Your business doesn’t just need better plans — you need to make informed decisions quickly. Yet too many supply chain digital transformations focus exclusively on the tech’s bells and whistles rather than the direct business outcomes.
The success of a supply chain solution isn’t about adding more dashboards or data lakes. It’s about building business-minded supply chain orchestration that powers planners and leaders to make faster, smarter decisions aligned to your overall strategy. Operational decisions don’t occur in a vacuum — they are also business and financial decisions, making cross-functional and data integration crucial to optimizing decision-making.
Supply chain planning tools like o9 that focus narrowly on forecasting or constraint modeling fall short of what modern organizations actually require: the ability to understand the business and financial impacts of every choice, leverage a common set of assumptions, collaborate across functions, model trade-off instantly, and drive unified outcomes.
The power of business-minded supply chain planning
Business-minded supply chain platforms are those that focus on improving how people make decisions by providing users with all the information they need in a unified, easy-to-use environment. When planners can navigate the system intuitively and adjust assumptions without specialist support, decision cycles shrink and alignment accelerates.
By aligning operational and financial planning, you can ensure every supply chain decision drives your business’s objectives and goals. Business-minded supply chain platforms are designed to:
- Empower planners to manage forecasts, scenarios, and models — not overwhelm them with complexity
- Model trade-offs between cost, service, and sustainability in real time, integrating financial planning with operational constraints
- Bridge planning horizons from long-term strategy to short-term execution
- Free up planners to collaborate with cross-functional teams, assess supply chain scenarios, and make informed decisions at speed
- Execute integrated business planning (IBP) in a single platform without workarounds
The planning platform you choose determines the decisions you make
When the goal is to align your entire enterprise around smarter decisions, the underlying planning platform makes all the difference. This is where Anaplan stands apart.
While platforms like o9 promise IBP, Anaplan actually delivers a decision-centric approach rooted in transparency, integration of financial data, and ease of use, empowering teams across supply chain, finance, marketing, and sales to plan together, not in parallel. Only then can your organization truly achieve IBP for business-minded decision-making at speed.
How Anaplan does it differently:
- Natively connects operational and financial models to see the revenue, cost, and profit impact in one place
- Enables business users to create and compare unlimited scenarios and push plan changes dynamically
- Layers in AI-driven insights into a transparent model that planners understand and control
- Drives adoption and usability with an intuitive grid interface mirroring how planners already work
- Orchestrates a single source of truth by merging supply chain, financial, sales, and data into one integrated plan with a unified IBP solution
- Deploys quickly and adapts as your business evolves with composable, out-of-the-box applications
Why Anaplan wins over o9 for decision-centric IBP
o9’s technological complexity often creates barriers to success:
- Steeper learning curves
- Limited cross-functional and financial data integration
- Black-box decision outputs
- Heavier reliance on specialists vs. business-owned management
For organizations seeking true IBP — where finance, supply chain, and commercial teams make decisions together — Anaplan is simply easier to adopt, scale, and integrate.
Decision-centric planning thrives when data is integrated seamlessly and when people understand the models, navigate them confidently, and adjust their own assumptions. That is the foundation of how Anaplan was designed and built.
Better planning starts with better decisions
As supply chain volatility has become routine, winning organizations will be those that can turn uncertainty into clarity — quickly, collaboratively, and with full financial context.
Anaplan makes that possible. This is the platform where decision-centric planning starts, and because of our flexibility, integration, openness, and ease of use, it’s the platform where your decision-centric planning will succeed.
