Item: Anaplan
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

FP&A and close use cases at the moment, with plans to expand usage. A detailed P&L is forecasted/budgeted in the tool at the most granular level with interfaces from ERPs and other planning software to create 1 submission to the corporate team. The planning is centralized in this tool for 400 users across different functional areas and teams globally. Calculations differ in complexity with some leveraging historicals to trend forward periods and some taking user inputs to determine an effective driver. The tool eliminates a significant number of Excel handoffs between teams and consolidation groups - previously, each region or BU had submissions to their groups and the groups to corporate and corporate to the leadership team. Leveraging a singular tool and a singular hierarchy simplified the consolidation while also creating consistency in reporting and calculations.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Creating a platform that allows user to trial and error a use case without feeling like they need to build perfection. Users can quickly stand up new models and apply Excel-based logic to automate different parts of their jobs.
Being hosted in the cloud allows users to access their data anywhere and creates a real time interface to the models. Previously, waiting for consolidations may have taken hours but the model to model import or intra-model calculations are relatively quick and require minimal downtime.
The interconnectivity of models and how it's architected can create a true connected planning experience. The flexibility of making different models (S&OP, FP&A, Sales, Workforce, etc.) and then creating integrations between the models allows an organization to plan holistically and view each aspect in greater detail.

Cons

Sparsity is a common problem for organizations, especially larger ones that have lots of granularity. There are ways to code around it, but it's something to always be mindful of and when you have contractors, they may not necessarily take the space-saving approach. In some cases, managing sparsity comes at the cost of user experience.
User roles and security management is lackluster at best. The admin needs to create separate roles for each unique person's job description. In other platforms, you can create groups of permissions and assign users one or many groups. Anaplan forces users to only have 1 and in some cases, users have hybrid roles that then require additional role creations.
The modeling features have not been upgraded in some time - most new features are behind paywalls and require additional payment. In the past, modeling experiences and platform improvements were baked into the cost of the licenses, but now require additional negotiations to receive improved features.

Return on Investment

Several teams that operate across business units and support multiple users have saved hundreds of hours per cycle by having their numbers directly calculated in Anaplan. Some teams previously had to send separate spreadsheets to each of their 200 partners and then consolidate for corporate reporting.
The reconciliation portion of the implementation was extremely time intensive. The calculations were somewhat difficult to validate for the end users and required significant involvement from the Anaplan team to support their understanding. This could've been minimized with better change management and onboarding.
The platform has forced teams to be consistent and operate under 1 model. Previously, users created their own files and baked in assumptions specific to their model but did not reflect the broader organization's assumptions. Having 1 central system prevents that from occurring.

Usability

The tool, if built well, performs as expected and if not, more. In the FP&A world, most of the time is spent on refreshing spreadsheets and performing data validations. Anaplan removes a significant portion of that job and allows users to perform the analysis portion of FP&A. Users retain the ability to input their assumptions and change things as they see fit. However, the core of the model will remain intact and drive consistency between teams. The ability to manage code and modeling within a function provides significant flexibility where it was previously delegated to IT or an external partner. There is risk with talent, as is true with every other system, that you lose resources or have inadequate resources. This is not a ding on the platform, but an overall risk you retain with every implementation. Excel is an universal tool that most finance professionals understand how to use. Anaplan is specialized enough that it requires a bit more knowledge and in order to make it performant, a lot more knowledge. Overall, the tool is a workhorse that can handle most customizations and allows teams to build as much as they want with fairly small limitations.

Alternatives Considered

Oracle Hyperion

Essbase/HFM were hosted on-prem and required regular maintenance from the vendor. The tools were good at the simple tasks of consolidation and relatively simple allocation/calculations. Anaplan is a cloud-hosted platform that can be accessed almost anywhere with an internet connection. It's easily modified and controlled by the functions and does not require significant IT intervention. The consolidations calculation in Essbase may take mins or hours, depending on how it's designed. For Anaplan, it's almost instantaneous to transfer data within the platform. Within a model, the calculation is automatic and does not require a manual refresh (provided it's all linked with a calculation and not manual data input). Admins have more flexibility with the tool and it acts as a traditional software life cycle.

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?

Would you buy Anaplan again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Workday Human Capital Management, SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Likelihood to Recommend

As with most platforms and implementations, the consultant or partner that builds the models are most important. The best platforms can be ruined by a poor implementation and results in poor adoption by the end users. Anaplan is best used for organizations that have their data well curated, processes well defined, and user based well engaged. When these things are aligned, the implementation can be as smooth as possible and the models coded appropriately. Anaplan can be leveraged across multiple market sizes as its structure is fairly flexible and can grow with size. The platform itself is on the older side as newer generation EPM tools have additional capabilities baked in. Anaplan's reporting tools are fairly basic and provides a small window into the possibilities of reporting. Overall, the tool performs as expected and does not expect to completely wow the users. It is a reliable engine that can be customized to your desire and the potential is only limited by the users managing the tool.

Anaplan Feature Ratings

Comments

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The tool can plan almost anything