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What do Gartner, Forrester, and IDC have in common? They all named Anaplan a planning leader.
My team and I believe that we live in a world of problems that look like nails. And for us, Anaplan is the hammer.”— Lucas Muro, Director of Bid Management, Infinera
deal analysis results in fewer missed opportunities
cost data ensures that deals benefit both customers and Infinera
margins and top-line revenue growth
But evaluating complex deals could take days or weeks with an old solution, and the results weren’t 100% reliable due to changing cost information. With deal desk and analysis in Anaplan, cost data is always current and complex deals can be evaluated in just one day, enabling Infinera to move, like its customers, at lightning speed.
Infinera’s sales teams submit 12,000+ pricing requests to the company’s bid management team every year. Infinera has more than 1,000 customers worldwide for its opto-electronic networking products, including 90% of Tier 1 carriers and 85% of leading internet content providers, and they’re constantly expanding their networks with new gear. Deals can get complicated in a hurry, so Infinera’s bid management team’s job is to confirm that every deal makes good business sense and aligns with Infinera’s deal strategy.
“Each of our 30,000 SKUs has its own pricing and associated costs, and we have customers around the world,” says Lucas Muro, Director of Bid Management at Infinera. Not long ago, he recalls, his team evaluated deals using individual spreadsheets; costs and other assumptions were sometimes out of date, and deal analysis took too much time. “We work in a super-fast-paced business, selling things that make the internet go,” Muro says. “With our old deal analysis tool, it could take us days, sometimes weeks, to get back to a customer.” Those delays could result in lost business.
Infinera brought in Anaplan in early 2020 and uses the platform today to plan in finance as well as sales and marketing. “But our biggest use case, our bread and butter, is our deal analysis tool,” Muro says. “With Anaplan we can figure out, very efficiently and accurately, if a deal makes business sense for us.”
Using Anaplan, all deals are evaluated based on consistent criteria — even in the face of Infinera’s high deal volume, massive product catalog, and customers who do business in a variety of currencies.
“Infinera’s procurement people regularly provide us with up-to-date cost information that we build into the pricing tool,” Muro explains. “Because we’re working with current costs when we evaluate deals, we’re giving our customers the absolute best price possible.”
And they’re doing it in record time. “Salespeople can bring a deal to us, have it analyzed, and respond to the customer the same day,” Muro says. “Because we use Anaplan, our sales teams gain a time-to-market advantage.”
Infinera teams worldwide use Anaplan for deal analysis. “We’ve got hundreds of people in different time zones all around the world working on the platform,” Muro says. “I’m able to guarantee that they’re working with the most updated information so they can accurately perform their tasks every day.”
This enables Infinera’s end customers — including the largest carriers and cloud operators in the world — to expand their networks at their own pace. “Now that we have Anaplan, we can operate at the speed of our customers,” Muro says. “And because I have information at my fingertips, I can answer any question about my business. I feel like the king of my universe.”
His entire team shares that empowered feeling. “My team and I believe that we live in a world of problems that look like nails,” Muro says. “And for us, Anaplan is the hammer.”
Lucas Muro, Director of Bid Management, Infinera: Infinera is a global supplier of optical transport equipment, servicing thousands of customers throughout the world and enabling the Internet to happen.
We plan with Anaplan because you can take any piece of data from any data source and combine it into a single platform that anybody can use any time that they want.
It saves the company time and resources. Never wondering, “is this information up to date?” Is this information the most accurate?” It always is, because Anaplan is always accurate.
Our bread-and-butter use case is our pricing tool that allows the sales team to go out and make a custom offer to the customer, choosing from 30,000 potential SKUs, each with its own price, each with its own cost.
Before Anaplan, it would take us days, sometimes weeks, to get back to the customer. But now, with Anaplan, we can get back to the customer [on the] same day.
Why I love Anaplan, and why I'm its biggest advocate, is because me and my team believe that we live in a world of problems that look like nails, and for us Anaplan is the hammer.
I'm Lucas Muro, director of Bid Management at Infinera. And we plan with Anaplan.