What needs improvement with Anaplan?

Anaplan's problem is that it has its own niche market. It cannot perform some tasks handled by Planning Analytics due to their different foundations, Anaplan on Hyperblock technology and TM1 on OLAP. Anaplan lacks a native ETL tool, making it challenging to integrate numerous flat files. Its licensing model could also be changed, and integration with other solutions simplified. The report on Anaplan and Planning Analytics could have been more detailed.

I do not have any improvements from my own end at this time.There are some specific features or functionality that I would like to see included in Anaplan in the future. From what we have been using, I do not think there is any specific one because we import and export numbers. Importing and exporting with CSV files is already available in Anaplan. I do not have any special requests from Anaplan. I still decided to give Anaplan an eight because I have not seen a specific dashboard on Anaplan. Anaplan could have a dashboard where you can see the flow of your numbers displayed on pictorials rather than just saying this is the number. Simple dashboards should be implemented.

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.

There are minor improvements needed on the dashboarding side and with the formulas, but no significant issues. Advanced planning with AI, machine learning, and related plugins would be great to see in the future.

Anaplan could enhance its user interface by including a more user-friendly API. Improving the deployment process to make it less complex and easier to manage is another area for potential enhancement.

One key area of improvement is pricing. With many competitors entering the market, pricing is something they need to reconsider, which could help us. Also, while cPanel is slowly gaining traction, the biggest competitor remains Excel. Since most people use Excel, Anaplan should offer more free training to help users get familiar with its features. This would make the platform more popular compared to other competitors. Anaplan has improved significantly over the years—five years ago, it didn’t have features like a good dashboard. Back then, everything was done on a classical dashboard, but now, it's all in the new UX. In terms of the product, there are still features that need to be added, but they are working on it. However, there are some smaller issues that also need attention.

The solution should provide customization.

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.

The tool needs to work on its integration with MS Excel and MS Word. The tool does not allow data analysis in spreadsheets which is possible on other platforms. I want the solution to be more collaborative to facilitate decision-making in organizations.

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.

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.

In terms of what could be improved, when there is a lot of data, it sometimes takes long to load. In the new experience, it does not let you pick a list in the formula box like it did in the old experience. I would like that to be included in the new release.

Automation needs to be built into this solution. There are various cycles within the platform and I am not able to easily enter a single case.

The integration technique should be a little bit easier. Currently, we need to connect with the API server and then we need to install it. That includes the IT team also. It would be ideal if the Anaplan consultant could do it in an easy or simple way. That would be great. I would love to see additional features added. They have an action tab, however, the action tab itself is a little bit complicated. It would be great if some easy thing could be incorporated there. I couldn't get any documentation that we can provide to the customer to lay out, for example, the features. It's there on the Anaplan website, however, it would be helpful to have some sort of proposal so that we can use the proposal to propose it to new clients. Also, the pricing is not there on the Anaplan site. We are not able to tell what would be a good quotation or what would be the price we would offer them. I'd like approximate pricing, or something related price so that I can tell customers what it would cost.

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

There are workspace issues, like the limitation on model sizes. The model is very limited to 130GB, a base model. We were one of the use cases to go beyond 130GB for a model size. So it's not enterprise-wide. Performance is quite weak if there are concurrent users. In the next release, I would like to see performance improved. It can't handle concurrent users because of the way it's designed. Integration is not that strong. We use a connector called Anaplan Connect, which needs a lot of interface to work on. License cost is quite huge compared to the other solutions we ran in the market. It's too costly for SME businesses.

I would like to see Anaplan adopt machine learning algorithms. That's where everything is heading—a package with AI, forecasting, and so on—but Anaplan still lacks it. Anaplan could make some improvements in terms of graphs and visualizations. They do have nice graphs to show the data, but when I compare it to Tableau or Power BI, Anaplan's charting ability is lacking. At the same time, I know it's not a BI tool. It does what it's supposed to do, but machine learning forecasting and artificial intelligence are much needed now. It still uses statistical forecasting. It's all formula- or history-based. There isn't really seasonal forecasting based on what we can now predict because of COVID and all. So the tools still won't support these sorts of forecasting. Also, the cloud engine slows down when working with a large dataset. It still lacks a powerful engine. There are a couple of areas they're still working on and recently they have improved a lot. And there are some features that have been lost when they update, but that is more related to the tool aspect, not the usability. We have inside access, so I can see the roadmap of what Anaplan is planning to implement. There's nothing specific that I would like to see that they haven't included there. They're working on the beta version of machine learning as well as the user experience. There are some new features like the ability to generate a PPT-style report within the system itself. In terms of the UI and dashboards, much needs to be improved. It's not perfect but compared to others, it is way better. And the way I had from other tools, actually, in terms of everything. I know there are a couple of improvements and announcements the way they use it and all, but it's always a trade-off between how people take it as an output or else anything.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The solution could improve by better dashboards and while entering the form loss and project implementation the ability to use graphical shapes more effectively.