Anaplan delivers a 303% ROI, Forrester TEI study reveals

Expand your expectations of what a truly connected enterprise planning platform can do.

Every CXO knows that prioritizing change can be hard. It often takes a few painful problems to push your organization to invest in a platform for major operational activities, such as planning. It’s natural, then, that such an investment is viewed through the prism of those problems and how well they’re resolved.

Adopting a platform for Connected Planning, like Anaplan, has a broad impact across the entire organization, often in ways that are hard to imagine. Connected Planning can save money, boost productivity, and minimize risk, and it also helps organizations solve problems they’ve wrestled with for years–problems that seemed beyond a solution.

Understanding those benefits in the abstract is difficult. Luckily, market researcher firm Forrester has made them much more concrete in a new commissioned Total Economic Impact study. To understand what the use of Connected Planning means to users, Forrester conducted interviews with multiple Anaplan customers, learning how they were handling the planning process before Anaplan and what the effects of their use of Anaplan have been. From there, Forrester used these customers’ real-world results to create a composite profile of a representational Anaplan user.

Planning productivity by the numbers

The numbers, by themselves, are impressive. Over three years, Forrester’s composite company enjoys:

• 303% return on investment
• $43.08 million in present-value benefits
• 10–20% reduction of inventory value balance
• 40% improvement in workforce planning productivity
• 0.5–1.5% reduction in SG&A cost ratio

Those – and other significant savings and improvements that Forrester assigned a percentage or dollar value to –represent a strong argument in favor of the investment in Anaplan by themselves. But the investment in Connected Planning also impacts other areas that have been headaches for planners for years. Although those problems may not be easy to attach a dollar value to, you’ll recognize their importance if you’ve ever been part of a planning process.

New solutions to old collaboration issues

For example, moving to a Connected Planning profile requires organizations to adopt uniform language, practices, and restrictions, both for process orchestration and data management. This gets the entire organization speaking the same language and reduces errors and data misinterpretations in the process.

It also has impact on the outlook of the people involved in planning. With consistent planning practices and increased collaboration, analysts from finance, sales, marketing, workforce, and supply chain understand how their colleagues’ findings were calculated, giving them the confidence to act on the data faster. Reducing the stress and time of planning cycles builds employee satisfaction and helps with retention. And automating data collection on a platform means analysts, planners, and IT staff can spend more time understanding the data and less time struggling to compile it.

Not surprisingly, the Forrester TEI report says that these factors contribute to the organization’s ability to better prepare for and manage rapid change.