Connected Planning for Better Business With Anaplan

The ability to make fast decisions and implement them across each pillar of operations is becoming increasingly challenging for companies. The manager needs access not just to timely data, but also to tools that will help him understand the data and the potential impact of his decisions across the business, from sales and marketing through finance, supply chain, human resources, and operations. Anaplan Connected Planning allows planners and managers to integrate data from disparate facets of their business and to analyze it in real time, enabling them to break down disconnected budgeting and planning processes and take advantage of data-driven decisions. In Anaplan’s experience, customers adopting a connected planning strategy had faster decision making, increased productivity, accelerated planning and reporting, reduced costs, and increased flexibility through faster decision making.

PRESENT SITUATION

Planning today no longer occurs on an annual or quarterly basis, but rather on an ongoing basis in an effort by managers to optimize their businesses. Marketers, salespeople, operations managers, HR departments, IT departments, and supply chain managers need immediate access to actual data so they can plan and pivot faster and more often; finance need to understand the impact of those pivots right away on the bottom line.

As a result, technology has become necessary to support planning. A few finance and planning professionals are now using planning apps, while line-of-business managers are utilizing spreadsheets to review and provide input to budgets. As a result, this created a planning process that was inherently flawed.

• Effortless: The influx of revised plans and slow planning cycles affected the productivity of managers and drove up the headcount in finance and planning departments.
• Time-consuming: Businesses had to spend significant time gathering, assimilation, and analysis of data from more than one operating system, which slowed decision-making and forced businesses to rely on old or imperfect data when making decisions.
• Disconnected: Managers were unable to plan their operations effectively without timely access to data across interdependent processes. Additionally, this lack of connectivity promoted a culture in which data isn’t transparently shared and is often debated.

CONNECTED PLANNING

Since managers have sought to speed up decisions by using real-time data in both planning and analysis rather than just analyzing old data, the concept of connected planning has grown increasingly popular. Connected planning uses a single platform rather than creating planning processes based on historical data, to make data accessible and analyze table for both financial and operational purposes. Anaplan customers identified the following examples of connected planning:

• Implementing ongoing adjustments to sales quotas and immediately understanding what effect those adjustments will have on sales, inventory, and compensation

• The delivery of detailed financial reports within days after the end of a quarter, and the provision of guidance within a week after the close of the fiscal year.

• Manage a portfolio of projects based on data obtained from a variety of external sources in real time and linking that information to actual project costs to optimize resources for faster delivery.

• Utilizing real-time data of professional services staff availability to optimize profitability when budgeting, bidding, and hiring resources

The ability for a company to collect, consolidate, and use data is made easier through connected planning, which allows planners to focus on analyzing data, identifying risk factors, and making better decisions through sophisticated what-if analyses and predictive techniques.

THE SOLUTION

As part of the Anaplan Connected Planning platform, planning and line-of-business managers can quickly and easily create plans, model scenarios, and create forecasts to reduce risk and costs associated with planning. This solution includes the following features:

• Availability of strategic and corporate plans, annual budgets, and forecasts, supported by driver and assumption-based planning capabilities, role-based views, and top-down and bottom-up perspectives.
• Features of version and scenario modeling, including multiple versions and scenarios with centralized control and versioning, and complex multidimensional scenarios.
• A streamlined way of creating your own business rules without coding, and the ability to modify business rules such as hierarchy rollups, currencies, charts of accounts, etc.
• Offers flexible revenue planning and forecasting with more than 15 unique revenue models that include multiple currencies and depreciation methods, as well as payment plans.
• Capability to plan at the group, role, or individual level; split, transfer, and adjust headcount across hierarchies; and automate key salary and benefits calculations.

Based on Anaplan’s cloud-based platform, the functionality is delivered in real-time by using in-memory computing techniques and scalable modeling. Users also have access to Anaplan’s App Hub, which contains applications, templates, and publishing features across a number of key business functions, including sales, marketing, HR, IT and operations, finance and budgeting, and supply chain. Several planning and budgeting processes are supported by Anaplan, including:

• The performance of the sales force, including planning for territories and quotas, forecasting sales, segmenting accounts, and determining sales capacity.
• Performance Management, including financial budgeting, planning, and forecasting, covering workforce, capital expenditures, operational expenses, revenue forecasting, and profit analysis, as well as tax and treasury planning, financial consolidations, and long-range planning.
• Management of the supply chain, including demand planning, supply planning, sales and operations planning, inventory management, and merchandise optimization.
• The management of the workforce, including compensation, succession planning, and headcount planning.
• Managing the marketing budget, marketing resources, and attribution analysis.
• Budgeting and performance of IT projects

WHY ANAPLAN

The company discovered that, before implementing Anaplan, many customers were using a mix of traditional on-premise corporate performance management (CPM) applications, custom applications managed by IT, and spreadsheets. Most of these customers had the same problem: a disjointed, time-consuming planning process characterized by a lack of both a single version of the truth and a consistent procedure for cascading down or rolling up changes. The Anaplan platform is attractive to customers for three main reasons: high usability, enterprise-wide planning on a single platform, and scalability

USABILITY

An important factor in customers’ selection of Anaplan was high usability. Managers were quickly able to learn Anaplan and create new models based on their business needs thanks to an intuitive interface that required minimal training and the ability to make changes without the help of consultants or IT professionals.

A SINGLE PLATFORM

Essentially, Anaplan’s single-platform approach is about creating a single application layer which is able to provide common and consistent data across all pillars of an organization. In practice, the single-platform approach allows companies to use a common approach for planning and modeling across all aspects of the business, creating reusable models and components that accelerate the plan-building process while ensuring consistency. A connected planning strategy requires this approach instead of traditional planning tools that are developed and used by departments and divisions. It was also compelling to see Anaplan invest in AppHub, which provides prebuilt templates and apps that users can customize.

Wrap up

I recommend that anyone wishing to make a significant improvement to any of their planning processes should consider Anaplan as a possible solution. For example, financial planning and analysis, sales, marketing, and human resources departments that are currently using spreadsheets for planning, reporting, and analysis should evaluate Anaplan, not just for its efficiency and effectiveness but also for its potential to transform its efforts into connected planning.