When I speak to Anaplan customers about V5, the first question I often hear is whether it is worth it.
In truth, I think that is the wrong question.
If you are looking at V5 as a like-for-like replacement for what you do today, it may not feel transformational. If the goal is simply to get the same answers faster, automate a few more handoffs, or reduce a bit of admin around existing cycles, then yes, the value can feel incremental.
But that is not where the real opportunity sits.
The customers who will unlock the most value from V5 are the ones willing to think bigger. This is not about evolution. It is about revolution.
The real shift is moving from a planning process that helps you answer yesterday’s questions slightly faster, to a live digital copy of your organisation that helps you ask better questions than you can today.
That is the mindset change that matters.
For me, V5 is the opportunity to stop thinking about planning as a periodic event and start thinking about it as an always-on operating capability. Instead of a quarterly forecast, a monthly review, or an annual budget cycle, you begin to create a digital model of the business that is always ready, always current, and always capable of testing the impact of a decision.
That is a completely different sport, and it sharpens your competitive edge at the exact moment the market demands faster, smarter decisions.
It means asking questions that most organisations simply cannot answer in real time today. If a team needs to recruit more people, should we hire, redeploy from another function, or change the workflow upstream to remove the need entirely? If procurement volatility is creating service risk, what does that do to margin, customer outcomes, and workforce capacity? If marketing wants to launch a campaign tomorrow, do we actually have the operational capacity to absorb the demand?
This is where V5 starts to give large organisations something they normally lose as they scale: the agility of a smaller business.
When you run a small company, the left hand naturally knows what the right hand is doing because everyone is close to the decisions. As organisations grow, that agility disappears into functional silos, delayed handoffs, and calendar-driven processes. V5 gives you the opportunity to bring that agility back through data, workflow, and intelligence.
That starts with Data Orchestrator, which I genuinely believe is the most important recent development Anaplan has made.
The reason is simple. It removes the lag between source systems and decision-making. Historically, organisations have often relied on multiple steps between source data, cloud storage, integration tooling, and finally the planning model. Each stage introduces delay, IT dependency, and cost. Even a small change, such as bringing through one extra column of data, can become a ticket, a queue, an approval cycle, and months of waiting.
Data Orchestrator changes that dynamic entirely.
It puts far more control back into the hands of the business, allowing teams to connect much closer to source systems, work at the right level of granularity, and reshape how data is used without waiting for a long technical chain of dependencies. What could previously take months can now happen in the same day.
That alone changes the economics of planning.
But where it becomes truly powerful is when Data Orchestrator works in tandem with Workflow.
The real value is not simply that data lands faster. It is that the moment data lands, the system can immediately surface what matters. Rather than notifying users that “the data is ready”, Workflow can direct attention to the exact variance, product, customer, or operational exception that requires action. It can apply intelligent rules around thresholds, materiality, tolerance bands, or strategic priorities, and then route the right person directly to the right page with the right selections already made.
That moves analysis from day three to day one.
More importantly, it starts to shift the entire operating rhythm of the business from relay-race planning to live planning flow.
Too many organisations still work in sequential handoffs. Sales works for three weeks, hands an aggregated view to Operations, who break it down and eventually pass a summarised version to Finance. By the time the final decision-makers see the output, the first assumptions are already out of date.
Workflow allows that model to be broken apart into live, concurrent slices.
Instead of waiting for an entire plan, teams can move product by product, channel by channel, customer by customer, or material by material. As soon as one part is ready, the next function can begin. Procurement gets earlier visibility of lead-time risks. Operations sees capacity flags sooner. Finance starts challenging assumptions while the bottom-up build is still taking shape.
The dead air between decisions disappears.
That concurrency is what moves planning from near real time to real time.
The next leap comes when Workflow and Polaris operate together.
For years, many planning models have been shaped by engine constraints. Hierarchies, dimensional choices, and aggregation logic were often designed to make the model work, rather than to mirror how the business actually thinks. That creates a barrier for occasional users and operational stakeholders, because they are forced to think in the language of the system rather than the language of the business.
Polaris changes that.
It allows the model to reflect the real shape of decision-making at the level the business genuinely works. Workflow then provides the control layer that keeps that greater granularity governed, visible, and auditable.
This tandem matters enormously.
Polaris gives you the ability to model the organisation at the level where decisions are truly made. Workflow ensures that greater granularity does not come at the expense of control.
The result is stronger operational adoption, better collaboration, and a lower barrier to contribution from users who may not be deep Anaplan experts. People can engage with the model because it mirrors the real business process they already understand.
That is where the idea of a digital copy of the organisation becomes real.
Finally, Forecaster and Optimizer take the conversation beyond speed and into decision confidence.
The goal here is not automated planning. It is augmented decision-making.
The system should take care of the low-hanging fruit. It should create the first draft, roll forward the obvious baseline, surface the likely outliers, and solve the mathematical core of complex operational questions.
Then people focus where human judgement creates the most value.
That might mean refining the difficult edge cases in a demand forecast, balancing service levels against overtime, or testing three different optimisation scenarios, for example, moving material between plants with the lowest fuel impact and the least operational disruption.
The point is not to remove people from the process. It is to give them a better starting point, so more time is spent on trade-offs, sensitivity, and strategic choices rather than turning the handle on manual first drafts.
That is where better decisions happen.
Ultimately, the real question for V5 is not whether it can improve your current planning process.
It is whether you are ambitious enough to use it to build something bigger: an always-on, always-ready digital copy of your organisation that allows the business to operate in real time.
For the right organisation, the business case absolutely washes its face.
The opportunity is to move beyond planning as a cycle and create a live decision network that helps every part of the business understand what happens when you squeeze the balloon in one place and where it will pop up somewhere else.
That is the real promise of V5.
Not better versions of what you already do.
A fundamentally better way to run the business.
If you are considering an upgrade to Anaplan V5, I would be delighted to talk through where the real value could sit for your business and how to build the right case for it.
Equally, if you are earlier in your connected planning journey and exploring where best to start with Anaplan, I’m always happy to share a practical point of view on the capabilities that will create the fastest and most meaningful impact.
Either way, the right answer is rarely to replicate what others have done. It is to start with the questions your business most needs to answer next.
