Achieving decision excellence through the connected enterprise

Anaplan CEO Charlie Gottdiener recently sat down with McKinsey & Company to discuss the growing importance of enterprise connectedness and Anaplan’s latest research quantifying the business value of better decision-making. He also shared details of Anaplan’s strategic direction for the future and talked about how we’ve repositioned the company to help our customers achieve even greater outcomes. 

Keep reading to learn more about three top-of-mind takeaways from Charlie’s conversation with McKinsey and be sure to check out his full interview. 

Our roots in customer-led innovation

When Anaplan came on the scene nearly two decades ago, we launched a fresh approach to planning that helped our early customers achieve more precise and dynamic planning. This new way of planning enabled them to connect financial plans to operations and bring iterative, real-time insights to areas like sales performance, supply chain management, and workforce planning. 

Our customers leveraged Anaplan to run their business and operational processes and ended up reinventing the possibilities of integrated planning along the way. And that is how the connected enterprise materialized — not only from innovation within Anaplan alone, but also from our forward-thinking customers.  

Anaplan is now building upon that innovation with industry-specific solutions and applications that allow our customers to leverage our platform faster and generative AI to automate and create greater efficiencies.  

The tangible benefits of decision excellence 

Business leaders across all industries are overwhelmed by the amount of data they receive and market fluctuations they experience daily. They need to know if they are making the best decisions in the context of this ever-changing business landscape.

Anaplan’s customers benefit from always having direct access to the right information to make real-time, well-informed decisions with confidence. In our recently published research report on decision excellence, we found an undeniable correlation between having a refined, interconnected decision-making process in place and exemplary company performance.

We surveyed 500 executives from the largest 1,000 organizations in the US, UK, and Canada. Our research revealed breakthrough evidence showing a 14% improvement in total shareholder return for organizations with higher decision excellence achieved through enterprise connectedness.

The competitive advantage of the connected enterprise 

Simply put: better-connected companies make better decisions and achieve better outcomes. Being able to communicate and share information efficiently from top to bottom and across all internal and external stakeholders will enable a competitive advantage over a lesser-connected business. 

Speed and agility are critical to success, and a connected enterprise can make decisions faster than competitors. Business leaders will be able to observe new inputs as they come in, assess what they mean in real time, make decisions quickly, act confidently, and then do it all again the next day.

Anaplan continues to challenge the status quo and approach the future with innovation. We are privileged to do so alongside an extraordinary group of customers and partners who share our innovative spirit and plans for a more connected tomorrow.