Item: Anaplan
Rating: 9
Author: Nagaraju Nandivada

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We plan our sales performance and territory management with Anaplan. It has been great and suits our use-case well. We dynamically manage territories and Anaplan has improved our productivity by mostly eliminating our manual workload. We also track the territory potential in a certain market and business, and manage the workload of the reps associated with the territory. We do headcount planning so the coverage is adequate and ROI is maintained. We segment and prioritize accounts based on certain drivers. The sales cycle, which used to take months, has been reduced typically to days. The time to value is great, and they are making a lot of improvements to the product roadmap which we are looking forward to.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Scalability and flexibility are the cornerstone features of the product, which eliminate the errors associated with Excel based approaches
The calculation engine Hyperblock which processes large amounts of data in the cloud, is the foundation that powers the tool. The ability to customize for any type of planning be it sales, finance, supply chain, headcount etc helps in exploiting synergies of different orgs.
The new features like combined grids, ADO (Anaplan Data Orchestrator), geo-mapping etc will enhance an already great product and make it a serious competitor in the market.
Great product support backed by a large community of experts

Cons

More AI features are required for the increasingly competitive industry. The product roadmap is already focusing on it
The tool is costly and the pricing definitely needs to be standardized and made transparent for all customers.
The integration ability with other systems should be made easily. ADO is definitely a game-changer but it needs to be bi-directional.
Geo-mapping like features should be brought in to enhance the experience to end user, focus should be on UX and reporting which already works great but has a lot of scope to improve.

Return on Investment

Sales cycle which happens yearly has seen productivity gains not requiring a huge team to maintain and considerably reduced the time to close from 6 months to a few weeks.
Increased visibility to high priority accounts leading to improved targetting driving revenue
Headcount coverage modelled vs current, allowing to improve share of wallet numbers.

Usability

Overall usability has been great and with recent improvements to the product it will be enhanced further. The time to value is great, and it doesn't require a lot of effort to build and maintain after the initial deployment. It supports and recommends the agile framework with The Anaplan Way which works well for us.

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

Likelihood to Recommend

I would recommend it for any type of planning like Sales, territory management, setting quotas, financial planning and consolidation, supply chain and workforce management. It should not be used for ETL purposes although it could handle some transformation. Integration capabilities need to be enhanced further. ADO solves some of it but it is new and needs to be bi-directional.

Anaplan Feature Ratings

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