My client is using Anaplan for budgeting and planning purposes. They execute their budgeting and planning processes by utilizing this tool.
Anaplan
Anaplan, IncExternal reviews
415 reviews
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Anaplan keeps getting better and better!
What do you like best about the product?
Building and making updates to Anaplan is really easy to learn for new users. Especially those already familiar with Excel, the formula syntax is easy to learn in Anaplan. Anaplan also has great customer support. They get back to you right away.
What do you dislike about the product?
Anaplan can be built overly complex and take up too much space if enough upfront work and thought isn't put into the design.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Anaplan saves our customers time and also gets them out of several different excel files. Streamlines their planning process. Everything is in one place, and everyone can access it, and it also updates all output reports live.
Real-time insights using Anaplan
What do you like best about the product?
Real-time connected planning helps to eliminate silos allowing for data driven decision making. Easily scalable and auditable gives us confidence our data is safe and secure.
What do you dislike about the product?
Limited visualisations mean other reporting tools are usually required.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Anaplan has enabled the business to easily consolidate data from multiple units to give real-time data to decision makers
Good adaptive tool for supply chain
What do you like best about the product?
Anaplan is easy to use. It can be customized to your business and manufacturing model. What I liked best was it's ability to scenario plan supply chain outcomes based on our requirements .
What do you dislike about the product?
I would like Anaplan to integrate high level analytics into the software so it can be used without having to use other tools.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Other legacy tools were complicated to integrate and use especially for a small and meduim scale industry. Anaplan worked perfectly for our business needs and was easy to use and maintain history.
Planning tool that does most of it well
What do you like best about the product?
With a solid foundation of data, integrations, financial models, the tool can be as flexible as the company needs. The code is easy to understand and easily built out with the proper talent (either in house or contracted). Users do not need extensive architecture knowledge to stand up models and then connect the pipes together. This allows teams to trial and error fairly quickly to build new use cases. The ability to manage a large portion of the infrastructure within the function and outside of IT is also very appealing. Typically, finance functions rely on IT to perform regular tasks and wait for results - with Anaplan, a lot of those activities can remain with the business. There are a variety of integration tools available as well as native tooling that can support an enterprise.
What do you dislike about the product?
Without major talent, the models can quickly go awry and be poorly designed. Though the functionality may work, it might be less performant or create complexities when trying to adjust existing logic. Talent is also a large factor when considering this tool as it requires either building a team in house or contracting out. With contractors, you run the risk of knowledge gaps & lack of documentation for proprietary processes. To facilitate the implementation phase, business owners need to actively participate and devote a large number of hours to support the build. This is expensive to manage with larger organizations and could be less likely with smaller organizations. On the support side, you may contract out activities but there is a ramp up time that companies need to factor in (though this is true with most tools). The pricing model is quickly evolving to a subscription based model (again not uncommon amongst most SaaS platforms these days). Customer support is fairly basic and can be escalated, but is cumbersome during critical periods.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
FP&A and close use cases at the moment, but are exploring additional use cases as we grow. As a global enterprise, we have performed several M&A activities that resulted in many planning processes & Excel-based packages. The tool consolidates all activity into 1 tool and eases corporate's requirement for consolidations. The tool also acts as the single source of truth for the forecast/budget and allows finance teams globally to perform their close reconciliations. There is a large automation piece factored in so users do not need to update Excel sheets manually every period or forecast cycle. This is a major time saver and resolves most user errors when managing manual calculations. The tool also consolidates master data so all teams operate on 1 standard and prevents the misstatement of KPIs based on segregated hierarchies. Overall, Anaplan is the starting point to create consistency and flexibility in how we manage our FP&A processes.
Cloud technology enhances budgeting and reporting with intuitive features
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
Both Hyperion and Anaplan serve the same purpose for budgeting and planning, but Anaplan is cloud-based. Previously, my client was using Oracle Hyperion Planning and Essbase, which was on-premises. Anaplan, being a cloud-based platform, allows customers to adapt easily. It is easier to enter data, load data, and develop reports compared to Hyperion.
In Anaplan, once you create a system, the end user can utilize the reports immediately. Users can create UX pages with boards and worksheets. The boards contain different cards such as bar cards, chart cards, map cards, KPI cards, and field cards. These cards are used for high-level reports and top-level management reporting. For plant-wise location, worksheets can be created for analysis purposes, analyzing data at the plant level, while reports are used for top-level purposes.
The board functionality works similarly to a dashboard, where users can add different cards. Users can drag data and add chart cards, field cards, map cards, and KPI cards to a single board.
Anaplan can handle large sets of data and models within its ecosystem. Data volume is not an issue for the platform.
What needs improvement?
The tool is very effective from a user perspective, providing good analysis and reporting capabilities. It is an excellent tool for financial planning, supply chain planning, and territory and quota planning.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have a total of 3.5 years of experience in Anaplan.
How are customer service and support?
I provide technical support for clients but have not had experience contacting Anaplan's technical support directly.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
The setup of Anaplan is very straightforward.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Currently, Anaplan is more expensive compared to other tools. This pricing is based on the tool's demands. However, I believe the price might decrease after some time.
What other advice do I have?
I previously worked with Hyperion Essbase and Hyperion Planning from Oracle, and now I work with Anaplan technology.
I provide technical support to users for security-related issues, creating new administration roles, and workflow management. We assist with security provisioning, user creation, workflow issues, and technical business logic modifications. On a scale of 1-10, I rate Anaplan a 9.
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Connected Planning Made Simple and Scalable with Anaplan
What do you like best about the product?
I like Anaplan’s flexibility and real-time calculation engine the most. It enables fast, collaborative planning across different teams without needing complex coding.
What do you dislike about the product?
Some improvements are needed in reporting, workflow automation (automated email trigger), and the mobile app experience.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Anaplan addresses the complexities of budgeting, forecasting, and FP&A by providing a unified platform that connects finance with other business functions like sales and operations. This eliminates data silos and manual consolidation, enabling real-time updates and scenario analysis. As a result, we get faster, more accurate forecasts and can respond quickly to changing business conditions. It greatly improves collaboration between finance and stakeholders, leading to more informed and confident decision-making.
best integrated planning platform
What do you like best about the product?
it's developed for business users who prefer excel-style planning by sheets
powerful and plain development tools oriented toward financial users - no tech background required for building models
process-enhanced excel with advanced reporting and analytics functionality
powerful and plain development tools oriented toward financial users - no tech background required for building models
process-enhanced excel with advanced reporting and analytics functionality
What do you dislike about the product?
their marketing and sales approach.
evangelistic marketing - sometimes it feels like new iPhone presentation or weight loss drug fair.
core platform worth its money, all non-core products ridiculously overpriced
evangelistic marketing - sometimes it feels like new iPhone presentation or weight loss drug fair.
core platform worth its money, all non-core products ridiculously overpriced
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
full-scale financial planning, budgeting and reporting
workforce performance analytics, up to daily granularity
workforce performance analytics, up to daily granularity
Best Modeling and Planning Tool on the market
What do you like best about the product?
Anaplan's standout feature is its powerful flexibility in connected planning, enabling seamless collaboration across departments. Its intuitive cloud-based interface simplifies complex modeling, while real-time data integration ensures accurate, dynamic decision-making. The scalability accommodates diverse business needs, and the ability to create custom workflows empowers organizations to adapt swiftly in changing environments.
What do you dislike about the product?
Anaplan's primary drawback is its steep learning curve, especially for new users unfamiliar with its modeling language or advanced functionalities. Complex formulas can be hard to debug, and the platform occasionally lacks intuitive visualizations for certain tasks. Additionally, performance may slow with extremely large datasets, and licensing costs can be prohibitive for smaller organizations.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Anaplan allows user to plan their territory with live calculations, live comparisons, and be able to make quick adjustments to tweak their assignments.
Anaplan is my preferred platform for modeling FP&A processes and producing connected forecasts.
What do you like best about the product?
The most helpful aspect of Anaplan is that it gives business users the ability to build models, i.e. planning, budgeting, and forecasting models, that are customized to their business needs. Models can also be built to incorporate data from almost any source, into the hundreds of millions of data points (rows/columns/cells), without compromising on performance or detail.
What do you dislike about the product?
Anaplan's customizability can also be a double-edged sword. Although there are more and more out-of-the-box solutions being built and provided by Anaplan and 3rd parties, an organization will most likely have to expend significant resources to implement.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Anaplan is helping me to build PBF models that connect all levels of the FP&A organization (from analysts to leadership) and beyond to other organizations throughout companies. With Anaplan you can provide large datasets and detailed models to produce detailed forecasts at the lowest levels, and easily consolidate and aggregate those forecasts to produce high-level reporting. Leadership can use these reports to analyze KPI's, simulate scenarios, strategize moves, make decisions, develop goals, and set targets.
As a model builder, I think Anaplan is a very good tool to build a sophisticated model.
What do you like best about the product?
Anaplan displays a very straightforward and clear way of code implementation, and it provides a very good training courses that support learner to get sufficient technical knowledge.
What do you dislike about the product?
The limitation of workspace. Sometimes end users require to see reports in very detailed granular level, but due to the limitation of workspace, we couldn't build that level.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The main problem is disconnection among different teams that are working in the same budgeting and forecasting processes, Anaplan provides a single source of truth that every users from different functional teams use Anaplan as the single platform to submit their budget & forecast, review & analyze their financial reports.
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