Item: Anaplan
Rating: 9
Author: Daniel Dunleavy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I implement primarily Finance and Supply Chain use cases. Standard Finance use cases - financial statement forecasting, budgeting, and actuals; zero-based budgeting, revenue and opex planning, and long range planning. Standard Supply Chain use cases - standard costing, capex, margin analysis, demand planning, supply/inventory planning, stat forecasting, BoM / Material planning, and capacity planning. My background is FP&A, Business Analytics / Market Intelligence, and Stats for Fortune 500 companies. Constantly experiencing similar bottlenecks with Excel - downloading the same data sets, manipulating them (moving formulas over and aggregating), and reporting / charting every month / quarter. Lots of human capital used on non-value added, repetitive activities. That's where I saw the value of Anaplan.

Pros and Cons

Automation
Data Hub
Connected Planning & Processes (Breaks down Business Silos)
Configurability
Ease of Learning (don't need to be a coder)

Multi-Select Capability for Dashboard Selectors (ex. select more than one product and see the results of both on a dashboard)
Numbered list actions in New User Experience dashboards (currently only available in classic dashboards).
Easy summary of which modules are used on what dashboards.
Anaplan being able to run its own integrations (no middleware).

Return on Investment

Time back on weekends
Save money
More accurate and reliable planning

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Cloud, Microsoft Power BI, OneStream, Adaptive, SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Integrated Business Planning

Customizability and ease of learning (not a coder, similar to Excel formulas). Not confined to the existing configurability of software's planning process/tables. Low IT involvement. Scenario and driver-based planning (can make inputs). Can be used for more than just Finance and more than one use case - all utilizing the same data sets. Integrations are relatively easy to set up and can range from CSV file loads to custom APIs.

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 Power BI, Postman, Jupyter Notebook, Microsoft Excel

Likelihood to Recommend

Anaplan is well-suited for complex, planning processes involving multiple areas of the business. For companies that want to put the software development into the business user's hands vs running up IT development costs. Great for scenario and driver-based planning. Data Hub allows for all data to be pulled into a single source of truth within Anaplan and allows for faster development of additional models utilizing existing data hub data. Anaplan can be expensive for mid-sized companies to use with only one use case. Designed for enterprise planning.

Master Anaplanner Review

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan