Best Practices

UX Designer Profile
Mature Anaplan customers have an increasing focus on designing dashboards and apps that create a positive user engagement. Enter — the critical role of the UX Designer UX Designers begin with the end in mind. Their goal is to create a seamless experience, often across multiple Anaplan models, improving the usability of…
The art of the possible: Predictive profitability
Achieving and maintaining predictive profitability is a common strategic imperative. Anaplan can help organizations with this strategic imperative more effectively manage and optimize their margins. Doing this effectively crosses finance, sales, supply chain, and marketing. Anaplan allows each part of the business to…
Dynamic renaming of line items
Consider the following situation: As part of a planning process, a planning user requires the following items to be presented in the module: * Current year revenue actuals - year to date, needed to plan for the next year around the third-quarter quarter mark of the year * Current year revenue projection, based on the run…
Demystify non-linear optimization: Episode 1
Prologue The Anaplan community has been facing more and more interesting optimization problem statements every day while they solve complex business problems. Business challenges often involve finding optimal assignments such as sales reps to customers, demand to production capacity, or workers to shifts – all while…
How to use “LOOKUP” with summary elements
In the following article, I would like to discuss a common case of model building: the LOOKUP function doesn’t work with summary elements of hierarchical lists. Among other things, this forces model builders to use SELECT and not configure Production Data for some lists. I want to present to you an alternative approach.…
PlanIQ for forecasting
PlanIQ provides us with an easy-to-use and intelligent time series forecasting tool. It integrates with the Anaplan platform and incorporates advanced machine learning and statistical forecasting algorithms. In this article, I explore functionalities that PlanIQ offers using a sample data set and the preparation steps…
Anaplan CloudWorks API and Azure Logic Apps
* Use case: event-based triggering * Building a Logic App * Technical flow * Special focus * Conclusion You’ve already had a flavor of using Logic Apps with Anaplan API in this article, thanks to my colleague Sean Culligan. In this post, we will do something slightly different by using Anaplan CloudWorks API with the…
Workspace management
This article introduces basic workspace concepts, provides recommendations on how to structure workspaces, and offers tips to help organize and reduce workspace size. Workspaces are a combination of a single or multiple models. Workspace size is the total of all models in a workspace, excluding archived models as archived…
Extracting data from Anaplan with Qlik Sense
So you finally did it – you joined the Anaplan Community. So many possibilities just opened up in front of you when it comes to connected planning and finance, but what about analyzing and visualizing your data? Well, no need to worry about that because Qlik has that part covered. In today's article, we'll be talking…
OEG Best Practice: Inside the Hyperblock
What are blocks? How blocks are calculated – General Lists How blocks are calculated – Native Time/Native Versions Hyperblock performance Summary block counts Should I worry about blocks? A reason why we shouldn’t focus on just the block count Focus Points We recommend this article to Experienced Model Builders and…
Using saved text strings to speed up blueprint configuration
This is an addition and update to a existing community article using similar methods now in the latest modeling experience. As a model builder, you have to define line item formats over and over. Using saved text strings, you can speed up the configuration of modules. When you add a new Line Item, Anaplan sets it by…
How to automate subsets
How to ensure your Center of Excellence keeps on top of subset management One of the easiest things that can go wrong in a model is when subsets get out of sync. In larger models you may have multiple subsets on large lists and keeping track of them all can quickly become very difficult. For example, what happens when…
A primer on Anaplan integration using Azure Logic Apps
Introduction With the release of Anaplan Cloudworks, this flow may be better addressed via a blob storage connection in Cloudworks, or with a combination of a Cloudworks flow and a post request to the Cloudworks API. My colleague @christophe_keom published a guide covering this topic. In my case, I wanted my flows to run…
OEG Best Practice: Data integration decision app
We built this app to make getting started on your Anaplan data integration journey simple with a quick questionnaire and helpful information and links. A common question that arises during Anaplan implementations (or even after go-live) is "How can I automate data feeds into and out of Anaplan?" While the ultimate decision…
Show and Hide Selections in the UX - The Basics
Show and Hide Selections: why use them? When building out your apps and pages in the UX, there are often instances where you want to hone in on a specific set of data. With Show and Hide selections you can surface or remove particular rows and columns from view, providing end-users with a faster route to the insights they…
Overview of Anaplan Data Integration Options and Which is Right for You
* Manual Import/Export * Anaplan Connect * CloudWorks * REST API * Anaplan HyperConnect * MuleSoft, SnapLogic, Boomi, and OneCloud * Power BI, Tableau, and DocuSign * Anaplan Tab in Salesforce.com * Conclusion Anaplan offers various ways of integrating data into the platform. The decision of how to import and export data…
OAuth - Part 3: Third-Party Applications
If you need a quick recap on getting started with OAuth and a Use Case illustration, click here and there. What are we talking about? Historically if a customer wanted to build a software application that interacted with Anaplan, a service account would need to have been used to authenticate into Anaplan. I will be…
OAuth - Part 2: Illustrated Use Case
Now that we are more familiar with the concept of OAuth, let’s see it in action. Adding a new way to connect to Anaplan and get an access token Now that we know more about the Refresh Token, we can imagine a customized script using OAuth information for as long as the token remains valid. In those scenarios, you might want…
[Start Here] OAuth - Part 1: The Basics
* What is available today? * What are the key benefits from OAuth? * How do OAuth works? * How to leverage the OAuth protocol? What is available today? Up until the release of OAuth support, when it came to integration, Anaplan supported 2 different methods: * Basic Authentication: Scripts and other tools whose purpose is…
Introducing the Optimizer Toolbox
What is the Optimizer Toolbox? The Optimizer Toolbox is a Model Builder’s reference guide that details common linear program constructions for themes such as allocation, scheduling, and time-phasing. Each theme is dissected in a sequence of modules that progress from simple to complex. For example, the “drawer” on…