In the modern world, organizations are grappling with unforeseen complexity, uncertainty, volatile and ambiguous environments. In order to stay nimble and relevant to external and internal customers, organizations should be futuristic, agile, and productive. Futuristic helps to predict the changing market conditions and helps leaders to make more impactful decisions; Agility allows you to plan and pivot faster than your competition in line with VUCA markets; productivity enables your high-value workers to spend less time manipulating data to do actual high-value work.  

To do this most organizations still use traditional spreadsheet-based tools to analyze, simulate, forecast and plan. According to multiple types of research most of the companies still spend more than 50% of their time on data collection and consolidation and it takes a month to plan for dynamic market conditions. These static business plans of yesterday are no longer equipped to respond to the dynamic market conditions of today. Organizations are grappling with the following challenges:

1. Difficult to access key data in the company’s spreadsheet-based planning process.
2. Intensive manual processes had in place and it could no longer cope with strong growth. It takes a lot of time and needs a lot of manpower.
3. Collaboration is a challenge!  Even when it sits on a shared drive the model is “locked” whilst one contributor is updating; it is very difficult to prevent unauthorized modification of the underlying model, and process steps such as email requests for updates and approvals are difficult to integrate.
4. Spreadsheets are fundamentally single user, desk-top tools whereas enterprise planning, budgeting, and forecasting need multiple, concurrent user, modelling capabilities.

The connected Planning process accompanied by best-in-class technologies is designed to give the best of both worlds by managing complex models that can be flexed by concurrent users in real-time to reflect changes in your business environment. It grows with you and your business so that leaders in your organization can make challenging decisions quickly and confidently. The power of planning should be in the hands of every individual within your organization so that the strongest people use the best available data to make better-informed decisions.

Connected planning addresses today’s business planning challenges by:

1. Providing transparency across the enterprise and supply chain partners to changes in the supply chain, commercial and financial plans, and risk.
2. Driving speed and agility in decision-making, go-to-market, and supply chain execution to deliver optimal business results.
3. Improving alignment and accountability across the organization and with trading partners, thus enabling collaboration end-to-end within and outside the organization.
4. Connected Planning allows users to leverage more data in a variety of formats for more detailed or nuanced modelling scenarios.
5. With Connected Planning, organizations can shift their focus from data consolidation to analyzing and determining risks and opportunities to ensure the best possible outcomes.
6. Connected Planning enhances corporate collaboration, dynamism, and intelligence.
7. With a cloud platform you can increase your storage and calculation capability when you need it.  In short, Anaplan is built to scale with your business growth.
8. Monthly consolidations are complete in days, annual budgets are built in weeks, and dozens of capital projects are monitored with precision. 

Anaplan’s Connected Planning solution is uniquely positioned to respond to all business changes and help drive your organization forward during even the most volatile and uncertain times. Increase accuracy, efficiency, and insights and avoid ‘spreadsheet hell’, Enable faster and more agile decision making, and enjoy the opportunity to become a real business partner. Include more data sources to make decisions based on the full picture rather than a narrow view.