Hub Anaplan 2018 : The future of planning is now

Anaplan has the wind in its sails: founded in 2009 by a former IBM employee, the planning tool has grown considerably in recent years and now achieves a turnover of 120 million dollars for a growth of 50%. As every year, the former start-up has moved to the Maison de la Mutualité in Paris for its now traditional "Hub", bringing together clients and partners around a day of conferences and workshops.

Becoming change

VISEO, which has carried out many prestigious projects with Anaplan, was present as a sponsor partner. Almost 1000 visitors gathered for this day dedicated to establishing Anaplan's position as a key player in corporate planning. The president of the company, Frank Calderoni, opened the plenary session with an intervention charged with bringing users together around the concept of connected planning: "Everyone today talks about disruption technologies as a tidal wave, but we must accompany this change instead of suffering it, we must become this change ourselves instead of being its spectators," he explains. While continuing to convey our own values, such as collaboration and value creation, we must make our customers understand that the main challenge of planning today is to be connected and cross-functional: we must think differently about how we plan, how we make decisions and how we connect our customers, our employees and our partners. "He cites the examples of Louis Vuitton and Berluti as significant examples of this success of the new paradigm defended by Anaplan, which is at once "dynamic, intelligent and collaborative".

Data at the heart of processes

Yves Tyrode, General Manager of Digital for BPCE, then spoke about their fruitful collaboration with the platform: he recalled that in a very competitive and highly regulated banking world, digital transformation and process automation are subjects that must be accompanied with agility and care. "Today we have to take into account all the technological revolutions - the cloud, DevOps - and then return better to the fundamentals of the company. It is necessary to understand, more generally, that digital, by bringing together the customer experience, the employee and the business process, breaks silos that existed in an antediluvian way. Now the common factor that is at the heart of this change, and at the heart of the processes, is the data, on which it is necessary to capitalize. »

The AI in the line of fire

Anaplan is also a strong investment in R&D: research teams based in York, San Francisco and Paris have developed a powerful artificial intelligence engine designed to add a predictive analysis brick to the heart of the planning tool. The collaboration with its historical competitors is also a growth engine, since Anaplan has opened its platform to other IA technologies, in particular by getting closer with the dedicated departments of Google or Salesforce. In this capacity, Maria Pergolino, Chief Marketing Officer Anaplan, will speak at a round table on the learning machine and artificial intelligence, with Jack Whyte, Global Engineering Vice President Anaplan, and Andrew Pease, in charge of Analytics for Deloitte. "It is necessary to remember, notes Andrew Pease, that today any human action is accompanied by a multitude of data which pass around him via applications; For a simple journey in Paris, for this reason, we use on average three applications, sometimes at the same time: Waze, Uber and Google Maps. These data generate noise, and the role of the artificial intelligence embedded in our platform is above all to filter and analyze this noise to draw constants that will be the basis of our predictions. »

According to Jack Whyte, "it is highly likely that in the years to come, the role of a data scientist or planner will above all be to calibrate the way in which these three elements interact with each other within a program and are interfaced, rather than to produce algorithms. »

This year Anaplan reminded us to what extent business planning is at the heart of technologies that are changing our understanding of the world: more than ever, we must be vigilant to make the most of the operational traces of this convergence of data that enable a system to be functional and efficient.