Digital Operations Planning And Analytics

Forrester published a scored evaluation of this market in 2016 and did not update it until the end of 2023.

Seven years without a Wave, for a category that every large enterprise uses to decide how it spends money. That gap is not an oversight, and Forrester's own note that a lot has changed in the interval is the understatement that explains it.

The category also has four names. Enterprise performance management, financial planning and analytics, extended planning and analytics, and digital operations planning and analytics all describe substantially the same market, and Forrester acknowledges the aliases directly.

A market with four names and a seven-year evaluation gap is one that spent a long period not being sure what it was.

The incumbent is a spreadsheet

Before the vendors, the honest starting point.

The dominant planning tool in most large enterprises is Excel, and it has been since before any of these platforms existed. Not as a legacy that has been displaced, but as the system where the actual planning happens alongside whatever platform was purchased.

The reasons are not irrational. A spreadsheet is infinitely flexible, requires no configuration, is understood by everyone in finance, and can be changed by the person who needs it changed without a ticket. Any planning process with an unusual requirement can be accommodated in an afternoon.

The costs are equally familiar. Versions proliferate, formulas break silently, the model exists in one person's head, consolidation is manual, and nobody can reconstruct why a number changed between the second and third submission.

Every platform in this category is sold against that incumbent, which shapes the products more than competition between vendors does. It is why modelling flexibility scores so heavily, why usability by finance people rather than by technologists matters, and why adoption rather than capability is the recurring implementation risk.

A planning platform that is less flexible than a spreadsheet loses to the spreadsheet, regardless of its governance advantages.

What the category covers

Forrester defines it as an applications category comprising an integrated set of reporting, analytical, and planning applications that help organisations develop growth strategies and optimise performance.

Decoded into the work: budgeting and forecasting, financial consolidation and close, scenario modelling and what-if analysis, management reporting, regulatory and statutory reporting, and increasingly operational planning across workforce, sales, supply, and marketing.

Forrester's grouping of the vendor field in its earlier market overview is a useful way to read the space. Digital operations platform providers with integrated planning capability, planning suite vendors, and financial-management-oriented planning vendors are three genuinely different starting points, and they produce different products.

The first arrives from operational systems and thinks in terms of connected data. The second arrives from modelling and thinks in terms of flexibility. The third arrives from accounting and thinks in terms of controls and close.

Inside The Forrester Wave: Digital Operations Planning And Analytics, Q4 2023

Published on 6 December 2023 and authored by Liz Herbert with Linda Ivy-Rosser, George Lawrie, and Sarah Morana, the evaluation scored fourteen providers against twenty two criteria.

Anaplan placed as a Leader, described by Forrester as a poster child for the planning and analytics space and a commonly considered choice for large, complex, global enterprises. Forrester noted its origins as a software-as-a-service pure play that entered in 2006 seeking to disrupt a decades-old market, and credited its expansion beyond financial planning into connected planning spanning workforce, sales, marketing, and finance, alongside a partner ecosystem including the major consultancies.

The companion Landscape published in Q3 2023 mapped twenty seven vendors, sizing them by category revenue with large vendors above two hundred million dollars, medium between fifty and two hundred million, and small below that.

That revenue banding is a useful detail. It tells you the market has a long tail of genuinely small vendors serving specific segments, and that the Wave's fourteen represents the top of a considerably wider field.

The findings that matter

Forrester identified three themes in the research, and the third is the one buyers should weight.

Modelling and planning software is moving to the cloud, with many vendors still holding on-premises customers and some still selling to them, but the large majority of new deployments now cloud-based.

AI is central rather than optional, which follows naturally in a category built on prediction and recommendation.

And the space still shows wide variation in complexity and global scale. Despite a market full of choices and considerable activity through acquisition and private equity investment, only a select few vendors are proven at the most complex global enterprises.

That third finding is the practical one. In many software categories the difference between vendors at the top is a matter of preference. Here Forrester is saying explicitly that a minority can handle the hardest deployments, which means the relevant question for a large multinational is a short list rather than a comparison.

What makes those deployments hard is worth naming. Multi-entity consolidation across currencies and accounting standards. Data volumes where a model recalculates across millions of intersections. Concurrent users submitting during a close window. Statutory reporting requirements that differ by jurisdiction. And organisational structures that reorganise annually, requiring the model to be restated historically.

None of that shows in a demonstration. All of it decides whether the implementation works.

Beyond finance

The expansion Forrester describes as broadening beyond finance-centric roots is what justified re-scoring the category, and it is worth understanding what actually changed.

Traditional enterprise performance management served the finance function. Finance built the budget, collected submissions from business units, consolidated, and reported. Business units participated by filling in templates.

Connected planning inverts the flow. Sales plans capacity and quota, workforce planning models headcount, supply chain plans inventory, marketing plans spend, and finance consolidates the financial consequence of all of them rather than dictating targets downward.

The argument for it is that the financial plan is a derived artefact. Revenue depends on pipeline coverage and win rates, which depend on headcount and territory, which depend on hiring capacity. A finance model that treats those as inputs rather than as linked drivers produces a number that is internally consistent and operationally impossible.

The argument against is that connecting them requires every function to plan in the same system on the same cadence with the same definitions, which is an organisational achievement rather than a software feature.

For anyone in revenue operations this is the interesting boundary, because it is where planning software meets the pipeline models and capacity assumptions that revenue teams maintain separately. Most organisations run those in a different tool or a spreadsheet, and reconcile them to the finance plan quarterly through a meeting rather than through a model.

The market has been changing hands

Forrester's Landscape research notes a dynamic vendor environment shaped by private equity investment, acquisitions by ERP vendors, consolidation among vendors, and new entrants.

Each of those does something different to a buyer.

Private equity ownership typically means pressure on margin and pricing, and a focus on retention over expansion. Products remain stable and roadmaps get conservative.

ERP acquisition means the planning tool becomes a component of a suite, with integration to the transactional system improving and independence from it reducing. For an organisation running that ERP this is usually good news.

New entrants tend to arrive with a modern architecture and a narrower scope, which is attractive to mid-sized organisations and a risk for enterprises whose complexity exceeds what the product has yet been proven against.

Given Forrester's finding that only a few vendors are proven at the most demanding scale, the vendor's ownership and trajectory is a legitimate evaluation criterion rather than corporate gossip.

What AI changes, and what it does not

Planning is forecasting, and forecasting has a well-understood accuracy ceiling that no technology removes.

Machine learning genuinely improves several things: baseline forecasts from historical patterns, anomaly detection in submissions, driver identification, and the speed of running many scenarios rather than three.

What it cannot do is predict the discontinuities that make forecasts wrong. A competitor's move, a regulatory change, a supply disruption, a leadership change. Those are the events that break plans, and they are not in the historical data.

Which suggests the useful application is not better point forecasts but better scenario coverage. A planning function that can model twenty futures cheaply is better prepared than one that models three carefully, not because any of the twenty is right, but because the organisation has thought about a wider range of outcomes before one of them arrives.

That reframes what to evaluate. Forecast accuracy claims are difficult to verify and easy to overstate. Scenario throughput, meaning how quickly a planner can construct, run, and compare alternative models, is observable in a proof of concept and describes the capability that actually matters.

Which returns to the spreadsheet. The reason Excel persists is that it lets someone try something in ten minutes. Any platform that makes exploration slower than that has lost the argument regardless of what its governance layer provides, and the vendors who understand this compete on modelling agility rather than on control.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy. Nothing here is financial advice.