Anaplan is a cloud-based enterprise planning platform that empowers businesses to effectively plan, analyse, and optimise their operations in real time. However, to fully harness the potential of the Anaplan platform and extract maximum value from your investment, it is crucial to develop a comprehensive road map. This blog explores the importance of road mapping for Anaplan and provides insights into unlocking opportunities and getting more out of your investment.
A road map serves as a strategic plan, guiding organisations towards their desired goals and outcomes. When it comes to Anaplan, a well-crafted road map provides several key benefits:
Alignment of Business Objectives:
Anaplan offers a vast array of capabilities and functionalities. Roadmapping helps align the platform's usage with your organisation's specific objectives, ensuring that Anaplan becomes an integral part of your business strategy.
Clear Prioritisation:
A road map enables you to prioritise Anaplan initiatives based on their potential impact on your business goals. It helps in determining which areas of your organisation would benefit most from the platform's capabilities, allowing you to focus your efforts and resources accordingly.
Enhanced Collaboration:
An effective road map facilitates collaboration among various stakeholders, including finance, operations, sales, and supply chain teams. By involving all relevant parties, you can ensure that Anaplan is utilised to its fullest potential, leveraging the collective intelligence of your organisation. A road map will serve as guide to connect functions through data, process boundaries and technology. It helps enables early proactive conversations on handoffs between processes, organisational boundaries and the level of detail. A clear road map will enable you to plan the resources you need and recognise the point where collectively your organisation has the critical mass of experience to operate without third party support.
Goal Definition:
Start by clearly defining your organisation's strategic goals and objectives. Identify the key business challenges that Anaplan can address and outline the desired outcomes you want to achieve through its implementation.
Current State Assessment:
Evaluate your existing planning processes, systems, and tools. Understand the gaps and pain points that Anaplan can address and map out the specific areas where the platform can provide the most value.
Stakeholder Engagement:
Involve key stakeholders from different departments and functions in the road mapping process. Gather insights and requirements from finance, sales, operations, and other relevant teams to ensure their needs are considered.
Phased Implementation:
Divide your road map into logical phases to ensure a smooth transition. Prioritise the most critical use cases or pain points, and implement Anaplan in a phased approach, allowing for incremental improvements and quick wins.
Training and Change Management:
Effective training and change management are essential for successful Anaplan adoption. Develop a plan to train your users on Anaplan's functionalities and provide ongoing support to ensure a smooth transition.
Continuous Improvement:
A road map should not be static; it should evolve with your organisation's changing needs. Establish a feedback loop and monitor the impact of Anaplan on your business. Regularly review and update your road map to align with new objectives and opportunities.
Many of our clients have started on their Anaplan journey and already developed discrete applications and are looking to evolve. For those organisations the next steps are typically to build on from the foundations in place. Often the next steps include:
Follow the process:
A logical next step would be to incorporate the next process in the sequence. This could be for example Supply Planning following Demand Forecasting.
Adjacent processes:
Connect solutions from other functions such as S&OP planning to FP&A
Deeper in the organisation:
Support more business units through rolling out to other parts of the organisations. This would typically involve harmonisation or the inclusion of new processes variants.
Richer functionality:
Enhancing the functionality to include advanced forecasting and scenario analysis, predictive analytics and machine learning to forecast future outcomes, detect patterns, and make data-driven predictions.
Elevate to senior stakeholders:
Connect insights from multiple applications to provide strategic level information. Implementing performance scorecards and KPI monitoring functionalities in Anaplan helps organisations track and measure performance against goals
Data Integration:
Integrate Anaplan with your existing systems, such as ERP, CRM, or HRM, to ensure a seamless flow of data. This integration enables real-time insights and enhances decision-making capabilities across your organisation
Our road mapping experience is a collaborative and dynamic session that brings together key stakeholders, visionaries, and our expert facilitators. We understand that every organisation is unique, and our workshops are tailored to your specific needs and objectives. Through a series of structured exercises and engaging discussions, we will help you craft a comprehensive roadmap that charts your organisation's journey towards achieving its strategic goals.
Our experienced consultants guide you through the process, ensuring active participation from all stakeholders. We employ proven methodologies and frameworks to facilitate strategic thinking, prioritisation, and decision-making. By fostering open and transparent communication, we encourage cross-functional collaboration and ensure alignment across teams and departments.
Embrace the power of strategic platform planning with our Road Mapping Workshop. Contact us today to embark on this transformative journey. Together, we will craft a roadmap to fully harness the potential of the Anaplan platform and extract maximum value from your investment.
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