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Key recertification updates: Deadline and holiday support
To give everyone more flexibility during the busy holiday season, the recertification exam deadline has been extended to January 31st.
The details
* Exams must be passed, not just scheduled, by January 31st.
* The promotion for Professional Solution Architects to take a free attempt at the Certified Master Anaplanners exam will still end on December 31st.
* For more information on what happens if you miss the recertification deadline, please see this community post: What happens if you miss the Anaplan recertification deadline?
Delayed response from Academy team
Please note that due to the holidays, the Academy certification team will have significantly limited coverage the week of December 22nd. You can still reach out to Academy@anaplan.com for certification questions, but please expect a delayed response. We will do our best to respond to your inquiries as quickly as possible upon our return.
For any immediate technical support, please reach out to Kryterion for support Support@KryterionOnline.com. A live chat is also available during the exams for support.
Recertification resources
To help you prepare, we have a wealth of resources available on the Anaplan Community:
* Anaplan Certifications
* Exam Prep
We encourage you to use these resources and schedule your exam soon. Good luck with your recertification!
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’Twas the sprint before go-live
Author: Brent Orr is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Global Data Architect at Accenture.
Set to the tune of 'Twas the night before Christmas'.
’Twas the sprint before go-live
’Twas the sprint before go-live, when all through the model,
Not a calc was circular, not even a toddle.
The blue cells were sparse, all formatted with care,
In hopes that St. Planual soon would be there.
The end users nestled all snug in their seats,
While visions of UX cards danced with their sheets.
And I with my laptop, and they with their asks,
Had just settled in for a few final tasks.
When out in Dev tenant there arose such a clatter,
I alt-tabbed from Slack to see what was the matter.
Away to the history log I flew like a flash,
Tore open the ALM pane — please don’t crash.
The source–target mapping on the new import flow
Gave the luster of horror to objects below.
When what to my bloodshot eyes should appear,
But “Dimension mismatch” and an ominous sneer.
With a grizzled old builder so lively and spry,
I knew in a moment it surely was… me (oh my).
More rapid than CloudWorks my fixes they came,
I whistled and muttered and called lists by name:
“Now L1! Now L2! Now L3 unite!
On Variant! On Style! On Category bright!”
To the top of the hierarchy — don’t you dare fall!
Now aggregate, aggregate, aggregate all!
As SYS modules soar when good builders try,
When they meet a hard problem and refuse to ask “Why?”,
So up to the blueprint my cursor then flew,
With a brain full of mappings, and a lookup or two.
And then, in a heartbeat, I heard on the chat
The pinging and dinging of “Can you just… fix that?”
As I turned to the UX and was spinning around,
Down fell a card with no context to be found.
It was dressed all in grids, from the headers to base,
And the layout was tangled, all over the place.
Its line items twinkled, its formats looked right,
But Sums mixed with Lookups? A terror at night.
A SELECT on a list hiding deep in the code —
I winced, for such sin might cause Prod to explode.
The eyes of the client — how they started to glow!
Their emails like snowflakes began to bestow:
“Just one tiny change,” they said with a grin,
“Can we pivot fake time and add Climate back in?”
I spoke not a word, but went straight to my work,
Untangling logic where gremlins might lurk.
I duplicated modules, but lean, not obscene,
Then pushed all the logic to SYS, nice and clean.
I mapped each product level, from fine up to broad,
With booleans so tidy they made users applaud.
Each LOOKUP and SUM had a crisp single role,
No SELECTs in target, no rogue top-level goal.
The UX got reshaped with a deft little click,
I turned off the totals that recalced not quick.
Then context selectors—just one, not a herd—
Drove every dimension with one simple word.
The performance returned, every calc running fast,
No more stalling rollups like ghosts of the past.
And users exclaimed as they tested with glee,
“This page actually works how we thought it would be!”
I flipped to ALM with a satisfied sigh,
Compared Dev to Prod with a critical eye.
Then pressed “Create Revision,” with fingers crossed tight,
And deployed to Production that cold winter night.
The jobs all completed with nary a hitch,
Not one lonely error, not one broken switch.
And I stepped from my desk into winter’s soft light,
Breathing out a blessing for models done right:
“May your logic stay elegant, your futures bright—
Happy planning to all, and to all a good night!”
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2025 Certificate Maintenance for Certified Master Anaplanners
The 2025 Certified Master Anaplanner Program has begun and there's incredible opportunity for 2025 Certified Master Anaplanners (CMAs) to demonstrate their thought leadership, technical expertise, evangelism, and mentorship capabilities across the entire Anaplan Ecosystem!
At their core, a Certified Master Anaplanner is someone who elevates others in the Anaplan ecosystem through the many ways they share their expertise. They do this through their mentorship, sharing their community perspective and technical architecture thought leadership, demonstrating innovative solutions, providing product feature insight, ideating and inspiring others in the Anaplan Community to define the future of the platform, leading COE development, developing innovative roadmaps to scale the platform for business decision-making, and championing for Anaplan in the competitive market.
Engagement Zones
The 2025 Contribution Activities list is attached to this post, accessible for CMAs to download:
2025 CMA Contribution Activities.pdf
Each contribution activity is mapped to four engagement zones to understand and communicate how Certified Master Anaplanners are driving impact within the Anaplan ecosystem. As mentors, thought leaders, Connected Planning evangelists, and technical experts, Certified Master Anaplanners are critical to elevating the broad Anaplan ecosystem and driving immense value through the many ways they share their expertise!
Each engagement zone is important to the Certified Master Anaplanner Community, the entire Anaplan Ecosystem, and the Anaplan Community! Our goal in highlighting these zones is to give each of you, as Certified Master Anaplanners, the opportunity to easily align your experience and personality with activities that are best suited for you to make a significant impact in a particular area of the Anaplan ecosystem. To that end, we ask that you select an engagement zone to focus on for your primary contribution activities or choose the unique blend of engagement zone activities you want to be recognized for. Will you aim to be one of the few Certified Master Anaplanners who complete activities in all four engagement zones during 2025?
We will be taking an agile approach towards contributions in 2025; therefore, we will review this list at least quarterly and share new contribution activities throughout the year as we determine a need.
Certification Maintenance Requirements
Certified Master Anaplanners must meet two key requirements during 2025 to renew their certifications for 2025. Unsurprisingly, the 2025 requirements are reflective of similar requirements in place during 2024.
* Complete Contribution Activities for 400 points (due December 15th, 2025)* Questions about the Contribution Activity Requirement or Certified Master Anaplanner recertification status should be directed to MasterAnaplanners@Anaplan.com
* Complete Technical Requirement* Pass a recertification exam by December 31st, 2025 - no extensions will be approved. * The study guide and the recertification exam will become accessible on July 8th, 2025 (months earlier than the technical requirement has been accessible in prior years giving you more time to complete this requirement).
* Information on the recertification exam is available here: 2025 Recertification Information
* All Certified Master Anaplanners should see the Recertification Exam Registration Instructions course in the Anaplan Academy CMA Program Maintenance learning path on Anaplan Academy. * This short course walks you through how to register for and schedule your proctored exam step-by-step, and includes the registration code you'll need to register for the exam!
* Questions about the recertification exam should be directed to certification@anaplan.com<strong> </strong>
Also included again this year is the mid-year check-in requirement. The goal for this requirement is to create greater visibility into where and how Certified Master Anaplanners are contributing, as well as to assist Certified Master Anaplanners in proactively planning how they will attain contributions throughout the year.
There will be a mid-year check-in requirement for Certified Master Anaplanners to complete half (200 points) of the annual points requirement by July 31st, 2025, or ensure they have activities totaling 200 points lined up and confirmed by that date.
Please also read through the 2025 Certified Master Anaplanner Program Terms and Conditions.
2025_Certified_Master_Anaplanner_Terms_and_Conditions.pdf
If<em>you are a Certified Master Anaplanner who has any questions about the requirements for annual certification maintenance, your status, or how to engage, please email </em>MasterAnaplanners@Anaplan.com.
<em>If you are interested in the Certified Master Anaplanner Program and wish to learn more about how to become a Certified Master Anaplanner, please review the resources </em><em>here</em><em> and reach out to</em> Certificate@Anaplan.com <em>with any questions. </em>
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From trade promotions to profitability: A digital oath to revenue growth management
Author: Tingting Xia is a Certified Master Anaplanner, EPM Manager and Supply Chain practice lead in Keyrus with 8 years of Anaplan experiences. She has been leading and wrapping up a trade promotion planning solution at one of the top global breweries.
Client challenges prior using Anaplan
First and foremost, the massive data: both master (SKU properties, Banner attributes, pricing structure etc.) and transactional (history sales, commercial guidelines, costs, competitor data, etc.) needed by the client’s KAMs (Key Account Managers, those who oversee trade promotion planning) to conduct trade promotion planning sit in various source systems and come with high volume. It took the KAMs a lot of manual efforts to pull all those data and consolidate them in Excel spreadsheets. Therefore, the promotion planning was only done once a month, mismatching the fact that their promotions are running on a weekly basis. This has led to the lagging and inaccuracies in their promotion planning already.
The inevitable human errors, lack of traceability and auditability throughout the whole processes added to the inefficiencies and inaccuracies of the planning as well.
The Excel spreadsheet-based planning came with another issue whereby every KAM had their own way of planning with guesstimation. It became hard to justify the plan to the management should there be a problem. The whole planning practices were not standardized nor scalable.
Due to the limitation of Excel spreadsheets, there was no advanced data analytics or insights either: scenario simulation to understand various drivers’ impact on promotion outcomes, real-time insights to drive timely action to capture revenue, etc.
The solution roadmap in three releases
We decided to take a phased approach with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) design in mind and with an end state (link TPM to financial planning to realize revenue growth management) in vision. In this way, we do not flood the KAMs with seemingly endless of discussions, loads of transformations but not seeing a working product in a short time. We guaranteed shorter time to value and earned their trust to guide them step by step away from their excel templates but on to adopting Anaplan.
Release 1
The MVP covers the listed basic functionalities below to remove the manual data consolidation time from the KAMs, automate their products’ baseline forecast with statistical models and standardize their promotion planning practices.
* Datahub: set up data integration with various data sources, perform data checks and then push relevant data into TPM model. With this, Anaplan becomes the single source of truth for the KAMs whenever they need raw data.
* Statistical baseline forecast by SKU by Banner by Week based on weekly history sales. A suite of statistical methods is developed to cater to different products’ selling pattern from simple ones: MA, DMA to sophisticated ones: Winters Additive, Winters Multiplicative, Ensemble, etc. Our final best fit method gives a forecast error as low as 2-3%. This has hugely improved their baseline planning accuracy compared to their old way of applying MA on their past 6 months sales on monthly bucket and then just flat average into weekly bucket.
* Standardized promotion creation template and mass creation (“copy-paste”) capability. We defined how a promotion should be created inside Anaplan properly following the same template across all KAMs to ensure consistency. Error prompt messages and security lock features are also developed to ensure planning accuracy. Instead of being only able to create promotion one by one, we also developed a feature which in layman term called “copy-paste”. It allows the KAMs to select one created promotion and then mass create it into the indicated future period carrying all the planned parameters like promotion price, uplift volume, discount offered etc. This saves the KAMs a lot of time when similar promotions are planned to run in a repetitive pattern into the future.
* Promotion calendar with detailed price and volume view. We custom-built a promotion calendar view instead of just using Anaplan NUX’s Gauntt chart feature because the client wanted more to be displayed in the calendar itself. The KAMs are now able to view their promotions vividly and intuitively in a chart-like view but also contains the detailed information they want to see.
Release 2
Release 2 solution focused on the commercial side of trade promotion planning and more advanced planning features. We standardized client’s pricing structure and price waterfall planning, set up commercial guidelines management and linked it to promotions, automated approval workflow and developed scenario simulation playground for KAMs to simulate how their promotion plan will change if they change their discount, price point, etc.
* Pricing waterfall: Master pricing structure was cleansed from their source SAP systems, keeping only relevant parameters going to TPM price planning. Specific pricing structure changes at SKU x Banner level due to client’s business nature. With this, KAMs can plan their products’ prices at the lowest granularity across weeks from Shelf Price to Net 3 accounting for relevant cost factors in between. Waterfall charts are used to visualize this Shelf Price to Net 3 evolvement to make price planning and each cost factors impact more intuitive and straightforward.
* Commercial guideline management: commercial terms are the pricing rules (i.e. minimum price, max discount, etc. allowed to offer for a specific SKU on promotion) for different depths of promotions across SKU and Banner. This was not properly set up and hence not strictly enforced during KAMs’ promotion planning in Excel era due to the level of granularity and multi-dimensionality it requires. With Anaplan, the commercial guidelines can be mass uploaded or fine tune via NUX direct interaction with ease. System automatic alert message then will be displayed should there be a breach of commercial guidelines when KAMs are planning their promotions.
* Approval workflow: Anaplan’s native workflow is set up with two main purposes. Firstly, the KAMs will submit promotions that are outside of commercial guidelines but the KAMs deem them necessary to achieve for example revenue, depleting aging stock goals etc. to their management for review and accept or reject. Secondly, review of commercial guidelines will be done in a regular basis to cater to changing business and market dynamics. If any revision for commercial guidelines is needed, then this revision will be submitted to higher management for review and approval. Approval workflow plays a critical role to facilitate, automate and make the whole trade promotion planning process auditable.
* Simulation playground: There are three types of simulation capability built for the client to cater to their different what-if analysis requirements.* Market share percentage simulation: Our client has access to competitors’ sales data at product category level with which historical market share percentage can then be derived coupled with client’s own history sales data. With this knowledge, we built market share percentage simulation for KAMs to simulate forecasted volume based on different target market share percentages at Category, Banner and Week level. Category level simulated percentages will be cascaded down to SKU level to simulate SKU level forecast volume. The simulated forecast volume will connect to below two types of simulations to form a wholistic simulation outcomes on financial impact.
* Promotion parameters simulation: This capability allows the KAMs to play around with promotion parameters like promo price, discount, scan, promo volume etc. to see their impact on financial outcomes in terms of Revenue, GDM, ROI, Customer Margin.
* Pricing simulation: Pricing simulation playground allows the KAMs to simulate different cost / expense factors from Shelf Price to the final Net 3 and eventually their impact on financial outcomes. Additionally, there is a “goal-seek” functionality built whereby the KAMs input their desired NIS (Net into Store) price and Anaplan calculates backwards what the Cycle Discount will be to achieve that target NIS.
All fore-mentioned simulations are connected to promotion planning and therefore generates a wholistic TPM planning scenarios from volume to financials. KAMs or management can then compare the different outcomes across scenarios and make informed decisions on commercial planning as well as final promotion planning.
Release 3
Release 3 solution is to link trade promotion planning outcome to financial planning and analytics and management reporting so that the management team can view the real-time financial outcomes based on KAMs’ updates in planning and hence aide their decision-making. In this release, P&L report together with other key management reports (S&OP, Market share) are developed integrating actualized financial data from the client’s ERP system and forward-looking planning data inside Anaplan. Key managerial KPIs like Revenue/HL, GDM (Net Profit)/HL, YoY (Year over Year), YTD (Year to Date), YTG (Year to Go), etc. in terms of both monetary values and volume are also at the fingertips of the executives.
* P&L report: P&L report is built by SKU, Banner, Week, covering both actualized data & forecast data. It links finalized (meaning after simulation) baseline forecast, price planning and promotion planning to churn out the final report, showing the management the evolution from Gross Revenue, cost / expense items in between, Net Revenue and then finally to GDM. It auto-refreshes once there is a change in the underlying planning. Therefore, whenever the KAMs report to their management, they are always referring to the latest updated planning. No more reporting on outdated data and then the KAMs take another probably half-day if being asked “how about now?” question.
* S&OP report: S&OP report definition by the client reports on volume (both actual and forecasted) in terms of both Hectoliter (HL) and Consumer Unit (CU) and final Revenue/HL by SKU by Banner across both history and future periods. It is a more concise management report dedicated to higher management for them to have a quick understanding on both volume and revenue.
* Actualizations vs Plan Summary: This report allows the management to review key metrics like Volume HL, Revenue, GDM, etc. comparing actuals vs what has been forecasted and planned inside Anaplan. Key comparison metrics like YoY, YTD, YTG are also implemented to give the management an overview of how the business is performing at a quick glance.
Summary
It has been a fulfilling 15-month journey with the client and the solution has helped the client to minimize manual work, changed their once-a-month planning to run weekly or even real-time, added science and advanced analytics to their planning instead of human guesstimation, improved their revenue planning accuracy to as high as over 95%, automated the whole process from data management to final management reporting onto Anaplan. No more crunching numbers in Excel; no more taking 4 hours to address management question on profitability, etc. Every step now is handled systematically and updated real time inside Anaplan with traceable auditability. The linkage from basic trade promotion planning to financial planning & analytics helped the client to truly transform and digitalize their revenue growth management.
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How I Built It: Codebreaker game in Anaplan
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:
https://play.vidyard.com/4rWNr9rRHuPtyhKNokW3Ah
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.
Code Breaker Game - Line Items.xlsx
Enjoy!
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Anaplan Connect, automation, and AI
Author: Steven Kraplin is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Senior Financial Analyst at The MathWorks.
Anaplan Connect is an Anaplan native tool designed to facilitate automation leveraging Anaplan’s API. Combined with a scheduling tool, this allows for bulk processing of data with limited to no touch points. Recently, Anaplan Connect has become so much more for us.
Background
We’ve long been using Anaplan to facilitate calculation of inter-company transactions and push results of those calculations back into our ERP. While leveraging Anaplan significantly reduced processing time, it still required admin hands-on interaction with the model and the ERP. Due to the nature of the workday this resulted in a global timing impact.
As we explored automating our inter-company processes, we had identified that to interact with Anaplan we’d need to leverage new paid tools, existing tools from other teams, or Anaplan Connect. Purchasing a new tool was out of the question, and working with external teams would have extended the scope and length of the overall project. We realized that Anaplan Connect, with some innovation, could be the appropriate tool for the job.
Through investigation we realized that we would be able to achieve everything we needed through Batch/PowerShell scripts and design a complete end-to-end process with no human touch points. Anaplan Connect is primarily utilized through Batch scripts, but we were able to incorporate its use entirely through PowerShell which grants more modern commands, and we are able to utilize unique functions to be able to call Anaplan Connect as needed throughout the process.
At a high-level, we were able to leverage PowerShell script to:
* Automated token generation, report execution and process scheduling within ERP
* Perform file clean up and quality checks before import into Anaplan
* Run Anaplan processes and exports via Anaplan Connect
* Parse/update files, send notifications and kick off external workflows in ERP, Anaplan and internal reporting tools
Leveraging PowerShell and Anaplan Connect allowed us to create a singular process that we’re able to easily monitor with the proper error checks while keeping everything secure using certificates/tokens for system access. By layering a scheduling tool and error checks we’re able to remove human interaction with the inter-company calculation process entirely and run it off-hours so that users have access to the necessary.
AI as Co-Pilot
We’re seeing Anaplan beginning to leverage AI for model design. As part of the project, we tapped into our existing AI tools like ChatGPT and MS CoPilot to explore API endpoints, design error handing strategies and controls, and review and optimize our script(s).
This allowed us to parse massive amounts of written Oracle and Anaplan information, especially in areas where documentation was sparse or the use case was unique. There are many new use cases for us to leverage Anaplan Connect to import more data consistently into Anaplan as we were able to convert many of the scripts written into functions in PowerShell that we can now call with limited/no code changes.
Final thoughts and recommendations
Anaplan Connect is a powerful tool that can drive automation strategies. For us, it turned a manual workflow into a seamless, secure and scalable process and we look forward to leveraging Anaplan Connect more in the coming year(s) as a flexible alternative to other options.
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End user documentation made easy with Anaplan
Author: Hillary Sich is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Senior Manager at Accenture.
Do you actually enjoy creating end user documentation for the models we build? Are you creating end user documentation as a Word document with multiple screen shots per page? If so, then this article is NOT for you!
Why not leverage Anaplan for end user documentation?
Pros:
* Never outdated
* Faster to create than word docs with screen shots
* Minimal model building
* Minimal impact on model size
Cons:
* Be aware of Report Manager display limitations
* Must be built within the Model where the App pages live if you want to be able to link pages
* Forces detail instructions on App Pages
Not convinced? I am not offended!
Here is what you need to build the documentation:
Three lists
* Pages (Create a list of pages to document)
* Activities (What can be done on the page)
* Topics (What to include on the documentation page such as Role, Purpose, etc)
Six modules
* Three properties modules, one for each list
* Topics x Page
* Activities x Page
Three UX Pages
* Page details
* User documentation set up
* Report Manager as output
Still interested?
Here are the Blueprints…
DOC01: Page Properties
DOC02: Topic Properties
DOC03: Activities Properties
DOC04: Topics by Page
DOC05: Global Documentation
DOC06: Activities by Page (Used only for filtering in UX)
What is that? About 15 minutes of build time? Totally worth it!
Use your imagination when creating the three UX pages (no screenshots here).
UX 1: Page details: More of an end user page to input details to include in the output Page. Include links to model flows, Page links, Text for Purpose and activities, etc.
UX 2: User documentation setup: More of an Admin page to maintain lists.
UX 3: Main output of all of your hard work. Here is a short lists of slides that could be included:
Slides 1-5 are examples of global information.
Slide 7 is used as a landing page with links to pages by App category
.
Slide example dimensioned by Page:
End user documentation is an important and valuable deliverable for all clients. Leveraging Anaplan to produce maintainable, professional documentation is now easier than ever!
What tips would you add? Leave a comment!
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Accessible by design: Our new accommodations for certification exams
Taking a proctored exam can be intimidating, even for the most seasoned professionals. While certification validates a learner’s skills and expertise, the exam environment itself can sometimes pose unnecessary barriers.
Our goal is to test your ability, not your endurance. That’s why we’ve made significant updates to make our exam experience more inclusive and less stressful. You can now utilize a range of accommodations, including extended time, assistive technology, comfort items, and access to resources like Anapedia, to create an environment that helps you perform your best.
The goal of the recent modifications we championed was simple but meaningful: to ensure that Anaplan certification exams focus on measuring skills and knowledge, not how well someone navigates a test under pressure. By introducing thoughtful accommodations into the standard exam experience, we’re creating a more inclusive, equitable, and learner-centered certification journey.
Why these modifications matter
We know that a proctored environment can create discomfort, distractions, and stress. Our vision is to make sure that every learner, regardless of their personal circumstances or needs, can approach the exam with confidence and focus on demonstrating what they know.
The changes are designed to minimize avoidable friction during the exam process, support accessibility, and ensure that we uphold the integrity of the certification while honoring diverse learning and testing needs.
What’s now part of the standard certification exam experience
The following accommodations are now available to all learners taking an Anaplan certification exam online. Users that take the exam in-person will NOT receive the same accommodations.
* Access to specific Anaplan learning resources like Anaplan Planual, Anaplan Community, and Anaplan Anapedia.
* Physical whiteboard usage is allowed with clear security protocols: no pen and paper, and the board must be shown erased before ending the session.
* IMPORTANT: Please note that pens and paper are not allowed during exam taking to prevent any questions from leaking and to protect the integrity of the exam.
* Extended exam times for those who need more processing time
* Use of medical devices, ensuring health needs don’t become barriers
* Music or ambient sounds in the background to help ease anxiety
* Leniency with eye-tracking requirements, recognizing natural movements and accessibility needs
* Breaks as needed
* Comfort items (will be coordinated with the proctor during exam taking)
* Comfort or service animals to support learners with disabilities
* Drinks and water, so staying hydrated isn’t a privilege
* Permission to move around/stretch, reducing physical strain during long sessions
* Screen reader or text-to-speech support for those who benefit from auditory processing
* Assistive technology such as magnifiers, dictation tools, or alternative input devices
Putting learners first while protecting exam integrity
Each accommodation was carefully considered to balance accessibility and security. This ensures that candidates have the flexibility they need without compromising the credibility of their certification.
This change isn’t just operational; it’s cultural. It reflects our commitment to meeting learners where they are, fostering trust in the certification process, and empowering every candidate to succeed based on merit.
Looking ahead
These modifications are just the beginning. As we continue to evolve the certification program, we’ll keep listening to feedback, removing barriers, and driving improvements that make the experience fair, inclusive, and supportive for all.
Certification should reflect what someone knows, not how well they adapt to discomfort. And now, we’re one step closer to making that a reality.
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