Planning whole units by a curve

Hi. We have a requirement, in which the customer wants to plan a given number of units to be sold by a monthly curve, in which you only have to plan whole units, i.e I have 45 units and the % of the curve in Jan 23 is 3.45%, so the units to be planned in Jan 23 should be 2 instead of 1.55 (the result of multiplying 45 * 3.45%). The issue is that if you round the value every month, at the end you end up planning not the 45 units but more or less.

We made a mock up in Excel of a possible mathematical solution, but when we try to put it in Anplan, it gives us circular reference

More than asking about the circular reference, is if there is a known way or what should be the way to be able to plan the units and that Anaplan makes and adjustment so that at the end you don't exceed or miss units to plan

I attach the excel with the mathematical difference if you can check it

Community_PlanningWholeUnits_153904.xlsx

Accepted answers

anikdas

Hi @danielpena

I have seen different approaches taken by different businesses - some go for an higher estimation, some lower estimation, some are happy with the rounding as is. There is no right or wrong answer rather different methods are suited for different business scenarios.

The approach that you have taken makes sense as it minimizes going over or under by a significant amount. I had made few tweaks to make it work and get around circular reference. See if this helps:

Final result: 0.04 differential

Blueprint View

All comments

anikdas

Hi @danielpena

The approach that you have taken makes sense as it minimizes going over or under by a significant amount. I had made few tweaks to make it work and get around circular reference. See if this helps:

Final result: 0.04 differential

Blueprint View

jasonblinn

@danielpena I was able to achieve a similar solution, but to @anikdas point there are multiple ways to solve this and it really depends on the business case, where you want the higher or lower number of whole units to fall.

For my solution, I used the Modulus formula, which is one of my favorites! It essentially tells you what the remainder of a division equation is.

Here is how it looks in grid view:

And here it is from Blueprint:

Essentially the Mod Line is diving the Units by 1 and then keeping the remainder, and then adding that remainder to the next period.

Just a different approach to find a similar answer.

Jason

danielpena

It does help!

We were getting the circular reference because we were using CUMULATE instead of accumulating with PREVIOUS. I don't know why we didn't try that...

Anyway, thank you for your help!

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