The solution improves forecast accuracy. We've seen forecast accuracy go from a variation of 10% to something like 2%. It also drives up the quality of analytics. What we're seeing is not only forecast accuracy improving but also the time spent on pulling data together to do a forecast. You get the benefits of both worlds and you get the forecast accuracy as people are spending significantly less time. 

It goes from about 50% on data validation, and getting the data, and validating the data, down to about 20% on a lot of our clients. You're freeing up those finance people that are pulling those models together. You're freeing up 30% of their time during the planning cycle to really spend a lot more on analytics, and deep-diving into the numbers, and doing a better job at understanding what those numbers are owning up to instead of spending all that time just consolidating all the numbers into one space.

That's definitely a big advantage. We are seeing massive time savings for people, freeing up time so that employees can do more value-added work. 

Especially over the COVID period, a lot of people have left and they haven't hired new people to replace them. The company is really looking at standardizing processes across the globe. This solution helps to build a platform where you can build a standard process across the world, and you get benefits from that idea of standardization where anybody can do anybody else's job as it's exactly the same all over the world. There is that advantage as well.

Before Anaplan, we would have to supply a lot of technical resources to the team just to make sure the solution was up and running. The great thing about Anaplan is that you don't need to have much technical knowledge. You don't need a lot of raw technical knowledge, but you'll have to have functional knowledge.

In the budget forecasting space, some clients have chosen to go with Anaplan because it offers a customized experience versus some of the off-the-shelf packages in our industry. It's a small industry in the sense that you're not selling tens of thousands of products. You're selling a few hundred across your whole client base. 

The user experience is usually not as rich in those products because they don't have the breadth of iterations, whereas, in Anaplan, you can set that up for yourself. Clients love that there are certain features and functions that they do as part of their budgeting process, so they don't have to rely on Excel and features like that. They can do everything inside of Anaplan. 

We are able to create and build the yearly budget and the yearly focus. It allows for a direct saving of human capital.

My clients exhibit enhanced efficiency in financial planning, supply chain management, demand planning, and financial consolidation. They possess superior visibility, enabling swift action-taking.

Anaplan is a driver-based solution. For a finance-driven project, the business inputs the revenue or the expense lines, which is directly connected to your financial statements and further integrated to your core systems for your consolidation of other things. For example, with store planning for new stores, it calculates the ROI.

It’s very agile and we can do changes in minutes, rather than waiting for consultants and change requests. So, it’s as dynamic as the business.

I believe Anaplan is a new cloud tool, and from time to time, there's a lot of improvement that the Anaplan company deploys with the system. So, with that improvement, we need to really adapt and know the new system trends.

In finance, mainly, earlier, we were using Excel spreadsheets. Every time their monthly cycle ends, the company needed to go back to the reporting. They would have to pull all the data from all the users and then publish all final reports. However, in Anaplan, everyone reports their numbers through the cloud and wherever the end-user or the planner wants to see the data collated, he can just simply open the Anaplan and then see the reports ready-made. It's much less work-intensive.

My organization has benefited from the solution providing us with very good forecasting models. Additionally, there is a tool where users can go through different dashboards,  a feature called Dimension where you can use multiple dimensions, and the granularity is very good for us.

Anaplan has eased a major pain point in mapping multidimensional data by combining all the necessary dimensions into a single tool. This makes it much easier for managers to understand the data coming in from their reps.

The capacity projection of certain lines helped to identify where the utilization is falling beyond a limit. It helped certain category planners to plan for long term investments (shift patterns).

• It has supported a global process change to sales forecasting and created a single method for this.
• It has created a global standard in corporate dashboards that all regions agreed to run the business from.
• It has simplified the sales forecasting process.
• It has increased visibility at a corporate & global sales leadership level where previously it was not possible in MS Excel.
• It has helped speed up business and reduced the time it took to report on and view the sales forecast.

We use Anaplan across multiple functional areas. I will elaborate a few features that have had the most impact on our organization:

• The forecasting/planning cycles: This used to take months to collaborate. It now only takes a week to finish and be worked upon.
• The commission payment systems: Have been automated in Anaplan. The commission payments are highly transparent and efficient now.
• The Bookings and Revenue Forecasting model: Allows us to predict the Salesforce requirements and to budget for them beforehand.