Anaplan is the latest cloud platform which enables organisations to efficiently collaborate within all areas of the business. With the vision to connect people, data and plans in real time coined ‘Connected planning’. The software enables firms to create dynamic, collaborative and intelligent plans that drive confident business decisions and help’s business accommodate today’s business planning needs
Adapting to the new dynamics of planning with Anaplan
With the supply chain planning landscape forever changing with the introduction of new technologies companies are being provided with enhanced solutions to deliver truly end-to-end supply chain management. The art of matching supply and demand seems to be a simple problem to understand but a highly complex one to solve efficiently especially with the challenges of globalised supply chains, end to end visibility and market volatility. These challenges create a necessity for organisations to have their fingers on the pulse to be able to use data to capture the frequently changing circumstances across the whole supply chain and efficiently plan, monitor and respond to these changes. Collaboration between the different silos within the organisation and other partners within its network are key to the success of supply chain planning and organisations are always on the lookout for ways to connect all these factors for improved visibility and agile decision making.
Connecting Planning: Empowering Value-based decision making
'Taking business from conventional planning to connected planning, Anaplan allows businesses to weave through the complexity of combining data, people and plans by enabling faster, more intelligent and collaborative planning’ - Anaplan.
The Anaplan cloud platform delivers a transformational impact on the business and the supply-chain operating model by improving opportunities for mobile collaboration and enhanced data analytics. Allowing information to be more readily available and bringing greater value to operational processes regarding end-to-end visibility with features such as the Central Data repository & Collaborative Workflow. This is achieved through the ability to collaborate between siloes and connect your supply chain plans to your financial, sales and marketing plans using the platforms Data Synchronicity functionality which dynamically synchronises Data across connected plans. Features like these enable companies to adapt to changing priorities and align their supply chain strategy with the overall objectives of the business empowering organisations to create demand-driven and profitable supply responses.
Anaplan for Supply Chain takes a holistic approach to supply chain management enabling real-time visibility across the network with its real time scalable modelling and calculation engine accompanied by the ability to create and develop applications for specific functions meaning the platform can accommodate most challenges Supply chain leaders are preparing to tackle. This creates the ability to sense and drive demand, and to facilitate a dynamic, collaborative S&OP process. The platform also provides an app hub which consists of 200+ prebuilt applications including a variety of supply chain solutions for Product planning, Demand management, Supply Management and S&OP. These applications can all be integrated allowing the business to set up a sound foundation for connected planning.
Key Features
- Cloud based business modelling and planning platform
- Enables users to build multi-dimensional flexible models
- Create dynamics scenarios and deliver top down or bottom up planning
- Real-time modelling with scalability backed with a calculation engine
- Instantly financialise your plans
- Constraint based planning & optimisation
- Reporting, dash boarding & alerting
Aligning your organisation with digital transformation and Anaplan
Digital transformation is one of the top priorities for chief executives and supply-chain leaders, as the value within organisations is largely a combination of the ideas and solutions they implement. Align your organisation with the new landscape of digital solutions and build an ecosystem with Anaplan;
- capitalise on the interconnectedness of all functions within the organisation
- visualisation through dashboards and a supply-chain control tower – monitoring, controlling, planning and optimising remotely and in real time
- Enhanced visibility, providing a granularity that previously would not have been available with the ability to build models to any level of granularity with any number of dimensions—layer in time (daily/weekly/monthly), hierarchies, relationships, and more
- Scheduled data flows, including product and consumer data, to enable organisations to respond profitably to real-time demand
Olivehorse ‘Hot Picks’ for Supply Chain Planning
Connected Planning
Enables dynamic, collaborative, and intelligent decision-making by incorporating all relevant information from across the organization into a single, cloud based platform.
Cloud Based Platform
It’s crucial to consider the processing power necessary to manage automated technologies as legacy systems & even some more recent platforms struggle to handle the continuous streams of data. Anaplan provides a single core platform enabling companies to connect & manage vital processes and ensure they are aligned throughout the business. Anaplan can provide an organisation with the ‘single view of the truth’.
Hyperblock™ technology
Is the key to collaborating on decisions in real-time is the heart of Anaplan, the patented Anaplan Hyperblock technology, a real-time, multi-dimensional engine. By tracking dependencies at the level of the line item, the Hyperblock™ technology enables updates or changes to models of any size, from one to one trillion cells, in real time.
Workflow
Collaborative planning tool – allows business process owners to define steps associated with a plan, link those steps to individuals/ or groups then set parameters to guide them through required actions. includes notifications, task reminders and User specific task boards.
Optimization
‘Anaplan Solver’ Gurobi engine processes up to 100 variables. Advanced mathematical modelling and algorithmic problem-solving to identify best outcomes for a business issue from billions of possible solutions.
Excel Add In
Configured views in Anaplan can be accessed in excel. Ad-hoc Analysis, Data input as flat numbers (send to users without Anaplan).
Not seen Anaplan previously or would like a demonstration of such functionalities mentioned above? Drop me an email to charles.nti@olivehorse.com.
Hope you enjoyed the read.
Supply Chain Analyst - Olivehorse Consulting