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Streamline hierarchy management with Polaris's new ITEMLEVEL and HIERARCHYLEVEL functions
Author: Dave Smith is a Senior Product Manager at Anaplan. In the world of enterprise planning, working with hierarchical data is fundamental—whether you're dealing with product categories, organizational structures, or geographic regions, the ability to roll up and see your plans at a macro-level is essential. Until now,…
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Experience expanded functionality and flexibility with Workflow Advanced
Authors: Dave Waller, Principal Product Manager, and Abby Schutt Beckman (@AbbySB), Technical Training Program Lead at Anaplan. Workflow Advanced is an additional capability in the platform that empowers businesses to visualize and automate processes with greater speed and confidence. At the time of this article, Workflow…
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Anaplan Workflow in action: Focused demo series
Author: Dave Waller, Principal Product Manager at Anaplan. Discover how Anaplan Workflow streamlines and simplifies complex approval processes with our set of short demo videos. Each video highlights a real-world use case — budget submission, capex submission, headcount allocation, and compensation plans — showing how…
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Anaplan Polaris – Getting Started
Are you a seasoned Anaplanner ready to harness the power of Polaris? You’re in the right place. Polaris, Anaplan’s next-generation calculation engine, is designed for fast, highly dimensioned calculation at scale. While the model building experience remains fundamentally similar to Classic, Polaris introduces key…
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[Start here] Modeling Experience
If you are an experienced model builder, you are already familiar with the power and flexibility that the Anaplan platform provides when solving your teams' planning needs. In February 2023, we made the enhanced Modeling Experience (MX) the default experience for our users, and from April 2024, the old classic interface…
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Anaplan Workflow Advanced: Intelligent Routing
Workflow Advanced extends Anaplan's workflow capabilities with sophisticated features that enable automatic decisions and intelligent routing. Workflow Advanced contains all the Workflow Basic functionality with the additional capabilities of branch and reconnect, send-back loops, value-based decisions, and parallel steps.…
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Why planning needs a different kind of MDM — and how ADO delivers
Author: Miki Sato is a Product Manager, Product Management Team (Data Management) at Anaplan. Many companies are investing in Enterprise Planning, AI, and BI to improve forecasting and decision-making. Yet across industries, business users still ask the same question: “If we have trusted data, why can’t we use it in…
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Anaplan Polaris – Applying Formula Guards to Optimize Calculations
This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance. This is a deeper dive on the concept outlined in the Anaplan Polaris – Understanding Blueprint Insights and Optimizing for Populated Space article. A “guard” refers to an IF…
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Creating and distributing formatting themes in Anaplan XL Reporting (AXL)
Creating formatting themes in Anaplan XL Reporting (AXL) ensures your Grid Reports look professional, are easy to read, and match your organization’s brand standards. These tailored formats help you create visual consistency across teams and over reporting cycles.This guide covers two approaches for creating and…
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Introducing New Resources for Anaplan Polaris: Benchmarking Performance
I'm very excited to share two new comprehensive technical resources that showcase the exceptional performance capabilities of Anaplan’s Polaris calculation engine. These documents provide detailed benchmarks and real-world performance metrics that demonstrate how Polaris delivers the scale, speed, and interactivity…
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Anaplan Polaris – Optimizing Calculation Performance Using Inline Conditions
This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance. This article explores a technique to optimize calculations in Polaris. We examine the practice of including formula conditions directly (“inline”) in the formula itself to…
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Shaping the future of reporting: How Anaplan empowers every decision-maker
Author: Miki Sato is a Product Manager, Product Management Team (Data Management) at Anaplan. Where insights meet action — right inside the planning platform. A new chapter in reporting Today’s decision-makers need more than static dashboards. They need fast, clear, and trusted insights — without relying on experts or…
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Anaplan Polaris – Calculation Effort
This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance. What is the Calculation Effort column? The Calculation Effort column is one of the Blueprint Insights contained within the blueprint view of a module (or the line items tab)…
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Bulk processing with Workflow
Author: Dave Waller, Principal Product Manager at Anaplan. While Workflow has been fine tuned for progressing single items through a business process, typically using forms to create new list items and then syncing workflows to that new item, there are some situations where there is benefit in processing new items in bulk.…
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Comparing SAP × Anaplan integration: Why ADO is the right fit for planning scenarios
Author: Miki Sato is a Product Manager, Product Management Team (Data Management) at Anaplan. To drive accurate and agile planning, it’s critical to integrate actuals from SAP ERP systems (such as S/4HANA) into Anaplan in a structure aligned with its model framework. This article compares three integration approaches — SAP…
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[Start Here] Anaplan XL Reporting
In this article, we will teach you what Anaplan XL Reporting is and what resources are available to support you as you get started with it. This article is intended as a self-service guide, but the best source of information will be your Account Executive or Customer Success Business Partner. Reach out to them or request a…
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Embedding accessible images
Author: Dave Waller, Principal Product Manager at Anaplan. Using certain modeling and page build techniques, it is possible to embed images across your UX apps in a way that provides alternate text for users who may be visually impaired or who may be using assistive technologies to announce on-screen elements. This article…
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End user triggering of workflow processes
Author: Dave Waller, Principal Product Manager at Anaplan. With the release of action button workflow triggers, customers have been able to apply Workflow to a raft of new use cases and business processes. End users are now able to instigate processes directly from their dashboards and UX pages, opening up the possibility…
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Creating more flexible export definitions in Anaplan
Anaplan exports, unlike imports, have no link to a saved view. However, there are ways to create Export actions that have more flexibility for future maintenance. After creating your view layout (using the view optimization best practices outlined in the Anaplan Polaris – View Optimization for Imports and Exports article)…
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Connected Planning with Salesforce x Anaplan
Author: Miki Sato is a Product Manager, Product Management Team (Data Management) at Anaplan. If your Salesforce data isn't driving real-time planning decisions, you're missing a critical link. This blog shows how connecting Salesforce and Anaplan — via no-code tools, embedded dashboards, or APIs — helps you turn frontline…
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Unlocking the power of Anaplan XL reporting: A video guide to using Anaplan XL
This article lists the videos available within the Anaplan XL tutorial series. Anaplan XL Reporting simplifies report creation, reduces manual effort, enhances security, and ensures reporting accuracy and efficiency. These videos delve into different aspects of Anaplan XL to help you get started with how to use the…
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Anaplan Polaris – View Optimization for Imports and Exports
This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance. This article explores how to optimize saved module views within the modeling experience, with particular attention to data import and export processes. We’ll revisit essential…
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The power of the ‘No’ version approach in Anaplan
Author: Hanwen Chen is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Professional Services Sr. Manager at Anaplan. Over the years, working closely with Anaplan customers across industries, I've been called in to diagnose and fix struggling models — often in crisis mode. Time and again, one particular design pattern surfaces as a major…
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How Anaplan powers reliable reporting
Author: Miki Sato is a Product Manager, Product Management Team (Data Management) at Anaplan. Inconsistent KPIs, scattered data exports, and disconnected BI tools slow down business decisions. This blog highlights how Anaplan’s data and modeling capabilities — especially through Data Orchestrator (ADO) and Polaris…
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Announcing a new chapter in the Planual!
Chapter 8: Anaplan Data Orchestrator is now live! Learn best practice rules for connecting and transforming source data, organizing and cataloging Data Orchestrator objects, and integrating Data Orchestrator into Anaplan models. There are four sections that make up Chapter 8: Connect: review important rules pertaining to…