Anaplan vs. SAP Integrated Business Planning

Anaplan is best suited for strategic planning initiatives in industries like CPG, Manufacturing, FS, Pharma. It can handle multiple use cases for each function in the company like Supply chain, Finance, Sales and more. It is one of the best tools I have seen in scenario modelling. It is not suitable for very detailed level planning, essentially execution level eg. Production scheduling.

One of the best parts is how it is suited to global or multi-site organizations with complex supply chains. It just operates across multiple regions with various manufacturing facilities, and that too with very much ease; it is simple, solid and very reliable in terms of working when the logistics is an issue and fetches data and insights very quickly.

Incentivized

• Ingest and integrate disconnected datasets and sources that speak different "languages"
• Flexible security and user-oriented customization of dashboards and datasets
• Smart architecture allows creative license to connect planning processes that have different time horizons and granularities
• Real-time ("live") collaboration is particularly useful for globally spread teams in different time-zones

Incentivized

• Comfortable database, it adjusts to what we know how to use.
• The platform acts quickly, and throws metrics and analysis adjusted to the times we need, thus automating the results.
• Complete and detailed reports, we can dynamically evaluate all the information.

Incentivized

• I would like there to be additional visualization improvements/features for reports
• Additional technical support resources would be great to quickly resolve bugs
• I would like for improvements around the ability to have a lot of dimensions in a table of data and the speed around processing those calcs.

• The system does not work as smoothly when processing large volumes of data. There are processing delays when we are busy planning.
• Moreover, because inventory exceptions are not automatically alerted, employees have to check them manually, which takes extra time. Upgrades in these sections could raise our operational efficiency.

Incentivized

Anaplan is already an established market leader in enterprise planning area. Its flexibility to build multi-dimensional models, real time scenario plannings are proven to be the best features and successfully implemented by global organizations. Anaplan's ambitious product team is ensuring to roll out new features regularly based on customer/ partner feedback. e.g their new improved polaris environment has strong potential to build very large models without worrying about sparsity. The integration with other tools/technologies is being easier (e.g. cloudworks). Hence, considering Anaplan as a platform that has proved to be successful tool in enterprise level planning, its focus on regular feature enhancements and future release roadmaps I believe this platform has potential to evolve further along with our business processes and requirements

Very useful. Already have a team that learnt the system and although took a while, they now use it seamlessly

Incentivized

Anaplan is interesting because it is at the same time easy to use and difficult to use. An end user can navigate a well-constructed app, being pointed in the right direction every time they feel a slight bit of confusion, and find everything they need in what feels like a straight line. Similarly, a model builder (developer of sorts) can have the exact same experience, but the journey is longer and more complicated. End users have great experiences with Anaplan, but sometimes model builders have a frustrating one. That is not to say model building is hard (because it truly is not), but things change, and when things change in complex systems, the effort required simply to investigate where a model builder needs to make an adjustment may frustrate them but also frustrate their non-technical bosses. However, the reality is that with complicated businesses, complicated business problems, come complicated solutions. It is actually a testament to Anaplan's capabilities that it has taken on the biggest problems at the biggest companies. It may be daunting to adjust it in those environments, but at least you know it did meet the needs there, which is more than most tools can say.

Because It is is a cloud-based platform that can be accessed from anywhere and also it has a user-friendly which is great for navigation within the software. As it offers a wide range of features including demand forecasting, supply chain planning, and collaboration tools which makes it even more powerful

Incentivized

There are very few outages. Maintenance is scheduled on two or three Saturdays per month, so as not to affect businesses. When there is an outage, users are kept informed of progress to restore the platform and typically this takes no more than an hour. Anaplan customer support is very responsive if we ever have questions about platform issues

Generally, pages load quickly and reports complete within a reasonable timeframe. However, when working with large or complex datasets or during times of multiple active users, performance can sometimes be impacted. That said, much of the performance depends on how the model is built and whether best practices have been followed. Optimized models tend to perform much better, so the experience can be somewhat subjective based on the setup.

Support quality has dropped since Thoma Bravo has taken over. I think some serious re-focus needs to happen here -- part of the beauty of being in the Anaplan community was how involved you felt in it before. Before I didn't dread sending a support ticket, now I am starting to.

Fast reaction specialists available

Incentivized

In my opinion, in-person training is always the best if you have the option to do so. This allows real-time interactions with the instructions, whereas the online training I took required me to write-down questions, email them, and wait for responses. This slows down the process, as you can imagine. That said, in-person training is an extra cost and it likely isn't needed for everyone. I would suggest selecting a small number of people to take in-person training and then having them act as mentors to the rest of your team. That way, as the rest of the team takes the online training, they have a resource to help them in real time.

Learning made easy . One of the best trainings i have attended. Training was very detailed training by the trainer, which helped me understand the basics of the model building. Level 1 training was easy and instructor was most helpful here. Level 2 training was challenging but was able to go thru due to understanding of the basics.

Agile methodology and breaking the work down into sprints was very helpful. Implementation required a deeper dive into our data than expected for the consultants to be able to construct the data model. But once it was in place, the focus on knowledge transfer enabled us to be able to use the product effectively after the team rolled off.

Incentivized

Set up a supply chain strategy. Define your north star. Follow it with good consultants. Get know how from consultants with a deep know how in the system. Do proper change management.

Incentivized

Anaplan is one of the only tools flexible to handle bespoke commission calculations. In addition to Sales Performance Management, Anaplan can be used to support other business functions, such as workforce planning or financial planning & analysis. Anaplan provides the scalability needed for an enterprise-level solution. While taking longer to implement, it also can provide a greater ROI.

SAP Integrated Business Planning was easiest to implement versus MS Dynamics and Jira because it allows us to scale on-demand, always having in mind our business requirements and without sacrificing compute resources or increasing costs by adopting operating system licenses. This is the case with MS Dynamics 365. Jira, which was previously used for years, was transforming into a monster because it is difficult, heavy, and hard to use for all organizations. SAP Integrated Business Planning was an excellent choice for countering all the issues with other solutions in the market, although it increased our budget.

Incentivized

We have managed to leverage Anaplan for financial planning and forecasting across the business. It is now used by almost every department, with more than 50 users (but I know of companies that have hundreds of users) and still the platform is quick and reliable. It is easy to make changes to divisions and departments or add users and apply different user settings - the core part of the model is not affected and end users can continue their work without any disruption

• Reduction in time spent by sales ops team in processing compensation by almost 20 %
• Ability to drill down into each compensation calculation to understand the details of how the comp is calculated. This has provided more transparency / traceability to end users
• we are able to release updates to the system faster as it is easier to maintain and sync

• The biggest positive is improved forecast accuracy; now, I can work in a structured manner to reduce my costs and anticipate demand for the products.
• Now, one certain item is that the Enhanced Data Quality is helping us a lot in making quicker decisions and a faster work life.
• The sales and operations teams are aligned now in a much better manner, and work is faster.
• Planning has become easier and smoother.

Incentivized