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Author: Author: Damien Bouquier has been a Certified Master Anaplanner for 5+ years and has developed solutions across a wide range of industries for FP&A, supply chain, and sales operations planning use cases.

In this ‘How I Built It’ tutorial, I show how Anaplan’s Optimizer can provide more transparency and user feedback. By surfacing the impact of user overrides — whether they result in an equivalent, degraded, or constraint-breaking solution — this approach helps demystify the “black box” nature of optimization.

By combining Anaplan’s powerful modeling capabilities with clear feedback loops, users can make more informed decisions, understand trade-offs, and trust the optimization process. This added visibility empowers planners to experiment confidently, while maintaining control and ensuring alignment with business constraints.

Questions? Leave a comment!

View all 'How I Built It' tutorials here.

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Author: Ekaterina Garina is a Certified Master Anaplanner and EPM Consultant at Keyrus.

Does your Anaplan model feel cluttered with too many line items and modules, making it difficult to find anything? Are you dealing with redundant calculations? Need a little optimization? Or perhaps you have a large model that needs restructuring? Spring cleaning is the answer!

Where to start?

Before diving into a deep clean, the biggest challenge is knowing where to begin. I like to approach this in two sweeps. First, clean up all the obvious areas — removing what is clearly unnecessary. Then, dig deeper into the structure and logic to optimize efficiency.

Before making any changes, always create revision tags (if your model is in ALM) and back up your model by making a copy. Regular backups throughout the process ensure you can revert changes if needed and prevent data loss or unintended disruptions to workflows and integrations.

First sweep: The essentials

1. Start with UX and integration
   
   1. Review pages and cards with stakeholders to identify outdated elements that can be removed or improved.
      
   2. Make a list of all published modules and line items.
      
   3. Check all cards to identify which line items are used as filters and drivers—this can take time, but it’s worth the effort.
      
   4. Check scheduled integrations to eliminate redundant jobs.
      
   5. Review all processes and actions, including those published on pages and used in integrations.
2. Back to the model
   
   1. Delete unused processes, actions, and data sources (in that order).
      
   2. Organize the Actions tab: Rename actions for clarity, reorder them logically, and group related actions into processes.
      
   3. Delete all unused views. If your setup allows, assign a unique code to each view and include it in the action name. This makes it easier to track and delete obsolete views.
      
   4. Set a default module view with a clear, structured "show all" layout.
      
   5. Go through remaining views and create a list of line items used as filters.
      
   6. Organize Dynamic Cell Access (DCA) modules separately, including all relevant DCA line items in the list.
      
   7. Now that you have a comprehensive list of all used and published line items (in addition to the ‘Referenced by’ column), you can begin deleting obsolete modules and line items.
      
   8. Standardize module and line item names and organize them for consistency.
      
   9. Review general lists, ensuring proper naming and order while removing unused ones.
      
   10. General lists should not contain calculated properties unless there’s a strong justification.

Second sweep: Deep optimization

1. Filter optimization
   
   1. Move all filter line items into dedicated filter modules.
      
   2. Identify and remove duplicate filters, merging where possible.
      
   3. Ideally, each card on a UX page should have only maximum of one filter on rows and one on columns. This simplifies adjustments—modifying just one line item can update the entire view. To achieve this, break down filter calculations into separate line items and then combine them into a final filter line item.
2. System module refinement
   . Move all attribute line items into system modules for better organization.
3. Formula and calculation optimization
   
   1. Export a grid with all line items in the model to review formulas.
      
   2. Check that aggregation functions (SUM, AVERAGE, etc.) are not used with LOOKUP, as this negatively impacts performance.
      
   3. Minimize the use of:
      
      1. NEXT/PREVIOUS
         
      2. RANKCUMULATE
         
      3. TIMESUM
         
      4. FINDITEM on large datasets
         
   4. Separate text functions from other calculations to improve performance.
      
   5. In IF formulas, ensure that the most common result appears first to optimize processing speed.
      
   6. Ensure there are no hardcoded values in formulas to improve scalability.
4. Final cleanup
   . Check and delete unused versions, snapshots, and other obsolete list elements.
   

Regular maintenance of your Anaplan model is essential for maintaining efficiency, improving performance, and ensuring usability. A well-structured model is much easier to navigate, loads faster, and reduces unnecessary complexity. By following this two-step spring cleaning process, you not only remove clutter but also improve the long-term sustainability of your model.

Take the time to clean up now, and future you will thank you for a faster, leaner, and more organized Anaplan experience.

Author: Aaron Overfors is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Principal Architect at Spaulding Ridge.

A strong user experience is the key to almost every Anaplan solution’s success. A well-designed Anaplan model that scales, performs well, and is easy to maintain will become shelf-ware without a thoughtful, purposeful user experience. In this first of two articles, I will explore the concepts and principles of effective dashboarding, including how to create a strong design prior to the actual construction of the user experience. In part two, we discuss how to execute this design and go over the tactics and approaches to page construction that will power your solution and deliver the value that your end users are looking for.

Concepts

The end goal of the solution design process is to have dashboards and/or exports that fulfill the needs of the business. Knowing that, we can ask questions and tailor structure at every stage of development. The following standards will help deliver a consistent and effective user experience founded on this principle.

Effective dashboarding

Remember that the dashboard is for the end user. The requirements (user stories) should determine the purpose of the dashboards as it is stated in the language of and from the perspective of the main user. It is important to put yourself in their shoes when designing the user experience.

Dashboards should help to make business decisions and plan easily. Remember that the visual layout of your dashboard will facilitate the decision-making process. Some dashboards are intended to be used in presentations while others are meant for high level executive reporting, and many are used to plan for in-depth planning work like projecting sales, units or various other forecasting metrics. Once the dashboards necessary have been determined with requirements, mock up the dashboards.

While mocking up the ideal dashboards, there are many things to take into consideration:

• Will they be able to effectively interact with the dashboard based on what is important to them?
• Does Anaplan offer the dashboarding capabilities/features they are referring to?
• What KPIs are important to them?
• How do they want to interact with those KPIs?
• Do they want to highlight outliers or extreme values?
• If this is a planning dashboard, what view will allow them to quickly and easily assess the impact of their changes?
  
• Are we putting too much on one dashboard? Is this overloading the end user?

A good dashboard allows users to review information; a great dashboard tells a story and allows users easily to investigate what is important to them.

User experience schema

To solidify the flow between dashboards, creating a user experience schema as a guide can be a highly effective exercise:

A user experience schema allows you, the designer, to illustrate where functionality will be accomplished in Anaplan prior to constructing it. This is helpful in three main regards:

1. You can map your user stories (requirements) to each dashboard to ensure each dashboard has a well-defined purpose, both on its own and in relation to other pages.
2. You can ensure each user story is represented in some form or fashion in the user experience.
3. You can pressure test the user experience design with your primary stakeholders to ensure the flow is natural and accounts for a regular business rhythm, including if multiple types of users plan to access a single page.

Apps and user roles

On the note of multiple user types, it is important to consider user roles and apps. Apps allow you to create collections of pages that cross multiple models and workspaces, so the way a user experience is built by user role can be more focused on workflows rather than model functionality. Are there distinct enough workflows with little overlap in page use that will warrant setting up multiple apps for this use case? If not, one single app with page restrictions by user role is likely the best option.

UX page types

Resource: Use apps and pages in the User Experience - Anaplan Technical Documentation

New UX page types

1. The User Experience (UX) contains three page types: worksheets, boards, and reports.
   
   1. Worksheets pages present a single large grid where data can be viewed or edited and additional supplemental cards can be nested to run actions or explain details.
      
   2. Board pages provide an overview of multiple cards which can help users visualize data through multiple formats of charts, images, KPIs, grid cards, and more.
      
   3. Report pages enable builders to create consistently-styled reports that allow managers and internal stakeholders to access key insights.
      

Worksheets

1. Worksheets display detailed data from Anaplan models on interactive grids. Worksheets can be used for deep dives into a single source of data for analyzing/editing data from one single module.
2. The insights panel located to the right-hand side of the worksheet allows the addition of editable grid cards, instructions, or actions.

Boards

1. Boards offer a solution for displaying data from multiple grids/modules. All well-designed boards contain multiple grid cards that relate to one another in an end users process.
2. An effective board allows end users to view or edit data displayed on the cards and to interact with the grids to change drivers or assumptions.

Reports

1. Reports are effective at presenting visualizations of relevant data that enables end users to clearly gain insights.
2. Reports offer structured sets of slides with robust formatting options to lay out data in the most effective manner. A drawback of reports is that data cannot be edited.

Which reporting capability should I use?

View a larger version of this image here:

‘Reporting’ often refers to providing a static view of data. Special design is needed to achieve this in Anaplan as it is not natively built for it; other tools handle strict ‘reporting’ better than Anaplan. A general guideline is that Anaplan is best for displaying data that needs to be routinely interacted with and changed. Other tools may provide advantages on a presentation and visualization front.

Now that we have explored the concepts and design of a robust user experience, our next step will be laying out the standards that help define a great user experience page.

Check out Part 2 here: Design standards for a superior user experience — Part 2: UX page standards

Questions? Leave a comment!

Author: Evgeny Seledkov is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Sr. Consultant at Keyrus.

Hello, I’m Evgeny, and I’ve been part of the Anaplan community for nearly ten years. Over the years, I’ve taken quite a journey — seeing this world from both sides: as part of a customer Center of Excellence, where I helped stakeholders with their day-to-day tasks and designed smart Anaplan solutions for making better informed business decisions; and from the consultancy side, where I’ve focused on showcasing the power of Anaplan to clients and ensuring we, as a team, deliver top-tier services.

One thing I’ve come to firmly believe is this: no matter your goals or which side of the table you sit on, the key to long-term success is investing in your team. That investment pays off quickly. People are a company’s most valuable asset. Having a knowledgeable, reliable team that shares common values and principles is essential for sustained success.

But what happens when we need to grow our team rapidly? A shift in strategy, new roles opening, or sudden project opportunities — many scenarios can trigger the need for expansion. Broadly, there are two approaches: short-term and long-term. While the short-term route often involves hiring experienced professionals from the community, an option that depends on availability and negotiation, in this article I’ll focus on the more strategic, long-term approach.

How can we ensure sustainable team growth that aligns with company strategy and nurtures the next generation of professionals? That brings us to the core topic of this article: how to make onboarding junior specialists a mutually beneficial process for both the individuals and the company.

To better understand the importance of onboarding, let’s look at the goals of both sides, starting with those of a junior specialist. Imagine someone who is just beginning their professional career or entering the Anaplan ecosystem for the first time, with the ambition to work closely with the platform.

Their goals might look like this:

1. Gain real-world experience and technical expertise.
   It’s a chance to build both technical skills, like model building, data integration, and applying best practices, with the access to the most advanced IT solutions and technologies on the market, and business acumen by working with real-world processes.
2. Develop a clear and sustainable career path.
   The experiences and knowledge gained become the foundation for long-term professional development. With the right support, junior specialists can map their ambitions to concrete career paths and identify the steps needed to achieve their goals.
3. Test the waters before committing long-term.
   Onboarding offers a trial period to see if a career in business planning, analysis, or Anaplan consulting aligns with their interests before committing long-term.
   

From the employer's perspective, the goals are a bit different:

1. Invest in talent.
   Companies are eager to bring in motivated individuals with potential, knowing that early investment can result in long-term value and loyalty.
2. Balance the team.
   Blending junior and senior team members helps manage costs while maintaining quality, creating a healthy team dynamic.
3. Support strategic goals.
   Hiring new talent helps meet internal HR targets and adapt to market demands, especially during growth phases.
4. Ensure strong fit.
   Cultural and professional alignment ensures smoother collaboration, stronger engagement, and higher retention over time.
   

To sum up: on one side, we have companies that want to minimize risks and invest their resources in individuals who align with their profile, goals, and values. On the other side, we have candidates eager to explore project work, IT implementation, business planning, and analysis - keen to discover whether this is the right long-term career path for them.

This is where a well-structured onboarding process becomes essential.

We also shouldn’t overlook the crucial role of the HR team. They are responsible for building a strong pipeline of candidates through high-quality screening and for mapping each candidate’s initial skill set to the company’s requirements. Once the pipeline is established and we, as a business, have selected trainees who show potential to fit into the team, onboarding can begin.

Together with the team, we developed a nine-week onboarding program designed to immerse trainees into the world of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). The program aims to reveal the full scope and depth of this field - from technical skills to real project experiences. While it’s primarily tailored for consultancy firms, internal Centers of Excellence may also find it beneficial.

Nine week onboarding program outline

Weeks 1–3: Anaplan basics

Anaplan Academy provides a clear path for starting the certification journey, beginning with Level 1, Level 2, and The Anaplan Way. These form the essential foundation for anyone working with the platform.

While completing these trainings, trainees also tackle simplified, real-life planning tasks in Excel. These open-ended exercises, based on use cases like FP&A, S&OP, and Workforce Planning, let them showcase their analytical thinking and gain hands-on exposure to planning concepts.

This phase concludes with an evaluation. Each trainee has a one-to-one session with a Senior Model Builder or Solution Architect to confirm their grasp of Anaplan basics, including concepts from PLANUAL and The Anaplan Way. They also present their Excel assignment to a panel of senior team members, demonstrating both technical understanding and communication skills.

This approach gives us a clear baseline view of each trainee’s starting point and helps guide their development through the rest of the onboarding program.

Weeks 4–6: Ad-hoc technical and business acumen skills

The second stage focuses on developing business acumen, recognizing that trainees have varying backgrounds. Our goal is to level-set their knowledge and expose them to real project challenges.

This is achieved through:

• Interactive sessions with senior consultants
  
• Hands-on workshops
  
• Mandatory internal trainings
  

We also emphasize that successful Anaplan models depend on more than just correct formulas — they must be performant, usable, and well-designed. That’s why we include a dedicated session on User Experience (UX), covering interface principles, color psychology, user journeys, and the role of UX in effective design.

Trainees are also introduced to our development standards: naming conventions, best practices, and team-wide agreements that ensure consistency and maintainability.

Another major focus is data. Since clean, reliable data is critical to any model’s success, we teach data analytics fundamentals using the Excel assignment from Phase 1. Trainees are expected to create a Data Flow Diagram (DFD) that maps out dependencies.

We also cover scheme notation and visual standardization, helping trainees break down complex processes. Their final output is a process map that includes roles, data flows, and levels of granularity.

The phase ends with a second knowledge check where trainees present their outputs and demonstrate understanding of both business and technical concepts.

Weeks 7–9: Anaplan excellence and sales readiness

In the final phase, trainees build their first full Anaplan model and app. We simulate a real-world scenario: a client using Excel asks for a more robust EPM solution. Conveniently, trainees use the Excel model they created in Phase 1 as the starting point.

Alongside model building, we introduce the Business Development process, a vital component of consultancy work. Our sales team runs workshops on pre-sales activities: understanding client needs, defining scope, positioning Anaplan, and creating value-driven messaging.

This all leads to a key simulation: a mock client meeting. Trainees present their models, acting as consultants addressing a client’s planning challenge. The senior team plays the role of a demanding client, asking tough questions and testing how trainees handle real-world scenarios.

At the end, trainees are assessed against clear criteria, and we provide a go/no-go decision. At this stage, we can already identify the trainees' strengths and areas for improvement, giving us insight into their potential career paths within the company — whether technical, business-focused, or a balanced mix of both. It’s also a moment for self-reflection, helping them decide if consulting is the right path.

Each trainee also has a buddy — a peer mentor who supports progress informally and provides guidance. This relationship is vital for building confidence and a sense of team belonging.

Conclusion

This onboarding approach has earned strong recognition within our company, as it enables well-informed, balanced decisions — both in support of our business goals and in helping young professionals launch their careers in consultancy. While it may seem time and resource intensive (and indeed, it requires significant effort to run and sustain), the long-term value is undeniable. In the end, it pays off quickly by bringing highly motivated, well-prepared individuals into the team.