Anaplan Platform Overview
Anaplan is a comprehensive, cloud-based enterprise platform designed to unify and enhance business planning, analysis, and decision-making processes across an organization. Here’s a detailed look at what Anaplan does and its key features:
What Anaplan Does
Anaplan integrates planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes to provide organizations with real-time visibility into their data, enabling better decision-making and operational performance. It bridges the gap between functional applications and analytic tools, often referred to as the “messy middle,” by creating a shareable, real-time model of how the business operates. This allows organizations to connect operational data to business intelligence (BI) dashboards and analytics, facilitating agile strategy adjustments to achieve desired outcomes.
Key Features and Functionality
Connected Planning Across Business Units
Anaplan connects previously isolated planning activities across various business units such as finance, sales, HR, and supply chain. This integration provides enterprise-wide transparency and visibility into how plans and actual performance flow between departments, allowing leadership to see how different corporate pieces fit together.
Real-Time Planning and Reporting
The platform offers real-time planning, modeling, and reporting capabilities. As soon as data is entered or updated, outputs and reports reflect these changes immediately, enabling rapid insights and scenario analysis based on the latest data. This is supported by Anaplan’s in-memory calculation engine, which can handle large-scale models with hundreds of thousands of data elements updating in real-time.
Data Management and Integrations
Anaplan unifies data collection and analysis in a single location, facilitating both high-level and granular insights. It supports robust integration with other systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and more through APIs, ETL connectors, and built-in integrations. This ensures that all planning and analysis use the latest available data sets from the right sources.
User Experience and Collaboration
The platform is designed for ease of use, allowing users to build interactive dashboards with key performance indicators (KPIs), charts, and reports without requiring coding knowledge. It includes features like flexible styling, dynamic text cards, and multi-page reports to bring data narratives to life. Anaplan also fosters collaboration with real-time updates, workflow management, and granular user access controls, ensuring that different teams can jointly update plans and forecasts in a single system.
Advanced Analytics and AI
Anaplan leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to enhance analysis. Its predictive intelligence tools integrate internal and external data to uncover hidden opportunities and provide actionable insights. Features like PlanIQ integrate machine learning and statistical algorithms to create business forecasts, while HyperModeling aggregates large data sets for easier analysis.
Scalable and Intelligent Architecture
The platform uses hyperscale computing to support operational insights, forecasts, and business strategies. This scalable architecture ensures that the platform can handle complex business scenarios and large data sets efficiently. Anaplan’s calculation engine, Polaris, introduced in 2021, further enhances the platform’s performance and capabilities.
Extensions and Integrations with Office Tools
Anaplan offers extensions for Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Office365, facilitating agile decision-making and breaking down silos between online and offline analysis and reporting. These extensions provide one-click access to Anaplan data with sync, refresh, and write-back capabilities.
Benefits
- Enterprise-Wide Visibility: Provides a single source of truth across the organization, eliminating siloed work and uncertain outcomes.
- Real-Time Insights: Enables rapid decision-making with real-time data updates and scenario analysis.
- Collaboration: Facilitates real-time collaboration among large communities of users, aligning the organization around shared metrics and plans.
- Predictive Analytics: Leverages AI and machine learning for richer analysis and predictive insights.
- Scalability: Supports hyperscale computing and large-scale models, making it suitable for complex business scenarios.
In summary, Anaplan is a powerful tool for corporate performance management (CPM), offering a unified platform for collaborative business planning, advanced analytics, and real-time decision-making. Its ability to integrate diverse business functions, provide real-time insights, and leverage AI makes it an invaluable asset for organizations seeking to enhance their strategic agility and operational performance.