I have often talked about why integration between SAP and Anaplan is so important — the simple reality that planning processes do not live entirely within Anaplan, and that data must flow seamlessly between the two platforms to support the way businesses actually work.
In this post I want to explore how you go about that integration, and in particular why, for many organisations, a point-to-point solution like EPM Fasttrack is the right choice.
Scope note: EPMFastTrack is specifically designed for on-premise or privately hosted SAP environments running on the NetWeaver platform — SAP ECC, SAP S/4HANA, SAP BW, SAP APO and similar. It is not intended for SAP’s SaaS products like SuccessFactors or Fieldglass, where a different integration approach applies.
The data platform alternative
When organisations think about integrating SAP and Anaplan, many naturally gravitate towards a data platform approach. The idea is straightforward: extract SAP data into a cloud data platform — Google BigQuery, Microsoft Fabric or Databricks, Snowflake, AWS — and then use Anaplan’s native connectivity to pull data from there into Anaplan. For some organisations, this is genuinely the right answer. If you already have a mature data platform, your SAP data is already sitting in it at the right level of granularity, and it is refreshed frequently enough to support your planning processes, then there is no need to look further.
But in my experience, that set of conditions is less common than you might think. There are four situations where the data platform approach runs into real difficulties.
1
You may not have a data platform.
Building and maintaining an enterprise data platform is a significant undertaking, and many organisations don’t have SAP data represented in it at the level of detail planning needs.
2
Timeliness.
Planning processes can be time-sensitive — a purchase order raised in SAP may need to appear in Anaplan within minutes, not after an overnight refresh.
3
Bidirectionality.
Planning doesn’t just consume SAP data — it produces data that needs to go back into SAP, which most data platforms weren’t designed to do.
4
Data reconciliation.
A transformation layer sitting between SAP and Anaplan makes it harder for a controller to trace a number back to its source.
The most underestimated of these is bidirectionality. A supply chain planning solution might take historical sales order data from SAP, use Anaplan’s statistical forecasting and machine learning capabilities to project future demand, and then send a finished goods production plan back into SAP for execution. A capital expenditure planning process might evaluate potential projects in Anaplan, and then create only the approved projects as WBS elements back in SAP.
“Whilst Anaplan’s connectivity to cloud data platforms has improved, using those platforms to write data back into core SAP transactional systems is a very different matter — it’s not something they were designed to do.”
Why point-to-point addresses all of this.
EPMFastTrack takes a different approach. As an SAP add-on written in ABAP — SAP’s native programming language — it installs directly inside the SAP system itself. There is no middleware sitting outside the customer’s firewall trying to connect inwards. The tool is governed by SAP’s own security protocols, including authentication, encryption and cryptography.
Because EPMFastTrack sits inside SAP, it has direct, deep access to SAP data and can expose it to Anaplan at exactly the right level of granularity, with refresh cycles that can run near to real-time. And crucially, it is fully bidirectional: as well as feeding data into Anaplan, it can take outputs from Anaplan — a supply plan, a set of approved Capex projects, a set of intercompany journals — and create the corresponding objects directly in SAP.
What this looks like in practice
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Orchestration from within SAP.
EPMFastTrack can trigger Anaplan processes and actions directly from within SAP — running calculations and refreshing planning models as part of the same SAP job that loaded the data, with no manual coordination required.
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Native job sequencing.
Loads and processes can be sequenced alongside internal SAP jobs using standard SAP job scheduling — for example, loading sales orders to Anaplan only after backorder processing has completed.
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Transparent reconciliation.
Rules and mappings are configured to prepare data — trial balances, segment assignments, COPA derivations — before it’s sent to Anaplan, so a controller can drill through to the underlying SAP transactions.
Choosing the right approach.
I want to be clear that I am not arguing the data platform approach is wrong — for some organisations it is absolutely the right one. But I do think it is underappreciated how often the conditions that make it work well are not actually in place. If you are an SAP customer evaluating how to integrate your on-premise or hosted SAP landscape with Anaplan, EPMFastTrack deserves serious consideration. It was built specifically for this problem, and it solves it in a way that a general-purpose data platform simply cannot.
