Enable Specialized Layout / Filtering in UX that Avoids Using Booleans

Planners and managers contribute to the planning in multiple ways in Anaplan solutions, entering numerical values, text entries, boolean business decisions like yes/no/approved… etc. Such users have contribution licenses to have the right to use Anaplan and contribute accordingly. Some other users are intended to be "read-only", only viewing the plan in Anaplan, looking at the information as reports, not entering business decisions into the plan. Companies need to limit these users' configuration to read access to the modules, so that these users do not contribute to the plan and thus require contribution licenses.

The challenge is that in some companies' Anaplan solutions the team has built reports with specialized layout or filtering options - ones that are currently beyond the capabilities in the Anaplan UX layer. Sometimes the solution implemented is one in which users are prompted to select boolean values in the UX screen, and then the underlying model adapts the data layout or filters to the underlying output module, so that the resulting report displays in the way that user selected.

Thus, the user who intends to "view" the plan has "contributed" to the model, even though the intent was just to impact the view in the UX, not to contribute to the business decisions.

The request is to enhance the Anaplan UX with more flexible layout/ filtering capability so that it is possible for the implementation team to enable such specialized filtering or layout solutions in such a way that the platform does not track that as a contribution.

I defer to the Anaplan Product team to determine the technical approach to support this requirement, but the ideal approach would be

  1. Improve the UX capabilities to allow such specialized filtering / display settings in such a way that does not require the implementation team to build underlying modules to determine the UX output. This would elimate the problem and also save space in the underlying model. Thus this is preferred.

Multiple customers have implemented such specialized layout / filtering solutions, and this impacts all end users who use or view these UX pages, every time they use these pages.

There are numerous examples of such specialized solutions which currently involve users setting booleans. Here is one where users can determine the time periods to show in different years.

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Comments

  • Well formulated Philip! Hope to see this enhancement implemented to the UX. Would be of great value to get a more correct and fair classification of contributors/viewers.

  • Someone might suggest, that "perhaps the commercials could be tweaked just a tiny bit to let Read-Only Users filter line items." 😎

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