October 2023 Community Member Spotlight: Anirudh Nayak
Let's celebrate @anirudh as our featured Member Spotlight for October! He has been in the Anaplan Community for over six years, a Group leader for our India Community Group, and recently appointed Anaplan Community Boss! Continue reading to get to know Anirudh and his Anaplan journey, expertise, and Community contributions. Fun fact – he has over 430 comments in Community!
About Anirudh
We asked Anirudh about his background and history with Anaplan. Here’s what we learned!
I started my career with Anaplan in 2017 after graduating as a Chartered Accountant. My fascination with automation began early in my career when I realized how much time and effort could be saved by streamlining processes. I'm always on the lookout for opportunities to automate repetitive tasks, so when I had the opportunity to work in consulting for Anaplan, it was a match made in heaven. Since then, I’ve co-founded Elite EPM and am leading solution delivery for Anaplan services.
We asked Anirudh a few questions to get to know him.
Please share an Anaplan success story you’re proud of.
I’ve worked with several partners and almost 10 different clients. It’s quite difficult to pick a single success story 😊
The broader theme I’ve noticed is that when Anaplan finally clicks for end users, and they can’t get enough of Anaplan and enhancement requests keep rolling in one after the other.
I enjoy helping customers adopt the latest and greatest features that Anaplan releases. I led the effort at one of our customers to completely transform their classic UX to NUX with all the bells and whistles enabled (including management reporting) and that saved dozens of hours. At another customer, they had an advanced self-service BI solution and were struggling with Anaplan adoption due to slow refresh times from Anaplan to the BI layer. I helped them use the excellent transactional APIs and optimized all the exports, that reduced refresh times from half an hour to less than a minute. In general, watching Anaplan adoption soar is a treat!
I’m currently working on Polaris POCs and excited for DMS and upcoming platform updates. It’s rewarding to watch Anaplan go from a platform to a full-fledged ecosystem and the opportunities it unlocks at each customer.
Please share something you can teach about Anaplan – any tips and tricks you’d like to highlight?
Did you know Anaplan supports OAuth 2.0 for external applications? It’s a superior way of authentication and even SSO enabled workspaces can use authorization code based authentication flows. So, there’s no need to create exception users anymore! It also saves the hassle of having to rotate passwords/certificates and is much more secure as OAuth credentials can be revoked from within Anaplan.
Learning and interacting with Anaplan APIs is an excellent add-on to a model builder’s skillset. It enables automating a lot of things from outside of Anaplan itself. I would like to point to this Postman resource to help get started:
I am also working on publishing a Jupyter notebook which self-documents API runs and gives users instant feedback.
What do you enjoy about the Anaplan Community?
As someone who grew up with early 2000s internet, forums like Stack OverFlow were a big part of my online time. I always admired the moderators, admins, and community leaders and their dedication and willingness to keep the community’s content as high quality as possible. In 2017 when the Anaplan Community forum had very few members, I enjoyed answering technical questions and helping other model builders. Since then, the Community has exploded in size, and I have interacted with so many great folks! It’s always a pleasure to collect badges, take part in the new Community challenges, and watch How-To videos from other experts. I also enjoy reading about other model builders experiences with Anaplan in their specific organization.
I am honored to have been recognized as a Community Boss for three years, including being recently appointed to the new, re-imagined Community Boss program in 2023. My enthusiasm for the community's future remains unwavering! I am thrilled to share that I've also been chosen as the Group Leader for the newly launched India Community Group, adding another exciting chapter to my journey.
October is Global Diversity Awareness Month, and we'd love to share an aspect of your culture! Tradition, recipe, etc. — share with the Community!
Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of South Indian filter coffee, or as we affectionately call it, "Kaapi." The coffee beans are a mix of dark roasted coffee beans usually Arabica as well as chicory (75:25 mix is my favourite). The ground coffee and chicory blend goes into a traditional metal coffee filter, where hot water slowly percolates through the grounds. This is then served with hot, frothy milk and sweetened to liking. Best served after piping hot after breakfast!
…..We hope you enjoyed learning more about Anirudh in this month’s Community Member Spotlight. Thank you, Anirudh, for being an outstanding Community contributor and advocate!
Want to learn more about our Community Member Spotlight series? Check out this post.
Do you know someone in the Community who you think should be featured in a Community Member Spotlight? We want to hear about it — please nominate them here.