Anaplan is a scenario planning and analysis platform designed to optimize decision-making in complex business environments so that enterprises can outpace their competition and the market. By building connections and collaboration across organizational silos, the Anaplan platform surfaces key insights.
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SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)
Score 8.3 out of 10
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The SAP BPC software is designed to help users plan and achieve a faster, more accurate close. The SAP BPC software aims to help users spend more time growing their business and less time closing books. The vendor’s value proposition is that their software delivers planning, budgeting, forecasting, and financial consolidation capabilities in a single application. This, in turn, enables them to easily adjust plans and forecasts, speed up budget and closing cycles, and ensure compliance with…
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Pricing
Anaplan
SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Anaplan
SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Anaplan
SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)
Considered Both Products
Anaplan
Verified User
Consultant
Chose Anaplan
Anaplan offers faster performance. The modelling tool is user oriented.
Verified User
Employee
Chose Anaplan
Scalability, Performance and UX is key from above two tools versus Anaplan.
Verified User
Manager
Chose Anaplan
Ease of use, intuitive design, business user friendly, quick implementation time
Verified User
Professional
Chose Anaplan
Better end user interface
Verified User
Manager
Chose Anaplan
Anaplan has the advantage of multidimensionality and fast calculation engine which is lacking in most of the above. Scenario planning is easier using Anaplan. Anaplan is not an off the shelf tool like most softwares that have been prebuilt to address specific problems/ issues. …
Verified User
Employee
Chose Anaplan
Anaplan provides the capability to do enhanced scenario modelling almost realtime and has wide range of integration options available to integrate the application with a wide variety of third-party systems. Anaplan UX is very intuitive which drives greater end user adoption. …
Easy to implement Easy functions and scripting easy access to any plan more structured learning experience ( self-learning especially, good certification program ( also free unlike SAP ) Handling data inbox sizes is better in SAP No issues of size or data sparsity SAP is …
Anaplan is cheaper, more flexible, and easier to develop than BPC. In particular, the ability to plan different parts of the business at different levels of granularity (e.g. planning fixed staff costs at the company level, travel & expenses at the regional level and executive …
I was an admin also in SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation). But, I can say that it's somehow hard to implement. It is not as flexible as Anaplan. I am using Anaplan for years already. This is a game-changer i.e. for Finance people. We were able to easily implement it …
Planful offers a great solution, however, they have significantly underperformed on their annual growth rate. The solution has a lot to offer, however, it is split across two solutions and is not True connected planning. OneStream is growing on a fast trajectory and has an …
I have used SAP BPC and SAC. With relation to BPC, it is more user friendly and easier to maintain. For SAC, it similar but varies when it comes to utilizing the data and setting up for charts
Verified User
Analyst
Chose Anaplan
I've used other products in the past, but I came into this company knowing I would be using Anaplan specifically. Thus far I am still fine with that decision.
Chose SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)
SAP BPC was decided to be implemented into our company due to the added value compared to other competitors who offer the same systems. Although SAP BPC has room for improvement, the ease of use was the deciding factor that resulted in the company picking it. Organization, …
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.
SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) overall is a good package and has helped improve our reporting a lot whilst also making it more efficient due to the reliability of data input / output. There are limitations like graphs being so limited in functionality and reports failing when too much data being processed however i would recommend to others.
SAP BPC is real time data. You can send information into the system and see it reflected in your reports immediately. Other systems may require a manual push into a reporting system.
SAP BPC is a shared reporting tool, so multiple users can be working in a model/environment at the same time, real time. This is especially helpful if your workbooks incorporated multiple processes requiring multiple users to get into the same model.
SAP BPC is a powerful tool designed to help all facets of the company, from cash flow to capital expenditures to headcount management to financial planning to consolidation.
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
SAP should focus on delivering one single product for planning, consolidation and budgeting needs rather than providing a large list of options to choose from.
The product is not very user-friendly compared to other cloud competitors. There is a heavy dependency on IT teams.
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.
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.
SAP BPC training content and trainers are very good. The training is structured and provides a very good understanding of the product features and functionalities. I attended 6 separate training sessions of week-long or more. I had very good experience in all the sessions. The training is organized very well.
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
With Hyperion we struggled as it didn’t have integrated planning and consolidation, whereas BPC does have it. BPC is easier for reporting as it is Excel-based. Also BPC has prepackaged business process flows that helped a lot. Hyperion on the other hand has a faster response time for user queries or report generation.
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
When originally implemented (as the predecessor product Outlooksoft) BPC took ASU from trying to budget and forecast for a 2B enterprise out of spreadsheets and into a far more consolidated tool. It has saved us considerable time over the years and paid for itself several times over.
BPC also allows us to present our budget in multiple different views to support management, board and departmental reporting.