Anaplan vs. NinjaCat

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.

NinjaCat has been great for getting clients quickly connected to popular advertising platforms like Snapchat, Facebook, and Google. It can blend data together easily to make overall data easy to access. The template designer is easy to use (though careful there is no auto save or undo button) and you can have a client ready report done easily with one of their premade templates or customize it for your needs. The fact that I can build any metric or pull in about any information with the Google Sheet data feature makes the product far and away one of the best products I've had the pleasure of using.

Incentivized

• Anaplan can scale as your business grows, for example adding new regions into to your geographical hierarchy.
• Anaplan is flexible and can do anything you want it to, there are no tables pre-configured that you need to fix your business process into.
• Reading formulas in Anaplan is straight forward with a quick learning curve.

• It automates Client Reporting for Digital Advertising -- it's time-consuming to set up, but once it is, you don't have to do very much after that.
• Adding Data Sources to your reporting. NinjaCat integrates with most digital advertising platforms, in particular, Google Ads and Google Analytics.
• It Manages Client Reporting in one place -- there's no need to send reports from different platforms and stitch the information together. NinjaCat pulls all the data and allows you to customize reports for your clients and send them concise data in an appealing format.

Incentivized

• Ability to decide if to apply the formula or a manual input on front end for each line item
• Real Time Data Transfer across models. Currently Data is transferred using Processes across different models. Having a functionality to access data from any model in real time would be great

• The tool does struggle with handling data from tools that aren't particularly clean.
• Many of the tools are designed to help agencies, so publishers have to jump through a few hoops or ignore certain areas.
• Portions of the tool don't work as expected but there are work-arounds in almost all situations.

Anaplan is a very strong multi-dimensional modeling tool that provides a calculation engine to empower a complex planning process. It is fairly easy to learn for those with experience in similar tools, or excel. It forces structure and auditability that spread sheets do not have, along with extensive security capabilities

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.

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

Everything is calculated in memory in the cloud. It's nearly instantaneous updates when you make changes. The only time things get a little slow is when you have a massive model with very intricate calculations...but "slow" for Anaplan is not what I would call "slow" for something like Hyperion. We used to have Hyperion calcs that ran for 60 mins before you could use data. The equivalent would be 60 seconds in Anaplan.

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.

The platform is in-depth and thorough. The support team is amazing. The ability to do automations and data visualizations are fantastic. However, it does lack integrations fore taking data to the next step. Other platforms let you integrate Python and R scripts for organizing data or even forecasting. If NinjaCat were to add this, I think it would be a 10/10 and best product on the market

Incentivized

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.

Anaplan training materials are clear, simple, easy to understand and to follow. Visuals are excellent. The vendor is good at updating training materials in a timely manner and encouraging users and administrators to keep coming back to Academy site for refresher courses or new feature courses. I really like their interactive diagrams

The platform allows a flexible implementation mechanic to be put in place, since the possibilities and functionalities are vast and there are very few things the tool cannot do well. The solutions for the financial planning and the integrated business planning we put in place were easily adopted by the end users and their day-to-day work was made easier.

Anaplan and these other tools are very similar. I cannot say that I selected Anaplan over them as I have worked with and been involved with setting up a number of tools for clients. They all have their advantages and Anaplan is a very strong tool in the cloud planning space

Google Analytics is raw data. Reporting has improved, but it is limited to the data available in Google Analytics Only. NinjaCat combines data across all the digital platforms you use. Acquisio and Kenshoo have similar capabilities on the reporting side but are cost prohibitive due to their pricing structure. You can't just us the reporting features of either of these 2 platforms as a stand-alone feature. NinjaCat does one thing and does it well -- Automated Client Reporting of digital marketing and advertising.

Incentivized

The platform is highly flexible and can be deployed across multiple departments and locations, supporting growth and varying business needs effectively. Its cloud-based architecture allows for scaling model size and user access as required. However, there can be some challenges with performance and model complexity as the scale increases significantly, which slightly limits its scalability in very large or highly complex environments.

• Anaplan's implementation led to a significant reduction in planning cycle errors and bugs, streamlining processes and improving overall accuracy in data inputs
• Standardizing the planning process and enabling cross-functional collaboration through Anaplan enhanced our ability to adapt swiftly to changing business needs, resulting in improved agility in decision-making
• The platform's capabilities, especially in Demand Planning and Supply Chain, positively impacted our ROI by optimizing resource allocation and solving complex business problems efficiently across multiple functions

• Improved perception of business by improving reporting
• Much quicker optimization for clients
• Stands out ahead of competitors