The DOP&A Wave reinforces the importance of Connected Planning

Today's complex business environment requires you to be more agile and adaptable than ever before. You need better ways to optimize operations, make faster and more confident decisions, and achieve strategic goals. Dubbed by Forrester as the “next generation” of EPM solutions, Digital operations planning and analytics (DOP&A) platforms have emerged to address these challenges, giving you the ability to gain deeper insights into your data, achieve operational excellence, and drive informed decision-making.

Forrester DOP&A Wave

The recently published Forrester Wave for DOP&A is a research and evaluation report that analyzes and scores the most significant vendors in this technology market. The report is based on a rigorous approach consisting of customer interviews, a detailed questionnaire, and an analyst evaluation. 

This report evaluates the 14 top vendors in the market based on 22 criteria in three broad areas — current offering, strategy, and market presence. 

• Current offering: A vendor’s position on the vertical axis of the Forrester Wave graphic indicates the strength of its current offering that includes business planning, reporting, user experience, and technology performance.
• Strategy: Placement on the horizontal axis indicates the strength of the vendor’s strategies including product vision, innovation, partner ecosystem, pricing flexibility and transparency, and community.
• Market presence: Represented by the size of the markers on the graphic, the market presence scores reflect each vendor’s revenue, number of customers, and number of projects.

The report segments vendors into four categories: Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, and Challengers. Anaplan is recognized among the three Leaders in this DOP&A report. 

The Forrester DOP&A Wave is a valuable resource providing you with an overview of the market to make informed purchasing decisions for solutions that best match the needs of your organization. 

Read the full complimentary report.

The report notes that decision-makers not only need real-time insights and granular performance metrics to better understand business performance, but they are also “expecting more sophisticated — but also easy — analysis that brings together multiple key data sources and enables more frequent and timely decision-making.” DOP&A vendors have responded to this by offering “user-friendly solutions that are based on cloud and AI.” And this reflects a “significant shift from the last generation of solutions, which tended to be either sophisticated but complex to use and manage, or easy but too simplistic for advanced enterprise needs.”  Given these trends, in the report, Forrester recommends DOP&A buyers seek key capabilities from vendors.

Anaplan: A Leader in the DOP&A Wave and a “poster child for the planning and analytics space”

A Leader in this DOP&A Wave, Anaplan earned the top score in the strategy category and scored among the top three in the current offering and market presence categories. Forrester’s vendor profile of Anaplan cites these points:

• “sought to disrupt this decades-old market…”
• “actively expanding beyond financial planning and analytics to offer true ‘connected’ planning…”
• “broad partner ecosystem, including a ‘who’s who’ of large consultancies…”
• “strongest at planning and modeling…”

Your path to stronger results

This Forrester Wave provides valuable insights into the Digital Operation and Planning Analytics market and can assist you in selecting the right solution for your organizational needs. However, as Forrester states, “Enterprise planning is becoming broader, and it now accounts for diverse data inputs and more sophisticated modeling that spans divisions. While this trend toward more connected planning across the enterprise can be powerful, not all systems are created equally.”

As a Leader, we believe Anaplan is well-positioned to enable you to achieve your operational and strategic goals. With our connected planning approach, ease of use, and scalable architecture, the Anaplan platform empowers your organization to make smarter decisions that drive growth and stronger performance.