Author: Miki Sato is a Product Manager, Product Management Team (Data Management) at Anaplan.
Inconsistent KPIs, scattered data exports, and disconnected BI tools slow down business decisions. This blog highlights how Anaplan’s data and modeling capabilities — especially through Data Orchestrator (ADO) and Polaris Calculation Engine — enable governed, consistent, and scalable reporting. By connecting data orchestration, high-performance modeling, and flexible reporting, Anaplan delivers trusted insights without over-reliance on external BI platforms.
1. The modern reporting challenge
Reports built in BI tools are everywhere. But when they rely on ad-hoc exports or manually reconciled data, confidence drops. Anaplan addresses this by serving as a governed, traceable, and real-time source of truth — integrated across your analytics stack.
2. What makes Anaplan reporting ready?
At the heart of Anaplan’s reporting strength are its data management and calculation engines:
- Governed and fresh data, aligned across planning and reporting
- Reusable, traceable KPIs to ensure trust in logic
- Transparent metadata for easier discovery and usage
- Integration with BI tools while preserving business meaning
- Workflow-driven accountability and auditability
These capabilities are already available in today’s platform.
3. What you can do today in Anaplan
- Orchestrate data with ADO: Connect to Snowflake, Databricks, and other cloud platforms using native connectors. Transform store data as the data catalog, and schedule automated data pushes into Anaplan — ensuring consistent, governed inputs for planning and reporting.
- Governed modeling with Polaris: Leverage Anaplan’s high-speed, multidimensional Polaris engine to calculate KPIs in real-time, across complex business structures. Polaris ensures:
- Alignment between planning logic and BI metrics
- Reliable performance across large datasets
- Consistent results, even with high dimensionality
- Real-time reporting in UX: Use Pages, Worksheets, and Management Reporting to explore and present KPIs, all powered by the logic and data managed by ADO and Polaris.
- Excel-native reporting via Anaplan XL: Build up-to-date reports in Excel with live model data, ideal for spreadsheet-centric operational flows.
- Workflow for process governance: Support data accountability by assigning tasks, tracking review status, and ensuring audit-ready steps are followed before reporting.
- Built-in data governance: Catalog data flows with ADO, enforce role-based access controls across models and reports, and trace lineage through job history and Polaris-driven logic.
Current reporting architecture of Anaplan
Anaplan connects external data, model-based logic, and reporting tools through governed orchestration and calculation layers.
4. Still evolving
As we expand governance capabilities, a few areas are still maturing, including (but not limited to):
- No centralized catalog for business term ownership/versioning
- No custom KPI builder UI (formulas must be built in models or ADO)
- BI tools can’t directly access business metadata
- Cross-model KPI filtering requires pre-blended datasets
These are active areas of investment, and improvements are already under way.
5. Why ADO and Polaris matter
- Trust the logic: KPIs built with Polaris reflect planning logic, not reverse-engineered BI metrics.
- Data reliability: ADO ensures your source data is always fresh, structured, and governed before it reaches the model.
- Audit-ready reporting: With Workflow and metadata tracking, reports built on Polaris and ADO outputs meet internal and external compliance needs.
- Faster insights: Governed data, curated by ADO and calculated by Polaris, reduces BI prep time and enhances decision-making speed.
6. Looking ahead
Anaplan is continuing to strengthen its data management and modeling capabilities to:
- Empower business users to manage KPIs more confidently
- Improve transparency into data quality and lineage
- Enable more interactive, self-service reporting experiences built on Polaris-calculated KPIs and ADO-integrated datasets
Stay tuned — these enhancements aim to reduce reliance on disconnected tools and give your teams greater control and trust in their reporting data.
Resources to learn more
Explore Anaplan's BI-ready capabilities:
- Anaplan Data Orchestrator (ADO):
- Polaris Calculation Engine:
- Anaplan Workflow:
- Anaplan User Experience (UX) Reporting:
- Anaplan XL Reporting:
For a comprehensive overview, visit Anapedia to explore all features and capabilities.
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