Anaplan

Thoroughly review your data: Build prototypes of your requirements in Excel or another tool before implementation. Ensure your data is clean, identify bugs, errors, and anomalies, and resolve them early. Gather end-user requirements: Collect and document requirements before starting the implementation. Ask "what-if" questions and create mock-ups of your dashboards to validate expectations. Engage IT support: Include someone from your IT team who can assist with ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes. Plan your ETL strategy: Determine which ETL process you will use in advance and start setting it up early to streamline data integration.

Model development can be complex and time-consuming. Anaplan’s coding language is not intuitive, so ensure you have in-house support or consultants available. Additionally, clearly define the use case before the initial rollout to streamline implementation and avoid inefficiencies.

Hire an in-house Anaplan specialist.

Consider the size and quantity of structural lists (e.g., legal entities, cost centers, business units, products, GL accounts, employees, etc.). While Anaplan promotes its ability to handle multiple dimensions in a module, size can quickly become unmanageable if overused.

Define Clear Objectives: Identify specific goals and use cases for Anaplan. Determine the problems you aim to solve, such as budgeting, forecasting, or resource allocation. Involve Stakeholders Early: Engage key stakeholders from various departments (finance, sales, operations) early in the process to gather requirements and ensure buy-in. Assess Current Processes: Evaluate your existing planning and forecasting processes to identify inefficiencies and areas for improvement that Anaplan can address. Invest in Training: Provide comprehensive training for users at all levels to maximize the platform’s capabilities and ensure smooth adoption. Start Small: Begin with a pilot project or a specific department before rolling out Anaplan company-wide. This approach allows you to refine processes and build expertise gradually. Leverage Anaplan’s Community: Take advantage of Anaplan’s user community and resources for support, best practices, and insights from other users. Plan for Data Integration: Assess your data sources and develop a strategy for integrating them with Anaplan. Ensure data quality and consistency for effective modeling. Establish Governance: Set up governance structures to manage user roles, permissions, and data access, ensuring security and compliance. Monitor Performance: Continuously track performance and user feedback post-implementation to make necessary adjustments and improvements. Stay Flexible: Be prepared to adapt your approach as you learn more about Anaplan’s capabilities and how they align with your organization’s needs.

A key piece of advice is to start small and scale up. Don’t try to build a full end-to-end system in one go. Focus on a critical use case, such as Budgeting or Sales Forecasting, and then expand as users become more comfortable. This also allows you to prove ROI early in the process. It’s also essential to engage stakeholders early. Since Anaplan is a collaborative platform, ensure that representatives from Finance, HR, and Supply Chain are involved in model design from the start. This prevents silos and helps create a shared system that works for everyone. Lastly, I recommend working with an Anaplan consultant or partner during the initial phase. They can help you avoid common pitfalls and accelerate the design process. Once you have a firm foundation, your internal team can take control of the system.

Quality of implementation greatly depends on skill and experience of the implementation team. Developing these skills in-house is necessary for long-term viability.

Be very thoughtful about how you architect and enable solutions. Anaplan is extremely flexible, but this can be a double-edged sword, as it may allow inefficient processes to be codified.

Plan Carefully When Moving from Excel to Anaplan: Transitioning from Excel to Anaplan requires careful planning. Instead of directly replicating existing processes, redesign and optimize them to fully leverage Anaplan’s capabilities. Build Internal Skills Alongside System Integrators: Companies should actively involve their own team in the Anaplan implementation. Work alongside System Integrators to ensure your in-house team develops the necessary skills to manage the system independently in the future. Collaborate Between IT and Business Teams: IT and business teams must work closely together. IT ensures proper data integration and governance, while the business team ensures the model aligns with their needs. Use Anaplan Where It Works Best—Planning: Focus on using Anaplan for planning tasks such as Forecasting and Budgeting. For advanced analytics, consider other tools better suited for those needs.

Make sure you use Anaplan for the right use cases.

Make sure you have someone on your team who knows Anaplan; otherwise, you risk accumulating technical debt or ending up with a highly suboptimal model.

For companies considering Anaplan, I strongly recommend evaluating the long-term costs as they scale to additional use cases and users. Anaplan can become cost-prohibitive quickly, as its per-user license fees are significant, and storage is intrinsically linked to user licenses. Additionally, I encourage prospective users to carefully assess their reporting needs. While Anaplan offers high flexibility for model builders, it is significantly less flexible for end users in terms of reporting capabilities.

Assess your build plan well and prioritize critical pain points.

Clearly define pain points and objectives to be able to produce a more detailed user story.

When developing new use cases, it is really important to weigh up the advantages of including these new use cases in the same model (more seamless integration and data flows; only one set of lists and hierarchies to maintain) against the disadvantages (the model can become slow and unwieldy to manage). It is really easy to get excited about how quickly you can develop new use cases and functionality in Anaplan and just keep building out the system, but if this isn't managed well, you lose system performance and it can take a lot of time, effort and, potentially, cost to redevelop models.

Make sure to secure right amount of resources that can support you implementation since even tough Anaplan is very Excel like, it may be a bit tricky, if you want to do it right.

Macht einen Prototypen oder Proof of Concept mit einem erfahrenen Integrationspartner.

Make sure you have someone on hand that knows Anaplan.

Ensure you have internal resources working on the model build and are not solely reliant on external consultants. It is critical that teams who will be using the model understand the decision points in the build and appreciate the efforts to maintain the model going forward. Having subject matter experts working hand in hand with the model builders ensures that the user experience is optimal and the applications contemplate all required capabilities.

Anaplan's flexibility as a platform is a huge strength, but also a weakness. If you do not put the correct governance and controls in place, it can cause problems further down the line.

Use a use case approach - have big picture in mind but built one use case at a time to deliver value quickly.

Have a clear final goal of what you want to achieve from your Anaplan model and expect this requirement to increase once you realize its full potential, but take small steps to steadily grow each model appropriately.

It is critical to have executive sponsorship and to hire an internal expert in Anaplan to lead this transformation. You can easily build one model in 3 - 6 months internally or with a budget consultancy, scaling your Anaplan use past a couple small use cases is impossible without an internal COE.

Make sure your processes are solid and documented. Have a plan to control development and updates.

Chose the right implementation partner for the job. Invest internally and build an internal CoE early stages. Create and drive an internal deployment roadmap in order to leverage data integrations between use cases.

Almost anything is possible with Anaplan. Make sure the business processes are defined before implementing.

Don't believe it's a quick project. Get your IT teammates involved from the very beginning. Spend extra time understanding and cleaning the data. Don't go live with the MVP (minimum viable product) from your consulting partner. Make sure it works properly with integrations and such first. Get people trained and involved in-house so they can troubleshoot and build up-front. They should be part of the implementation.

Organize your data. Engage IT and ensure they are a part of your project team with their own parallel timelines. When implementations are rocky, it is because the master data changed throughout the engagement requiring re-work. Negotiate hard - you have leverage. Be ready to walk away. Look beyond your immediate needs - envision the perfect future and make sure Anaplan has convinced you that you can achieve this perfect future. Align on this future vision to ensure your partner also takes a long-term perspective on your day 1 architecture.

Start slow and keep improving over time.

Ensure that you have in-house knowledge to supplement any external engagement. Will make a better deployment.

Plan for data integration strategy and decide on a good ETL tool along with Anaplan. Try to implement in hybrid agile method instead of pure agile.