On a joint road to success in supply chain and S&OP planning

The strategic partnership between valantic and Anaplan continues to be a success story – especially in the area of supply chain and S&OP.

In 2022, the topic of “planning” will be more present than ever in companies: this trend has intensified since the Covid-19 pandemic and shows that no industry and no business area can remain competitive on the market in the long term without intelligent, networked planning. valantic and Anaplan are therefore investing intensively on both sides in a future-oriented partnership in order to help customers establish a company-wide planning platform and ensure a cross-functional, highly networked development of use cases in finance, HR, marketing, sales, and the supply chain. The number of customer projects that have already been successfully implemented jointly speaks for itself: the range extends across the healthcare, retail & CPG, banking and public & transportation sectors with well-known customers such as the Swiss Federal Railways.

But what is the “recipe for success”?

valantic’s range of services is based on a holistic project approach that not only imparts knowledge to the customer on site, but also intensively and sustainably accompanies the transfer into practice:

We are excited for our partner Anaplan to be positioned as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Supply Chain Planning Solutions. You can find more information to positioning here.

We believe this latest recognition is not only deserved, but also comes at exactly the right time, as we see an increased need for planning in the area of the supply chain among our customers.

But why are supply chain planning and sales & operation planning (S&OP) currently given such special importance on the market?

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that networked supply chain planning is a decisive competitive advantage that allows companies to react faster to dynamically changing market conditions and the associated changes in demand in a global supply chain.

This creates a desire for manufacturing companies, regardless of their industry affiliation, to share, reconcile, and link planning data across an extended supply chain to ensure cross-departmental, forward-looking planning.

By using a networked planning solution for the supply chain process, the following points are guaranteed and thus bring companies enormous benefits and cost savings:

• Optimized demand planning
• Reduction of inventory
• Reduction of process and delivery times

However, the reality within many companies is very different today:

• Multiple, separate supply chain planning systems cause decision-making delays
• Separate systems in sales, marketing, and finance lead to incomplete S&OP processes
• Scenario planning skills are limited

All of this makes it difficult and expensive to react to changes or interruptions within the supply chain in a reasonable time.

As an enterprise planning and analytics platform, Anaplan pursues the goal of bringing together all relevant data, people, and plans or systems across departments in order to address the requirements in the supply chain, among other things.

As a versatile planning platform, Anaplan does not offer a predefined process for specific problems but instead provides companies with a toolbox for almost all planning problems, for the tools required are always very similar.

This flexibility not only enables the solution to be designed according to needs, but also to be used in different areas of the company, something that Anaplan calls connected planning.

Anaplan promotes the collaboration of various functions such as sales, marketing, finance on a uniform platform. This enables S&OP teams to make complex planning decisions in a short time:

• Decisions are mapped across departments and managers in a user-friendly and secure application
• Supply chain costs are visualized and managed with complete P&L modeling on multi-level supply chain networks as well as interactive balancing of supply and demand
• Product innovations are optimized through the coordination and evaluation of introduction scenarios and profitability at the push of a button
• Simulations of risks and opportunities between numerous strategic options and changing market conditions at the operational level are easily possible
• The patented in-memory hyperblock calculation engine enables multi-dimensional scenario modeling without limitations to stay one step ahead of market changes
• The best alternatives or outcomes for the business are determined based on real-time scenarios, allowing for more frequent, faster, and more complex modeling
• Advanced use cases can be driven by statistical prediction capabilities and AI based components (Plan IQ)

Get the analyst report now!

Would you like to learn more about how Anaplan compares to other planning solutions within the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Supply Chain Planning Solutions? Then you are in the right place here!

Would you like to learn more about why companies should use connected planning now?
Then download our white paper on the subject right now!