Anaplan Blog

1989

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:57:00 -0500

Ah the good old eighties. Yuppies, the FiloFax and it's when Harry met Sally. Oh, and people were using spreadsheets to run their businesses. Very progressive.

OK, so a little tongue in cheek, but if you're still using spreadsheets to track and manage much of your critical daily business you really need to take a look at a better alternative.

One of the areas we find most commonly is subjected to widespread spreadsheet use is Sales and Opportunity Management.

Of course, the mainstay of the sales process is the CRM system. CRM systems are great for managing leads, contacts, accounts and opportunities, but not very good and planning and forecasting opportunities and rep performance.

You see to really get a handle on your opportunities and how they, as well as the performance of your reps change, week-over-week you need something that is far more dynamic than a spreadsheet of a CRM system. You need something multi-dimensional so you can pivot and analyze on the fly, cloud-based so you can use and collaborate using the system anytime, with anything with anyone.

As our latest animation shows below, using what is now a 30 year old technology to get a handle on today's dynamic business environment is just a waste of time, money and talent.

So, drop the suspenders, (or braces if you live in Europe), change the FiloFax to an iPad and say hello to a business planning, modeling and analysis platform that will change the way you run your business forever. Say hello to Anaplan.

Check out our fun new animation below and see what we mean.

Understanding Forecasting

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:18:00 -0500

This post was inspired by a tweet I received after posting a recent Anaplan article last week, (SFDC vs Anaplan) outlining the differences between how Anaplan and salesforce.com perform sales forecasting. I'd like to genuinely thank that consultant, (who shall remain nameless), for inspiring me to outline how mis-understood forecasting sales and financial information is, especially in the CRM community and around how people think salesforce.com does it.

His tweet was:

Wow nice misinformation ever heard of analytical snapshots? #sfdc

Well Mr. X, sit back and let me help you understand what forecasting is really all about and why Analytical snapshots aren't the answer.

First, let's level-set. Analytical snap-shots from salesforce.com are great. Complex to set up, (here's just a few of the discussions I found about them on forums, (Setting up Analytical snapshots), for the average sales manager, but great. They are also 'static' and fall firmly in the Business Intelligence category. So this is not to diminish their importance, (although I haven't met anyone who uses them yet), but let's not compare them to planning and forecasting in a multi-dimensional, in-memory environment. They are chalk and cheese.

Business intelligence is not and has never been a form of forecasting. It can be used in conjunction with planning and forecasting, but does not replace them. No, it's an analysis, snap-shot in time or query of a body of data to give an answer to a question. It is past or current history. This should not be confused with forecasting or planning which is a data set, usually multidimensional in nature, that one interacts with in order to project a desired result, or at least to predict some future result or outcome. It's the perfect blend of past, present and future. Something you can read/write to, not just read. It is forward looking in nature.

Last time I checked, sales leaders constantly want to know how the quarter and year will turn out in the future. That means they need to look at what the situation is now and predict what will happen in the future. This means they have to interact [write] with the data, i.e. write in their own predictions, to be able to see what the quarter/year will turn out like.

For example, if my Q2 is looking rather sick, I need to be able to look at deals that are currently forecasted in Q3 and see if any could come in early. Then, I need to change the close date, or sales stage, or discount rate or a combination of those to see what the quarter will now look like. And I need to do that real time. And I may have many iterations before I get it right.

I wonder if you can do that with 'Analytical Snap Shots'? I don't believe so. You'd have to go back to salesforce.com and change the opportunities you think will come in, one by one, run the report again and run the snap shot again. (See snap-shots run constraints in the aforementioned forums reference link). Then Analytical Snap Shots will tell you how the business is doing and how reps are performing, right? No, don't believe it will do that either.

So, in summary, I am sure Analytical Snap-shots suit a purpose. What Anaplan does however is very different. Anaplan takes the critical information you have on opportunities and transforms it into an indispensable sales management tool that sales leaders can use to control every aspect of the sales forecast. Add to that a sophisticated cloud modeling engine that allows you to extend far beyond just pipeline and opportunity management and you have solution that far out-paces simple analytics.

So, Mr. X, it's not misinformation you should be worried about, it's misunderstanding. One of which I hope I helped clarify.

The Big Restructuring

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:57:00 -0500

I am starting to notice a pattern here. As we talk to the ever-growing group of salesforce.com users, I am often asked what kind of "reports and dashboards" can you produce? Perhaps they ask for these static views of their data because that is what they are used to. Or maybe they are hoping to take the data deluge and turn it into something that is manageable. Regardless, what they get carries inherent latency and may well be out of synch with the current situation.

We have also observed that salesforce.com customers are spending significant sums of money to improve the performance and effectiveness of their sales and channel operations on top of the significant investment they make in the sales cloud with salesforce.com. Sales intelligence tools, compensation and commission management tools like Xactly.com, special sales skills training programs. The list goes on and the $$$ go up and up. Yet, we learn that most of these prospects confirm what is reported in the industry press that sales productivity remains a huge challenge to profitability at most companies. The Bridge Group reports that average quota achievement for sales reps remains stuck in the low 50% range.

These are typical of the results that I saw when running Mercury Interactive back in the early 2000s. And we had one of the best sales forces in the software industry. Most of our VC friends that look at our business model tell us to factor in 60% achievement when determining our customer acquisition costs. Add to that the fact that most well-run sales machines bake in 25%+ turnover into their sales recruiting models and it's no surprise to learn of the drag on profitability that comes from lagging sales productivity. And this is AFTER spending all this money on all these new tools, programs and skills uplifting activities. What gives?

Nothing has really changed in terms of how organizations connect with what is going on in their marketplace of customers from what we observe of our clients in trial or otherwise evaluating Forecast 360 as a new tool to add to their sales performance management arsenal.

Stateless data that is consumed using the same old methods and tools. Limited collaboration and an inability to separate between what some of our trial participants call the anecdotal forecast and the real forecast To track, measure and understand these forecasts, salesforce customers continue to rely on old desktop productivity tools like Excel spreadsheets. These users have tried to make up for the shortcomings of the spreadsheet by buying a collection of Business Intelligence tools that provide them with those pretty reports and graphs we mentioned at the outset. Measuring data in a static process with lots of latency and in a stateless form doesn't do much to bring new insights to the makeup of the forecast.

Changing your organization's information metabolism is critical to improving the productivity of your sales teams. I love this concept of thinking of your company as an organism that has to adapt if it want to realize the benefits of continuous improvement. These organization must speed up the ability to learn what is going on with their customers and prospects. Get the latency out of the system dive into the opportunities that make up the forecast and discuss them in a collaborative and interactive environment. Enrich the data with insights that afford the team to measure the forecast and apply the collective intelligence of the organization to understanding the forecast. These ideas are presented in a penetrating interview with Erik Brynjolfsson of the MIT Sloan School of Management from the monthly magazine published by the school.

Here is a link to the interview: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/articles/2010/spring/51330/it-innovation-brynjolfsson-article.

Bryunjolfsson is a big believer in restructuring the traditional company organism from analog form into a digital business. We have all these wonderful data stores like the Sales Cloud from salesforce.com, chock full of interesting data. But you need the tools to track, measure and analyze that data and remove the latency inherent to any data sitting in a silo. The goal is to create what he calls actionable knowledge that the organization can metabolize, share, and replicate all for the purpose of enabling innovation. Key to the enabling process is his conviction that people must be trained and ready to embrace new roles and responsibilities to doing the measuring and gain the insights.

Bringing this back to the challenge of sales productivity, we think of the sales forecast as something that can be constructed and tested. Yet, we continue to adhere to the old principal of a sales rep "submitting" his forecast as if he is the only person somehow qualified to sort through all of the information and conclude what customers will buy how much and when. No wonder we remain stuck at such low levels of quota achievement.

Using the organization's collective intelligence enriched from the metabolizing of precious market and customer information is a fresh approach to building and driving a company's sales forecast. Collaboration is critical to this new approach and enabling that interaction together with live data that is actionable is the breakthrough that Forecast 360 brings. But we need managers and sales ops people that can bring the critical insights of the marketplace they have learned over the years. What's key here is freeing them of the shackles that limit their contribution today.

Many of the sales ops people we meet in our trials know as much or more about the mix of opportunities that represent the forecast than anybody else on the team. Yet, their jobs continue to be relegated to that of data collector, cleanser, and validator. Bryunjolfsson of MIT encourages digital businesses to leverage this in depth business knowledge and combine it with today's digital tools to enable these people to take on a more central role in mapping the best path to making the sales target. Sorting the huge pool of opportunities for the best mix and aligning that mix with the sales resources in the field is a whole new approach to driving the number. Stop stove-piping these opportunities and hoping that the sales rep has it right. Centralize the management of the opportunity mix and then decentralize the chase through the best alignment of sales resources.

It's time to view the sales forecast as a series of experiments designed by collaborative teams of sales execs and their reps and orchestrated through the insights of the sales ops team. Putting actionable knowledge at their fingertips is possible with today's digital tools like Forecast 360. Bust up the old paradigm of push sales forecasting using old spreadsheet technology and static BI tools and move to a dynamic forecasting process that brings teams together to work to the target speeding the analysis and accelerating the metabolism of key data from the marketplace of customers and prospects. And watch your sales productivity go up and your profits grow.

Wanted: Pure Talent to be trained in Customer Facing Roles

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:18:00 -0500

In 20 years I've seen the good and the bad. The BAD include:

Little passion and poor domain knowledge
Great talkers with no listening skills
Eager to learn - surf online 24 * 7
Team Players when its time to party

Anaplan seeks the following Talent:

Mathematically and analytically gifted
Passionate about supporting or selling business modeling solutions
Cup half full folks who enjoy making others successful
Thoughtful listeners willing to guide others patiently
Proud to be associated with an Industry Leader
Enthusiastic about business operations, spreadsheets, accounting

If you have all the above attributes - the natural talent, the desire and the passion to succeed - then drop me a note. We will train and guide you to become the best at what you do.

Many of us have advanced degrees, but our best-ever recruit was a dishwasher who dropped out of high school and is now one of the world's leading Product Managers in his area. 20 years later, he has joined us again for another adventure.

We remunerate success highly.

Anaplan relocates to San Francisco in July.

Write to me in total confidence at GHaddleton@anaplan.com

Guy Haddleton
CEO
Anaplan.com

On-boarding salesforce.com customers into Anaplan takes 10 - 22 minutes.

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 18:52:00 -0500

In one very busy 8 hour period last week we on-boarded several trial companies with 10 to 100’s of sales reps each. I observed them all and here’s how we did it.

We operate remotely using GoToMeeting.com. Once introductions are over, Simon (an on-boarder app coach) passed presenter status to the trial company - enabling us to view the trialist’s screen.
It takes a minute to log into Anaplan and salesforce - we review the salesforce data structures and custom fields.
The trial company exchanges salesforce security credentials with Anaplan (these are simple to get) and then runs the Anaplan Import using the salesforce API.
For a larger implementation with 8,000 live opportunities it took less than 20 seconds to transfer all the data. Some custom fields took a few minutes to understand.
The trial company completes a couple of set-up mappings eg (reps > org structure), (sales stages > pipeline, forecast). Extra data like sales plans and rep admin details are entered later.
The shortest set-up time from start to finish was < 10 minutes; the longest about 22 minutes. Every week thereafter its two clicks and RUN.
And then the fun starts. Over the next 20 - 40 minutes Simon guided the trialist through the app, with her data being used as the reference point. In the first week we focused on general themes, rep performance against quota, capacity plans, personalization etc.
The second week provides the data to compare ‘what’s changed’ since the previous week. the Compare function - its unique and revealing.

One point has became quite clear - it’s much faster using one of our app coaches to onboard than DIY. Saves at least 60 minutes of fluffing around.

Enable the debate

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:13:00 -0500

“All of us are smarter than any of us.” -- Dr. Douglas Merrill, former CIO, Google

In speaking with my sales manager colleagues and friends, when it comes to their weekly forecast calls both down the chain (with reps) and up (with sales execs), I’ve found a few common themes, including:

You can’t do a sales forecast in a vacuum,
You have to look for what’s possible,
You have to sift through all the activities to understand what actions will have the most impact in moving a prospect forward,
Follow-through (on requests and promises) is key.

Most account review conversations turn into a (more or less) constructive debate: “have you shown them this?,” “have you asked for that?,” “how can we solve this issue?,” and so on. The goal is to make sure there’s a value match between your goods & services and their business objectives (equal to or greater than your proposal price). And that is a multi-party conversation among client, rep, manager, exec, partner, technical folks…anyone that can help make the value connection and bring something to the debate.

One technology to help keep track of that debate, and help steer it in the right direction, is a model of the deal. This model would show firstly how things have been progressing (expected close dates, forecasted amounts, sales stages, etc.) over time, and also the impact that winning or losing (or delaying) the deal would have on:

This quarter’s numbers (forecasted bookings vs. plan) for the region and the company,
Partner pipeline (if appropriate), and
The reps own performance (vs. coverage & quota)

So in order to enable the “deal debate,” all the concerned parties would want to share that deal model, in context of the region, partner, and company plan. And they’d want to share it in two ways:

as a consumer (getting visibility to the history, the current state, and the potential impact, and
as a contributor (inputting the variables that drive the “what-if” part of the model: potential new close dates, potential discounts & deal amounts, potential sales stages, etc.)

Of course you’d want that as easy to use a possible, always at your fingertips, and accessible by all the concerned parties.

I’m curious, how do you do that now?

How Anaplan became so fast and flexible - thank you Steve Jobs

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 13:38:00 -0500

Since our launch a few days ago I've been flooded with questions as to how we got to be so fast and flexible. Our primary goal building Anaplan was to be the fastest and easiest to use multi-dimensional modeling platform by Orders of Magnitude from existing 'old-world' solutions.

Technology advances over the last 20 years have certainly helped - 64 bit in-memory processing utilizing TB's of Ram is a giant leap forward compared to disk processing. Innovating calculation update dependency graphs (the process of calculating millions of cells) provided another significant step forward.

But the real breakthrough came when we examined the Apple engineering model - do it ALL yourself to deliver exceptional performance. Apple has repeatedly delivered remarkable product innovation and performance thru its excellence in design and by developing all its hardware and software internally. Google has achieved similar performance with BigTable - its own database, to manage many of its applications.

Thus, if we were to deliver significant improvements to our multi-dimensional scalability and overall performance we had to build our own multi-dimensional database tightly coupled to our blazing fast calculation engine and feeding our own JAVASCRIPT grid object available in any browser.

The results have exceeded expectations. As many of you observed last week we now COMPLETELY update 700m cells of dense data < 1 sec, slicing and dicing at whim and changing/implementing model structures in seconds. Thank you Steve for showing us the way.

R.I.P. Budgeting

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:05:00 -0500

I recently found an article that talks about budgeting. I could not resist commenting as I think this has gone the way of the Dodo. Here's the original article from Fred Wilson, a VC in NYC who we follow. He writes great articles and blog posts and is well worth reading.

Budgeting in a large company

Here was my response to the article.

I've been in the planning and forecasting space for many years, both at the internal management accounting level and as a vendor selling such solutions. I stopped using the word 'budgeting' a long time ago. Quite honestly, using the words 'fast growing' and 'budgeting' in the same sentence is an oxymoron. There is nothing fast about budgeting. By the time it's finished, it's out of date. It does not have the ability to be dynamic the way the business is. Far better to produce a 'plan' and forecast against that, adjusting as you go along in almost real time, rather than gauge your performance off of a budget that was out of date when it was communicated out to everyone.

There's also another point to make here. The article insinuates that the whole Executive/Senior team are involved. Sure, but that's where budgets fail because that the only team that gets involved. Operations, (where all the money is spent and made) get wind of the 'budget' when it's been signed off by the ivory tower. Result - filed under T for trash. Operations continue business as usual.

I've seen it a hundred times. If you don't involve ALL stakeholders in the process, good luck. What you need is a top's-down, bottom-up process, that forges agreement between all stakeholders and can be adjusted on-the-fly as business grows and/or changes.

Seems your next post will be talking about forecasting, which I look forward to. I just think the whole budgeting part in a company should be transferred into a dynamic plan.

Change is the hardest thing

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:17:00 -0500

During the last several years I have worn many hats, from investment partner to COO, a Board member and advisor and, of late, start up exec. From these vantage points, I note a recurring theme: bad habits die hard. There is an entrenched fabric to most organizations that supports unquestioned assumptions and the reversion to: "this is how we do things". I recently read an interview in the MIT Sloan Review with Tom Malone, he of organizational effectiveness and design fame.

He observed that most organizations continue to regard Technology as something you use to do the same old things better/faster/cheaper. Yet, technology changes the things we can do in the first place. This is particularly true today. When Mark Benioff speaks of Cloud 2 (most companies missed Cloud 1) he is providing an overarching term to describe the arrival of technologies that will profoundly redesign the way the companies work. As a result, the design of organizations and the roles that make up contemporary organizations will change; and this is going to be very uncomfortable for many.

All of this has been brought home to me as we build our new company, Anaplan. Our mission is to bring the power of online multidimensional business modeling to the executives and business analysts. Historically, this powerful technology has been the province of the Benedictine monks of IT and we mere mortals were dependent on them and the business analysts they supported to get any benefit from these powerful but combersome and costly tools. Most people have little interest in such dependency relationships and the business analyst, the operations directors and most Finance people reverted to Excel to handle the business tasks of modeling, forecasting, planning and analyzing the business and reporting back in some elongated process loop to the decision makers.

How is it that a 30 year old technology, wholly ill-equipped to work at the pace of, and handle the complexity of today's rapid fire global businesses, remains as the mainstay of most organizations? Bad habits die hard!!

Benioff is right on Cloud 2. It will flip the conventional way of doing things upside down. This collection of what Malone refers to as "coordination technologies" rewires the flow of communications and information in an organization. As such it will dramatically impact on many people's jobs. All too many roles are purposed to have their occupants act out the role of data collector and authenticator. Unfair to the talents of these people and unnecessary with the technologies available to organizations, today.

Take, for example, the sales forecasting process. We at Anaplan focused the power of our new online business modeling platform on this process because it was still crude how it worked and, for the most part, dependent on 30 year old technology - the spreadsheet. Yet it is the lifeblood of the business and a reflection of the complexity and dynamism of a business. To improve sales forecasting and gain a real understanding of what's possible and how to best achieve it, companies must move to Malone's coordination technologies. We think our online modeling platform will be one of the core linchpins of these technologies, all designed to bring an organization a new "collective intelligence". Think of it as crowdsourcing key business decisions. For today, you can allow far more people to have far more involvement in deciding what to do. You will end up with better quality decisions and more timely decisions.

Top sales executives, working with the teams in Sales, Marketing, Finance and Services, can change the way their companies are doing things in a profound way. Leave behind the sales forecast by inquisition process and crowdsource your forecast seeking the optimal mix of opportunities to make your number. Leverage today's coordination technologies to design the best way to deploy your team on the field. The collective intelligence residing in your organization is powerful and anxious to contribute to the key decisions that will define your company.

Welcome to your new day job!!

One Slice or Two?

Fri, 28 May 2010 16:05:00 -0500

It's a cheesy title, (excuse the pun) I know, but it got you to read this far.

It's time to sing about some of the great Anaplan features. This one in particular is something I hear a lot about and get a lot of great comments on.

I wanted to discuss the value of being able to 'slice' data, as we at Anaplan call it. If you use Microsoft Excel or some other spreadsheet, you may know it as 'pivot tables'. But the Anaplan 'Slicer' isn't really a pivot table.

Pivot tables are what you give someone when they've become bored and/or frustrated with their rubiks cube, (remember those), and they want another complex, challenging and mind-blowingly frustrating experience that will keep them occupied for hours.

No, the Anaplan Slicer is not that. It's a built-in, already there, no fuss, right there in the toolbar function that let's you see your data in a way, (I just bet), you've not seen it before. It's looking at data at different angles and from different perspectives to see insights. And before you say, 'oh, that's just Business Intelligence', please, just stop. It's much more than BI.

Slicing with BI just let's you see a result and not do anything about it, (i.e. write as well as read data - Anaplan let's you interact with the data, (in the 'slice') and 'what-if' a different result. In other words, answer a question like, 'what if I moved that opportunity from that quarter to this quarter? What would that look like?

So, what does the Anaplan Slicer look like?

Three easy steps in any Anaplan module gets a new perspective of your data. Step 1 in the illustration shows the 3 dimensions of a simple module. 'Measures' in rows, 'Regions' in pages and 'Months/Qtrs' in columns. (You see the expanded view of the 'Regions' to the right).

From this you can see an individual 'region' or 'city' as a page and the 'measures' such as 'Sales Forecast' over time, (columns). Great, but what if I wanted to see all the 'Regions' down the side, (Rows) looking at a particular 'Measure', say 'Sales Forecast' to compare side by side by 'Region'? Easy. Step 2 shows that a simple click of the 'Slicer' button re-orientates that view to the result you see in step 3.

And remember, this is all done on the web from the cloud. Any browser, any operating system, anyone, anywhere. All built in.

Is this a big deal? Sure it is. In Excel, pivot tables have to be based off of straight tables made up of columns with 'fields'. And of course we all create spreadsheets like that don't we? Of course we don't. You have to build them. So you have to duplicate the data and transform it into another format. Yuck.

Creating pivot tables are not for the faint-hearted and I honestly don't know too many people that use them on a consistent basis. Rather they create another sheet, same data, different orientation to cope with the view they want.

With Anaplan 'Slicer' things are different. Let's all move on and get modeling and forecasting in the Anaplan cloud.

The Definition of Forecasting Insanity

Thu, 27 May 2010 07:05:00 -0500

OK, I admit it, I used to be an addict. An addict to spreadsheets that is. Boy, I could macro with the best of them - in fact I even completed a few courses of VB 5 and 6. Holy cell references Batman, the 90s sure were fun for that sort of thing. Why did I get so into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, macros and VB code? Well, I just needed to plan and forecast some stuff.

In those days I was heading up a Management Information and Systems team for a large publicly traded group of companies - 8 to be exact. Of course juggling all those companies with all those spreadsheets, (yep, I used to open up my workbooks and go for coffee while the dynamic links updated), was a nightmare. We knew the data had to be inaccurate. We gave it best guess in many instances. The data came to us in all sorts of forms. Every year, I would start from scratch and re-design everything to try and get rid of the bugs and formula errors that spreadsheets are so good at organically growing for you. Plus, business changed and trying to tweak the spreadsheets I had just proved to be too much hard work.

At times I think the spreadsheets were working against us like HAL in 2001 Space Odyessy ...

I'm sorry Dave ...

Of course the reason I kept redesigning the spreadsheets was because I expected a different, more accurate result the next time. But, as we all know, that's just insanity when it comes to spreadsheets and forecasting. They'll always give you the same result - just never the one you want.

So, having been in the planning and analytics game for many years now, I can't help wondering why people still rely so heavily on spreadsheets for such a critical process. Share a spreadsheet with anymore than one person and things start to go wrong. Try to change the spreadsheet model too much and things start to get dicy. Use one of these enterprise applications and things get, well, that's for another post.

But, we've moved on now. At least those in know have. New kids are coming on the block that really get the issues.

So, in my opinion, to continue to use spreadsheets as a mainstay for the critical decisions organizations have to make is the definition of forecasting insanity.

Let's all move on.

Anaplan Launches Forecast 360 for salesforce.com users

Wed, 26 May 2010 21:05:00 -0500

So here it is folks, the first Anaplan App of many to come: Anaplan Forecast 360° for salesforce.com users.. We officially launched the App today.

Check out the press release here: http://tinyurl.com/3ydf6b7

If you use salesforce.com and need to do any sort of sales forecasting on a weekly/monthly basis and are stuck in Excel hell, you should take a look and do a trial. You will not be disappointed.

Welcome to your new day job.

What happened to 'What-if'?

Thu, 20 May 2010 11:51:00 -0500

I’ve been seeing an increase in blog & twitter traffic around SaaS Business Intelligence (BI), predicative analytics, and better decision making lately. And it’s great that we’re making strides in information presentation and consumption. What’s missing though, to me, is a corresponding uptick in information contribution and modeling.

We generally use BI and reporting tools to get at our data, uncover issues, and focus on specific problems. We’re supposed to then make informed, data-driven, intelligent decisions, and get better results. But there’s something missing.

What do the data and the problems mean?
What levers can we pull that will have the right impact?
What do we want to do, and how should we do it?

What we aren’t doing enough of is having a robust, forward-looking, inclusive debate around our assumptions, our drivers, our performance and our potential.

We’re not really asking “what-if?”

Imagine if you could ‘what-if’ to your hearts content without having to engineer spreadsheet formulas like this:

=IF(OR(ThisQuarter!I8<=$D$3,NOW()<$D$3),F8)+IF(AND(NOW()>LastQuarter!$D$3,NOW()<$D$5,I8>$D$3),ROUND((H8*(NOW()-$D$3)/30*2%)+F8,0))+IF(I8>$D$3,ROUND(H8*(I8-$D$3)/30*2%,0)+F8)+IF(AND(NOW()>LastQuarter!$D$5,I8=0),ROUND((H8*14%)+(F8*14%),0))+IF(AND(NOW()>LastQuarter!$D$3,I8=0),ROUND((H8*(NOW()-$D$3)/30*2%)+F8,0))

Maybe that’s the problem: It’s too hard!

The right people aren’t involved in the debate
The tools are arcane, complex, difficult to audit, and hard to believe
The lag between data and decision is too long
The process consists of e-mailing around spreadsheets, arguing about their validity and continuing until we give up and make what we hope is a good guess
Too hard to build, use & maintain

What if we could what-if on-the-fly to uncover the right scenario and see the right way forward?
Check out this sales forecast example video at around the 5-minute mark: without corrupting the system of record (salesforce.com) you can see the impact of modeling your sales forecast and the right way forward. The numbers update instantly. You can invite as many people as you want to participate in the debate. No software to install. No spreadsheets to maintain.

Maybe if we make what-if easier, it will part of our everyday job.

1000s of spreadsheets??

Wed, 19 May 2010 08:40:00 -0500

Everyday I learn of horror stories about the number of spreadsheets crawling around an org - in the finance dept of one larger business 400,000!! Yesterday it was 100's of workbooks on a single desk top and wasting 10 minutes to find the required version. A $100m business outsources to India its weekly management forecasting process - 8 spreadsheet jockeys employed full time just to manage a core business process. wow.

When I was CEO of Adaytum one of my 'bigger' mistakes was investing $1m+ in Siebel, the CRM system of the day. I was sold the vision of 'one view' of the customer and the ability to 'automatically' deliver weekly sales forecasts, rep performance, quota planning, territory planning, commissions, sales contribution... Sure, and we ended up employing additional folks on spreadsheets to do this. I could never find out what was happening in our business in Australia, the UK, the South - 'we'll get you a spreadsheet', 'sorry wrong spreadsheet' - next week...

10 years later nothing has changed. Salesforce has replaced Siebel. Its a system of record, NOT a forecasting solution. Mr Softy from Redmond remains the king of workbook silos that don't connect or share with his 30 year old technology. I wonder how many millions of people are employed around the world writing macros for some mindless task?

We designed Anaplan to be a platform to rapidly build connected apps that support business processes the spreadsheet shouldn't. Our first app was designed as a direct consequence of my Adaytum experience managing a complex sales process - nothing has changed and its time for a better way. Let me know of your speadsheet horror story....

High Frequency Forecasting

Tue, 18 May 2010 12:20:00 -0500

Doug Smith signing in. I am thrilled to be a part of the Anaplan team. My passion for changing the way people work together to produce extraordinary outcomes can be fullfilled by virtue of the breakthrough technology that Michael Gould and team have brought to the market. This will be fun.

The last decade has brought enormous changes to the way people engage with each other in the worlds of commerce and community. Innovations in technology and rapid changes in the globalization of people and capital movements have given rise to new social networks, new shopping experiences, and dramatic shifts in political affairs. It has been nearly one year since the twitter community brought the Green Revolution in Iran to the whole planet exposing the despotic state of affairs in their country, despite efforts to choke off the flow of information by the regime.

The pace and flow of information accelerates the rate of change in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. Only recently we witnessed the shocks that technology can bring to capital markets as the immediacy of data flows to a community of traders brought most to a stilled moment of panic. That same "blink of the eye" flow of information quickly brought a collective exhale bringing the markets back from a perceived brink. High frequency trading, a phenomenon of impressive innovations in technology and its application to capital markets, both contirbuted to the seizure and resuccitated the patient.

Witnessing all of this innovation and consequential impact reminds me how far industry has to go in order to catch up to this pace of innovation. So fundamental a process as sales forecasting still depends on 30 year old technology and human interactions choked off by layers of latency. Rather than busting up all of these organizational and information barriers, the technology investments made companies and enterprises during the last decade have only served to reinforce them. The industry peddles its wares under a different name and tech marketing has become more contemporary. But the silos persist.

We can do better. Anaplan seeks to bring a whole new approach to the way sales teams interact with each other, their business partners and their colleagues in marketing, finance and operations. We call it High Frequency Forecasting and believe it will redfine the way that companies operate. Break down those information and organizational silos, enable people to work together and see what is possible. Combine the power of social business frameworks with your plug 'n play Anaplan applications so your teams know where they stand, what improvements they can make; and, then move on a dime.

Check out the Anaplan App 360 Series and tell us how high frequency forecasting has changed the way your teams work. Welcome to your new day job.

Welcome To Anaplan

Mon, 17 May 2010 23:43:00 -0500

Hi everybody and welcome to Anaplan,

I am Guy Haddleton, CEO of Anaplan and its brilliant to be back in the industry with ‘The Team' after a few years of R&D. I returned to the business modeling and planning industry because I saw that both the technology and vendor business models remained locked in the 1990s; SaaS might have come of age, but at a fundamental level the ‘new' enterprise solutions are just old technology models on a hosted platform.

These SaaS point solutions are generally reincarnations of the old ... inflexible, weeks (months) of implementation, enterprise sales models, expensive and building silos in the sky. But their essence is the same; taking a single spreadsheet based business process and trying to build a point solution around it. Cloud based - but still more Silos; this can't be the future.

Neither is the 30 year old spreadsheet which has turned a generation of analysts into programmers. In over a decade of unprecedented technological advance, business modeling systems have missed the boat. The business problems of the mid-90s remain the same - scattered silos, lost zip files, versioning nightmares, the same expensive, drawn out implementation process. There has to be a better way.

Our goal was simple - to throw out the status quo and create an entirely new user paradigm in terms of how she gets started, buy and consume. Take Web 2.0 usability and time to value; add to this a rich, scalable, cloud modeling platform less all the absurdities of current enterprise systems and then layer on top an application architecture permitting natural connectivity across all applications.

Today, we announce our first App Series - Forecast 360 for salesforce.com customers; I look forward to hearing from you about your experiences.