Anaplan is a relatively expensive piece of software. It's definitely being applied to very complex problems, and if the price were to drop I expect it would be more broadly adopted. 

From a product point of view, they have launched some new reporting functionality, which is pretty basic compared to something like Power BI.

What they have done to compensate for the reporting was to build native APIs into something like Power BI and Tableau, so that you can integrate your data into a reporting suite. The need to continue to develop this. There's new functionality all the time, however, some of the core functionality was lacking about three, four years ago. It's continuously getting resolved and improving, and I'm now pleased with the level of functionality, however, they need to keep going in this direction.

I would like to see Anaplan adopt machine learning algorithms. That's where everything is heading—a package with AI, forecasting, and so on—but Anaplan still lacks it. Anaplan could make some improvements in terms of graphs and visualizations. They do have nice graphs to show the data, but when I compare it to Tableau or Power BI, Anaplan's charting ability is lacking. At the same time, I know it's not a BI tool. It does what it's supposed to do, but machine learning forecasting and artificial intelligence are much needed now. It still uses statistical forecasting. It's all formula- or history-based. There isn't really seasonal forecasting based on what we can now predict because of COVID and all. So the tools still won't support these sorts of forecasting.

Also, the cloud engine slows down when working with a large dataset. It still lacks a powerful engine. There are a couple of areas they're still working on and recently they have improved a lot. And there are some features that have been lost when they update, but that is more related to the tool aspect, not the usability.

We have inside access, so I can see the roadmap of what Anaplan is planning to implement. There's nothing specific that I would like to see that they haven't included there. They're working on the beta version of machine learning as well as the user experience. There are some new features like the ability to generate a PPT-style report within the system itself. 

In terms of the UI and dashboards, much needs to be improved. It's not perfect but compared to others, it is way better. And the way I had from other tools, actually, in terms of everything. I know there are a couple of improvements and announcements the way they use it and all, but it's always a trade-off between how people take it as an output or else anything. 

Anaplan's workflow component is probably the biggest area for improvement. I'd also like to see Anaplan add an ad hoc reporting tool that allows users to query things. It's going to factor into how you design your data set and your models, but I'd like the ability to create ad hoc queries against the data that's in there.

The limit today is in the ability for business people to describe what they actually need. I don't see any need for improvement on Anaplan's side. The limit is within the people who use it and not the product itself. 

It's not easy to test the Anaplan processes completely, as it's so large, that it is covered by Anaplan. It's quite difficult to test everything, including all the business rules all the business cases. It requires a lot of data to be able to test everything because it's so big. When you implement the accounting software you just have to test two devices and just two customers invoices, two customers, and then you know it works fine. However, when you implement Anaplan on the scale on which it is implemented, it is difficult to test every single business case.

The ability of the end-users to manage the software is due to the fact that it becomes so sophisticated. On top of that, there are so many business rules to set up in the system that as a business user it's hard to gauge what they're doing and it's possible to get lost.

The advantages of Anaplan are its weakness. You can set up whatever you want, however, it tends to be really big, and the users have to be very competent, very efficient, and have to know what they need to do to use Anaplan. There needs to be a good understanding of the solution. When the user was working on Excel, due to the fact that Excel is very small and it's very limited, a user can understand everything. With Anaplan, the scope is so wider, which makes it difficult for the average user to manage and drive the process. Some users are very skilled. They have good knowledge of what they're doing. Others are not. It will become difficult for them.  

I'd like to see the ability to print papers, as it's not easy to do so right now. I know that we are in August and by the end of August Anaplan will release new features about reporting. However, in France, we are quite old-fashioned people. A lot of clients like to have a sheet of paper - something printed. That's not easy on Anaplan. Anaplan is designed to be worked on from a screen, on a laptop, on a smartphone. It's not designed to allow a person to print a sheet of paper with data.

The integration technique should be a little bit easier. Currently, we need to connect with the API server and then we need to install it. That includes the IT team also. It would be ideal if the Anaplan consultant could do it in an easy or simple way. That would be great.

I would love to see additional features added. They have an action tab, however, the action tab itself is a little bit complicated. It would be great if some easy thing could be incorporated there.

I couldn't get any documentation that we can provide to the customer to lay out, for example, the features. It's there on the Anaplan website, however, it would be helpful to have some sort of proposal so that we can use the proposal to propose it to new clients. Also, the pricing is not there on the Anaplan site. We are not able to tell what would be a good quotation or what would be the price we would offer them. I'd like approximate pricing, or something related price so that I can tell customers what it would cost.

The negative is that the higher the flexibility, the higher is the complexity. That can act against you as a negative because it does require a model builder or a coder/developer.

It's not something that can be easily learned. It's a full-time job for someone who's a kind of specialist. Once you've learned it, it's great, but it does take a few years to build that knowledge up.

Any integration or interfaces into it and out of it can be hard, depending on the client and the tools available.

As additional features wise, if it could be more intuitive, it might be helpful.

The price of the solution can improve.

There are workspace issues, like the limitation on model sizes. The model is very limited to 130GB, a base model. We were one of the use cases to go beyond 130GB for a model size. So it's not enterprise-wide. Performance is quite weak if there are concurrent users. In the next release, I would like to see performance improved. It can't handle concurrent users because of the way it's designed.

Integration is not that strong. We use a connector called Anaplan Connect, which needs a lot of interface to work on.

License cost is quite huge compared to the other solutions we ran in the market. It's too costly for SME businesses.

• The sizing can be improved.
• Need more subsets for Versions and Time.
• Reporting can be vastly improved.

Right now, if we build a module using 3 versions, 100 GL Accounts, 25 Cost Centers, and 13 periods (12 months + 1 Year), the sizing of the model calculated would be 3*100*25*13 = 97500, irrespective of the data present in the module. I mean, even if you have only 1000 cells with data out of those 97500 cells, and the remaining cells are null, still the sizing is calculated for all the 97500 cells.

Further, we do not have an option of having only a few months or a few versions (Actual Forecast in module). We should either use them or not use them; if we can get a subset for the version and time, then we can reduce the sizing to some extent.

In the above example, if the module was only for forecasting purposes, then the sizing could be reduced to 65000 instead 97500 by reducing the number of versions to 2 from 3.

Sizing is the biggest challenge in providing solutions.

The dashboard could be better. Because within a dashboard or report, you have to do a lot of scrolling. You need to scroll down because the table doesn't fit in a single view. That's why even the users aren't happy with that kind of user experience. They need to scroll to see all the data, and it could be better if it fits in just one page. That way, you can see everything.

In the next release, I want automation that's connected to Anaplan. For example, to load master data from SAP to Anaplan. I don't know if this already exists, but a log where you can see the progress and see if there's an error will also help. It would be better to give you the error message, for example, if there is an error within the automated process importing to Anaplan.

The tool needs to work on its integration with MS Excel and MS Word. The tool does not allow data analysis in spreadsheets which is possible on other platforms. I want the solution to be more collaborative to facilitate decision-making in organizations.

Workspace allowance and integrations with external systems are the things to be improved. Apart from that, everything else works well except for the poor ETL capabilities. They should first solve the issue of integrations and modeling sparsity. That would be great.

Automation needs to be built into this solution. There are various cycles within the platform and I am not able to easily enter a single case.

The solution could improve by better dashboards and while entering the form loss and project implementation the ability to use graphical shapes more effectively.

In terms of what could be improved, when there is a lot of data, it sometimes takes long to load.

In the new experience, it does not let you pick a list in the formula box like it did in the old experience. I would like that to be included in the new release.

There is no demand planning, no dedicated demand planning where it can do statistical forecasting. They have engaged with a plan queue to do the statistical forecasting. However, if we compare it with SAP or others, they don't have an in-house forecasting tool or anything.

It would be nice if the solution offered better extensions. For example, in SEC Excel, they have one extra extension, which is really good in terms of performance. It would have been really great to have something similar, however, from what I have seen so far it is not up to the mark. Whenever you load the data in Excel and then send it back to Anaplan, it takes a lot of time. It's very hard to use it. Rather than using the available extension, people prefer to go back to Anaplan again.

Plastic dashboards were a little bit hard to create, however, it's my understanding that it's a bit better now.

The solution can improve by providing an easier form of integration to different platforms, such as receiving data from different Salesforce. There is a process to do it through the use of APIs but it could be made much easier. This would be a large help to us.

Anaplan could be improved with a stronger consolidation module. In the next release, Anaplan should include out-of-the-box integration with software systems. Currently, they don't have a connector, so you have to work with an API or directly with a company to build connections, whereas their competitors already include native connectors.

The visualization tools in the product are limited in comparison to other reporting tools.

I would like to see more flexible graphs. That is, more varieties of graphs, more customization (like choosing colors, gradients, etc.) and more conditional formatting options (format sharply or gradient).

Anaplan gave us some limitations in terms of these aspects. There might be scope for experimenting around the formatting, if not the types, of graphs!

Anaplan needs to place more limits on builders/developers in some cases because we found that if we continued to customize a given sales forecast model it would degrade performance slightly as we continued to add dimensions to our forecasting model.

• A better presentation layer would certainly take it a notch higher.
• As compared to other BI tools, such as QlikView, the presentation layer is not as user-friendly.
• It still does a fairly good job on the look and feel of the dashboards. But this is the only area in which there is scope for improvement.

One area of improvement is conditional formatting. It's not very practical, and you need to specify additional formatting for each line item, which increases the size.

These are also areas that could be improved for the long-term sustainability of the platform.

Anaplan should come up with flexible options to connect to a data warehouse rather than an Anaplan hub, like a data decoupling layer with an option for customers to maintain their data on their own cloud. They could also continue to improve their UX and provide more features on the reporting side, including more options for charts and graphs.