ActivTrak vs. Anaplan

ActivTrak is useful to help keep track of your employees, and set up flags where they may occasionally go awry. I find the number of features to be adequate for monitoring our business, but would be better served if I spent time tailoring it for our unique needs. I don't think ActivTrak is great for live-views.

Incentivized

Anaplan is best suited for strategic planning initiatives in industries like CPG, Manufacturing, FS, Pharma. It can handle multiple use cases for each function in the company like Supply chain, Finance, Sales and more. It is one of the best tools I have seen in scenario modelling. It is not suitable for very detailed level planning, essentially execution level eg. Production scheduling.

• ActivTrak gives me a breakdown of hours during which my employees were actively working, when they were active online but unproductive, when they were inactive, and when they were not online.
• ActivTrak gives me a detailed breakdown of the software, platforms, and programs my employees worked on/in during each block of the day.
• ActivTrak provides a detailed breakdown of how I spend my time each day to help me improve my productivity.

Incentivized

• Ingest and integrate disconnected datasets and sources that speak different "languages"
• Flexible security and user-oriented customization of dashboards and datasets
• Smart architecture allows creative license to connect planning processes that have different time horizons and granularities
• Real-time ("live") collaboration is particularly useful for globally spread teams in different time-zones

Incentivized

• A more detailed explanation is required when updating specific titles within the system. For instance, total time has recently become "screen time". An email notification of this change and its implications would have gone a long way.
• Easier to read the Activity Log in reporting. Sometimes, when downloading large amounts of reports, it can be cumbersome and challenging to navigate through them.
• Customized reports feature.

Incentivized

• I would like there to be additional visualization improvements/features for reports
• Additional technical support resources would be great to quickly resolve bugs
• I would like for improvements around the ability to have a lot of dimensions in a table of data and the speed around processing those calcs.

We have been using it for several years and find the benefits are quite excellent for the cost so we will renew again next year.

Incentivized

Anaplan is already an established market leader in enterprise planning area. Its flexibility to build multi-dimensional models, real time scenario plannings are proven to be the best features and successfully implemented by global organizations. Anaplan's ambitious product team is ensuring to roll out new features regularly based on customer/ partner feedback. e.g their new improved polaris environment has strong potential to build very large models without worrying about sparsity. The integration with other tools/technologies is being easier (e.g. cloudworks). Hence, considering Anaplan as a platform that has proved to be successful tool in enterprise level planning, its focus on regular feature enhancements and future release roadmaps I believe this platform has potential to evolve further along with our business processes and requirements

ActivTrak is a great product that just keeps growing. Having used it for quite some time, we have been able to see ActivTrak grow and evolve as a product. The ActivTrak webinars are also helpful to get to know and learn the product. ActivTrak really just works with little effort needed after the initial installation

Incentivized

Anaplan is interesting because it is at the same time easy to use and difficult to use. An end user can navigate a well-constructed app, being pointed in the right direction every time they feel a slight bit of confusion, and find everything they need in what feels like a straight line. Similarly, a model builder (developer of sorts) can have the exact same experience, but the journey is longer and more complicated. End users have great experiences with Anaplan, but sometimes model builders have a frustrating one. That is not to say model building is hard (because it truly is not), but things change, and when things change in complex systems, the effort required simply to investigate where a model builder needs to make an adjustment may frustrate them but also frustrate their non-technical bosses. However, the reality is that with complicated businesses, complicated business problems, come complicated solutions. It is actually a testament to Anaplan's capabilities that it has taken on the biggest problems at the biggest companies. It may be daunting to adjust it in those environments, but at least you know it did meet the needs there, which is more than most tools can say.

Have not experienced any outages or application errors.

Incentivized

There are very few outages. Maintenance is scheduled on two or three Saturdays per month, so as not to affect businesses. When there is an outage, users are kept informed of progress to restore the platform and typically this takes no more than an hour. Anaplan customer support is very responsive if we ever have questions about platform issues

Some reports are a little slow to load based on the size of record sets returned.

Incentivized

Generally, pages load quickly and reports complete within a reasonable timeframe. However, when working with large or complex datasets or during times of multiple active users, performance can sometimes be impacted. That said, much of the performance depends on how the model is built and whether best practices have been followed. Optimized models tend to perform much better, so the experience can be somewhat subjective based on the setup.

Support is always fast and the agents are ready at all times to help when an issue arises, if the tier 1 agent isn't able to provide a solution to the issue they're asked about they quickly escalate the issue to tier 2 or 3 to ensure that the appropriate support is given to the issue at hand to have it quickly solved. No issue we've had so far has taken more than two days to be solved.

Incentivized

Support quality has dropped since Thoma Bravo has taken over. I think some serious re-focus needs to happen here -- part of the beauty of being in the Anaplan community was how involved you felt in it before. Before I didn't dread sending a support ticket, now I am starting to.

In my opinion, in-person training is always the best if you have the option to do so. This allows real-time interactions with the instructions, whereas the online training I took required me to write-down questions, email them, and wait for responses. This slows down the process, as you can imagine. That said, in-person training is an extra cost and it likely isn't needed for everyone. I would suggest selecting a small number of people to take in-person training and then having them act as mentors to the rest of your team. That way, as the rest of the team takes the online training, they have a resource to help them in real time.

Learning made easy . One of the best trainings i have attended. Training was very detailed training by the trainer, which helped me understand the basics of the model building. Level 1 training was easy and instructor was most helpful here. Level 2 training was challenging but was able to go thru due to understanding of the basics.

There should be a way to automatically implement the system without giving users the opportunity to accept or deny the program on their computers.

Incentivized

Agile methodology and breaking the work down into sprints was very helpful. Implementation required a deeper dive into our data than expected for the consultants to be able to construct the data model. But once it was in place, the focus on knowledge transfer enabled us to be able to use the product effectively after the team rolled off.

Incentivized

I am unsure, to be honest. I have not had much exposure to different productivity software. I lucked out by using Active Trak first. I do not feel the need to investigate or review other productivity software. I would recommend ActiveTrak to other companies, users, or those searching for productivity software.

Incentivized

Anaplan is one of the only tools flexible to handle bespoke commission calculations. In addition to Sales Performance Management, Anaplan can be used to support other business functions, such as workforce planning or financial planning & analysis. Anaplan provides the scalability needed for an enterprise-level solution. While taking longer to implement, it also can provide a greater ROI.

The product's overall scalability is good as our team grows. We would like to see updates to meet market demands.

Incentivized

We have managed to leverage Anaplan for financial planning and forecasting across the business. It is now used by almost every department, with more than 50 users (but I know of companies that have hundreds of users) and still the platform is quick and reliable. It is easy to make changes to divisions and departments or add users and apply different user settings - the core part of the model is not affected and end users can continue their work without any disruption

• Real-time productivity metrics and detailed workforce analytics have allowed us to better understand our workforce and make adjustments for better productivity.
• Because we were able to curb bad habits, team behavior is at an optimal level.
• Since our productivity level has gone up, the return on our investment in staffing has risen.

Incentivized

• Reduction in time spent by sales ops team in processing compensation by almost 20 %
• Ability to drill down into each compensation calculation to understand the details of how the comp is calculated. This has provided more transparency / traceability to end users
• we are able to release updates to the system faster as it is easier to maintain and sync