User Group Discussion Q2 What is your biggest challenge in implementing Anaplan?

ChristineCoffin

Industry Group	Key points from table discussion
Telecoms & Media	·      Diverse user community and needs made standardisation difficult   ·      Standardisation of strategic plans with lack of visibility of previous planning methods ·      Overcome by: Adding User story to address local planning exceptions and enable standardisation
Aviation & Travel	·      Adoption, fear of role being diminished by Anaplan ·      Building Anaplan capability and building an internal Anaplan roadmap ·      Reporting Solution. Excel Addin becomes “on premise” ·      Dashboards ·      Getting internal buy in ·      Sparsity and Model size ·      Perceived as blackbox, users need to understand how to trace numbers
Utilities	·      Sparsity – was always an issue and still continues to be an issue, they have to work around it which results in impact to functionality of the model and more maintenance.  ·      Getting users buy in to the product ·      User Training ·      Shared Lists would be good as there are certain common lists applicable to all models which they have to update from the data hub would be nice to just have a shared global list – update once and apply to all models ·      How to connect models together
Construction	·      Understand the timing and how all is linked ·      Becoming independent Model Builders ·      How to build the models and understand the adoption of the internal system and change of views for different departments ·      Segregation duties => superuser privileges ·      Archive: sorting by dates and modified dates (needs improvement in organising the archiving, we have need for better search) ·      Archive takes big space!
Consumer Product Goods	Their biggest challenge was Business Engagement. Not used to a managed implementation with phased release of functionality. Users thought being agile means they can keep changing their minds  Second problem is the presentation of data.  Sourcing non Anaplan data and presenting along side in similar structure has been an issue.   Different team made same point – getting history and managing history and restating it with Anaplan structures – remapping.   Trying to build a data mart outside of Anaplan and to service needs of other systems causes Anaplan project to slow down as trying not to make things Anaplan centric
Financial Services	Enablement for people with accounting experience that were not involved in the initial model build is a challenge. They struggle to understand how calculations flow therefore to trust the data. IT is the challenge that resists to change and doesn’t support, all of the data updates are still manual (automation could help to speed up the planning cycle even more) Same issues with IT pushing back on support with automation and with raising concerns on security. Getting the MVP requires a lot of investment upfront when the value has not been proven
Other	Adoption & changing mindsets away from Excel Anaplan Space issues
Table to add