Anaplan Extends Intelligence Capabilities with PlanIQ for Predictive Forecasting and Agile Scenario Planning

New integration with Amazon Forecast arms business users with easy to understand machine learning-driven insights and predictions

Anaplan, Inc., provider of a cloud-native platform for orchestrating business performance, announced PlanIQ, a new intelligence framework that delivers advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities for predictive forecasting and continuous, agile scenario modeling. Designed to make advanced analytics more accessible, Plan IQ produces insights that are explainable and predictions that can improve the accuracy of plans and drive confident decision-making. With PlanIQ, Anaplan customers have flexible access to multiple intelligence techniques such as native predictive capabilities and seamless integrations with third-party ML-based systems, including a new integration with Amazon Forecast – a fully managed service from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that uses ML to deliver highly accurate forecasts. This new integration allows business users across finance, supply chain, HR and sales to deliver precise forecasts.

Anaplan PlanIQ builds on Anaplan’s powerful foundation of predictive algorithms, embedded intelligence, and analytics capabilities by placing AI, ML and advanced data science techniques in the hands of business analysts and operational leaders. Anaplan’s proprietary AI technology and native intelligence capabilities, including Predictive Insights, leverage both internal and third-party data to equip business leaders with the insights needed to uncover new opportunities and build strategic growth plans that optimize the business for long-term resilience.

“Today’s pace of change makes it impossible for business leaders and their teams to rely on historical data for building accurate plans that anticipate the future,” said Ana Pinczuk, Chief Development Officer, Anaplan. “With PlanIQ, Anaplan customers can operate their business using connected, forward-looking plans built on predictive forecasting and agile scenario modeling, turning the ability to move quickly into a competitive edge.”

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Anaplan PlanIQ with Amazon Forecast

Anaplan PlanIQ with Amazon Forecast is a fully managed solution that combines Anaplan’s powerful calculation engine with AWS’s market-leading ML and deep learning algorithms to generate reliable, agile forecasts without requiring expertise from data scientists to configure, deploy and operate.

Based on the same ML technology used by Amazon.com, Amazon Forecast delivers more accurate predictions to Anaplan customers by pulling in data from Anaplan and automatically testing several deep learning algorithms before selecting the model optimized to generate the strongest forecast for a customer’s unique use case. By automating analysis, Amazon Forecast helps Anaplan customers drive greater inference from historical data, third-party data and forward-looking business metrics to uncover new insights fast, allowing business users to spend more time developing strategic plans based on highly accurate forecasts.

“The way businesses forecast continues to be disrupted, and accessible intelligent forecasting is essential for high performing teams to successfully drive growth and mitigate risk amid volatility,” said Ankur Mehrotra, General Manager, AI Verticals, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Anaplan PlanIQ with Amazon Forecast puts sophisticated ML algorithms based on the same technology used by Amazon.com into the hands of Anaplan customers to deliver precise forecasts for virtually any business condition.”

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Anaplan PlanIQ with Amazon Forecast enables teams across finance, sales, supply chain and HR to evaluate more scenarios and unlock the value of ML-based insights to drive growth and optimize performance by analyzing large amounts of internal and external data. For example, planners can now improve demand plans with external signals, decision history, and overrides to improve forecast confidence.

“Anaplan PlanIQ with Amazon Forecast is a powerful addition to our intelligence offerings,” Pinczuk said. “By combining Amazon Forecast’s best-of-breed ML methods with Anaplan’s leading connected planning capabilities, Anaplan customers can continuously generate highly accurate predictions and automated analyses to optimize business performance across the entire enterprise.”

Anaplan PlanIQ can be deployed across functional and industry use cases, including:

• Corporate, Business Unit and Operational Planning: With Amazon Forecast, finance teams can determine external and internal drivers to create rapid and accurate rolling forecasts for revenue, opex, capex, P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow. Teams can bring these forecasts into Anaplan for additional analysis of variances, scenarios, risks and opportunities for more confident decision-making.
• Demand Planning: Demand planners can significantly improve forecast accuracy and improve top- and bottom-line performance of their organization by utilizing Amazon Forecast within Anaplan to enable demand sensing, reduce forecast cycle times, and model multiple commercial pricing and promotion scenarios to shape demand and mine decision history.
• B2B Sales Planning: With Predictive Insights, sales leaders can leverage AI-enriched insights to more accurately predict buyer propensity, increase sales forecast accuracy and drive top-line revenue growth.
• Workforce Planning: Workforce-related costs often account for the largest share of operating expense. With Amazon Forecast, HR teams can more accurately forecast workforce demand and costs based on drivers from across the enterprise and third-party sources. In Anaplan, HR and planning teams can connect their headcount forecasts to revenue plans, opex forecasts and operational plans to optimize talent strategy and resources for winning business performance.

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