Starwood Waypoint Homes reduces reporting time and develops robust forecasting capabilities

We are in the single-family residence space. It’s a simple business, but has a lot of complex parts. We needed a tool to be able to provide fast reporting, house a lot of data, the ability for us to use the reporting quickly for a lot of analysis, and to develop our robust budgeting, forecasting, modeling. And the current status that we had made it virtually impossible to do all the things that we needed to do in real time.

Anaplan was, across the board, the best solution for us in terms of data structuring, the ability to manipulate, its multidimensionality—everyone uses multidimensionality, but I think Anaplan is above and beyond their competitors. A big thing for me personally was their customer service upfront with the proof of concept, and we felt that that was a good leading indicator of the type of customer service we would get once we contracted with Anaplan.

We got connected with Aviana through Anaplan so we met. We have a three-phase approach, and Aviana has been in from the start and it’s been a good partnership.

Prior to Anaplan, we used Excel and our own software tool for our ERP but it was primarily Excel. But at some point, it just become too many: there was too many versions, too many cells, too many formulas, etc., and so there was always a risk that it could crash, you could lose data. That’s what we used before and the whole point now is not to use Excel.

Right now, we are using Anaplan for our reporting purposes we are able to produce that reporting package very quickly in comparison to things that take us days to produce.

Anaplan is significantly faster and this platform allows us to centralize all our thoughts, our planning, our companywide strategies with one tool that is accessible to the different stakeholders in each area—and the platform will allow us to be able to collaborate and improve our business in long run.