Anaplan vs. Xactly SimplyComp (discontinued)

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.

It's fine if your comp plans are really simple. It should have no problem multiplying ACV by a rep's BCR and maybe having a SPIFF or two. If you have accelerators, decelerators, complicated hierarchies, constant "exceptions to the rule", and need a platform to be flexible...SimplyComp simply won't be able to help here. Any "solutions" they implement will be short-term bandaids that will have to be addressed again sometime in the future

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.

• Reporting of financial statements is simple and easy to navigate.
• Plans can be customized to meet multiple different types of bonus/commission schedules.
• Salesforce integration further improves the automation of commission reporting.
• Administrators have the ability to add/remove plans as needed limiting the need to work with a support person everytime a change is made to the commission plan. This has been particularly useful in our company as we are still trying to develop the appropriate commission plan structure so we are frequently making changes to the existing platform. Our administrator has had no issues making changes as needed and can typically get them done quickly.

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 platform is incredibly complex for non-basic commissions plans and setting things up is painful and time consuming.
• Importing functionality is improving, but still subpar, requiring a lot of manual entry for customer plans.
• The time lag to actually calculate commission (after a user clicks the "calculate" button) is long, leaving one sitting and waiting for the software to do its thing.
• For our non-US team members, we wanted insight into USD and local currency commission. SimplyComp doesn't support this.

Incentivized

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.

Our Implementation Consultant was fantastic. She made herself available, scheduled for in advance to accommodate our schedule, and was very helpful on our calls. She happily executed work on our behalf behind the scenes to help move our implementation along. The Customer Support team was mixed, as is expected with Support teams. Nothing horribly bad, but nothing to write home about. SimplyComp is a newest product for Xactly so everyone is still learning it

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

This is the first time I've used a software for commision only. I've usually just used Salesforce to calculate my sales numbers and then do the math myself. This is nice to know the exact number but I don't think a lot better

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

• Positive impact is our reps are able to view their commissions much more clearly in SFDC. We are also able to calculate 95% of our commissions more rapidly (and have to spot-check the rest).
• Negative impact was the onboarding process and "learning as we go" rather than having a set process document for getting us live.

Incentivized