool. A lot of times this involves getting the client comfortable with planning at a higher level. Sometimes companies cannot do this and this limits the ability of the tool because of space. Anaplan is not well suited for detailed reporting if company leadership 'needs to see everything by 7 dimensions' and that is the way they look at it. The best thing to do here is export the plans out of Anaplan and view them in Power Bi or another tool that is better suited for viewing and manipulating large sets of data. This is because building a reporting module off of an example like this, (even 1) can take up most of the remaining space available. This I see as the largest limitation. This however has not been an issue as most customers already have subscriptions to those tools.

A very flexible and powerful planning tool that can be used for almost any use case

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan