Item: Anaplan
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Anaplan for Sales Operations, primarily for revenue forecasting, but also for a variety of sales planning activities, such as quota planning, account clean-ups, in-year account movements, territory assignment changes, and sales performance evaluation. Anaplan serves a single source-of-truth for all these activities, providing users worldwide a single portal for their work, with views and data access governed by model administrators (preventing exposure to unauthorized data). Anaplan also provides a greatly flexible and agile platform, where tools can adapt to our ever-changing and deeply specific needs while having the capacity to undergo rapid iterations.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Agile development
Data security
Auditability
ETL
Multidimensional calculations

Cons

Real-time data streaming vs. batch processing
Front-end UX design

Return on Investment

Anaplan has enabled a level of forecasting that would have been impossible in other tools or offline Excel files
Enables end users worldwide to work with datasets of at least 36M, enabling quality inputs by end users and allowing us to enforce data validations
Five Production models deployed globally are sourced from a singular Development environment, which creates easy standardization of model architecture and drives standard work

Usability

Anaplan has a fairly high barrier to entry when it comes to model building. Thankfully there is are robust online learning resources and a community to help get builders off the ground. Anaplan has also made it much easier to accomplish data engineering work using easy-to-use interfaces within the Anaplan environment, meaning model administrators do not need to know how to write in a scripting language to set up and automate data pipelines and scheduled jobs.

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

Alteryx Platform, Microsoft Excel, DataGrip

Likelihood to Recommend

Anaplan does very well in scenarios that require the exchange of multiple spreadsheets, where files have to be collected and collated from a number of stakeholders, where multiple source datasets need to be synthesized to perform a task, where versions of data files must be coordinated and kept up-to-date, and where large numbers of users need to interact with a dataset simultaneously. Anaplan is also well-suited to tasks or projects that require rapid iteration or are prone to changes in requirements.

Anaplan is not as well suited for situations that require robust reporting or dashboarding. While Anaplan has some reporting capabilities, dedicated BI tools (e.g. Tableau) will provide richer capabilities.

Anaplan Feature Ratings

Comments

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Anaplan Excellent for Sales Planning and Data Automation