Blog

Articles about the Anaplan Community and Connected Planning

Event recording available: Anaplan Workflow expanded
If you missed our spotlight event on Anaplan Community Experience: Workflow Expanded, a recording is now available. Anaplan's Elizabeth Schera and Chris Stauffer share insights and strategies to optimize your processes. Presenters highlighted how to thoughtfully design workflows around real business processes rather than…
CoE guidance: A practical Polaris migration strategy by project phase
Author: Laiza Tagumpay is a Certified Master Anaplanner with a background in Customer Success and Solution Architecture, now happily building and scaling Anaplan as a CoE Principal Engineer in a biotech company. Migrating from Classic to Polaris is not a lift-and-shift exercise. It requires a mindset shift in how models…
Five tips for managing remote projects
Author: Paola Malafaia is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Associate Consultant at Cornerstone Performance Management. Most of my early career was working physically allocated on a client with a specific project goal in mind. Those were the days of whiteboard sessions, impromptu desk conversations, and the constant,…
Annual rollover best practices — event recording available!
Last month, we hosted a Community Challenge inviting members to share their annual rollover best practices. We provided prompts to encourage members to share how they prepare for this critical time-of-year activity, their strategies for a smooth and successful rollover, and to inspire others in the Community with their…
How to maintain complex Anaplan environments — Part 2: Technical foundations for scale
Author: Piotr Weremczuk is a Certified Master Anaplanner and FinSys Application Specialist at EQT. In the first part of this two-part article, I explored the non-technical foundations of maintaining complex Anaplan environments: leadership, governance, accountability, and the importance of building the right team. All of…
How to maintain complex Anaplan environments — Part 1: Leadership, governance & the human foundation
Author: Piotr Weremczuk is a Certified Master Anaplanner and FinSys Application Specialist at EQT. February 2026 marked my tenth anniversary of logging into Anaplan. A full decade. When I realized this, I decided it was finally time to write down some of the things I’ve learned about setting up and maintaining complex…
Modulation in Anaplan
Author: Arun Thakar, Vice President in the banking industry. In cases where you have a single DEV model and multiple TEST and PROD models, the situation may arise where one user group asks for a feature that is not required for other users in different models. All too often the answer is to build modules, lists, and logic…
Using territory maps with Anaplan
Author: Paola Malafaia is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Associate Consultant at Cornerstone Performance Management. After setting up Territory Maps, I had a few learnings and I thought it would be helpful for other developers to put some notes about the basic settings of this mapping feature for dummies. The goal here…
How I Built It: Dynamic driver-based planning
Author: Chris Allen is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Manager at Allitix part of Accenture. Hi Anaplan Community! This ‘How I Built It’ video shares a dynamic feature to toggle between different planning methodologies corresponding to different lines on the P&L for driver-based planning. It's a feature that can be…
Create export template for Anaplan users to import using months
Author: Tyler Beck is a Certified Master Anaplanner at TBLB LLC, and is currently a Team Lead at CVS Health. Use case An end user needs to export a template from Anaplan using Months as the time period in columns, and qualitative data in rows. When the template is exported as a CSV file the years in the dates turn to days…
Recognizing your impact: new points, badges, and ranks!
Inspired by the incredible engagement and collaboration we see in our Community every day, we want to better celebrate your contributions. We’re thrilled to introduce our updated Community ranks to clearly map out your engagement journey with us! Recognizing your Community contributions We've updated our Community ranks to…
Interviewing and onboarding Anaplanners
Author: Andrew Barnett is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Vice President at PJT Partners. Having worked at several firms in the Anaplan ecosystem, both on the partner side and as a customer, I’ve seen firsthand how critical it is to hire and develop the right Anaplan talent. Bringing an experienced Anaplanner onto your…
How I Built It: Dynamic Allocation Order
Author: Kndia Davis is a Certified Master Anaplanner with five years architecting scalable Anaplan models. Dynamic allocation order is a foundational requirement across many industries, whether you’re distributing inventory, assigning capacity, or prioritizing financial allocations. In most Anaplan models, this allocation…
Combined Grids: examples in accounting and construction
Author: Jonathan Cushing is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Senior Consultant at Vuealta Consulting. As a Chartered Accountant and someone who has experience in both in-house consulting roles for housebuilding and construction companies, I was excited by the release of Combined Grids in Anaplan. For years, when end-users…
Fiscal to Gregorian calendar conversion in Polaris
Author: David Edwards is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Associate Partner at Columbus Consulting. For retail and consumer goods companies, a common issue occurs when different departments (typically supply chain and finance) utilize different calendar structures. Supply Chain teams often rely on a fiscal calendar (such…
A quick reference guide to hierarchical structures in Anaplan
Author: Arun Thakar is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Vice President in the banking industry. Lists and hierarchies are a key foundational aspect to model building. In Anaplan, lists are a critical building block of the model and depending on which structure one uses can greatly impact user experiences, model…
How I Built It: User filters with variable hierarchy properties
Author: Erik Svensson is a Certified Master Anaplanner and a Principal Solution Architect at Anaplan. Hello Anaplan Community! Thank you for checking out my ‘How I Built It’ tutorial. In this video, I demonstrate a powerful technique for creating dynamic user filters. This solution gives your end-users the flexibility to…
Polaris: The science behind better business planning
Author: Parmod Kumar, Certified Solution Architect, and Financial Planning & Supply Chain Specialist at TCS. Reading time: approximately 8-10 minutes. Why the Polaris engine Is powerful and beautiful Polaris is Anaplan’s next‐generation calculation engine, built from the ground up to handle high dimensionality, sparse…
How I Built It: Center of Excellence App
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…
A four-lens metrics system for Anaplan CoEs
Author: Marina Ketelslegers is a Certified Master Anaplanner and FP&A voice for Anaplan and AI passionate about CoE support, solution architecture, and training. I’ve seen how Anaplan Centers of Excellence (CoEs) start with strong momentum. There’s enthusiasm, executive support, and a clear ambition to make connected…
Anaplan API user reporting with Python
Author: Michael Moore is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Director, Enterprise Planning at HP. In this article I will cover: Why use Python for user administration? Prepare Begin OAuth2 login Finish OAuth2 login using redirect URL to fetch authentication token Import useful Python modules Fetch data about yourself Sort…
Share your favorite 2025 Anaplan features — November Community Challenge
As 2025 comes to a close, we're wrapping up the year with our final Community Challenge — and we want your input! Share your experiences with the Anaplan features that made a real difference in your work this year, and hear other Community member perspectives. Question for the Community Challenge: What were your favorite…
How to build a User Access Management Model (UAM) that scales
Author: Artem Shchaulov is a Senior Anaplan Consultant and Certified Master Anaplanner with 8+ years' experience implementing global EPM solutions. In my first article, we established why access management breaks at enterprise scale and why a dedicated User Access Management (UAM) model is the only architecture that works…
Structure is what makes AI work: Next-generation decision-making in Anaplan
Author: Miki Sato is a Product Manager, Product Management Team (Data Management) at Anaplan. Earlier this week, our CPTO Adam Thier announced a set of AI-driven innovations designed to advance enterprise decision-making. Three products — Custom Analyst, Agent Studio, and CoModeler — are now generally available, and…
How to create a dynamic time list using a numbered list
Author: Tyler Beck is a Certified Master Anaplanner at TBLB LLC, and is currently a Team Lead at CVS Health. Use case A client requests a flat list for time that will change year over year and does not want to manually update the list, and does not want to use native time. Instead of creating a production list to update…
Discover how Anaplan turns complex workforce simulations into real-time insight
Author: Judee Dimapilis is a Certified Master Anaplanner and co-founder at Malaya Tech Consulting. Preparing for a major business launch is always complex, especially in the gaming and leisure industry where coordinating different departments, opening phases, and staffing requirements add another layer of operational…
User Access Management in the UX
Author: Lis de Geus is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Customer Success Consultant at Bedford Consulting. Setting the details of a user’s access is usually a job for the workspace admin: decide their role and selective access to lists members. However, the Users tab is not always the friendliest, especially when thinking…
Share your annual rollover best practices — Community Q&A Challenge
The first Community Challenge of 2026 is officially here, and it's all about preparing your models for the future with seamless annual rollovers! A well-built Anaplan model anticipates the future. One of the most critical, yet often overlooked, aspects of model design is preparing for the annual rollover. Models are often…
Clay before carbon fibre, flat files before data full blown orchestration
Author: Alejandro Gomez Sanchez, Certified Master Anaplanner, and Principal Consultant. Data orchestration is a remarkable capability. When done well, it is genuinely transformative: comprehensive, accurate and dependable data for decision-making is available instantly. Beyond the satisfaction of well-orchestrated data, my…
Stop duplicating modules: Meet Combined Grids
Author: Vijay Pasumarthy is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Sr. Principal Consultant at Genpact. If you had two modules with a common dimension and wanted to show information from both on the same page, your options were limited: Build a new “combo” module and recreate all the line items or Drop two grid cards side by…