Anaplan Review: A Consultant's Insight
September 18, 2023
Anaplan Review: A Consultant's Insight
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan
I am part of the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) practice of a specialised consulting firm focused on creating value through technology and process transformation for private markets and financial services companies. Our EPM practice designs and implements solutions for financial and operational planning and reporting using tools like Anaplan and Workiva. We empower our clients to improve performance and achieve their goals.
Over the last 5 years, I have implemented Anaplan for clients in various industries including real estate, telecommunication infrastructure, and insurance. Use cases for the implementations I have done include leasing metrics reporting, operational income forecasting, asset cashflows, and traditional FP&A use cases.
Over the last 5 years, I have implemented Anaplan for clients in various industries including real estate, telecommunication infrastructure, and insurance. Use cases for the implementations I have done include leasing metrics reporting, operational income forecasting, asset cashflows, and traditional FP&A use cases.
- Anaplan is great at unifying enterprise data and facilitates a very fast way of updating data from source systems which reduces (or eliminates) inherent risks associated with traditional MS Excel based reporting.
- Anaplan enables forecasting processes to be streamlined and be collaborative making it easier for users to share data and insights that assists in improving communication and decision making across an organisation.
- Anaplan can scale easily so that businesses can start with one use case and then easily add more users as other parts of the business decide to allow Anaplan to be used to solve their business problems.
- The standard Anaplan integration tool (Anaplan Connect) seems very archaic compared to other available tools in the market and does not have the ability to transform data prior to it being ingested into Anaplan. They do offer another tool that does a better job and is more user friendly but it is for a fee. However, they will be introducing something called Data Management System in the next few months which is very promising and seems to be something that will handle all the things that an ETL tool does and more!
- Calculations at various levels of a dimension can be tricky and requires more effort for a model builder. I have personally seen other tools make calculations at any level of a dimension so much more easy to build which in turn makes the drill through of those calculations less complicated and more easily understood by users. Would be great if Anaplan can improve on this area.
- Companies requiring very large transactional data sets to be used in Anaplan have the option of using a different calculation engine called "Polaris" which allows larger "sparse" models to be built and can work side-by-side with the traditional Anaplan engine. Companies needing these very large models built may then have to have models built using the traditional calculation engine (for smaller, dense models) as well as the new Polaris engine (for larger, sparse models) which will make the model build a bit more challenging. Having said this, I haven't yet seen an existing client need the new Polaris engine as yet.
- Ease of use for the end users and for the model builders.
- Scalable solution
- Seamless data integration
- I cannot quote any specific client names, however, I have had clients reduce their reporting process from several weeks to several days.
- I have seen client case studies with 100%, 200% and 300% ROIs.
As a senior technical consultant implementing both IBM Planning Analytics (IBM PA) and Anaplan some years back, my preferred solution was Anaplan as IBM PA required a consultant's time for software upgrades, configuration and other software setup time which didn't add value to the client. This has changed in the more recent IBP Planning Analytics cloud version but I guess it shows that IBM has been lagging Anaplan in this area. And I don't think it has caught up yet. The other key area that I think IBM PA users have to be mindful of is with the use of Turbo Integrator and any business logic imbedded it in that is not transparent to the user. With Anaplan, business logic applied in the model is much more transparent to the user.
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