Anaplan

Anaplan Review: Is It the Future of Enterprise Business Planning?

For many large organizations, strategic planning is a chaotic puzzle. Finance works from one set of numbers, Sales has another, and Supply Chain operates on a third. This drowns leadership in a sea of disconnected spreadsheets and conflicting data.

This is where Anaplan comes in. It is a connected planning platform that is cloud-based and specifically designed to enable enterprises to integrate their operations across every team. The company boasts that 2,500 brands like LinkedIn and Bayer are already planning with Anaplan. Moreover, it claims to hold the unique capability to Outpredict, outplan, and outperform with Anaplan Intelligence.

Let’s understand if Anaplan really holds the power to tear these silos and develop one source of truth, so that you can drive your business with clarity and confidence.

This is our detailed Anaplan review to assist you in deciding whether it can be in your strategic toolkit or not.

Pros and Cons of Anaplan

Key Anaplan Features

Anaplan's platform is built around a powerful modeling engine, and its suite of AI solutions is designed to connect your entire organization. Let’s look at some of its core features here:

1. In-Memory Scenario Planning

At the heart of Anaplan is its in-memory processing engine. When you open a model, it's loaded directly into memory, which helps you make incredibly fast, real-time calculations. This powers multi-dimensional "what-if" scenario planning. It enables you to adjust variables and immediately see the impact on business performance without limitations.

2. Predictive Forecasting

The platform provides predictive insights to help you anticipate future market conditions, sales costs, and industry trends. By analyzing historical and current data, Anaplan helps your organization move from reactive to proactive planning. This helps you make more informed decisions based on robust forecasts.

3. Centralized Data Hub

Anaplan acts as a secure, central hub for all the datasets required for your planning and analysis. This ensures data integrity and consistency, and creates a uniform dashboard that provides a solid foundation for all modeling activities.

4. Automated Workflows and Notifications

Anaplan also helps you digitize and streamline business processes by creating automated workflows. Here, you can set up targeted Notify Actions to prompt specific people. Next, when you need your colleague’s input, you can use customized messages to tell them what they need to do. This ensures smooth handoffs and reduces communication delays.

5. Contextual Commenting

Conversations are kept directly tied to the data. You can comment on specific data cards to spark focused discussions and tag colleagues with @ mentions. This sends them an immediate notification to bring them into the loop.

6. Direct Page and Context Sharing

With Anaplan, you can bring collaborators to the exact information they need by sharing specific dashboards or worksheets with up to 20 users at a time. When a page is shared, it includes the precise context (like a filtered view), directing your colleagues to the data point under discussion.

7. Comment Summary View

You can keep up with conversations at a glance using the Comment Summary View. This feature lets you see all comments on a page within your current context, making it simple to track team discussions even if you aren't directly tagged in them.

8. Slack Integration

Anaplan integrates directly with Slack to meet your team where they already work. The Anaplan Slackbot notifies you when a page is shared with them or when they are @mentioned in a comment.

9. In-Product Downtime Alerts

The platform also provides you with a heads-up on scheduled maintenance with in-product notifications. These alerts are also sent via Slack and mobile push. It gives you visibility into planned downtimes so you can organize your work accordingly.

Anaplan Pricing

Anaplan does not publish a fixed price list, as costs are customized based on an organization's scale and requirements. For most enterprises, the Anaplan cost for subscription typically starts between $50,000 and $250,000.This total investment covers more than just the software itself, including critical components like data integration, employee training, and change management.

Key AI Solutions by Anaplan

Anaplan is integrating an advanced set of artificial intelligence applications throughout its platform. This is meant to improve the planning process into an active exercise. This assists the businesses in identifying trends, envisioning the results, and making better decisions.

1. Predictive AI for Forward-Looking Insights

Anaplan enables predictive and prescriptive insights with advanced machine learning to transform complex data into easy-to-understand, actionable forecasts. It provides:

• Anaplan Forecaster: It uses machine learning to make multi-dimensional forecasts with great accuracy. Further, it makes the forecasting process more automated, enabling teams to make faster and more confident predictions about future business performance.
• Anaplan Optimizer: It assists companies in resolving difficult optimization challenges, like maximizing production output or minimizing shipping expenses, by finding the optimal possible outcome from a vast set of data.
• Anaplan ML Open: It assists you in adding your existing models of ML and data science resources to enhance planning.

2. Generative AI in Productive Planning

Anaplan incorporates conversational generative artificial intelligence to enable you to communicate with the tool in natural language.

• Anaplan CoPlanner: This acts as an intelligent partner used to solve complex queries in the form of what-if questions. Business can simply ask their questions in plain English, and are answered with contextually relevant and correct insights in real time. 

3. Smart Agents to Integrate Fast Decision-Making

Anaplan has created smart agents with roles that are pre-trained to speed up planning and reveal insights within a particular business function.

• Anaplan Finance Analyst: This smart agent automates important finance functions, such as anomaly detection and data variation analysis. It determines any risks and opportunities of your financial plans and helps in strategic decision-making.
• Anaplan Supply Chain Analyst: It is used to optimize inventory, logistics, and demand planning. This supply chain solution makes it easy to predict disruptions and discover cost-saving opportunities, and make the entire supply chain more efficient based on data-driven recommendations.
• Anaplan Sales Analyst: It assists sales leaders in optimizing territory and quota planning. The smart agent analyzes performance data to identify growth opportunities and potential risks for your sales plans to be ambitious and achievable.
• Anaplan Workforce Analyst: It simplifies the process of workforce planning by assisting HR leaders in aligning their talent strategy to their business needs. It is capable of examining the skill gaps, planning future hires, and streamlining the compensation packages to hire and keep the best.
• Anaplan CoModeler: This is a smart agent that is intended to speed up the process of model building by comprehending your instructions given in natural language. Moreover, CoModeler will assist in the creation, expansion, and optimization of the model, decreasing the overall development time.

Anaplan Alternatives

If you are looking for alternatives to Anaplan, here are some platforms you can check:

• Oracle EPM Cloud
• SAP Analytics Cloud
• Workday Adaptive Planning
• Pigment

MobileAppDaily’s Review of Anaplan

Honestly, Anaplan is one of the most powerful connected planning platforms available for the modern enterprise to solve the critical issue of organizational silos. For too long, Finance, Sales and Marketing, Supply Chain, and HR have operated from separate spreadsheets, creating a disconnected and chaotic planning environment. Anaplan directly addresses this by breaking down those walls to create a single, intelligent view of the business.

With its powerful AI and predictive capabilities, the platform is designed to help you outpredict, outplan, and outperform the competition. Additionally, Anaplan offers an incredibly effective solution to enable true enterprise-wide planning. This allows you to accelerate time to insights and act with precision.

However, Anaplan requires a significant initial investment of both time and money to deploy, configure, and master. The platform's steep learning curve means its value is only fully realized when a company commits to a thorough implementation and training process. Despite this, for organizations ready to make that investment, its ability to connect every corner of the business proves its value as a strategic resource.