Using Anaplan for Supply Chain Planning

We hear from many prospective customers about the challenges they face with accurately and efficiently conducting their supply chain planning. One area where we’ve gained a lot of experience is helping customers enhance their S&OP processes. Historically, these businesses would have relied on Microsoft Excel and Access solutions to complete their planning, but the reality of using these tools is often far from ideal. The sort of challenges they face are as follows:

• Capturing inputs from multiple users across the business is tricky. Spreadsheets end up being emailed around the organisation and then linked back together in a confusing web of linked spreadsheets.
• The level of granularity that can be achieved through a spreadsheet may not be enough for the business to plan accurately.
• Building in the ability to calculate a statistical forecast or seasonality can be tricky in Excel.
• Sharing the results of a forecast across the business can be slow, especially when different versions of the truth emerge. It can then be very time consuming to produce reporting packs which may end up needing to be redone if the plan gets updated.

Mentat Technology has worked with several customers to deliver S&OP solutions in Anaplan. We’ve helped these customers remove the limitations presented by their old solutions and realise the benefits of implementing a cloud-based, integrated model. In turn, these companies have gone on to roll-out Anaplan across other parts of their organisation such as Finance, thereby leveraging the benefits of connected planning.
Our customers have reported significant reductions in the time it takes to produce forecasts, and that has allowed them to increase their forecasting frequency. Some customers have chosen to implement statistical forecasts that greatly improve the accuracy of their sales forecast, to the point where the accuracies of these statistical forecasts beat those of their own sales team!