In today’s fast-paced business environment, agility and foresight are essential to staying ahaed of the competition. Anaplan is a powerful cloud-based platform that enables businesses to streamline their planning, forecasting, and decision-making processes. Anaplan helps you connect data, people and plans seamlessly.
In today’s fast-paced business environment, agility and foresight are essential to staying ahaed of the competition. Anaplan is a powerful cloud-based platform that enables businesses to streamline their planning, forecasting, and decision-making processes. Anaplan helps you connect data, people and plans seamlessly.
“Operating in today’s environment is challenging for businesses because of incessant disruptions. Companies struggle with making fast, accurate decisions.”
We consistently see that centrally aggregated financial plans are disconnected from operational tactics and events. Anaplan isn’t just financial planning. Anaplan is meant to connect people, data and plans within an enterprise. It breaks down silos and enables collabration and communication across the enterprise. Anaplan is built around this idea of “Connected Planning”.
Connected Planning serves as a catalyst for driving decision-making to new heights. It enables organizations to leverage real-time data, colloborate seamlessly acress functions, and align their plans and actions within strategic objectives. This holisitc approach drives a culture of agility, adaptability, and innovation, enabling organizations to respond swiftly to market changes and acts on emerging opportunities.
Understanding exactly how a single strategic objective can be achieved only through execution of multiple use cases across multiple functions and how these use cases impact one another with downstream effects, is essential to determining the full value customers can get not just from planning, but from “Connected Planning” in Anaplan.
Examples of these use cases include long-term strategic planning, revenue forecasting and operational expenditure (OpEx) planning. In the honeycomb diagram above, these use cases are organized within a value chain, where each use case connectis within one or more others. This interconnectivity highlights the dependencies between the use cases, illustrating how information flows seamlessly across them.
For example, a company expanding into a new market aligns long-term strategic planning with revenue & OpEx planning, ensuring financial goals support sales targets. Sales forecasts then influence quota modeling, marketing performance and incentives, creating a seamless flow where adjustments in one area (e.g. slower sales) trigger real-time strategy shifts across functions.
Anaplan operates on an in-memory calculation engine, allowing businesses to gain instant insights and make data-driven decisions without delay. Changes in data are reflected across models and departments in real-time, ensuring that stakeholdes always have access to the most up-to-date information.
Thanks to its Hyperblock™ technology, Anaplan processes large datasets at remarkable speeds, enabling businesses to conduct complex scenario planning and forecasting within drastically shorter planning cycles. This speed enhances agility, allowing companies to adapt quickly to market shifts and operational challenges.
Anaplan’s architecture supports multi-dimensional modeling, meaning organizations can structure and analyze data in ways that reflect their real-world operations. Whether planning by product, geography, department, or customer segment, businesses can easily adjust and expand their models free from rigid constraints of traditional systems.
Anaplan is able to handle any amount of data needed for models, in any business unit across the enterprise, all in one workspace. Its cloud-native architecture ensures scalability, security and performance, making it suitable for any business environment, small to large, simple to complex.
Anaplan seamlessly connects with various data sources, including ERP, CRM, and BI systems, ensuring that businesses can leverage their existing infrastructure. With APIs, connectors, and integrations, Anaplan fits naturally into an organization’s broader analytical ecosystem, enhancing decision-making with unified data.
Anaplan fosters cross-functional collaboration by breaking down data silos and ensuring that all teams—finance, sales, supply chain, HR, and operations—work from a single source of truth. With real-time data synchronization, multiple users can contribute to planning models simultaneously, ensuring alignment and transparency across the organization.
With year of expertise in data consulting as well as integrated business planning, we bring deep industry knowledge and technical excellence to every Anaplan project. Our hands-on approach ensures that your business achieves smarter planning, faster decision-making, and improved operational efficiency.
Ready to revolutionize your planning process?
Get in touch with our Anaplan experts today!
Anaplan has been recognized for the third consecutive year as the leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Financial Planning Software (FPS) in 2024. The Magic Quadrant graphic depicts an evaluation of vendors based on their Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute, serving as an unbiased assessment of how well competing providers are performing against Gartner’s market view and is supplemented by validated user reviews.
Execute well today or may dominate a large segment, but do not demonstrate an understanding of market direction.
Execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow.
Focus successfully on a small segment or are unfocused and do not out-innovate or outperform others.
Understand where the market is going or have a vision for changing market rules, but do not yet execute well.
In the same year, Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Supply Chain Planning Solutions recognized Anaplan as a Challenger, this recognition being considered by Anaplan as a testament of their commitment to delivering top-notch supply chain planning solutions and the ability to meet the evolving needs of the customers.
EPM software integrates with ERP systems to improve the management of financial and operational processes, supporting integrated business planning and enterprise-wide Connected Planning. It helps FP&A teams identify performance gaps, analyze causes, collaborate effectively and deliver accurate, timely planning, analysis, and reporting.
| Anaplan | SSAP (BPC) | Oracle (Hyperion & EPM Cloud) |
|---|---|---|
| User-Friendly Interface, Adoption & Integration: Anaplan offers a modern, intuitive interface and seamless integration with various systems. | Outdated Technology: SAP BPC has been a reliable tool for financial planning and consolidation, but it is nearing the end of its lifecycle, with limited integration capabilities compared to newer solutions. | Outdated Legacy System: Oracle’s legacy systems offer reliability, security and customization for large enterprises but come with high costs, complexity and limited flexibility. |
| Advanced Planning & Analytics & Customer Support: Anaplan has strong capabilities for planning and analytics, enhanced by resourceful customer support and regular updates. | Limited Flexibility: While SAP BPC offers solid planning features, its flexibility is limited and future enhancements may be more constrained. | Limited Capabilities & Poor Support: EPM Cloud is ideal for standardized processes but may lack agility and customization, with variable customer support. |
| Scalability, Security & Maintenance Costs: Anaplan is built for scalability and strong security features, with lower maintenance costs. | End of Life: As SAP BPC approaches the end of support, businesses may face scalability and security challenges, along with increased maintenance costs. | Aging Data Architecture: Oracle’s architecture is reliable but requires costly customizations, which can impact scalability and security. |
| Cross-Functional Collaboration & Real-Time Updates: Anaplan facilitates real-time collaboration across functions with live updates. | Limited Cross-Functionality: SAP BPC is designed for department-specific planning, therefore reduces cross-functional collaboration. | Limited Collaboration: Oracle’s system design can hinder real-time updates and cross-department collaboration, leading to delays and reduced agility. |
| Implementation Time & Cost-Effectiveness: Anaplan provides rapid implementation providing a cost-effective solution with minimal ongoing maintenance. | Slow Implementation & High Maintenance Costs: SAP BPC integrates with other SAP systems but connecting it to non-SAP tools or cross-functional software may require time-consuming and costly customization. | Slow Implementation & High Maintenance: Oracle’s systems require longer implementation for thorough setup, resulting in customized solution. This can result in higher upfront costs and more maintenance. |
Supply chain management tools are designed to streamline inventory, improve customer service and optimize overall operations. Initially developed for manufacturing, these tools have since expanded across various industries, helping businesses reduce costs and improve efficiency. They integrate with ERP and CRM systems, providing valuable insights into business operations and customer behaviour. Below we compared Anaplan with one of the competiors for Supply Chain Solutions.
| Anaplan | Blue Yonder |
|---|---|
| Easy to Learn & User-Friendly: Anaplan offers a standardized platform that is intuitive and easy to learn, enabling faster integration. | Complex Legacy System: Blue Yonder is a well-established solution that has evolved over time, which can result in a steeper learning curve and increased intricacy for users. |
| Highly Flexible & Customizable: Anaplan provides a highly flexible platform that allows users to easily customize solutions. | Limited Flexibility & High Customization Costs: While Blue Yonder can be tailored to specific needs, its high customization costs and reliance on legacy technology may limit the long-term flexibility. |
| Faster Deployment: Anaplan enables quicker deployment due to its standardized, flexible platform, allowing businesses to implement solutions rapidly. | Longer Implementation: Though it remains valuable for organizations with established workflows, Blue Yonder's legacy nature and complexity can lead to longer deployment times and delays in time-to-value. |
| Advanced Technology with Live Data Model: Anaplan leverages a live data model running in memory, improving performance. | Legacy Technology: Blue Yonder relies on older technology that lacks the same in-memory data model capabilities, leading to lower performance. |
| Increased Agility & Productivity: Anaplan’s platform provides agility, allowing businesses to quickly respond to changes. | Less Agile: Blue Yonder is effective in managing large-scale operations for established processes, but its rigid structure can limit agility, making it harder to quickly adapt to market changes. |
With year of expertise in data consulting as well as integrated business planning, we bring deep industry knowledge and technical excellence to every Anaplan project. Our hands-on approach ensures that your business achieves smarter planning, faster decision-making, and improved operational efficiency.
Ready to revolutionize your planning process?
Get in touch with our Anaplan experts today!
