What do you like best about the product?

Anaplan is an easy-to-use SaaS platform with global coverage. Over the last 10 years, they have adopted the best-in-class funcitonalities on their platform to rival other big players in the EPM space such as Oracle, SAP and TM1. It is used for enterprise wide planning and improving collaboration among various teams within an organisation from finance to sales, HR, marketing, tax, operations and treasury to name a few. The platform uses simple drag and drop functionality along with excel-like scripting to build models and front-end pages, resulting in quicker adoption times for both end-users and new model builders and making implementation a breeze. The Anaplan REST API can be leveraged to connect the system to other existing ERPs and master data source system to ensure integrity of data across an enterprise.

What do you dislike about the product?

While Anaplan has recently produced some exceptional functionalities like geo-mapping and workflow, and has a strong roadmap with GenAI coming into the picture soon, a lot of these capabilities (such as Workflow, or the new Polaris engine) come at an additional cost to customers. A lot of times customers are discouraged from using these features due to the additional price tag. This prevents consultants and partners like us from leveraging the full power of Anaplan to implement for the customer. However, the minimum/basic features that come with an enterprise licence are sufficient for a great start to the Anaplan journey.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Anaplan solves a wide array of problems including but not limited to: better data integrity, improved collaboration, scenario planning, faster forecasting cycles. Even though we are a partner/consultant, we also use Anaplan internally for sales perfomance management, financial budgeting/forecasting and workforce planning. Adopting Anaplan has made the before-mentioned processes significantly faster and more reliable. I have also implemented supply-chain use cases for customers, which have resulted in better communication with their suppliers, reduced cost through optimised inventory and better collaboration across the enterprise.