An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
Anaplan Inc. seems to be coming to market maturity at the exact time enterprises are technically and culturally ready to revisit the idea of connected planning. The well-encoded corporate planning exercise used to mean balancing financial performance and forecasts for S&OP (sales and operations planning), but planning has become much broader to encompass distributed plans for supply chain, HR, sales, IT and other functions.
The company started from the kernel of one of the first cloud-native shared platforms their founders dubbed the “Hyperblock” which was first commercially available in 2011. Companies use Anaplan as a multi-dimensional, in-memory calculation engine for connecting data, plans and people that spans multiple business functions and use cases.
With so many potential inputs for any business decision, and so many potential impacts, a lot of information has to be spun up in such a planning model. Scalability is essential, but so are experts to apply best practices to make models work correctly and interpret plans for action. The company’s App Hub provides an interface for their ecosystem of partners and users to share or resell their own specialized planning apps or industry-specific planning routines atop Anaplan’s platform.
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