Anaplan Product Overview
Anaplan is a cloud-based enterprise platform designed to facilitate connected, adaptive, and collaborative business planning and performance management across various business units. 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 improved 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 build and test scenarios, illuminate blind spots, and uncover hidden opportunities.
Key Features and Functionality
Connected Planning
Anaplan synchronizes planning across the organization, connecting previously isolated planning activities into a single source of truth. This integration enables enterprise-wide transparency and alignment, allowing leadership to see how plans and actual performance flow between different business units such as finance, sales, HR, and supply chain.
User Experience
The platform offers an intuitive user experience with personalized dashboards, interactive pages, apps, and boards. Users can build and customize dashboards with key performance indicators (KPIs), charts, and reports, and perform ad-hoc analysis with flexible styling and formatting. Anaplan also integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Office tools, Google Sheets, and other applications to enhance productivity and break down silos between online and offline analysis.
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 various systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and other platforms through APIs, ETL connectors, and built-in integrations. This ensures that all planning and analysis use the latest available data sets in real-time or scheduled batches.
Planning & Modeling
The platform allows users to model complex business scenarios with multi-dimensional modeling and unlimited constraints. It supports a wide range of planning activities including budgeting, forecasting, demand planning, financial consolidation, profitability modeling, and workforce planning. Anaplan’s hyperscale Optimizer tools provide real-time, end-to-end visibility and “what-if” scenario planning to ensure accurate forecasts and optimal resource allocation.
Anaplan Intelligence
Anaplan leverages predictive AI and machine learning to enhance decision-making. Its AI-based predictive intelligence tools integrate internal and external data signals to uncover hidden possibilities and provide actionable insights. This capability helps organizations optimize decision-making, increase profitability, and accelerate time to better outcomes.
Real-Time Planning and Reporting
Anaplan provides real-time planning, modeling, and reporting capabilities. As soon as data is entered or updated, outputs and reports reflect these changes immediately. This real-time capability enables rapid insights and scenario analysis, allowing teams to collaboratively model different versions of plans and forecasts and see the enterprise-wide impacts instantly.
Workflow and Collaboration
The platform fosters collaboration across business units with real-time updates and a single system of truth. Built-in workflow and approvals enforce oversight and compliance without slowing planning cycles. Granular user access controls enable decentralizing planning to business users across the enterprise, ensuring everyone works from the same metrics and plans.
Scalable and Intelligent Architecture
Anaplan’s architecture is scalable and intelligent, applying hyperscale computing to operational insights, forecasts, and business strategies. The platform includes a powerful in-memory calculation engine called Polaris, introduced in 2021, which supports large-scale models with hundreds of thousands of data elements updating in real-time.
In summary, Anaplan is a comprehensive platform that connects people, data, and plans across the enterprise, providing a unified source of truth for better decision-making, improved operational performance, and enhanced strategic agility. Its robust features and integrations make it an invaluable tool for organizations seeking to navigate today’s dynamic and hypercompetitive business environment.