Anaplan vs. SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)

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.

For a large company trying to bring processes and functions together with one tool, SAP BPC is a great solution. It requires hours of effort to implement and configure, which would not be appropriate for smaller companies. SAP BPC also requires dedicated resources to maintain the system on a day to day basis, as well as an administrator type personnel who can troubleshoot slow performance or issues with the system. You also need users who are willing and exciting to use this system and actually trust that this is a solution.

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

• Allows for full integration of data to be analyzed in real time. Although we still load actuals on a delayed basis (2 business days after month end), when developing the budget, we not longer have to do a full loading process from a different application into BPC prior to being able to report and analyze the current budget status to prior budget versions or actuals.
• It is easy to learn basic report building. The hardest part is learning the available dimensions and the different possible combinations and their results, but that will also vary from company to company depending on the complexity of the industry.

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.

• When a change is needed in the EPM reports it is not very flexible and needs IT intervention
• Performance sometimes is an issue when consolidating more then 20 entities specially at quarter end
• Script logic complex to handle and always needs BPC consultant when changes are requiered even if minimal - has very high costs

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

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.

Unlike other SAP traditional products, SAP BPC was meant to be simple and familiar to financial users

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

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 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.

We need a big support team with various skillset like BPC, ABAP, BW, HANA, FICO etc

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.

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.

Incentivized

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.

SAP Training contents are very good, informative and exhaustive.

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

The implementation was carried out in two phases spread over a period of 4 years with 2 upgrades in between. We also had multiple upgrades to HANA.

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.

Sage BPC is very much ahead of Dimensions in multiple areas. The speed and ease of reporting with Sage is very good when compared (although the bank reconciliation task is one thing that i feel is much more effort on Sage and takes more time than previous). We selected SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) as we have multiple foreign entities and a team in India producing reports so needed one package that could reliably provide information in one currency and show it clearly.

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

• 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

• 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.

Incentivized