Anaplan on AWS: Intelligent innovation scales alongside revolutionary planning

In enterprise planning, nothing is absolute. Keeping pace with unforeseen business changes, market shake-ups, and evolving consumer expectations is anything but easy for business leaders.

What remains absolute is this: One size does not fit all when it comes to the tools and technologies business leaders need to plan and run their organizations.

The right tools offer flexible choices

Businesses have a wide variety of strategic, operational, financial, and resource-focused challenges facing them on any given day. Business and technology leaders must choose the right enterprise planning tools and capabilities to meet their needs both now and in the future.

Not only that, but organizations need to combine these different solutions within a platform that fits into their organization’s IT needs. For example, consider demand planning in the disrupted, volatile post-pandemic world. To accurately forecast customer demand and deliver on expected outcomes, business leaders have to balance operational costs with inventory volumes, while avoiding supply chain instability.

Behind the scenes, however, technical limitations and disjointed dependencies can make forecasting and performance much more complicated. Today, leaders need to move quickly and creatively, flexing different data sets to gain deeper visibility into changing consumer buying behaviors as well as understanding the varying impacts of pricing and product changes.

At the same time, they’re tasked with aligning operational processes across teams, reducing their technical dependencies on IT and data scientist teams, and blending recent and historical behaviors and trends into more precise forecasting—all within a scalable, unified platform experience.

Organizations that can overcome their myriad challenges gain an automatic advantage over their competitors, and this advantage is the result of having the right enterprise planning tools to meet the needs of the business.

Agility with Anaplan on AWS

Anaplan and Amazon Web Services, Inc (AWS) have collaborated to provide customers with exceptional flexibility, choice, and intelligence to solve business complexities across the entire enterprise. Combining market-leading innovation with powerful planning intelligence, the new Anaplan on AWS offering lets businesses take digital transformation to new heights and speeds.

Anaplan’s enterprise planning platform helps business leaders accelerate decision-making across every line of business with high-caliber collaboration, connections, and ease. By aligning these powerful, agile planning capabilities with the growing infrastructure requisites of IT leaders, enterprises can run the Anaplan platform on AWS infrastructure to expand the reach of planning.

Together, joint innovation between Anaplan and AWS empowers business leaders with:

• Real-time data and agile decision-making that helps business leaders keep pace with the speed of change.
• Rich data intelligence, using internal and external insights, for improved forecast accuracy and performance.
• Intelligent planning and foresight to adapt nimbly to future business conditions.

With access to advanced planning capabilities, joint solutions, and seamless integrations in a scalable, secure public cloud infrastructure, Anaplan on AWS customers can create a digital backbone for their organizations, confidently building agile, forward-looking plans that fuel innovation and growth.
For example, consumer and manufacturing firms are frequently challenged today by labor and component shortages. With Anaplan, these firms can scenario plan different workforce and supply chain constraints against the consumer demand to set the right pricing and promotion plans to optimize revenue.

Intelligent innovation paves way for revolutionary planning

With the Anaplan platform running on AWS, businesses can accelerate digital transformation with a global, scalable, and high-performance infrastructure for enterprise planning. Additional benefits include the ability to:

• Take digital transformation to new heights and speeds with Anaplan and AWS technologies.

  In addition to running the Anaplan platform on AWS infrastructure, the collaboration goes up the stack to integrate with AWS’ data sources and AI/ML services. Embedded tools, such as Anaplan PlanIQ with Amazon Forecast and Anaplan CloudWorks with AWS S3, enhance business productivity and collaboration for faster planning and execution cycles.

  The AWS S3 integration via CloudWorks makes consolidating large amounts of internal and external data and automating processes in the Anaplan platform fast and easy for business users. Anaplan customers with AWS S3 cloud storage benefit from faster and greater data access for deep, real-time visibility into business processes without burdening IT.

• Optimize operational and revenue performance with flexible, intelligent forecasting

  Anaplan PlanIQ with Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service for intelligent forecasting blending the power of the Anaplan platform with Amazon’s state-of-the-art machine-learning technologies.

  By combining Anaplan’s flexible scenario modeling capabilities with embedded intelligent forecasting from Anaplan PlanIQ with Amazon Forecast, customers can bolster forecast accuracy and performance, ramp up forecast automation, and re-forecast against multiple scenarios—resulting in significant cost and time savings.

  For example, traditional demand forecasting for prescription pharmaceuticals can take at least three months to build and run—any errors or changes can leave consumers unable to access the medications they need or loss in market share.

  Using PlanIQ, one leading pharmaceutical company was able to start running reports in less than five days across 13 SKU combinations with up to 10 years of historical data at a 12-month forecast horizon, resulting in better predictions for about 75% of the SKU-treatment phase combinations by 2-16% than the existing solution, approximating $7 million in benefits.

• Scale and expand Connected Planning into new locations.

  Future expansion plans for the collaboration include deploying Anaplan on AWS to new regions. With AWS’ large global footprint, business leaders can use Anaplan to plan, derive, and analyze edge-to-edge enterprise insights for better-informed decisions and swift, agile actions.

The right combination for flexible enterprise planning

The expanded joint effort between Anaplan and AWS provides its customers with unparalleled possibilities for enterprise planning. From innovative technologies to intelligent forecasting solutions, Anaplan on AWS helps business leaders across every industry speed digital transformation with confidence and success.

Anaplan on AWS is now available in the AWS Marketplace and for customers in the United States region.