G2

Verified User in Mining & Metals

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

7/25/2025

"Anaplan Review By An Experienced Consultatnt"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Anaplan?

Connected Planning in the True Sense:-

Anaplan empowers organizations to break down silos by enabling real-time, cross-functional planning across all business units. It’s not just about building individual use cases in finance, supply chain, sales, HR, or marketing — it’s about connecting those use cases to create a unified planning ecosystem.

When teams operate in isolation, decision-making becomes fragmented and slow. With Anaplan, data and insights flow seamlessly between functions, allowing for agile, aligned, and forward-looking decisions. For example:

Finance can instantly see the impact of Sales forecasts or Supply Chain disruptions on financial plans.

HR can align workforce planning with growth targets and territory realignments from Sales.

Operations can proactively adjust inventory based on real-time demand signals and promotional plans.

This interconnected planning environment drives not just efficiency, but strategic clarity, allowing the entire organization to pivot quickly and respond to change with confidence.

Anaplan delivers Connected Planning in the truest sense — helping businesses turn complexity into clarity, and plans into action.

Agile Development, Truly Enabled by Anaplan:-

Anaplan empowers organizations to build and evolve planning applications rapidly by embracing Agile methodology in its truest form. As a low-code platform, Anaplan allows both developers and business users to collaborate in real time, iterate quickly, and deliver value fast.

Short implementation cycles mean solutions can go live in weeks, not months.

Business users are hands-on from day one, enabling true co-creation and ownership.

The platform encourages continuous iteration, so models evolve as business needs change — not after the fact.

This makes Anaplan more than just a planning tool — it’s a dynamic platform for innovation, where teams can experiment, prototype, and refine solutions without being bogged down by heavy IT cycles.

In a world where speed, adaptability, and alignment are essential, Anaplan brings the Agile mindset to life across the enterprise.

Anaplan’s Hyperblock Engine: Speed and Scale Redefined:-

At the core of Anaplan lies its proprietary Hyperblock engine — a powerful in-memory calculation engine designed for high-speed, complex modeling at enterprise scale. Whether you're running millions of calculations, adjusting multi-dimensional scenarios, or realigning global plans, Hyperblock processes changes in real time, delivering immediate insights. Handle complex, large-scale calculations with speed and precision. Instant recalculations across massive datasets — no waiting, no lags.

Support for multi-dimensional modeling enables deeper, more dynamic analysis:-

This isn’t just about fast spreadsheets — it’s about enterprise-grade agility, where strategic decisions can be modeled, tested, and deployed in minutes, not days.

With Hyperblock, speed becomes a strategic advantage, helping organizations respond to change with confidence and clarity. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Anaplan?

Integration with External Systems: Progress Made, Room to Grow:-

Anaplan has taken meaningful steps toward improving integration capabilities, particularly with the introduction of Anaplan Data Orchestration (ADO) and CloudWorks. These tools provide native connectors to popular platforms like Salesforce, Google BigQuery, Azure, and more — making data movement smoother and more automated than ever.

However, the ecosystem of native connectors is still not fully comprehensive. Organizations working with less common or industry-specific systems often need to rely on:Custom integrations via APIs/Third-party middleware tools (e.g., MuleSoft, Boomi, Informatica)/Manual data uploads for certain cases

As connected planning continues to evolve, there's a clear opportunity for Anaplan to expand its library of native connectors — especially to ERP systems, data lakes, and modern analytics platforms — to further streamline end-to-end planning workflows.

The foundation is strong, but enhancing integration flexibility and coverage will unlock even greater value for enterprises aiming for truly connected ecosystems.

Workflow Functionality: A Good Start, but More Depth Needed:-

Anaplan’s Workflow functionality has introduced basic process governance and task tracking, helping organizations begin to formalize approval steps and user collaboration within planning models.

However, many real-world business scenarios require more advanced capabilities, which are not yet fully supported by the current Workflow feature set. For example: Multi-level approvals/Conditional task routing based on user input or data/Role-based branching logic/Integrated notifications and escalation paths/Granular task tracking and history logs

Today, teams often need to rely on external tools or custom workarounds to manage complex workflows, which creates friction and reduces the seamless experience that connected planning should enable.

There’s a strong opportunity for Anaplan to evolve Workflow into a more robust orchestration engine, aligning it more closely with enterprise process management needs — and truly enabling end-to-end planning governance inside the platform.

Missing Native Current Date/Time Functionality: A Basic Need Still Unmet :-

Anaplan excels in real-time modeling and scenario planning — yet it lacks a native function to retrieve the current date or timestamp, which is a surprisingly basic feature in most modern platforms.

For many business use cases, this capability is essential: Timestamping data changes or user actions/Driving time-based logic (e.g., deadline tracking, aging, escalations)/Automating workflows based on the current day/

Creating dynamic dashboards or alerts

Currently, to use the current date or time, teams are forced to: Pull the value from an external system or script/Set it manually — which defeats the purpose of automation/Build custom integrations just to pass in today’s date — adding overhead and frustration

For a platform that enables connected, real-time planning, the lack of such a foundational feature feels like an unnecessary limitation. Adding a native TODAY() or NOW() function would eliminate the dependency on external systems and significantly enhance the modeling experience. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Anaplan solving and how is that benefiting you?

Efficiency and Automation Gains Through Anaplan:-

Anaplan has played a critical role in streamlining business processes and automating repetitive, manual tasks across our Business Planning department. By digitizing and integrating key planning activities on the Anaplan platform, the team has significantly improved operational efficiency and reduced manual effort.

Key outcomes include:

Automation of repetitive data aggregation, validation, and reporting tasks

Streamlined workflows and reduced dependency on spreadsheets and offline tools

Faster, more reliable scenario analysis and decision-making

Improved collaboration and visibility across planning stakeholders

As a result, within a 5-year timeframe, the Business Planning team was able to run with around 50% headcount, without compromising on output or quality — demonstrating the real, tangible impact of Anaplan on operational efficiency.

This transformation not only improved productivity but also freed up team capacity to focus on more strategic, value-adding work.

Consistent Data Definitions Across the Anaplan Ecosystem:-

Anaplan has been instrumental in streamlining and standardizing data definitions across the organization, ensuring consistency and alignment throughout all planning models within the Anaplan ecospace.

By leveraging shared metadata, centralized data hubs, and master data governance, Anaplan enables:

A single source of truth for key dimensions such as products, customers, time, regions, and organizational hierarchies

Consistent metrics and KPIs across departments and business functions

Improved data quality and governance, reducing redundancy and model mismatches

Faster onboarding of new use cases and easier maintenance, thanks to reusable data structures and definitions

This approach not only reinforces data integrity, but also fosters cross-functional collaboration, ensuring all teams operate with the same foundational assumptions — a critical enabler for connected, enterprise-wide planning.

Anaplan Management Reporting: A Single Source for Leadership Insights:-

We have successfully adopted Anaplan Management Reporting to present business plans, forecasts, and key insights directly to our leadership teams — eliminating the need for separate PowerPoint presentations or offline reporting packs.

With everything now built and maintained within Anaplan, we benefit from:

A single, real-time source of truth for both data and visual storytelling

Live updates that ensure leadership always sees the most current figures and scenarios

Reduced manual effort in creating and maintaining reports across multiple tools

Dynamic, interactive visuals and narrative text for clearer communication of business performance and plans

This approach not only improves reporting efficiency, but also enhances transparency and trust in the data — allowing leaders to make faster, more informed decisions based on real-time insights. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.