Comparison business planning solutions: Excel* vs Anaplan vs Pigment

Excel planning
In our projects, we do still see a lot of supply chain decisions being made based on Excel planning. We replace this Excel planning with a robust, flexible and agile planning platform Pigment. Excel has many advantages: flexibility, easy to setup, comes with no additional costs. And to a certain level of planning, we see that Excel can perform quitte well.
As combinations of planning points increase (number of SKU’s, customers, channels), it becomes more difficult to maintain the Excel planning file(s). The increased data points can also result in a less performing planning file or even become corrupt. As a backup, many versions (separate files stored on a shared folder) are created, resulting in loss of overview and updates made to the wrong file. The ability to create a scenario is complex and time consuming and involves in most cases a duplication of the file to support scenario planning, resulting in two files to maintain!
In the old days, when a customer wanted to replace Excel, we implemented (now known as) legacy systems like Cognos Planning or Hyperion Planning. The first mature cloud-based planning tool that came to market was Anaplan (around 2010 – 2011), which replaced the need for its own hardware, periodic updates (with CD-Roms!). From a user perspective, this platform was very user friendly, easier to implement compared to Cognos Planning with improved performance.

Anaplan: the first cloud-based planning tool

Pigment: the next generation cloud-based planning tool

Conclusion based on comparison