How I Built It: Integrating Hierarchy Cards, Anaplan Connect, and Outlook

Author: Kamal Verma is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Solution Lead at Accordion.

Hello Anaplanner Community!

I am excited to participate in my second ‘How I Built It’ tutorial. Many clients want to be informed via an email notification when changes occur in their models.

This video will present one method to extend the functionality of Hierarchy Cards and Anaplan Connect to integrate with Outlook to automate approval notifications. This ‘How I Built It’ tutorial provides the high-level steps for a model builder to configure Anaplan to export a CSV file which can be used by a VBS script to email approval changes to relevant end-users.

Key features:

  1. Display employee attributes and approval status within a hierarchy card.
  2. Utilize a job scheduler to run an Anaplan Connect job, create an export file, and run a VBS script.
  3. Utilize Anaplan Connect to export a CSV containing the email recipient, email subject, and email body to be transmitted when changes occur.
  4. Utilize a VBS file to call a local Outlook instance to generate an email notification with the appropriate details.

Leave a comment if you have questions!

P.S. Check out my other ‘How I Built It’ here on Extending LISS capabilities.