Pigment vs Anaplan
Introduction
In our sales cycles, we do come across different types of customers. Different as in the industry they work in, the size of the company, the maturity of their planning processes and the planning tools they are currently using. Even companies working in the same industry, established around the same time and from a revenue perspective about the same size, still can have very specific characteristics that make these companies unique.
Looking at the planning systems these companies are using, it is a mixture of Excel/ Google Sheets and (legacy) planning systems, like o9, Anaplan, Blue Yonder, SAP, to name a few. The customer each has distinct reasons to look for alternatives, like pricing (especially around renewals), functionality, ability to adjust the model by a business user, black box (users have no idea how the outcome has been calculated), the lengthy and costly updates of the current planning system or performance. All valid reasons to look for a platform that offers more value for the buck.
Replacing Anaplan
What we recently experience is that current Anaplan users are looking for alternatives. Companies that invested in the Anaplan platform for 3 to 6 years, now turn outward to see if there are alternatives. The main reason: these customers are up for a renewal and are startled by the steep price increase for the renewal. Especially if it is a customers that has many transactional data records to be loaded (hundreds of millions) and the combination of the data points leads to sparsity in the planning model. Example: you have thousands of products (SKUs) in your portfolio and many customers, but a product is only bought by a few customers. Resulting in a few data points when you show product by customers in an overview.
In that case, customers needed to ‘upgrade’ to Anaplan Polaris and use Anaplan ADO. The upgrade to Polaris results in a better responsive planning model, but the investment is steep: in additional licenses for Polaris as well as the creation of the new Anaplan model. A simple migration from the old environment to Polaris is (unfortunately) not possible. Overall, a very costly migration, that after a 3-year contract needs to be renewed. Anaplan uses a new pricing model, which causes many unpleasant surprises for the existing Anaplan customers.
So, they start to look around for alternatives. And we see that in our conversations with customers. When we started with Pigment, we created proposals for customers that wanted to replace Excel/ Google Sheets with the more robust planning platform Pigment. Today, we have many opportunities where Pigment is evaluated against their current Anaplan implementation. And as mentioned, the main reason being the renewal that is due in a few months.
In our sales cycles we do see that, besides the price difference, also the functionality plays a huge factor in the decision making process. Once an user sees the Pigment functionality and compares that to Anaplan, they are in awe and love the function rich Pigment platform. Anaplan modellers grasp quickly the difference between the modelling process in Anaplan versus Pigment and one customer mentioned that the way Pigment is created, results in “more flexible modelling”. And the speed of releasing new functionality is unmatched. Pigment releases small and larger new functionality at a large speed that it is sometimes difficult to keep up, even as a partner!
Conclusion
Anaplan customers are looking for alternatives. Main reason: the new pricing model that is activated when you are up for a contract renewal. When Anaplan customers see the functionality Pigment can offer (out of the box scenario functionality, handling of sparsity, AI and Machine Learning functionality), they also realise that that are feasible alternatives out there. The speed of implementation, the adoption rate for the end users (planners love the Pigment interface), the rich functionality of the platform, the ability to create connected planning in your organisation, the easy of maintenance, are part of the unique selling proposition (USP) of the Pigment platform. Pigment solves planning issues for the business with ease!
If you are currently using Anaplan (or another planning system) and are looking for alternatives, let’s have a talk to see what your current requirements are. We can jointly discover if Pigment is an alternative. You can reach us at jan.veerman@planadigm.com or give us a call at +316 – 5188 4701 to discuss your wishes.
