Item: Anaplan
Rating: 8
Author: Angela Breard-Chen

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have implemented Anaplan for clients across several industries for headcount planning, sales forecasting, [and] supply chain (demand planning, promotion planning, inventory, and shipment planning). I am also a user that uses Anaplan for headcount planning, project management, and project financial reporting. The implementations I have worked on have been for user groups ranging from 5-300 end users.

Pros and Cons

Centralizes planning methods and structures across a business
Real time calculation updates
Business-friendly development language, doesn't need to be owned by IT

Model performance slows as you try to build more complex models that include multiple forecasting methods
Model to model integration isn't real time
Calendar/time settings are restricted to a single type

Most Important Features

Development language is easy to understand and easy to learn
Master lists and hierarchies can be maintained by end users
End users can drill down into calculation details from dashboards

Return on Investment

Has reduced a lot of time spent on manual excel work
Reduces avoidable errors (overwriting data, deleting rows, conflicting inputs between users)
Supports more collaboration across different parts of the organization

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, Zoom, Paycom

Likelihood to Recommend

Anaplan is great for allowing businesses that are currently operating at the limits of excel to expand beyond what excel can do. It helps automate a lot of simple data management problems such as having a central hierarchy and allows time-intensive and manual reporting (such as pivots) to be updated in real-time as planning is ongoing. Anaplan starts to be difficult to use when planning is done at a very granular level of time, anything more granular than [a] day, partially because it causes model size to be very big and calculation time to slow a bit.

Straightforward, Flexible Planning Tool That Can Be Managed by Anyone

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan