January 2024 Community Member Spotlight: Tristan Silverio
We are thrilled to kick off 2024 with our latest Community Member Spotlight, @TristanS ! Tristan has been part of the Anaplan ecosystem for the last eight years and an active contributor in the Community for nearly seven years. Continue reading to get to know Tristan, his inspiring Anaplan journey, and contributions below!
About Tristan
We asked Tristan about his background and history with Anaplan. Here’s what we learned!
My journey started in 2016 when I joined an Anaplan project as a Business Analyst. A few months after the project started, our Anaplan Model Builder left and I got concerned over the viability of the project given the project’s leadership didn’t signify any intention to replace the model builder. To mitigate the risk of the project being discontinued, I taught myself model building and ended up building three end-to-end integrated models, and became the project’s Anaplan lead. Today, I am a Solution Architect for Cornerstone Performance Management, delivering Connected Planning solutions for our clients.
We asked Tristan a few questions to get to know him.
Please share an Anaplan success story you’re proud of.
Two projects come to mind:
1. Development of Material Requirement Planning (MRP) for blood processing, which is the first of its kind Anaplan IP. The inherent nature of transforming raw blood material into a finished product has the capacity to give rise to various manufactured goods, contingent upon key driving variables. It involved understanding a lot of mathematical and product derivation calculations which was a great challenge that I implemented in the client’s Supply Planning Application.
2. Trade Promotions Management (TPM) application for one of the world’s largest wine companies evaluated by an independent third party as a best in class solution. The solution covered the full end-to-end life cycle of promotions management starting from Top-down and Bottom-up volume planning, promotions creation, promotion tracking to promotion financial claims and accruals. Due to the size and breadth of functionality, products, customers, and geography covered, I had to develop creative solutions to address risks and issues associated with model size and performance.
Please share something you can teach about Anaplan — any tips and tricks you’d like to highlight?
One word: “Polaris”. While working on the TPM application, our client requested a five dimension bubble chart report. We were developing the solution in Anaplan Classic, but had to abandon development when we realized it would use up too much workspace. A few months after the solution went live, I started performing some R&D using Polaris. Out of curiosity I wanted to see how Polaris faired against the implemented bubble chart report. On Polaris, I ended up with a 360 billion cell module. That’s at least 300 Gb of space used if built on Classic, but on Polaris … it consumed less than 1 Gb! Before sharing my findings there were a few in my team that perceived Polaris with reservations and reluctance. After sharing my findings, it converted them to advocates and our company is now looking at utilizing Polaris for projects that fit the right profile for the platform. During my R&D, there is one limitation on Polaris though that I found which I have given feedback to Anaplan — it doesn’t work well with Gantt charts when the underlying module for the Gantt chart has multiple dimensions.
What do you enjoy about the Anaplan Community?
The Community provides a real-world lens to problems and solutions we encounter in Anaplan. One problem can have ten potential solutions. Out of the ten, best practice guides from Planual and available articles from Anaplan may narrow it down to three. You can leverage on the Community’s previous experiences to give real world insight on the pros and cons of the remaining three options to narrow it down to one. In some instances, the Community might even give you an 11th solution you had not considered.
What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
The best piece of advice I’ve ever had was from the movies 😊. It’s a recurring theme you see a lot, all the way from sci-fi to romance movies, but doesn’t get mentioned a lot. The advice is “paranoia is self-fulfilling”. Emotionally driven risk mitigation are catalysts for issue eventuation. Take "Avengers Age of Ultron" as example: Tony Stark was so scared someone will come to destroy the world, that he created Ultron. We all know how that ended! Then you get tons of movies about actions overzealous partners/parents do to hold on to their loved ones and it is the result of those actions lead their loved ones to leave them. So before you act on your fears think twice.
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We hope you enjoyed learning more about Tristan in this month’s Community Member Spotlight. Thank you, Tristan, for being an outstanding Community contributor and advocate!
Interested in learning more about our Community Member Spotlight series? Check out this post.
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