Anaplan Reviews

Anaplan can be used for many types of planning, such as finance, supply chain, sales, and workforce.

My organization has benefited from the solution providing us with very good forecasting models. Additionally, there is a tool where users can go through different dashboards,  a feature called Dimension where you can use multiple dimensions, and the granularity is very good for us.

Anaplan provides 130 GB of cloud storage for organizations to use as part of their license. 

It is easier to implement for the developer teams and client users who are using it. For example, if a client is using thousands of Excel documents, it becomes very easy for Anaplan to do all of the calculations and move things around inside.

The flexibility is very good, it is easy to make new changes to the deployments.

The solution can improve by providing an easier form of integration to different platforms, such as receiving data from different Salesforce. There is a process to do it through the use of APIs but it could be made much easier. This would be a large help to us.

I have been using Anaplan for approximately three years.

The solution is very stable.

Anaplan has been scalable, there are a least 40 domains where this solution can be used, such as OPEX and financial planning

In my organization, we have approximately 10 clients using this solution.

We are extensively using this solution in the project we are currently involved in.

We provide the implementation and the after the support of the solution.

The installation is not difficult but I would put it in the easy to medium level of difficulty.

The amount of technical staff required for the implementation and maintenance completely depends on the requirements of clients. There is some flexibility that comes after the first deployment, we can do enhancement for the same deployment instead of creating a new one.

We follow the Sprint method of implementation and it can take approximately two weeks. However, as previously mentioned the time is dependant on the client's requirements. For example, we are doing an update to enhance a previous implementation that will take approximately two months.

We are not the end-user to know if the clients are receiving a return on investment. However, I would conclude they have been receiving a good return on their investment because we are having an increasing number of clients and we are doing enhancements to previous deployments.

I would strongly recommend this solution to others.

I rate Anaplan an eight out of ten.

My main use of Anaplan is for financial planning and budgeting forecasts.

Anaplan's strongest feature is that its GUI is very modern and user-friendly.

Anaplan could be improved with a stronger consolidation module. In the next release, Anaplan should include out-of-the-box integration with software systems. Currently, they don't have a connector, so you have to work with an API or directly with a company to build connections, whereas their competitors already include native connectors.

I've been using Anaplan for seven years.

Anaplan is a bit pricier compared to its competitors - the license costs about $4,000 per user annually.

Anaplan's technical support is very good.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy, though it can vary based on users' needs. Depending on the scope of the user's requirements, it can take anywhere between two and twelve months to deploy everything.

Anaplan is a great product for large organizations with multiple locations that want to do FP&A. I would give Anaplan a score of eight out of ten.

My primary use case of this solution is to solve business scenarios, including sales and operations planning and compensation management for top FMCG clients and service provider clients.

Anaplan has eased a major pain point in mapping multidimensional data by combining all the necessary dimensions into a single tool. This makes it much easier for managers to understand the data coming in from their reps.

This product has a very good modeling feature, and its graphical representation of visualizations has also been valuable.

The visualization tools in the product are limited in comparison to other reporting tools.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

My impression is that this is a reliable solution that gets very good feedback at the management level. 

We have something called Anaplan Connect, which is like an in-built Anaplan connector, where we can connect with our third-party data sources, and we don't have any issues, especially when we do an integration perspective.

My experience with customer support has been great, they are very responsive to any issues.

Before using this solution, I used to develop using Excel macro dashboards. I switched because while Excel is a bigger environment compared to Anaplan, this product is a tool created to achieve something, not like an enterprise package.

With Anaplan, setup is almost like solving a Rubik's cube - there are no book rules for the product. So the complexity varies depending on the business scenario and how well the people involved understand the logical requirements. However, the product's architecture is very simple, so the sync process happens in a matter of seconds.

Anaplan sell their licenses on a storage basis, which they call a bucket. 

I would personally recommend Anaplan, especially for anyone who is having issues dealing with bulk loads of Excel data or is experiencing pain in allocation or planning. Anaplan is a one-stop solution and does not require knowledge of a programming language - if you're familiar with Excel functions, that will be sufficient. I would rate this product as eight out of ten.

• Multi-dimensional
• Easy to restructure
• Cloud compatible

The capacity projection of certain lines helped to identify where the utilization is falling beyond a limit. It helped certain category planners to plan for long term investments (shift patterns).

I would like to see more flexible graphs. That is, more varieties of graphs, more customization (like choosing colors, gradients, etc.) and more conditional formatting options (format sharply or gradient).

Anaplan gave us some limitations in terms of these aspects. There might be scope for experimenting around the formatting, if not the types, of graphs!

I have used the product for one year.

Very rarely. The tool slows down around once every two months.

There were no scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10.

I used a different solution. I switched to expand my exposure to a budding tool in planning.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It might cost more compared to some decent tools in the market. But one should be mindful about the capabilities of Anaplan, which justify the cost.

I haven't done this, as it was already selected by my organization. However, I did some market research to see how other options are flourishing, and found Anaplan to be a worthwhile option.

There are fewer experts in the Indian market, but there seems to be a lot of scope in global markets. Anaplan is a worthwhile investment for a top performing planning solution in any sector, Finance, Capacity, or Budgeting, etc.

• Ease of integration with Salesforce (Sales Cloud).
• Flexibility - the ability to run several different sales forecasting models, but have those parts roll-up to a corporate model.
• Extremely customizable (add fields, add dashboards/components, etc.)

• It has supported a global process change to sales forecasting and created a single method for this.
• It has created a global standard in corporate dashboards that all regions agreed to run the business from.
• It has simplified the sales forecasting process.
• It has increased visibility at a corporate & global sales leadership level where previously it was not possible in MS Excel.
• It has helped speed up business and reduced the time it took to report on and view the sales forecast.

Anaplan needs to place more limits on builders/developers in some cases because we found that if we continued to customize a given sales forecast model it would degrade performance slightly as we continued to add dimensions to our forecasting model.

We have used the solution for more than two years.

For the most part Anaplan had reliable up-time and stability so this was not an issue.

Small changes could create massive amounts of data without the Anaplan Builder knowing that they did that. This could push us over space/storage limits quickly.

After going live in August 2015 we had to double storage capacity and rebuild the entire forecasting model six months after go-live in Spring 2016 due to a poor initial design that led to wasted storage and less optimal performance.

Anaplan provided us with some great resources and Professional Services resources to get our initial sales forecasting model off the ground.

Previously we used MS Excel. We switched because we needed global visibility, forecasting accuracy and a cloud/SaaS/online solution for our sales organization.

The organization & forecasting solution in Excel had gotten so complex, took too long to aggregate and was giving Sales Leadership false forecasts (based on bad data).

Initially we thought it was straightforward, but it ended up being complex, but not because of Anaplan. The challenge was getting a Global Sales organization to agree on a single way to do sales forecasting. That took almost eight months to nail down. Once that was done, it only took six weeks to get the Anaplan sales forecating model setup and rolled out to our users.

Be mindful about storage limits initially. Also, make sure you decide how many Administrator licenses you need. If I recall, the Admin/Developer license costs ten times more than a standard user license so make sure you know how many of those you really need at your company to make cost effective decisions for your organization.

We also looked at Salesforce (native forecasting solution), Adaptive Insights and an IBM solution.

Get Anaplan Professional Services to start, make sure to pay for additional Anaplan training sessions and continue to invest in training for your organization. These skills are not easy to pick up so getting help to start your project is highly recommended.

• Serves as a platform: You can design your solutions on top of it
• Allows you to do “what-if” analysis on the go
• Allows collaboration across the organization: This is most essential for security

We use Anaplan across multiple functional areas. I will elaborate a few features that have had the most impact on our organization:

• The forecasting/planning cycles: This used to take months to collaborate. It now only takes a week to finish and be worked upon.
• The commission payment systems: Have been automated in Anaplan. The commission payments are highly transparent and efficient now.
• The Bookings and Revenue Forecasting model: Allows us to predict the Salesforce requirements and to budget for them beforehand.

• A better presentation layer would certainly take it a notch higher.
• As compared to other BI tools, such as QlikView, the presentation layer is not as user-friendly.
• It still does a fairly good job on the look and feel of the dashboards. But this is the only area in which there is scope for improvement.

I have used this solution for more than four years.

There were no stability issues.

This product is super scalable and efficient.

Mostly there is no need for any support. Anaplan is very supportive in case you need to contact the technical support.

Being a business analyst, we use multiple tools.

We were the early adaptors of Anaplan. Because of the customizability that it offers and the ease of various “what-if” scenarios, you can build on this tool.

None of the other tools in the market offer that level of flexibility. Hence, it is pretty unique in that sense.

There is no setup required. It is a cloud platform.

Go for a bigger deal initially. Once you start using it, you will certainly want more of it.

We had evaluated Tableau and QlikView. Even though a lot of the other tools do a good job, only Anaplan allows flexibility and customizability to design solutions and do real-time “what-if” analysis.

Have a core team dedicated only to Anaplan and you will realize the true potential of this tool.

The tool is very good and customizable.

I'm using it to produce a proof of concept and SDNA.

The best thing is that it's very intuitive and user-friendly. You don't need coding skills to manipulate the platform.

One area of improvement is conditional formatting. It's not very practical, and you need to specify additional formatting for each line item, which increases the size.

These are also areas that could be improved for the long-term sustainability of the platform.

It's been about three months now.

There are around 13 users in my company using the solution. 

It's quite easy to set up. It doesn't require much effort.

It is an expensive solution. 

I would definitely recommend using the solution. It is a practical and easy-to-use solution. Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

Anaplan's most valuable features are that it's a no-coding platform, everything can be scaled to your other functions, and it's easy to learn and use (especially because Anaplan provides excellent interactive training).

Anaplan should come up with flexible options to connect to a data warehouse rather than an Anaplan hub, like a data decoupling layer with an option for customers to maintain their data on their own cloud. They could also continue to improve their UX and provide more features on the reporting side, including more options for charts and graphs.

Anaplan is quite stable.

The initial setup is straightforward and rarely takes more than twelve weeks.

Anaplan gives a good ROI.

So long as Anaplan fits your requirements, it's quite affordable. It's a value-for-money product and a very reasonable price compared to competitors like SAP or IBM. There are multiple pricing models, and you only need the costlier license if you use the model builder.

I would advise those implementing Anaplan to go through the L1-L3 training program. I rate Anaplan as eight out of ten.