Anaplan vs SAP ERP vs SAP S/4HANA comparison

Anaplan is a cloud-based planning and performance management platform with documented use cases in finance, sales, supply chain, marketing, IT and HR. At the core of Anaplan's technology is a single hub where business users can build, deploy, maintain, and share models without coding or reliance on IT personnel.

With Anaplan You Can:

• Accelerate revenue growth
• Convert data into market opportunity
• Drive higher sales performance
• Gain market share
• Improve customer satisfaction
• See edge-to-edge across your company
• Achieve business and technology goals
• Become agile and resilient with continuous models and forecasts

The Anaplan Platform Is:

• Flexible
• Scalable
• Collaborative
• Secure
• Multi-dimensional
• Built to help businesses think ahead and rapidly adapt to change

Anaplan Benefits:

• Illuminate blind spots and hidden opportunities.
• Easily create a shareable, living representation of how your business actually works.
• Dynamic planning allows you to continuously adapt to market changes and other changing circumstances effectively.
• Information is always readily available and can be easily shared with all teams across your enterprise.
• Anaplan provides intelligent decision-making. The platform gives you all the information you need to make business decisions and also gives you the ability to run several “what if” scenarios to determine which decision is best based on a large range of variables - at record speed, instead of it taking days or weeks to complete.
• By using Anaplan, you can adapt to changes very quickly. You can consider all of the possible options before responding in real time.
• Anaplan can be used remotely from wherever you are.
• Anaplan will help your organization stay focused and on target. You can stay in control with the ability to run scenario calculations quickly and use the information to make adjustments as needed.
• Anaplan provides accurate, real-time data so you don’t have to worry about the risk of bad data. In turn, this boosts shareholder confidence because Anaplan’s platform mitigates the risks associated with incorrect data.
• Anaplan’s Connected Planning helps you meet regulatory requirements. All the relevant business data is held in one place, therefore making adjustments easier to implement quickly. With Connected Planning, results also have a full audit trail.

Anaplan Features:

• Hyperscale computing: Anaplan eliminates the “messy middle” caused by out-of-date, siloed signals.
• Integrated and dynamic signal set: This feature incorporates internal and external factors, relationships, and market context across functions which can all be seamlessly integrated.
• Responsive unified system: Anaplan’s high-fidelity, responsive, and unified system for execution and accountability is reliable, accurate, and traceable.
• Real-time insights: Detect signals hidden in your systems and gain insight into every asset, resource, risk, and change to help provide decision clarity.
• Unlimited multi-dimensional scenarios: Anaplan helps your organization run unlimited multi-dimensional scenarios to identify ideal plans of action.
• Synchronization: Using Anaplan, you can synchronize execution and readiness. Anaplan enables autonomous and coordinated in-market action by connecting headquarters to your most remote outposts.

Reviews from Real Users:

"Anaplan's in-memory calculation engine is super-fast compared to the old tools we previously used. You enter the data and everything shows up in one go.” - Sandeep A., Lead Analyst at a retailer

"This product has a very good modeling feature, and its graphical representation of visualizations has also been valuable.” - Raghavendra K., Lead Consultant at a tech services company

"Anaplan is a three-dimensional cloud platform that is good for analyzing data, visualization, integration, terrific for visibility.” - Anaplan model builder at a tech services company

SAP S4HANA is an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system that uses sophisticated technologies including machine learning and AI. It is most commonly used to integrate and manage business functions and is an ideal solution for large enterprises. The platform includes supplier relationship management (SRM), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), and product lifecycle management (PLM) functionality.

SAP S4HANA offers three different deployment options:

• On-premises
• Cloud
• Hybrid

SAP S4HANA Features

SAP S4HANA has many valuable key features, including:

• Customizable
• ERP, CRM, SRM, SCM, PLM co-deployed
• High throughput
• Fast analytics and reporting
• Smaller total data footprint
• SAP HANA multi-tenancy
• All data: social, text, geo, graph, processing
• New SAP Fiori UX for any device (mobile, desktop, tablet)
• Unlimited workload capacity
• High-volume transaction processing (OLTP)
• High volume real-time analytical processes (OLAP)
• Service Management
• Digital Boardroom Integration

SAP S4HANA Benefits

Some of the benefits of using SAP S4HANA include:

• Speed: S4 HANA applications leverage speed, context, and data accessibility to ensure you can stay up to date with rapidly evolving technology.

• Improved performance: With SAP S4HANA, you can plan, execute, or generate reports and analytics based on live data to increase performance.

• Simplicity: SAP S4HANA’s whole infrastructure was designed with simplification in mind — from the management of the solution to the administration of the IT landscape. The solution serves as the digital core for business process simplification and enables the centralizing of hardware and network resources.

• Cost effective: SAP S4HANA is a cost effective solution. It provides the ability to bring together all the analytical and transactional capabilities of a variety of systems in one location, enabling better decision making.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by SAP S4HANA users.

A Mechanical Engineer at a construction company says, “It is a very powerful, highly customizable tool. The most valuable feature is that the reporting is fast. We can see the results from that in that our commissions come in fast. That is the main advantage.”

Another reviewer, a SAP Technology Manager at a financial services firm, mentions, "It is more or less a very, very smooth and seamless product. Day by day they are increasing their technology features and they are keen to resolve the issues. India has a complex business scenario and SAP is thinking about that and resolving the issues day by day. In terms of the features I have found most valuable, I don't think that there is any lack or any gap process-wise. SAP is a very good tool."

A Project and Service delivery Manager at a tech services company comments, "One of the most valuable features, which we used the most, was the FI module, for finance. It involved controlling, account receivables, account payables, and complete financial steering."

A Senior Architect at a construction company states, “The POD applications are very useful to us. There are a few POD apps which we are using for different business scenarios. They are quite interesting.” He also adds, “The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The documentation is very good. The solution can scale well. The solution is stable.”