Anaplan Winter 2014 Release is Almost Here

At Anaplan, we’re constantly striving to create the best experience for our customers, and in less than two weeks we’ll unleash a significant visual update with the introduction of our beautiful newTilesinterface.

We are particularly excited about this release, as it delivers a cleaner look and feel, improved navigation and faster model interaction. Let’s take a closer look at three of the enhancements.

Model Tiles

The powerful Anaplan platform allows you to build any type of planning application, and it connects the plans and people across your organization with a top-down and bottom-up approach. Financial planning and analysis, sales forecasting, and territory and quota management, just to name a few, are all functions that must interact when rolling up to corporate-level plans. With the new Tiles interface, users who build and consume applications for each function can easily and seamlessly find and access the models they need to work in. I believe we have made the navigation back and forth between your models incredibly easily. This greatly alleviates the headaches in navigation and accessing information that arise from trying to combine data sets from different departments using disparate tools and separate systems.

Role-based Navigation

Another important new feature included with this release is Role-based Navigation. We know that Anaplan allows for the onboarding of hundreds and thousands of users, all contributing unique and important data. In the context of powerful models that reflect the complexity of the business, users may have felt a bit overwhelmed by the vast amounts of information at their disposal. We’ve listened closely to user feedback in this area and now, with Role-based Navigation, each user will have easy access (in one click) to the dashboards and modules that are relevant to his or her duty or role. The beauty is that we have succeeded in hiding the back-end complexity of the model, showing a very simple user interface for each user’s specific role.

Intelligent Mapping

We’ve empowered the end users to do their own part in hierarchy management with Intelligent Mapping (aka numbered lists). Say, for example, you need to integrate marketing promotions and campaigns across regions to roll up into one corporate marketing plan. With this release, the management of promotions can now be done by region. This means that business users in the field can easily create campaigns specific to their region by simply duplicating another marketing campaign that has already been created for another region. Different users with unique data sets can copy that campaign, giving them direct control of their own data, while keeping the structure unified across the greater campaign. This means that the promotions and campaigns will directly map to the overall plan and roll up through a single hierarchy that is recalculated in real-time.

This removes the middleman and avoids the need for one person to master all the campaigns. End-users are empowered to manage their part of the hierarchy, and do not have to rely on a central department that is disconnected from the field. This is unique to Anaplan: no other enterprise planning platforms offer this ability.

We have much more information to share with you over the next couple weeks, but in the meantime head over toWinter ’14 Anaplan Platform Releasefor the full breakdown of features being introduced and a video walkthrough of the enhancements.