Item: Anaplan
Rating: 8
Author: SJ Estrada

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Anaplan is used across our organisation. The use cases that I am familiar with are related for Finance, i.e. Budgeting & Forecasting, Workforce Planning, & Revenue Planning. All of our BUs are onboarded to Anaplan for the creation of our Annual Operating Plan while only a fraction use it for Forecasting. This number is expected to grow as we continue to build out features for our Forecast model. Currently, we are implementing models for Workforce Planning and expect to build out our Revenue model in mid to late 2024. The Workforce Planning model is expected to be used by all BUs for Budgeting & Forecasting cycles while the Revenue model will be piloted for one BU.

Pros and Cons

Anaplan is flexible, meaning it can be built to accommodate almost all business use cases
Implementations are quick - delivery of MVP products and phased enhancements is ideal
The UX is user friendly and Finance users enjoy the similarity of features to excel (like pivot, filter, etc)
Anaplan continues to enhance its product and listen to its customers / community

Audit Reporting - it's currently difficult to use / read the audit reports
Security - security is not centralised & too broad (actively being worked on)
Data Integration / Management - data management and orchestration could be centralised (actively being worked on)

Return on Investment

We are able to submit plans at least a day before deadline now.

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?

Yes

Would you buy Anaplan again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Anaplan is a strong tool for finance as it can be built for a variety of business processes. Its flexibility allows us to customise the tool for each unique aspect of the business. While it is extremely flexible, it is important to have the right people in place to help manage the tool long term or else scalability / optimisation could be at risk. Implementations for Anaplan are quick and you can easily deliver an MVP and then continue to add on additional features throughout the year in releases. Users enjoy working with the tool because of the UX - if dashboards are built with a strong user journey in mind. The auditing feature is not very user friendly; the export of history must be exported, parsed and displayed on a separately built dashboard to be useful. Security is too broad and not centrally managed (but this is being worked on!). More work needs to be done to make integration and data management easier (again being worked on!).

Anaplan is a flexible tool that can be built for most business processes

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan