Celebrating @andrewtye as our June 2025 Community Member Spotlight! With a decade of experience in the Anaplan ecosystem, Andrew is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Community Boss who has made meaningful contributions to the Community over the years. He’s shared nearly 800 comments and is a familiar presence in forums, events, and beyond — offering thoughtful support and guidance to fellow members. Check out his spotlight to learn about his career journey, favorite Anaplan tips, and what he values most about the Community!
About Andrew
I’m currently working as an Anaplan Technical Lead at Aviva (global financial services firm) in the UK, focusing on new project delivery. I ensure that all projects get the most out of the platform and provide coaching support to the Anaplan Center of Excellence (CoE) team on best practices and problem-solving. I’ve been using Anaplan since 2015, predominantly in the FP&A space, and have been a Certified Master Anaplanner since 2019 and a Community Boss since 2023. I’ve seen the platform evolve from the Classic UX to a significantly more end-user-focused UX, and now to a more complete solution with Workflow, Management Reporting, and ADO. I’m very much looking forward to seeing where Anaplan goes next — especially with Anaplan AI.
We asked Andrew a few questions to get to know him.
Please share an Anaplan success story you’re proud of.
When you’ve been involved in the platform as long as I have, there are so many success stories. From the initial lift and shift of a couple of spreadsheets back in 2015 to having an ecosystem of models supporting forecasting in 2025, there’s so much to be proud of. For me, it’s one of the initial builds where I began to see the power and potential of Anaplan. It was the classic finance setup — a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of links to be edited, a lot of manual data, and different ways of doing things. Working with end users, we started simple. Firstly, replicating the spreadsheet functionality for a single trading unit before moving through the end-to-end process, understanding requirements, dataflows, and current challenges. All things we have to deal with now. By the end, there was an ecosystem of models starting with product trading through sales channel distribution and then to a central cashflow model with all the various rules that entailed.
Please share something you can teach about Anaplan — any tips and tricks you'd like to highlight?
It’s going to sound simple, but follow DISCO, Planual, and really think about your model front to back — start with the outputs and aim of the build, and work backwards from there. The time spent on model design and flows, UX design, and usability will give you such a good starting point for the build, as all your questions will be answered. Some useful resources can be found here:
When it comes to the build, here are a few top tips:
a. Use style field for formatting in the UX — even if it’s not a header or summary calculation you’ve got six categories to use.
b. Give your app a homepage to aid end users with their journey around your model — it’s a much easier experience that having to remember which pages to use.
c. Want specific reporting output modules and key time periods to report on? This relies on have a fake version list rather than using the standard version functionality.
Start with your standard line item module.
Create two lists — one as a fake time dimension, the other as version comparative.
Then using lookup create a further module that re-dimensions the initial module and create a line item subset.
And finally, create a module with all the relevant line items in it using COLLECT functionality. Notice that I’m using SELECT here — the fake time and version comparative are non-production list but gives the ability to create variances and other calculations.
What do you enjoy about the Anaplan Community?
What makes the Community so enjoyable? Knowing that if you’ve got a question to be answered, there’s probably someone out there who has already asked and then that question answered. Even if it’s not exactly the same scenario, often or not the answer will work. And people not being afraid to share how they’ve solved particular challenges whilst making sure that data isn’t shared. There’s also so much that can be taken from the best practice and “Did You Know” articles — the recent blog on use of codes and line item subsets from @JonCushing will mean less complicated mappings and trying to keep names all lined up moving forward. I often find myself referring back to a handful of articles, as they provide so much insight and are incredibly useful when you get brain freeze or want to provide coaching to other developers.
And of course, the Community isn’t just this website — there are the virtual events, live events, and posts on LinkedIn. You never know where you might find the answer to your problem.
What's the most memorable trip or vacation you've ever taken, and why was it so special?
A couple of years ago, my partner and I went to Sicily, which itself is a spectacular place to visit. But the reason it was so memorable was our journey there. Rather than getting a plane from London like sensible people, we decided it would be far more fun to get the train! Three trains via Paris and Milan, the last of which was a sleeper service down to Sicily, made for an excellent way to get to our final destination. Plus, you get to see so much more at ground level rather than at 30,000 feet!
Now, every holiday since, we’ve always tried to take the train at some point. Last year it was from Stockholm to Narvik, right at the top of Norway, and this year it was from the north to south of Sardinia. Often, the adventure is just getting there.
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We hope you enjoyed learning more about Andrew in this month's Community Member Spotlight. Thank you, Andrew, for being an outstanding Community contributor and advocate!
Interested in learning more about our Community Member Spotlight series? Check out this post.
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