Introduction
Clarity Partners recently completed an Anaplan implementation for a high-growth, high-tech, software company headquartered on the West Coast of the United States. As the client had previously implemented Anaplan for income statement analysis, the purpose of the implementation was to expand the use of Anaplan to include the creation of bookings and revenue waterfalls, thus, replacing the current process which was conducted in multiple Google Sheets.
The goal of the implementation was to replicate the bookings and revenue waterfalls in Anaplan. The new Anaplan application allows current bookings to be viewed against future quarters and forecasted bookings. Forecasted bookings were derived from historical trends and input-driven assumptions entered in Anaplan. Additionally, functionality was developed to allow the client to flag which orders were approaching a renewal. Flagged renewals were then accumulated by quarter, and end-users interacted with a single Anaplan dashboard to input forecast assumptions to model the renewals impact to the client’s long-range revenue plan.
Process & Implementation
Process
The implementation of Anaplan for long-range revenue planning and forecasting of future bookings allowed key end-users to shift the paradigm of their day-to-day job. The process evolved from requiring end-users to interact with multiple Google Sheets and multiple sources of data, to interacting with five to ten Anaplan dashboards. As a result of the implementation, key end-users no longer spend time consolidating multiple spreadsheets to produce the required outputs for reporting and are now able to spend their time analyzing the data in Anaplan, adjusting forecasts and understanding trends and the impact those trends will have on their long-range revenue plan.
Implementation
The implementation was completed in an aggressive five-week time frame. This was made possible due the client’s experience with Anaplan and its ability to dedicate two fully-enabled resources who handled nearly all components of testing.
- Launchpad Training: 20-hour instructor-led course designed to teach model-building fundamentals
- Project Planning: Our implementation team spent 4 days on requirements gathering, user stories and project planning
- Implementation: We worked side-by-side with our customer and Anaplan to complete model construction
- Roll-out: After testing, our implementation team completed a successful roll-out to the business
Conclusion & Impact
At the conclusion of the project, Clarity Partners attributed the success of this engagement to strong client investment and involvement. On the Clarity Partners side, project management followed the Anaplan Way and was very organized. The foundation to every successful engagement is design, which was clearly documented, and understood by both the client and Clarity Partners teams. On the client side, the key-users were involved throughout the entire project lifecycle. As this was the clients second Anaplan implementation, their understanding of their current process and Anaplan, allowed the implementation to move quickly, yet thoroughly to meet all deliverables of the aggressive timeline.
