Pure Storage discusses three Anaplan deployment best practices
At Hub16 ,Yousuf Khan, Vice President of IT at Pure Storage, discussed the company’s implementation of The Smart Business Platform and the lessons learned throughout the deployment process. Pure Storage, the market’s leading independent solid state array vendor, implemented Anaplan with the help of Anaplan partner OpenSymmetry.
In recent years, Pure Storage has experienced tremendous growth, driving the company to continously improve its business planning process. Prior to implementing Anaplan, Pure Storage faced difficulties with data accuracy, communication and inefficient planning cycles. After extensive research, Pure Storage selected Anaplan as its planning platform, implementing it for territory planning, incentive compensation planning, and financial planning and analysis.
Anaplan has had a significant impact on the company’s planning methods. Prior to introducing Anaplan, said Khan,“It took us seven months to do business planning, and get actual output. This year, with the Anaplan deployment, planning took two months.” Today, Pure Storage has its entire sales organization on one platform. Khan shared three best practices to a successful Anaplan implementation:
- Receive feedback at the beginning of the process. Feedback is one of the most important pieces during the implementation process. Khan recommended building a briefing document to use during review meetings and keeping the focus on what the company ultimately wants to achieve.
- Focus on data hub integration. Define the most important data fields and what data sources will be used, then establish a proper hierarchy — before deployment.
- Leverage industry best practices. Pure Storage networked within the tech community, spoke to various CIOs, and conducted Anaplan customer reference calls to determine which strategies were successful and which were not. Flexibility and willingness to adapt are important throughout the deployment process.