Item: Anaplan
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Anaplan for financial consolidation, capital planning, and headcount management. Anaplan helps with creating a decentralized, real time source of truth that we can quickly use to make business decisions. In combination with our existing HRIS solution Anaplan also allows us to efficiently track and report on headcount at a granular level.

Pros and Cons

Cloud based source of truth
Flexibility to quickly develop in response to business need
Very flexible
Did I mention flexibility?

Can be difficult to implement in-house without an experienced team
Would enjoy no/low code API integrations with other systems
Not great with sparse data sets (Anaplan has recently released functionality called "Polaris" that is supposedly better with sparse data sets
Not the best for management reporting, BUT, our strategy is to use external BI tools in combination with Anaplan for management reporting.

Most Important Features

Decentralized source of truth
Flexibility

Return on Investment

Allowed us to reduce time to report for budget/forecast
Time savings on month end budget versus actual reporting
Allowed for standardization of business processes.

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Anaplan again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Anaplan is great as a central consolidation spot/source of truth. Decentralized nature makes it accessible and end user inputting can be very straightforward. Anaplan is also flexible, almost to a fault. Can easily develop whatever functionality end users desire. Given how flexible Anaplan can be, implementation can be difficult in house unless you have an experienced team. Often recommend starting with external implementation to lay the groundwork/mentor in-house team. I don't think Anaplan is the best reporting tool. Other business intelligence tools are better suited to serve your reporting needs. Anaplan is also not engineered well for effective dating data. It is not a great data repository and should not be treated as such.

Easy to learn, difficult to master

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan