Author: Reena Sethy is a Principal Product Manager at Anaplan.
In today’s rapidly changing business scenario, organizations need the ability to make faster, accurate decisions to stay relevant. As organizations grow, their data landscape often becomes quite complex and disparate. This makes it more difficult to derive real-time data driven business insights from planning.
Anaplan Data Orchestrator (ADO) addresses this key challenge to help bridge the gap between data and insights from the planning models. One of its key features, is it’s out of the box transformation capabilities. This enables users to enrich data efficiently for Anaplan planning scenarios, without relying on external tools or complex scripting.
What is Anaplan Data Orchestrator?
Anaplan Data Orchestrator is a data management tool designed to streamline data ingestion, transformation and dissemination within Anaplan ecosystem. It allows users to schedule and manage data preparation through an intuitive and centralized approach across the planning process.
Native data transformations in ADO
Traditionally, data preparation took more than 60 % of the model builders time and required use of third-party ETL tools and model building expertise. With ADO, data transformation can be accomplished without any coding or complex tooling, making model builders much more efficient and reducing total time to value. This also simplifies the number of tools required to prepare your data by reducing overall total cost of ownership. Refer Figure 1, an example screenshot for ADO transformation view.
Figure 1
Let’s look at a use case of demand planning. Typical data for this would be sales history, seasonality, data from CRM systems, and promotions etc. Could also involve getting data on weather and market conditions. Which means users need to gather data from different systems or exports from local csv/Excel files, do the required cleaning to address incomplete records, or remove duplicate data, then unify the SKUs or product hierarchy and location codes etc. Often spend days standardizing the units and formats of the variety of data, preparing it for the right structure for planning through time, geo dimensions and aggregating to provide daily or weekly or monthly views. In this process, also required to do data validations making sure the data is accurate, consistent and complete, so the planning outcome is trustworthy.
With Anaplan Data Orchestrator, users can accomplish all the data transformations within hours. It allows users to apply transformations — such as filtering, joining, mapping, and aggregating through a simple UI. Refer Figure 2 below.
Figure 2
This no-code approach empowers business users and analysts to work directly with the data. Anaplan’s transformations are built for planning use cases. It provides a collection of relevant functions which can be included in the formulas to make the data planning-ready. For ex. CURRENTTIMESTAMP returns the current date and time, DAYSINMONTH returns the number of days in the year and month you specify, IS_WHITESPACE returns a boolean value (True or False) to indicate whether the expression contains only spaces or other invisible characters, TRIM removes all leading and trailing spaces, and extra spaces between words in a text string.
You can align data formatting, dimensional hierarchies, and reconcile naming conventions very easily. It also provides a data lineage map which means you maintain visibility into how data is modified along the pipeline. This level of transparency not only supports data governance but also helps in troubleshooting and finding impacted models in case of any upstream changes. Whether you’re handling a few thousand rows or millions of rows, you can easily disseminate the data transformations to the planning engine with a click of a button, reducing end to end planning time and effort.
The data transformation capabilities in ADO reduces the need for third-party tools and streamlines the journey from source systems to planning models. Enterprises can take faster decisions, improve data accuracy & trust. They can adapt to changes across business functions quickly. It’s an essential tool to unlock the full value of data through planning.
As we continue to evolve ADO, you can expect increased support for additional external data sources, and more automated transformations through integration with AI/ML models and a truly connected planning experience across the business functions.
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