Anaplan Reviews

We're a service provider, so we work with multiple clients to build out Anaplan solutions across a lot of different disciplines. We have a couple of high-tech companies. We're using it to manage the PR process, the purchase request process for marketing, which includes campaign management, and also for how a purchase request gets funded. It's that modeling around scenarios where you want to really understand what costs are associated with activities. 

Shortly, we're going to implement around connected with revenues so we can understand in more detail the ROI on marketing. This is for a high-tech Fortune 100 company.

What you do is you buy a workspace and then you basically have access to that workspace, and then you can build models within that workspace.

The solution improves forecast accuracy. We've seen forecast accuracy go from a variation of 10% to something like 2%. It also drives up the quality of analytics. What we're seeing is not only forecast accuracy improving but also the time spent on pulling data together to do a forecast. You get the benefits of both worlds and you get the forecast accuracy as people are spending significantly less time. 

It goes from about 50% on data validation, and getting the data, and validating the data, down to about 20% on a lot of our clients. You're freeing up those finance people that are pulling those models together. You're freeing up 30% of their time during the planning cycle to really spend a lot more on analytics, and deep-diving into the numbers, and doing a better job at understanding what those numbers are owning up to instead of spending all that time just consolidating all the numbers into one space.

That's definitely a big advantage. We are seeing massive time savings for people, freeing up time so that employees can do more value-added work. 

Especially over the COVID period, a lot of people have left and they haven't hired new people to replace them. The company is really looking at standardizing processes across the globe. This solution helps to build a platform where you can build a standard process across the world, and you get benefits from that idea of standardization where anybody can do anybody else's job as it's exactly the same all over the world. There is that advantage as well.

In corporate performance management where you're looking at building out forecasts, modeling data, and have really heavy interaction with data, it's extremely useful due to the fact that, unlike using Excel to build out models and things like that, it's very collaborative.

While you can put Excel in the cloud, and try to collaborate that way, it doesn't necessarily work as well. Whereas, this works really well as a collaboration solution. You can build complex data models. You can have lots of people entering lots of different pieces of data into them, similar to what you have in Excel, and yet, it's in the cloud and it's designed for the cloud, and it's a bit more structured than Excel.

It takes out a lot of the risks you have in building models in Excel. On the other side of the spectrum, you have your consolidation tools. You've got your Hyperion, you've got your adapters. Their primary purpose is to consolidate large amounts of data. They're typically quite purpose-built with little ability to customize them and their core function is consolidation. You can also add driver-based solutions on top of that. It's very rudimentary, and it's very designed around the application. These solutions typically are for corporate performance management. If you're a smaller company, and you just need a basic consolidation solution, that's where you go. 

Where we're seeing the opportunity in the market is at the Fortune 100 companies that have far more complex modeling type scenarios where you need to be able to have a lot of people collaborating together, and you need a lot of information all at everyone's fingertips. This is where you see the big advantage of a solution like Anaplan.

Anaplan is a relatively expensive piece of software. It's definitely being applied to very complex problems, and if the price were to drop I expect it would be more broadly adopted. 

From a product point of view, they have launched some new reporting functionality, which is pretty basic compared to something like Power BI.

What they have done to compensate for the reporting was to build native APIs into something like Power BI and Tableau, so that you can integrate your data into a reporting suite. The need to continue to develop this. There's new functionality all the time, however, some of the core functionality was lacking about three, four years ago. It's continuously getting resolved and improving, and I'm now pleased with the level of functionality, however, they need to keep going in this direction.

I've used it for about the last five years.

I've been super impressed with the performance. I use other technologies for multi-billion dollar, trillion-dollar companies, and they can sometimes be a little bit challenging, especially if you haven't got a great PC. Due to the fact that this is all in-memory computing, the stability has been pretty good. 

The challenge to that is building the model. For example, we just built a model for a client recently, and we created a holiday calendar, which had a relatively complex calculation in it. That was actually slowing the entire model down. Every time there was a change, we just had to hard code the numbers as opposed to having it calculating all the time. That said, the actual stability is pretty solid.

Still, when you're building the model, you can get performance issues, which may be caused by actual model design, as opposed to the software itself. My advice is to make sure to spend the money on a good architect. If you can get a good architect, you're fine with the builders as most people pick it up quickly. 

It's phenomenally good at scaling. We built a solution for a retail chain, which basically initiated transfers from a centralized hub down to stores. There were 800 stores and about 600 skews in each store. It was all machine learning that drove the purchasing. And we were able to, on a daily basis, send an automated transfer to the central hub. There were six hubs around the world, and it would automatically on a daily basis send anything between 100 and 250,000 skews to different stores based on predictive algorithms. 

Typically, it's very unusual to deal with a small business. Typically Fortune 100 companies are using this product. There are a couple of different models, however, just the cost of being able to build a model, for a smaller company, that amount it would cost doesn't make any sense.

Also, typically, smaller companies don't have as many complex problems to solve. You can have a standardized model, whether it's a forecasting model or a headcount model, full cost and headcount, or a sales model and things like that. For smaller companies, Excel could handle it.

We do have plans to increase usage in the future.

Typically the way it works is that you normally start off with a use case or a number of use cases, and then the client gets used to using it. They build up an internal team as well, and then they expand the use cases out, and that continues to kind of build-out. There are just hundreds of modeling opportunities where you can bring in two sets of data, where you can bring in lots of people putting information in and, you can bring in predictive analytics. So there's always a huge amount of opportunity. The nice thing about Anaplan, as well, is it's very connected. I can use that one use case and I can use data out of that use case in another model, and all the models are connected. If somebody changes something in one model, then it'll change in the other models as well.

The tech support is pretty good. They're very responsive, and that typically means they're pretty good at solving problems. They can tend to take a little bit of time. Sometimes the challenges that we have are, typically, quite complex. 

When we had a performance issue on one of our models, it took them at least three weeks to do a full review of the model as the models are quite complex. However, they did a detailed breakdown line by line and there were probably 10,000 lines of items in here. It's built as cubes, so we have line items inside the cubes, similar to a pivot table in Excel. They did a full analysis, and then we got a detailed report at the end of where we had performance issues on a line-by-line basis and we could easily fix those issues.

Previously, if we were building models and things like that, we would typically build them in SQL, and, before then, Microsoft Access, and before then, Excel. Some of my clients still use Excel just to keep it kind of simple, however, the reason why we switched to it is that it's really easy to set up the user interface, so you can build something that used to take us six months in SQL with a web UI. Now it takes us six weeks to build something. It's just the speed to deployment which is significantly faster. This is due to the UI which is very well designed, so you can build out that UI very, very quickly. Then the model in the background is also extremely powerful as it's all in memory. The barrier for most companies is the cost to switch. A lot of our clients would stay with Excel models until they got to a certain point, or a company got to a certain size, and then they would move over to an Anaplan.

My background is not technical. My background is in finance. Therefore, picking up a solution is relatively quick if you're familiar with building models in Excel, or some of the other technologies out there. However, for a non-technical user, it is relatively easy to pick up. A lot of our clients don't necessarily use their IT department to support Anaplan, however, it does require that the people internally are trained. My advice is also to get a very good architect.

A lot of the projects we do are actually fixing other people's models. For example, people have built out a particular model that hasn't been positionally well designed. What we end up doing is going in and redesigning the model just to optimize it. What we need from clients is to really get them to focus on ongoing support. Getting them trained up is a key part of the deployment. Making sure that they are driving the functionality, et cetera, however, where we support them a lot is more in that initial design phase to make sure that we're building the right model for them.

The deployments are typically pretty small. For a small deployment, probably two or three people are needed. A larger one might have up to ten people.

For deployment, what we normally do is we do it in phases. A typical phase will be about three months, and a lot of our projects last a couple of years. The solution is very agile, so typically when we deploy, we have something up and running in the first month so that we can start to set it against people's expectations and understand some of the challenges. A typical project lasts three months. It might be to build a particular model, and then we'll go on and then we build another model or enhance the first one and things like that. For a typical deployment, end-to-end, is about three months.

The product probably doesn't require maintenance. The reality is that if you're doing business modeling, business modeling is constantly going to change. It doesn't necessarily need maintenance, and yet, typically, you don't want to build something that's static for very long, so you're constantly updating it. Where we see companies doing well is to have them invest in the development upfront, and then invest in what they call a center of excellence that is an internal team of people, that's centralized that can help architects and build future enhancements. Then, you have Anaplan experts within the business that can update and build constant enhancements. If you think about the modeling capability, this is not something that is like a one-off kind of development. It's typically an ongoing thing. 

We had COVID in between, so the dates are not a hundred percent accurate, however, a client was looking at a significant cost return just being able to get the right level of inventory in every store across the world meant that, there was a 5% impact on the bottom line. I haven't got the final numbers yet. They are still working them out, however, from what we were seeing from sales, there was a 5% increase at least in sales. That was all translating to the bottom line as well.

Some client ROI's are a little bit more difficult to quantify. It's ROI in saving people time and being more accurate. One of our clients went from 10% to 2% accuracy of the full cost, which meant that they were able to make far better decisions. They knew exactly how much things were going to cost, for example. This is an IT organization within a Fortune 100 company, a tech company. It made their lives a lot easier when they were going through this massive uncertainty. They were able to really understand exactly what their underlying costs were.

The entry-level is anywhere from about $30,000 to $50,000 a year, however, it does go up significantly after that depending on the complexity and how much space you're using. It's really driven by the number of users and also the space. It's more the user base, however, sometimes you need to buy extra users just to get the space.

Currently, we are working on a partnership agreement with Anaplan.

It's one of the areas that I probably haven't explored enough at the moment, however, they have added integration into machine learning as well. The idea of that is you can build out a model and then you can push it through a machine learning model and then you can get an answer out of that. That's an area that I haven't probably spent enough time exploring, however, we're definitely working towards that.

If you've only got one person that's going to be building, then you probably want to go with something else, however, if you've got a complex modeling problem, and you've got a lot of people that are interacting with it, your typical kind of forecast and where you want to collect data from loads of different people, and you're just finding that Excel isn't doing it for you, this solution is worth considering.

I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten. If there'd be any reason why not a ten, it is just it is that much more expensive. It's a lot more difficult to get more clients onto it. You need to be a certain size to get it, to use it, however, from a stability point of view, from delivering value, et cetera, it's well worth it.

I'm using Anaplan to provide production support for my client. The Anaplan model is already there and what I'm doing is fixing bugs updating the logic. That's my main role in the project. I will fix those queues for the business and update some processes or dashboards to better suit business needs, as per their requests.

I believe Anaplan is a new cloud tool, and from time to time, there's a lot of improvement that the Anaplan company deploys with the system. So, with that improvement, we need to really adapt and know the new system trends.

I like updating the current model. For example, if the business wants to see a different version or a different report style, I'm happy to work, manipulate, and do some data visualization changes for them.

The dashboard could be better. Because within a dashboard or report, you have to do a lot of scrolling. You need to scroll down because the table doesn't fit in a single view. That's why even the users aren't happy with that kind of user experience. They need to scroll to see all the data, and it could be better if it fits in just one page. That way, you can see everything.

In the next release, I want automation that's connected to Anaplan. For example, to load master data from SAP to Anaplan. I don't know if this already exists, but a log where you can see the progress and see if there's an error will also help. It would be better to give you the error message, for example, if there is an error within the automated process importing to Anaplan.

I have been using the Anaplan tool for about three years.

Right now, Anaplan is very stable. It has some downtime from time to time, but they're able to reinstate it to work as it is. I think many of our users have a demand planner, and they are the main users of Anaplan for our clients. Many of them are in field sales roles, and these people are in the market selling the product. I believe the number of users ranges from 30 to 50 for one country.

In terms of scalability, Anaplan is great. Right now, there's a lot of changes that need to happen in our model, and I believe you can easily ask for an increase in size, and it can adopt the new logic that encouraged a lot of space.

Sometimes, we find bugs within the system, and we don't know how to fix them. So, every year we file maybe five to ten tickets with Anaplan support to fix the bugs that we found.

I used IBM Cognos TM1, which is now called Planning Analytics. I started using Anaplan because I was given an additional role, and I started supporting Anaplan simultaneously. 

I think there's a lot of differences between Anaplan and IBM because Anaplan is cloud-based. But I believe IBM Planning Analytics is getting on the cloud as well. The old version of IBM is more like a remote desktop. But Anaplan is on the cloud, and you can access it via the web anywhere you go.

The initial setup is quite complex because we have this one development team, and we have plenty of markets connected to one model. There's a lot of customization to tailor-fit with the market requirements and with the country requirements. Setting up a new model takes the team at least three months or five months at most.

We implemented this solution. We followed the Agile methodology, and there were a lot of sprints for two weeks and then we released all the enhancements or deployments. It's very fast-paced.

I would advise potential users to have a good model builder and a solutions architect to transform their business complexity into an Anaplan module or dashboard that fits and works for them. They need to have a great solutions architect, a finder, and the end model builder, which will convert this complexity in Excel and to an equivalent Anaplan report.

The biggest lesson I learned using the Anaplan is that everyone can learn to use the Anaplan tool if they have the perseverance to learn. Everything is in Google, and you can Google the logic that you need to apply to a given bug or issue with the module within the system. It's continuous learning, and you have to keep learning and using the Anaplan system every day to be more familiar with the tool.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Anaplan a nine.

There are four or five main use cases. One is for P&L. It's for profit and loss planning forecast and actuarial reporting. We also use it for balance sheet reporting. And then I have what is connected to payroll and HR. I have a lot of business cases and allocations by product, by customers, et cetera, as well.

We are able to create and build the yearly budget and the yearly focus. It allows for a direct saving of human capital.

The modeling part of Anaplan, which is a model builder in which you can build whatever you want, has been great. There is no limit. The sky is the limit with Anaplan.

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

The solution scales well.

We have found the product to be very stable. 

The limit today is in the ability for business people to describe what they actually need. I don't see any need for improvement on Anaplan's side. The limit is within the people who use it and not the product itself. 

It's not easy to test the Anaplan processes completely, as it's so large, that it is covered by Anaplan. It's quite difficult to test everything, including all the business rules all the business cases. It requires a lot of data to be able to test everything because it's so big. When you implement the accounting software you just have to test two devices and just two customers invoices, two customers, and then you know it works fine. However, when you implement Anaplan on the scale on which it is implemented, it is difficult to test every single business case.

The ability of the end-users to manage the software is due to the fact that it becomes so sophisticated. On top of that, there are so many business rules to set up in the system that as a business user it's hard to gauge what they're doing and it's possible to get lost.

The advantages of Anaplan are its weakness. You can set up whatever you want, however, it tends to be really big, and the users have to be very competent, very efficient, and have to know what they need to do to use Anaplan. There needs to be a good understanding of the solution. When the user was working on Excel, due to the fact that Excel is very small and it's very limited, a user can understand everything. With Anaplan, the scope is so wider, which makes it difficult for the average user to manage and drive the process. Some users are very skilled. They have good knowledge of what they're doing. Others are not. It will become difficult for them.  

I'd like to see the ability to print papers, as it's not easy to do so right now. I know that we are in August and by the end of August Anaplan will release new features about reporting. However, in France, we are quite old-fashioned people. A lot of clients like to have a sheet of paper - something printed. That's not easy on Anaplan. Anaplan is designed to be worked on from a screen, on a laptop, on a smartphone. It's not designed to allow a person to print a sheet of paper with data.

I've worked with the solution for more than ten years. 

The solution is very stable and very reliable. there's no doubt about that. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

I have never met a limit in Anaplan as far as scalability is concerned. I understand from a certain point of view that there is a limit. However, with my daily customers, for 10 years now, since it's more than 10 years that I've been working on it, I have never met any limits as far as scalability is concerned.

I have various clients on the solution, and their users range from just five to up to 100 people in the sales area. 

I would say in the first year clients are using perhaps two or three percent of the company are using Anaplan. The second-year is the same. By the third or fourth year, they grow and up to 10% of the company will use it. Within six or seven years, you may go up to 50 or 75 percent.

Technical support is really fabulous. I've been working in data processing for the last 25 years, and Anaplan is incredible. They're fast, they are skilled, they are competent, and they are accurate. It's really great. They're wonderful. The support is incredible.

We did previously use IBM Cognos. We also noticed people were using Orion Hyperion, however, it is called something else now. 

Cognos is very limited. It takes quite a long to implement and it is not scalable at all. You cannot extend the usage of Cognos as very quickly you are faced with a limit. IBM and Anaplan are like day and night.

In terms of initial setup, I would say 95% of the time it's very straightforward.

Deployments, for a small project, can take between two and three weeks. Bigger ones can take two or three weeks. That's between 10 and 15 days. Even larger projects can take three months. That's for a very sizable project. 

The implementation strategy is agile. We design the scope with the customer, with the business user. First, we define the scope with the business user, and then we do an agile process. And after that, there is a test process.

For the customers who are using Anaplan exclusively from a financial SPNA point of view, the only return on investment we can expect is about savings in relation to personnel count. It can shrink staff. That said when the customer uses Anaplan for sales composition planning, or sales management, or supply chain project, there is a direct return on investment within six months. It really depends on what field of the business they are implementing with that. In finance, you will not have a return on investment and in supply chain management you will see an ROI.

While the cost is on the higher side, the value is high as well. The customer's plan is a yearly cost. It's software as a service. Beyond the standard licensing fee, there are no additional costs. 

I'm using the latest version. I am not using the beta, however, I am using the live version.

I am a consultant and a partner, so I am working on the cloud deployment. 

I would advise new users to not try to create something too complex in the first year. Keep it simple. It's so powerful. You can do so many incredible things with Anaplan, however, if you try to go there in the first year, you will lose yourself.

Anaplan is the type of software that requires collaboration between people, more than ever. You cannot have an Anaplan project if you are not a team and a collaborative team. Previously, with IBM Cognos, this was not the case. 

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

My first project in Anaplan was about capacity planning for the factory's RCT and NCTC capacity planning. My second use case was about CapEx and OpEx planning for another client. Mainly it's finance and supply chain related activities.

In finance, mainly, earlier, we were using Excel spreadsheets. Every time their monthly cycle ends, the company needed to go back to the reporting. They would have to pull all the data from all the users and then publish all final reports. However, in Anaplan, everyone reports their numbers through the cloud and wherever the end-user or the planner wants to see the data collated, he can just simply open the Anaplan and then see the reports ready-made. It's much less work-intensive.

The modeling is very easy. It's almost an Excel-like model building. It is very easy to change the logic or business rules. You can do it anytime. It's not like you need a different team set up for the changes.

The solution is very user-friendly.

The initial setup is very easy.

The solution is scalable.

The solution has been very stable so far.

We have found that the product integrates well with SAP and they have ready-made connectors. In fact, it is easy to integrate with any other system. They have plug-and-play software which makes integrations easy with very little time consumption required. 

You don't need to have a programming language to use Anaplan.

There is no demand planning, no dedicated demand planning where it can do statistical forecasting. They have engaged with a plan queue to do the statistical forecasting. However, if we compare it with SAP or others, they don't have an in-house forecasting tool or anything.

It would be nice if the solution offered better extensions. For example, in SEC Excel, they have one extra extension, which is really good in terms of performance. It would have been really great to have something similar, however, from what I have seen so far it is not up to the mark. Whenever you load the data in Excel and then send it back to Anaplan, it takes a lot of time. It's very hard to use it. Rather than using the available extension, people prefer to go back to Anaplan again.

Plastic dashboards were a little bit hard to create, however, it's my understanding that it's a bit better now.

I've been using the solution for more than two years at this point. 

The solution is stable. I've never faced any issue where it had downtime or anything. It has never failed, at least for me.

The solution is very scalable. In previous projects, there were some changes that the business wanted to make, however, they were not able to do it in SAP or Cisco systems. They used append models to do those changes and send them back to SAP.

Considering the previous project, there were almost 300 to 400 users. There are finance project managers across the zones or the CapEx and OpEx controllers.

Our latest client does plan to increase usage. They've already forgotten all about trying to make Excel reporting work.

Technical support is very good. I have also worked on SAP previously, and, if I had to compare SAP support and Anaplan support, Anaplan support is quite responsive. We're very satisfied with them overall. 

I didn't use business performance management, however, I do use SAP, IBP, and APO. These are mainly ERP-related Software solutions.

The initial setup is not difficult or complex. It's very simple and straightforward. 

Generally, the deployment takes four to five months to complete at least the basic agenda. Later you can keep on adding the functionalities once the users start filling the Anaplan, they go ahead and ask for more requirements.

The four to five-month deployment includes, for example, the process of customization and testing.

We did not use an integrator. I'm in consulting, so we get the projects for the deployment.

I don't know anything about the cost or the licensing. It's not an aspect of the solution I work on.

We have partners and we do the implementation for clients. 

I am using a SaaS version of the solution.

Generally, people rush to design the scope and just start building. I would say that new users should focus first on designing the process and scope. Once that is finalized, then move into the model building rather than pushing everything in one go.

During our training in Anaplan, there was one quote saying, "almost everything can be built in Anaplan". There were scenarios where I thought, okay fine, Anaplan can't build this logic, and yet, after a point, we were able to build that logic. It's pretty scalable.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Anaplan is used for various financial planning, such as supply chain, and consolidation.

My clients exhibit enhanced efficiency in financial planning, supply chain management, demand planning, and financial consolidation. They possess superior visibility, enabling swift action-taking.

The most valuable feature of Anaplan is machine learning. The solution is constantly evolving from feedback. Additionally, there is a wide range of training material online.

The price of the solution can improve.

I have been using Anaplan for approximately eight years.

The solution is generally stable. There are tweaks that need to be made for optimum stability.

The solution is highly scalable.

We do the support ourselves and rarely needed global support from the vendor.

We did not use another solution previously.

The initial setup of Anaplan is easy because it is low code or no code deployments. The full process of deployment can take six months. We do not need a lot of resources for the deployment.

We do the difficult customization for the customers. We provide our customers with feedback.

The price of the solution is expensive.

If the solution is built correctly there is no maintenance needed.

The crucial aspect is to ensure that there are individuals who possess the knowledge to effectively utilize the tool. It is akin to piloting an airplane, where one must first acquire the skills to fly before attempting to operate it. Otherwise, they will crash it.

I rate Anaplan a seven out of ten.

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.

You can use this solution for almost everything that you need, that includes the sales forecast, workforce, planning of technical KPIs, etc. It's not a focused solution for a specific use case.

It's simple to use and has a lot of functions suitable for many use cases. Here, you don't have to know how to code. So it's like Excel-based syntax.

Workspace allowance and integrations with external systems are the things to be improved. Apart from that, everything else works well except for the poor ETL capabilities. They should first solve the issue of integrations and modeling sparsity. That would be great.

I have been using this solution for five years. It's a SaaS solution so it's always up-to-date.

I would rate it nine out of ten.

It's one of the solutions that could be scaled up quite easily if its architecture is set up correctly at the beginning of the project, compared to many others marketed by big and well-known CPM/BI providers. Currently, we have approximately 20 Anaplan users in our organization.

I would say it was a good experience. I faced probably zero unsolved issues. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate it all nine. They're good at solving issues.

Positive

I switched due to the company's policy I work for now.

It's not easy to start from scratch, but the complexity is something you can also find doing your planning in Excel. So, I don't think Anaplan has an outstanding complexity.

As it is cloud-based, it doesn’t need to be deployed on your servers and it's usually deployed via partners. We just make sure it serves the needs of the organization considering the demands of the specific projects.

It's not that expensive compared to the vast majority of other products. But it's not cheap, it's somewhere in the middle. I would rate the cost five out of ten.

I would very likely recommend the product to my colleagues. 

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.

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.