Anaplan Provides Great Flexibility and Customization!
January 04, 2022
Anaplan Provides Great Flexibility and Customization!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan
We use Anaplan for core Financial Planning & Analysis needs to create annual budgets, quarterly forecasts, as well as intra-quarter projections. We also utilize the tool to plan and forecast position level personnel expense and headcount. I personally oversee the creation and maintenance of the platform for these needs. I was involved in the creation of all 5 models as a model builder, as well as an end user of all models as a Financial Analyst. The tool has been a great asset to our FP&A activities with it's ability to plan and forecast at the most granular of levels and provide a consolidated location for all data. We have reduced our usage of excel and passing spreadsheets back and forth because of Anaplan, which has been a huge time saver and great way to connect all teams.
Pros
- Flexibility - the tool can be built the suite the company's needs. It allows for maximum customization for even the most complex business models.
- Data Integrations - the tool has the ability to connect to many different data sources so that data can be passed seamlessly.
- Connected Planning - the tool allows for teams across the organization to pass information and data back and forth between models, enhancing the ability to do connected planning
Cons
- Anaplan struggles with hierarchies where children list items have multiple parents. In our organization, we like to slice and dice the data many different ways as the solutions we sell don't fit just 1 single product hierarchy. You cannot assign more than 1 parent to a list item, which means you have to create duplicate list items and map them together in order to achieve your desired goal of looking at the single piece of data in different hierarchies.
- Speed can sometimes we an issue. If we have too many users in the model at the same time, there can be some lag in saving data inputs. Also, structural changes, such as updating a formula, can sometimes take several minutes to save if there are other processes running within the model at the same time. This makes it difficult to have more than 1 model builder making structural changes at the same time.
- Anaplan doesn't do a good job of conditional formatting. I find the functionality very limited and hard to use in a way that pleases our end users. The color options are less than ideal as well.
- Flexibility - Our company is unique and a standardized 'one size fits all' tool would not fit our needs. The ability to create models in a way that makes the most sense for our company is wonderful and vital to our success.
- Connected Planning - Our company is rather large and we need the ability to pass data back and forth between our departments to ensure we're all on the same page and consuming the same data. Anaplan allows this to happen without much manual effort.
- Data Integrations - Our company utilizes a data warehouse for all financials. The ability to connect with that system and pass data back and forth has been a game changer. We would not be able to complete our annual budget without the data integrations.
- Anaplan has allowed us to speed up our annual budget process. It previously took several months to complete the process, but we've been able to shave off several weeks thanks to Anaplan. Our end users can input their data directly into the tool, as opposed to passing spreadsheets back and forth, and it's available to others in real time.
- Anaplan has completely changed the game for us with position level personnel expense and headcount planning and forecasting. We previously performed this work in Excel, and with a company so large, doing position level planning in Excel makes for some extremely large files. The ability to migrate this process into Anaplan has been a huge win for us. We can now complete these activities much quicker with less headache.
We previously used Tidemark for our annual budget process. However, it was unable to accommodate our needs when it came to position level planning. We decided to select Anaplan for this very reason. Anaplan allows us the flexibility we need to do our position level planning in a way that works best for us.
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
Comments
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