Best Of

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.

.

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 Review pages and cards with stakeholders to identify outdated elements that can be removed or improved.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!