Introduction & Objectives
Clarity Partners recently completed an Anaplan implementation for a multinational, Fortune 50 company located in the United States. The goal of the implementation was to replace a myriad of Excel spreadsheets with one connected planning solution. Due to the many lines of business of a company this size, the implementation team replaced over 100 spreadsheets with a single solution.
The objective of the implementation was to replicate a long-range plan with eight desired dimensions. Even with the multitude of spreadsheets in the previous Excel-based process, the customer team was unable to see the complete picture of all dimensions. For example, in some cases, they could point to a lowest level of products, regions, channels and revenue types, but never the complete picture of all dimensions. Anaplan allowed them to see all those dimensions at their lowest levels, 15 years into the future with multiple versions and scenarios.
Process & Implementation
Process
From a process perspective, the key end-user and steward of the long-range plan was enabled to shift from inputting long-range plan assumptions on about 50 spreadsheets in the Excel format, to about 5-10 dashboards in the Anaplan format. Previously, the end-user was unable to store assumptions without saving alternative versions of 10+ files and 100+ sheets. Now they are able to save and store multiple versions with different assumptions in the same model. Using the bulk copy function in Anaplan, they can also quickly copy these inputs across versions. This duplicative process previously took days to input and test, and was therefore prone to human error. This process in the Anaplan-state took seconds to complete.
Implementation
In a very aggressive timeline, Clarity completed this implementation in six weeks. The long-range plan use case was this company’s first Anaplan engagement – the customer team had extensive experience modeling in Excel, and were rapidly enabled in building in the Anaplan platform. Clarity started at square one with Launchpad Training, and then spent three days documenting and collecting requirements, drafting user stories and determining levels of efforts. Clarity began building the platform immediately thereafter and, six weeks later, the implementation team was wrapping up testing and completing a successful roll-out to the business.
- Launchpad Training: 20-hour instructor-led course designed to teach model-building fundamentals
- Project Planning: Our implementation team spent 3 days on requirements gathering, user stories and project planning
- Implementation: We worked side-by-side with our customer and Anaplan to complete model construction
- Roll-Out: After testing, our implementation team completed a successful roll-out to the business
Project Impact
In the project debrief, the success of this engagement was credited to everyone “doing their job.” On the Clarity Partners side, project management was organized, design was clear and the build was executed according to the architecture design, which was created in tandem by the customer and Clarity. On the customer side, the key-users were involved throughout the process, enabling not just a successful implementation, but a successful rollout and adoption of the Anaplan solution.
