Year in review: My 5 favorite 2024 Anaplan releases

Chad114499
Chad114499
in Blog
Image: 2024 highlights

Author: Chad Frantz is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Senior Technical Associate at Alpha FMC.

Here we are at the end of another year. A perfect time to look back and reflect on what’s happened and where things are going. As we’ve become accustomed to in the Anaplan environment, that includes looking at the updates and continued improvements to the platform. These updates review new tools for model builders to be aware of and to consider when developing their solutions. This includes not only looking at features they’re familiar with, but also maybe an entirely new addition or an upgrade to less commonly used features that they can utilize to enhance their models.

Below are five updates from 2024 that I’d like to take a moment to reflect on together.

Anaplan Data Orchestrator

ADO is probably the biggest update of 2024. With this tool, solution architects and model builders can re-visualize the data foundations behind almost every model and transform it into a more user-friendly and intuitive data management tool without the need to design and build a model specifically to house data.

Key advantages to using ADO include: the ability to validate and transform form data, more efficient storage of data, flow of data, and the reduced need for experienced model builders to set up and maintain data in ADO. Below is some additional information for each:

  • Validate and transform data: Transformation views are the mechanism ADO uses to push data to models, and can be used to complete regular data maintenance that has been historically done in a data hub model, such as removing duplicate entries from source data, or joining datasets to create a complete and comprehensive view of the data for export.
  • More efficient storage of data: Data is stored at the tenant level. Allowing for easier communication of data to models across workspaces and allows for a higher volume of data to be stored.
  • Flow of data: Data pushes out to spoke models rather than each model pulling data independently, allowing users to push the most current information out to all models simultaneously and ensure all models and all users are working with the same information.
  • Reduced need for experienced model builders: ADO is designed to be utilized by an integration administrator and to function more like a standard data management tool. This means data can be handled by a model administrator and doesn’t require experienced model builders to develop a data hub.

These are just a few of the improvements ADO can bring to the Anaplan experience and highly recommend reviewing the ADO course in the Learning Center if you haven’t already.

UX: Commenting on worksheet pages (September)

The native commentary functionality in Anaplan can be a very useful way for teams to communicate within the platform and leave relevant context for themselves and others. Now this functionality is available on worksheet formatted UX pages as well. This includes viewing at the page level, any comments on the worksheet grid or any grids used in the Additional Insights section. This commentary aligns to specific context selections allowing for a range of commentary targeted for specific intersections of dimensions and for specific users. Users can be tagged to a comment to ensure that they receive a notification and an email related to a message meant for them to review or take action on.

UX: Reordering categories and pages in app (September)

The contents page in the app now allows for more flexible categorization of pages. Previously, it was standard practice to use alphanumeric naming of each page to identify categorization and sequencing. Builders have likely fielded questions from users as to why each page required this code and found it unnecessary or confusing. Now the pages can be ordered to the users’ desires and don’t require the coding for sequencing. This should give users a cleaner presentation that fits with their expectations.

UX: Conditional formatting and rich text

The ability to add conditional formatting to text and rich text (bold, italic, underline, etc.) is a nice addition to the UX. This can be very handy when trying to guide end users’ attention to look at specific data points or to follow a workflow of a process by drawing attention to key words or metrics. Model builders could even color code metrics or grids to align to color coding in instructions to make the flow even easier to follow.

User list enhancements

Back in February, Anaplan updated the user list to enable a top level. This is very helpful functionality to review and summarize items across users in the model. This can be used in many cases, but a common use case this can help with is process management within Anaplan. In this scenario, there might be multiple users required for inputs or review of something like sales planning where multiple representatives roll up to a region or department. Using summary in these cases allows users to check the status of these such processes without any additional build in the model. In addition to that, the Users list contains all the standard list functionality like subsets and will show as a list along with all of the other lists in General Lists.

Conclusion

These are just a few of my personal highlights, but highly encourage all Anaplanners to review this years’ updates and keep up with the monthly announcements to best utilize the new features coming regularly to the platform. At the time of this writing, we recently received the announcement of Anaplan Intelligence and Anaplan CoPlanner and are eagerly anticipating more information on these new features coming soon!

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