Master Your Supply Chain Operations With an Anaplan App
By: James Snyder and Rola Losco
How many functions in your company's supply chain and logistics departments are currently being handled manually? These approaches often involve managing and updating multiple offline spreadsheets, and they're taking time and effort your employees could be spending on more directly value-adding responsibilities.
Anaplan, the versatile and powerful planning software platform, represents an alternative to all that manual work in departments including the supply chain. Anaplan automates and transforms the analytics, planning and forecasting tasks currently requiring so much hands-on effort from your team. And now there's a streamlined way to start seeing value from Anaplan.
Anaplan apps, implemented by an expert partner like Allitix, represent an approach that can deliver a tailored deployment, shaped by industry best practices, faster than would be possible otherwise. This isn't a limited version of Anaplan, it's the real thing — sized and optimized for your supply chain.
What Can Anaplan Deliver for Supply Chains?
Anaplan's role in the supply chain is to act as a versatile technology platform, touching all areas of your operations.
These include:
Statistical forecasting: The platform's forecasting tool is loaded with industry and machine learning (ML) algorithms, quality-of-life features like outlier management and the ability to segment forecasts by product and more.
Inventory planning: Anaplan enables users to plan every aspect of inventory, including sourcing, aging analysis, replenishment, transfers and more. Inventory can be planned down to the distribution center or retail location level.
Production planning: Available production planning applications include capacity planning, material planning, allocation planning, scenario modeling and more. Users can build and track production at a strategic level.
Demand planning: Demand planning tools, which integrate with CRM platforms, support special considerations like bundles, sales and the impact of marketing campaigns. Demand can be managed at the product level.
Executive sales and operations planning (S&OP): The executive tool set includes a variety of review, analytics and task management tools. Direct integration with financial systems enables efficient oversight.
These supply chain features apply to any and all businesses operating at points in the manufacturing, retail or sales life cycles. With the supply chain Anaplan app, they're available as part of a right-sized package built by experts to conform with industry best practices.
No two companies will use the exact same selection of features in the same amounts. Thanks to custom configuration during implementation, it's possible to receive the ideal capability lineup for your organization's use case.
Why Use an App To Implement Anaplan?
In Anaplan terms, an app is a starting point, not a set of limitations. When you select the supply chain app as your Anaplan implementation methodology, you're working with a tailored list of features and modules that have proven helpful to companies' supply chain and logistics teams.
Apps are based on best practices that users have already tested and defined within the wider Anaplan ecosystem. These are strategies from the leading edge which have been commodified and turned into discrete units. This comes before the configuration process and provides a starting point.
There is still configuration involved — just as an app doesn't mean a cut-down or limited version of Anaplan, it's also not a generic version. By selecting which functionality matters most to your team, you can build out an experience that targets your supply chain, rather than a general idea of the modern supply chain.
The Value of Apps: Speed Without Compromise
The key trait associated with Anaplan apps is fast time to value (TTV). When you cut down on the amount of time that elapses between selecting Anaplan and putting it into action, you can adjust your return on investment (ROI) figures upward.
The head start that comes with an Anaplan app is notable — you can find yourself with a fully functional and running Anaplan implementation within 12 to 16 weeks. The head start and clarity provided by the Anaplan supply chain app, guided by an expert Anaplan partner, enables your team to spend less time in the awkward transition between legacy systems and the new platform.
With the early pre-planning stages eliminated by selecting from pre-built capabilities, your implementation partner can get straight to work on process engineering. The end result is an Anaplan deployment neatly wrapped around your specific supply chain business processes, on a timeline that would otherwise seem unfeasible.
How Can You Configure Your Supply Chain App Implementation?
Configuration is the heart of an Anaplan implementation. This is where you select which of the platform's many capabilities are most applicable to your team's day-to-day needs.
Close collaboration between your stakeholders and the Anaplan experts from Allitix will shape the results of the implementation. The Allitix professionals consult with your leaders across departments and functions to make sure the lineup of available modules matches your needs.
The process of turning on the features that matter most for your business may also include skipping capabilities you won't use. Focusing only on relevant modules provides more time for process engineering and configuration of those tools, while creating a more streamlined experience for the end-users within your supply chain.
Anaplan Reaches Across Departments
When considering the Anaplan supply chain app, it can be important to remember that there is room to use the planning system beyond the confines of the supply chain. Expanding into financial analysis, sales planning and more is possible after the fact, because the Anaplan supply chain app is a head start rather than a limited version of the platform.
If you use the supply chain as the site of your first Anaplan deployment, you can use the results within that department as a test case for more widespread usage. The same planning, automation and analytics offerings can deliver value when applied to cross-departmental use cases.
Configuration Isn't the End
While initial configuration is an important step in your Anaplan journey, there is also room to make changes after the fact. One of Anaplan's key advantages over other business planning platforms is its flexibility over time.
When you need to change your planning algorithm to suit changes in your organization or market, you can do so in the Anaplan console. Other software platforms could require months of work and thousands of dollars to achieve similar results, while legacy spreadsheet methods come with their own excessive labor.
What's The Experience Like Implementing the Supply Chain Anaplan App?
Implementing Anaplan unlocks an endlessly deep list of planning, analytics and automation capabilities. Doing so via an app is a convenient, fast and streamlined way to do so, informed by best practices. Once you have your Anaplan system up and running, you have the "real" version of Anaplan, subject to expansion and all functional updates from Anaplan.
With Anaplan in place, your company's technological future becomes clearer. Highly manual legacy methods and inflexible, monolithic software platforms like SAP and Oracle share a few traits: They come with a high cost of ownership and a high cost of change. Anaplan can cut through that expense.
The supply chain can be a valuable place to start with an Anaplan app implementation. There's a good chance your organization needs to manage supply chain and logistics processes in some capacity, whether it's primarily on the manufacturing, distribution or sales side of its industry.
After witnessing the power of Anaplan in the supply chain, you can either consider further cross-functional use or leave it self-contained. How you use the Anaplan tool set is up to you, driven by your priorities, and the specific business plan you're building around.
Get Started With a Tailored Supply Chain App
As with any kind of Anaplan implementation, your experience using an Anaplan app will depend on the partner organization you choose to guide you through configuration. This is where Allitix can provide an edge.
Allitix is a highly engaged Anaplan partner with all of the multiple PartnerAccelerate badges to demonstrate aptitude in numerous aspects of implementation, including Supply Chain. The Allitix team has spent years slicing Anaplan down into bundles of functionality to target specific use cases — app implementations are an evolution of this method.
When you work with Allitix on your supply chain Anaplan app implementation, you can have your cake and eat it too. You gain the flexibility and configurability to use Anaplan in any way that suits your specific needs in the supply chain or even beyond. You also gain this functionality on an accelerated timeline, empowered by the pre-configuration work that goes into the app.
Anaplan is not a "black box" solution, as is the norm with business software platforms. Rather than replacing inefficient legacy systems with hard-to-manage, expensive-to-maintain tools, you receive a platform that welcomes further configuration and adaptation.
When asking yourself whether the time is right for an Anaplan supply chain implementation, it's worth considering how much time and effort currently goes to manual, offline planning with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The team member effort going into that work could be better spent. Anaplan allows you to better utilize their efforts, and an app-based deployment can get you to that new work style on a faster timeline.
Reach out to Allitix to learn more about your options with Anaplan.