Connected Planning? Cloud-based EPM? Or DOP&A?

No matter the term, Anaplan agrees that traditional EPM is a thing of the past, and “future-fit” companies need modern planning and analytics solutions that cut across the business for improved organizational health and growth.

What is DOP&A?

Today’s business leaders require real-time insights into organizational performance to best face critical mandates of balancing cost-cutting with generating revenue, while also minimizing risk and maintaining regulatory compliance. As a result, Forrester has introduced digital operations planning and analytics (DOP&A), a modern take on enterprise performance management (EPM) that is cloud-based, with AI at the core.

Forrester defines DOP&A as “an applications category comprising an integrated set of reporting, analytical, and planning applications that helps organizations develop growth strategies and optimize business performance in a digital-first world.”

Gartner calls this evolution xP&A, and at Anaplan, we’ve called it Connected Planning, since 2017, helping companies better understand current performance and proactively forecast what’s next for faster, more confident decision-making. Come join hundreds of the world’s largest and most complex organizations in converting change to their advantage by using Anaplan to transform how they see, plan, and lead their businesses.

 


Digital Operation Planning

Moving beyond EPM to DOP&A

  • While EPM has historically been associated with on-premise financial planning and budgeting, DOP&A emphasizes cloud-native planning and analytics across a wider range of business functions, such as sales, marketing, workforce, and supply chain. 
  • Forrester advises business leaders should adopt a DOP&A strategy to obtain insights into past business performance, better plan for the future with versatile modeling capabilities, and ensure accurate reporting and regulatory compliance.
  • Dynamically connect financial, strategic, and operational plans for improved collaboration and visibility to better anticipate change, address complexity, and move at the speed of the market.
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Redefining enterprise performance management

“As the digital operations planning and analytics (DOP&A) category matures, solutions are evolving beyond their classic budgeting and planning roots to help with business decision-making in a fast-paced digital world, with AI at the core… These tools are critical to ensure the business is making the right decisions and able to generate profit and growth.”

— Forrester Research, The Digital Operations Planning And Analytics Landscape, Q3 2023, by Liz Herbert with Linda Ivy-Rosser, Sarah Morana

Maintain a competitive edge with DOP&A

  • DOP&A, like Connected Planning, is about helping organizations develop growth strategies and optimize business performance in a digital-first world.
  • Forrester advises planners look for providers that are fully committed to SaaS with a strong community of customers and partners, pursuing disruptive AI in ways that make it easy for the user, and that can handle the scale and complexity needed in all relevant locations.
  • Now is the time to move away from manual, error-prone, disparate tools to a single, modern planning and analytics solution that enables collaboration and provides transparency into your financial and operational plans for improved business outcomes.
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Anaplan differentiates with strong planning and analytics

“Anaplan is a poster child for the planning and analytics space and is a commonly considered choice for large, complex, and global enterprises. As a SaaS pureplay, the provider sought to disrupt this decades-old market when it entered the market in 2006… Anaplan has been actively expanding beyond financial planning and analytics to offer true “connected” planning — which includes workforce, sales, marketing, and financial, and which offers a more accurate and complete view of business decisions in an enterprise.”

— Forrester Research, The Forrester WaveTM: Digital Operations Planning And Analytics, Q4 2023, by Liz Herbert with Linda Ivy-Rosser, George Lawrie, Sarah Morana