Item: Anaplan
Rating: 9
Author: Ken Cheung

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are implementing Anaplan to our customers. Most of the customers usually still rely on excels to do their planning, which there are a lot of silos due to the limitation of excels and computing power of local machine. Anaplan is an excellent platform to help company to streamline planning process in a specific function (e.g. Finance, Supply Chain, HR) by removing silos and providing real-time calculations. Also it enables organization to achieve connected planning in an organization by linking models in different function together on the same platform.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Financial Planning & Analysis
Flexible architecture in Anaplan enables users to plan at a higher granularity
Supply Chain Planning
Time dimensions allows statistical forecasting can be easily implemented
Staff Cost Planning
No rigid structure in the platform allows organization to define the planning hierarchy that fit the organization perfectly

Cons

Reporting capability
Would be great if there is an option to include properties of dimension into report
Need significant effort on handling of sparsity with concatenating dimensions
More flexible on conditional formatting, allow to configure the conditions with formula instead of a rigid line item

Return on Investment

We have a customer in Foods Industry got their budgeting cycle reduced from 3 months to 1 month
In a big retail customer, 1% revenue uplift by optimizing stores layout
Released man power in BU from streamlining planning process

Usability

1. It has a highly customization user-friendly UX which has a style close to Excel, making finance users really easy to pick-up.
2. It is a low-code / no-code platform, which business users could manage the model themselves without relying on IT. All formulas are really similar to what the excel has which lower the learning curve of the tool.
3. Real-time collaboration & connected planning capability allow multiple users to interact on the same platform and always looking at the same source of truth.

Alternatives Considered

Jedox

Jedox has limited the standard dimensions to 6 only in the financial workspace. If you need any other custom dimension, it has to be defined in analytical workspace. However, data interchange between Financial Workspace and Analytical workspaces are not real-time and rely on customizing the data interchange process by SQL statement.
In which, Anaplan does not have this limitation in number of dimensions in the model, and all modules can be linked with formula. Any changes in one of the module would be reflected in other modules linked in real-time.
The effort of implementation is easier and the overall user-experience is better.

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 Teams, Microsoft SharePoint, ChatGPT

Likelihood to Recommend

I had an implementation on sales planning scenario in a large enterprise selling spirits in China. They have chosen Anaplan as the planning platform to replace the planning process in excel. In order to do budgeting / forecasting on sales, they have to pull all the existing sales contracts from their CRM system and project the sales based on contracts conditions, also planning renewal of the contract.
In the past, excel couldn't handle the large amount of data, where there are more than millions of contracts.
However, Anaplan is an excellent tool for them, thanks to the hyper-block technology, enabling them to perform real-time calculation on top of millions of transaction records.
They can now perform budgeting / forecasting at a more granular level in the past, thus increasing the forecast accuracy in the company.

Anaplan Feature Ratings

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