Anaplan is a scenario planning and analysis platform designed to optimize decision-making in complex business environments so that enterprises can outpace their competition and the market. By building connections and collaboration across organizational silos, the Anaplan platform surfaces key insights.
N/A
Workday Adaptive Planning
Score 7.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Workday Adaptive Planning streamlines planning workflows, using AI and real-time data integration to improve collaboration and provide predictive forecasts for better strategic analysis.
Anaplan and Workday Adaptive Planning are both Corporate Performance Management products focused on budgeting and financial planning. However, they are most commonly used in different market segments, and are ideal at different points in businesses’ growth and development.
Adaptive Planning, recently acquired by Workday, is most commonly used by midsize companies. The CPM tool integrates natively with the Workday HCM platform and is designed to help data flow smoothly from HR to finance and accounting processes in a unified system. Anaplan is more enterprise-focused, with a heavier focus on traditional CPM capabilities like financial process management and reporting.
Features
Anaplan and Workday Adaptive Planning both provide advantages for their users.
Anaplan’s capabilities are scaled to enhance enterprises’ financial performance management. Reviewers highlight the platform’s flexibility and adaptability to business process and data structure changes. This customization is designed to help enterprises be more flexible and better absorb business changes. Anaplan also allows for a large number of different users on the platform for excellent collaboration support.
Workday stands out for its support for midsize and growing companies, particularly those who have outgrown their Excel-based financial processes. Its Office Connect feature creates a familiar and accessible experience for professionals used to Excel-based financial processes and reporting without adding on a substantial training curve. For those who do require additional training, the Adaptive Learning Center provides a host of self-service resources for training and development.
Limitations
Anaplan and Workday Adaptive Planning also have certain limitations worth considering.
Anaplan lacks some of the support that users look for from CPM vendors. In particular, some reviewers have found a lack of training materials when adopting and training on the platform. It also is limited as a standalone data warehouse for financial data.
In contrast, Adaptive Planning reviewers have had issues with post-implementation flexibility in some areas. One area of note is the platform’s web-based reporting capabilities, which are more limited than on-premise features. Additionally, Office Connect is not a one-to-one match with Excel in terms of processes and functions, so there is still a learning curve and change management necessary when transitioning away from Excel.
Pricing
Anaplan provides 3 different packages, all priced by custom quote from the vendor. The Basic plan includes core CPM capabilities around model building, dashboarding, and Microsoft Office integrations. The Professional plan adds on Application Lifecycle Managament and Auditing support, as well as DocuSign and additional support features as add-ons. The Enterprise plan provides all of the features beyond Bring Your Own Key, including an Informatica iPaaS license and additional computational power.
Workday Adaptive Planning offers two packages, each priced by quote from the vendor. The Standard package includes all the core features and capabilities, while the Enterprise package adds on unlimited storage, additional automation, and sandboxing. Workday also offers 3 license types, a Full Seat, or admins, which cost the most, Contributors, which are standard users, and Viewers, which can access data but not make changes.
Features
Anaplan
Workday Adaptive Planning
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
7.4
Ratings
3% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
9.3
Ratings
20% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports
6.40 Ratings
9.00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards
7.90 Ratings
10.00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates
7.90 Ratings
9.00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
9.1
Ratings
11% above category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.0
Ratings
2% below category average
Drill-down analysis
9.10 Ratings
9.00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities
9.10 Ratings
7.00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration
9.10 Ratings
8.00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages
00 Ratings
8.00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
8.4
Ratings
2% above category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.0
Ratings
3% below category average
Publish to Web
8.60 Ratings
00 Ratings
Publish to PDF
7.90 Ratings
8.00 Ratings
Report Versioning
9.20 Ratings
8.00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling
7.90 Ratings
8.00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
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.
In a previous company, I was hired based on my experience with Workday Adaptive Planning. After being hired and reviewing the company, I quickly determined they were not large of enough of a company to need the program. Instead, we made better Excel budget templates, utilized OneDrive and created a better experience without the cost. Left the job after 9 months because I worked my way out of the position. My next role I looked for bigger companies and had better success with implementation.
Version Management. Adaptive lets us manage many versions/scenarios all in one platform with the robust ability to compare them to each other.
Processing Performance. With the Elastic Hypercube technology that was implemented a few years back, we can watch changes flow through a complex web of formulas and arrive at an answer within seconds.
Audit Trail. Our administrators love the ability to see and report on who made what changes when, which leads to real accountability within the organization.
Web reports and sheets are not great for in-depth reporting, and require the use of the OfficeConnect for Excel plugin and, therefore, the use of Excel for extensive reporting capabilities.
It has limited formula functionality in some instances, requiring again the use of OfficeConnect for Excel for extensive calculations.
I would like to see new planning sheet types or upgrades to existing sheet types; functionality has been the same for over 10 years.
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
For one we're in way too deep to not move forward with Adaptive. We're integrated with Workday, we do a ton of reporting with Adaptive, and it's working very well for planning and forecasting. No reason to look back or change course.
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.
Workday Adaptive Planning has detailed online help with both articles and videos that are comprehensive. It has a lot of similarities to Excel, which most finance people are already familiar with, plus the user interface is intuitive and easy to pick up. The online support team is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.
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
There haven't been any lately. The only one issue I can think of is when there was an update in Adaptive that altered our reports. Before I realized there was an issue, Adaptive reached out to let me know, so that it could be fixed.
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.
All aspects of Adaptive Insights perform well. One area that I wish was quicker was integration. When importing data from Intacct our accounting ERP platform, it can sometimes take 4 hours for the import to process. The earlier imports are done, the quicker they complete. My estimate for a quick upload is about two hours.
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.
Whenever we have had any questions, issues, or concerns, the support has been quick and thorough. [This] allow[s] us to be able to fully resolve any issues, or be connected with the right group quickly to attain the result we were after; be it from simple formatting to adding new detailed reporting.
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.
This was extremely helpful so that they could walk you through the model and teach you more about the complexity of various areas. It is most helpful when it is specific to your organization's model. The larger in-person trainings were helpful but they tended to be more generic and entry level. The trainings that are more tailored to your specific needs are the most helpful.
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.
They often times tended to be way too generic or entry level. They would also become sales pitches to upgrade or get new Adaptive Planning products. The questions in the training would be very niche and specific to other organizations. They were rarely helpful to the group at large.
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.
Trust the expertise of very strong 3rd party implementers. Having deployed Adaptive at a separate company before, I thought I knew it all (hubris, I know). Fortunately, I began to (very quickly) trust the judgment of our Carlson implementation team, and they provided invaluable insights and best-in-class processes that have benefitted me and my team greatly.
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.
For best-in-class capabilities, you'll very likely need to split the various HR and financial systems into separate systems rather than using a consolidated platform like Workday. However, a consolidated platform provides benefits by being a single location for employees and a single system for IT developers to work with. This would need to be compared to employee efficiencies gained by working with better systems.
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
We went from 2 users to 70+ users over a 2 year period of time. The application scaled wonderfully. 65 of those users were non-finance users so they were able to quickly learn the software and prepare budgets quickly and efficiently. That is the power of Adaptive and its ability to scale
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
