Item: Anaplan
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We support our customers to implement Anaplan in different use-cases: FP&A, HR, Marketing, supply chain, etc. Anaplan is cloud based platform that supports users have one place for any EPM requirement that a company could have. The platform is very scalable, helping the users to have the same performance on simple Finance use-cases that generally require less amount of data to much more complex and high-volume data that a supply chain use case could require.

Pros and Cons

data integration
complex formulas
very good scalability
modular building: start simple, evolve to complex calculations

Reporting: cannot accept more than 3 dimensions in Rows/Columns area
Reporting: dynamic show/hide columns (for non-numeric line-items)
Reporting: difficulty to create flexible dependent filtering criteria (Filter A to show only values for Filter B and vice-versa)

Most Important Features

in memory engine: no need to launch additional calculations to see Top level effect of a data modification
user friendly interface: you do not need to be an IT specialist to be a good Anaplanner model builder
Excel-based formulas: quite easy to understand how the formula works in Anaplan. there are a lot of functions that are similar to Excel.
very good on-line training platform: very comprehensive Anaplan platform that makes very easy for a new Anaplanner to start the journey to become a trained model builder (and it's all free of charge)
Anaplan support: very competent and quick to solve the platform issues

Return on Investment

common platform: all users are integrated and can have 1 version of the truth
increased quality in closing the month: to spend more time in checking data than in aggregating and putting together the data.

Alternatives Considered

Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management and OneStream

A successful implementation is not always related to the tool, but also related to the quality of the implementation taking into account the limitations, particularities, or the way of working of the tool and using the best-practices related to that tool.

I think Anaplan can implement many more use-cases across the organization, insuring similar performances by handling much more granular data.

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

Oracle Enterprise Data Management, OneStream, Microsoft Power BI

Likelihood to Recommend

Anaplan it's very good for use-cases where a lot of Excel are involved (especially for Budgeting and planning applications). Anaplan can deal with a lot of data and can summarize data very easily. As a multi-dimensional database, Anaplan deals very well with homogenous calculations across dimensions and it is a real scalable calculation engine. Users have similar performance calculations on models with 100 million cells as with 1 billion cells.
Having an "in-memory" calculation engine, the users can see the effect of the modifications without the need to push any additional calculation.

Anaplan is less appropriate for finance consolidation use-cases, where the "parent" calculation is not the arithmetic sum of the children. However, there are some nice tricks to implement in Anaplan in order to have different calculations at parent level than as child level

Anaplan to replace the Excel pains within the organization

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan