Best Of

Great questions @SanthoshS! You're correct, the points do not reset annually; they accumulate throughout your entire Community journey. 

Regarding your concern about it becoming too easy, we've designed the rank system to focus on how points are earned, not just that they are accumulated. When creating the updated ranks, we carefully looked at the distribution of our members and points. Our goal is to see our dedicated members reach the highest ranks, including Legend! You can learn more about points and how to climb the ranks in this article: https://community.anaplan.com/kb/articles/153848-climb-the-ranks-a-guide-to-points-badges-and-ranks

The activities that help you progress in the beginning are focused on initial engagement and getting familiar with the Community. As you climb the ranks, the emphasis shifts to more high-impact contributions, such as becoming a go-to resource for complex forum questions or sharing your deep expertise with other members.

While we would love to see our dedicated members reach the Legend rank, the path is designed to ensure it's a title that is truly earned and one you can be proud of!

Author: Marina Ketelslegers is a Certified Master Anaplanner and FP&A voice for Anaplan and AI passionate about CoE support, solution architecture, and training.

Hello Anaplan Community!

I’m sharing a short walkthrough of my Anaplan Center of Excellence (CoE) App designed to help new CoE leads set up their CoE with clarity and structure.
I show how you can use it to define your CoE charter, roles, and roadmap, and then manage success through a practical four-lens metrics system (Adoption, Platform Health, Business Value, CoE Health).

I also demo the recommendations page that turns metrics and a light self-assessment into a focused improvement plan.

If you’re starting a CoE (or refreshing one), I hope this gives you a strong, reusable blueprint.

Also, if you missed it, I published an article going into details on Center of Excellence Metrics here: A four-lens metrics system for Anaplan CoEs.

How I Built It: CoE App

Feedback from the Community is very welcome.

About the Author: Tristan Colgate is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Managing Director at Fidenda.

Hi Anaplan Community!

I’m excited to bring a new and fun video to the Community ‘How I Built It’ tutorial series. In my video, I’ll walk through how I used Anaplan’s Optimizer to solve the world’s hardest Sudoku puzzle. In 2012, mathematician Arto Inkala created what’s considered to be the hardest Sudoku puzzle to solve and I’ve never been able to solve it, so I brought in some assistance from my favorite tool!

Optimizer is a really important part of the Anaplan platform. It can be used by organizations to find the optimal solutions to business problems where there is a need to optimize a business outcome that has multiple moving parts and constraints. In doing so it automates business decisions that are impossible for humans to thoroughly analyze. For example, I have implemented it at a media organization that needed to decide which new television program projects they should invest in to maximize ROI, whilst observing other targets such as minimum hours of programming needed per genre.

Check it out and let me know if you have questions!

…..

All the 'How I Built It' tutorials can be found here.

Hello, Anaplan Community!

What an amazing year it’s been! As we look back on 2025, I am absolutely blown away by the spirit of collaboration and support that defines our community. Every single day, you all show up for each other, sharing knowledge, solving complex challenges, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

This year, you collectively posted over 1,500 questions and provided an incredible 4,000+ answers! That represents thousands of moments of connection, learning, and progress. Thank you for making this community the vibrant, helpful, and indispensable resource that it is.

⭐️ Community Champions of 2025!

I want to give a special shout-out to some of our most active and helpful members this year. Your contributions have not gone unnoticed, and your willingness to jump in and help others is the bedrock of this community. A huge round of applause for a few of our top commenters: @devrathahuja @Dikshant @rob_marshall @seymatas1 @Tiffany.Rice @Prajjwal88 @andrewtye @SriNitya @logikalyan and @alexpavel.

🏆️ Perspectives from Anaplan Certified Master Anaplanners

One of my favorite parts of this community is learning from the best of the best. To celebrate the year, I asked five of our brilliant Certified Master Anaplanners to share their biggest wins from 2025 and what they’re aiming for in 2026.
I hope their stories inspire you as much as they’ve inspired me!

Junqi Xue, Certified Master Anaplanner and Solution Architect at valantic

For Junqi, 2025 was all about building a deeper, more versatile skill set and giving back to the community. Here's what he had to say:

"Here are my learnings from 2025:

Built my foundational knowledge:
a. Completed trainings on ADO, Polaris, Workflow, and tried finding their use cases in our projects and proposals across functions, e.g. finance and supply chain.
b. Attended the workshop for the Anaplan SC APP, getting to understand the capabilities of Anaplan Apps more in details, advocated and shared the knowledge with my internal colleagues.

Enhanced capability: I implemented two complicated use cases of Optimizer (production planning, resource allocation and planning), including the analysis of the results.

Community growth: Some interesting new functions were suggested and added to the valantic Anaplan extension this year, namely the visualization of the line items, list items, or anything, that is used as filter in saved views. Along with the visualization of actions/processed used on the UX. As a result, now the model clean up is even easier, especially solving the pain point of not being blind anymore."

Junqi's target for 2026: "Gather more hands-on experience on the Polaris engine."

Julie Ziemer, Business Solutions Architect at Royalty Pharma, LLC

Julie and her team drove a true transformation in how their organization approaches planning. In her own words:

"This past year has been a truly transitional step forward in our Anaplan journey, driven by myself and my team. What began as an effort to modernize financial modeling has evolved into a full-blown transformation in how we plan, connect data, and collaborate across departments.

We've successfully built and streamlined the foundation of our models, providing a clearer, real-time view of performance and forecasts. This means significantly fewer spreadsheets (win!) and far more confidence in our numbers. Along the way, we rigorously tested, refined our logic, and constantly reminded ourselves that “version control” is not a lifestyle choice, but a life-saving best practice. The progress hasn’t just been about automation; it’s been about building a sustainable framework that enables us to work smarter, not harder.

Looking ahead, our team's focus is on expanding Anaplan’s role in financial reporting, bringing greater automation, transparency, and storytelling to our data. To ensure long-term success, we’re laying the groundwork for a Center of Excellence (CoE) to help our models, processes, and people thrive as a connected Anaplan community."

Julie's goals for 2026:

1. "To ensure 100% adoption of Anaplan by all finance team members, completely moving away from legacy systems to establish a single source of truth for planning and reporting.
2. To lead the integration of Anaplan beyond the finance function into a new business area, such as research or HR planning, to foster true connected planning across the entire organization."

Wenwei Liu, Anaplan Systems Architect at Atlassian

Wenwei’s journey from consulting to an internal role gave her a powerful new perspective. She shares:

"Through my transition from Anaplan Consulting to the internal Anaplan team, I gained a fundamentally different perspective on how Anaplan supports business connected planning from the customer side. A key accomplishment was contributing to a large-scale model rebuild project that deepened my understanding of the platform's capabilities and identified critical customer needs. This shift from external consultant to internal team member positioned me to bridge consulting expertise with product strategy, uncovering pain points and opportunities that will drive more customer-centric solutions."

Wenwei's goal for next year: "Leverage emerging AI capabilities and new Anaplan features to enhance the connected planning experience for our users, while improving efficiency in model building and internal support processes."

Dmitry Sorokin, Senior Software Engineer at lululemon

Dmitry focused on the power of collaboration and technical excellence to elevate his company's Anaplan ecosystem. He reflects:

"2025 was a year of collaboration and learning. I focused on simplifying complex model logic to reduce calculation times and enhance the user experience across our Anaplan Connected Planning ecosystem. I also partnered with engineering to streamline integration pipelines, improving data refresh speed and overall reliability."

Dmitry's goal for 2026: "I’m excited to continue mentoring new model builders while expanding my architecture expertise. I plan to explore new ways to leverage AI in model building, automated testing, and planning workflows."

Ekaterina Garina, EPM Consultant at Keyrus

Ekaterina spent her year strengthening Connected Planning by bridging the gap between finance and procurement for her clients. She explains:

"This year, I worked closely with clients to strengthen their FP&A capabilities in Anaplan, helping leaders gain clearer insights and make more confident, data-driven decisions. A major highlight was delivering equipment-level variance analysis that improved visibility into cost drivers and simplified performance explanations for stakeholders. Procurement reporting was enhanced through the introduction of clear price and volume impact breakdowns, enabling a deeper understanding of spend movements. These initiatives strengthened Connected Planning by aligning finance and procurement around shared outcomes and consistent insights."

Ekaterina's goal for 2026: "I look forward to continuing to deliver scalable, high-impact solutions that help organizations plan faster and respond more effectively to change."

Now, it's your turn!

What an inspiring collection of achievements! Now, I want to hear from YOU.

What was your biggest win of 2025? What are you looking forward to tackling in 2026? Share your story in the comments below!

Happy planning,
Ginger Anderson
Sr. Manager, Community & Engagement Programs

Author: Chris Stauffer is the Director, Platform Adoption Specialists at Anaplan.

My kids and I enjoy code-breaking games, and so I wondered if I could build one in Anaplan. Over the years, there have been many versions of code breaker games: Cows & Bulls, Mastermind, etc.

The object of this two-player game is to solve your opponent’s code in fewer turns than it takes your opponent to solve your code. A code maker sets the code and a code breaker tries to determine the code based on responses from the code maker.

I came up with a basic working version last year during an Anaplan fun build challenge. Here's a short demo:

If you would like to build it yourself, the instructions on how the game works and how to build it are below.

Game start: Code maker input

Player 1 code maker starts the game by going to the code maker page and choosing a secret four color code sequence using a grid drop down list. Code makers can use any combination of colors, including using two or more of the same color. You could set up model role and restricting access to this page using page settings to ensure the codebreaker cannot see this page.

Player 2 code breaker input

The code breaker chooses four colors in the first row attempting to duplicate the exact colors and positions of the secret code.

The code breaker simply clicks the first row in the grid, uses a list drop down to make color guesses and then clicks the Submit? button. A data write action writes a true boolean into the code breaker module to turn on the module logic checking, turns on DCA to lock the row submission, and provides an automatic calculated code maker response. Unlike the real board game, the code maker does not have to think about the response nor drop those tiny black and white pins into the tiny holes in the board — the calc module does the work automatically and correctly every time! I’ve been guilty of not providing the correct response to a code breaker attempt which can upset the game and the code breaker.

First guess

Below the code breaker selected blue-red-yellow-blue and clicked the Submit button. Since two guesses are the right colors AND in the right column position, the calculated response is “Black Black”, telling the code breaker that two guesses are in the correct position and are the correct color.

A black color indicates a codebreaker has positioned the correct color in the correct position. A white color indicates a codebreaker has positioned the correct color in an incorrect position. No response indicates a color was not used in the code.

Second guess

In the second row, the code breaker input green in Spot 1, but kept red-yellow-blue and now only has one color in the correct position (yellow spot 3), but gained insight that there are now three correct colors with two in the wrong position thus the black-white-white response.

Third guess

The code breaker selected blue-yellow-green-yellow and now has all the correct colors with only two out of position.

Fourth guess

You have to be a little lucky to break the code on the fourth guess, but hopefully by now you get the idea of how the game works in Anaplan.

The winner of the game is the player that solves the code in fewer guesses than the other player, so each player takes a turn as code maker and code breaker.

Conclusion

The model uses a lot of conditional formulas, text functions (&, MID, ISBLANK, FIND), and custom matching logic, to identify right color and wrong position matches (white) and right color right position matches (black). A very simple couple of UX pages makes it easy to allow for two player game. You’ll have to create the model roles for code breaker and code maker and set up the page security settings.

Attached is the line item export in case you are curious or want to build it yourself. There are probably multiple ways to build the logic or make the formulas more elegant, but it was for me a fun diversion.

Enjoy!