A bold move from Anaplan to Fabric-based Agentic Performance Management

Rising cost of ownership of specialized CPM tools

This client had built robust planning models in Anaplan covering revenue and operations use cases, including labor, freight, and inventory. The team was highly satisfied with the platform’s capabilities.

Despite their satisfaction, they were feeling pressure with total cost of ownership. Licensing costs were significant, and every model change required meaningful time and spend. They were paying significantly for product features they weren’t using. That friction grew as the business changed quickly through a period of rapid growth and heightened scrutiny.

The disruptive alternative: Microsoft Fabric

The client asked OVG to evaluate alternatives on its behalf. Oracle, already in place for consolidation, had proven too rigid for business FP&A, which is why the client adopted Anaplan in the first place. Pigment offered improved capabilities for the client’s scale but carried the same cost and ownership concerns.

OVG began exploring Microsoft Fabric as a dark-horse option just as the client’s IT organization independently launched its own Fabric pilot. Confidence grew with further testing. Fabric covered the standard CPM requirements, including modeling, versioning, security, and visualization, with the ability to connect directly to IT’s data foundation, aligning with its AI roadmap, instead of another standalone system.

The first pilot: labor planning

OVG moved the client’s labor planning model from Anaplan to a combination of Fabric, Power Platform, and Excel. The client originally moved to Anaplan from Excel because manually consolidating Excel workbooks took far too much time. But by moving to Anaplan, they traded off the flexibility of Excel. They observed that many business users still copied and pasted from Excel into Anaplan. The new approach offered the best of both worlds – efficient consolidation and reporting with the accessibility and flexibility of Excel for the business.

On the revenue side, the client moved to a more granular, customer-level forecast that resolved the bridging questions their prior aggregate approach could not answer. The new approach armed the team with far more visibility than before to explain budget-vs-actual variances and adjust course as needed.

Five years of models in under nine months

With the pilot proven, OVG migrated five years of Anaplan use cases to Fabric in less than nine months, at far lower overall investment. The client exited Anaplan cleanly, with no period of paying for two platforms in parallel. Measured against the 90% annual software savings realized, the one-time services investment paid back in under a year — and the savings recur every year thereafter.

Expanding into an agentic future

The client is now expanding adoption of Microsoft Copilot and Claude Cowork across the organization. Because planning and forecasting data lives in Fabric, it is readily available for agentic use cases, without the restrictions a third-party planning tool imposes on access to its data.

The client is now realizing the vision of Agentic Performance Management – first-party ownership and agency over their planning processes and technology, Finance and technology teams working together, and more time to spend on value-add activities.

The Takeaway

Enterprise-grade planning no longer requires a specialized CPM platform. When planning runs on the same data foundation as the rest of the business, it costs less to own, adapts faster, and is ready for AI from day one.