Hi
Obviously you are not likely to get an unbiased opinion here.
From what I have heard Anaplan pretty much runs out of steam at 5 dimensions, largely related to the sparsity issue.
If you take a typical model, you have a minimum of :
1) Version dimension, Actual, Budget, Forecast, etc
2&3) At least one Time dimension, although for Forecasting you usually want two, eg how does the forecast for this year made this month compare with the forecast for this year made last month, etc.
3,4,5) Currency conversion, even a simple list of input currencies converting to a single company currency needs one dimension. If you have to convert to more than one currency, eg expressing figures in dollars and pounds, that's another dimension, and if you want to do things like being able to express data at historic rates or current rates to be able to eliminate or reflect the effect of currency exchange movements, that's another dimension
6) Measures dimension, eg Units, and Sales Value, etc
7) Probably some sort of adjustment dimension will be needed, eg figures before and after adjustments, figures before and after central expense allocations.
So you can easily use up 7 dimensions before you have put any business specific dimensions into the model, eg Entity, Department, Product, Geography, Project, etc.
How do Anaplan handle something like this? Well from what I have heard, you will probably find lots of little cubes, one for Actuals, one for Budget, etc, one for pounds, one for dollars, etc. You have to push data from one cube to another. It rapidly gets more complex to build. Pushing data from one cube to another means that it could hardly be described as real-time.
By comparison you can do this all in a single cube in TM1/PA and get far more insights in the data, because the modelling is better. If you change a number in the TM1 cube you can instantly see the effect of that change at all levels of consolidation, in all currencies, etc. Because things like Forecast and Budget are in the same Version dimension in the same cube, you can instantly get Forecast vs Budget variance. You cannot do that if they are held in separate little cubes in Anaplan.
I would see Anaplan as a solution for small department with limited modelling requirements. It is unlikely to work as an enterprise solution.
Unfortunately, issues like scalability and the ability to handle complex modelling are often not apparent in the quick demos that most customers see before buying a product.
Regards
Paul Simon
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Paul Simon
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Original Message:
Sent: Tue May 26, 2020 08:30 PM
From: stephen waters
Subject: IBM Planning Analytics vs Anaplan
Paul, As well as the differences outlined by Palu Glennon below I would add a few others:
- Planning Analytics (PA) has a much more powerful calculation engine for more complex processes. As well as standard budgeting systems we have developed industry specific applications for insurance premium modelling, production planning and aircraft ground handling costs. All of which involve high volume sophisticated modelling
- PA has sophisticated, easy to use presentation tools for reporting, analysis and input. The Workspace provides full browser based dashboarding interface and you can use the Excel add-in to design higly formatted Excel templates for input and reporting. These can be accessed either directly in Excel or as a "web sheet" in the Workspace.
- Infrastructure. PA can be provided as a full SaaS offering or via a perpetual license that can be installed on premises and on a public or private cloud. The software is exaclty the same across all platforms and you can easily move application between the platforms.
- Pricing. In general I think you will find PA significantty cheaper than Anaplan, particularly if you consider that all users are licensed to create their own reports and dashboards. My understanding is that, with Anaplan, you need to be an adminsirator to create dashboards and many Anaplan customers need to purchase Tableau to do the reporting. Happy to be corrected if this is no the case.
Hope this helps
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stephen waters
Original Message:
Sent: Sun May 24, 2020 10:10 AM
From: Paul Glenn
Subject: IBM Planning Analytics vs Anaplan
What are the differences (technical limitations) of IBM Planning Analytics (not old TM1) vs Anaplan?
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Paul Glenn
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