Authors: Dave Waller, Principal Product Manager, and Abby Schutt Beckman (@AbbySB), Technical Training Program Lead at Anaplan.
Workflow Advanced is an additional capability in the platform that empowers businesses to visualize and automate processes with greater speed and confidence. At the time of this article, Workflow Advanced supports expanded branching of process flows, execution of multiple steps in parallel, sending back work to previous stages in the workflow, and querying of model values to automate decisions where human intervention isn’t needed.
Workflow Advanced features
Check out the below to learn more about the current features of Workflow Advanced. Note that, in addition to the technical considerations listed below, these features require that the tenant is enabled for Workflow Advanced, and only a Workflow Owner can leverage these steps in a workflow.
Parallel Steps
What it does: Allows multiple approvals to happen in parallel while providing different stakeholders with unique experiences.
Benefits: Approval steps can occur for multiple users at the same time, with the option to direct each stakeholder to a different page or provide them with different instructions.
Uses cases
- Approval of budget adjustment requests, where multiple department leads need to approve at the same time and need to be directed to department-specific UX pages to review the requests.
- When data needs to be moved to a series of modules simultaneously.
Technical considerations
- Parallel blocks — a collection of parallel steps — do not currently support branching. This means that if a decision step is added as the first step in a parallel block, the branching must be disabled before subsequent parallel steps may be added.
- If using ADO steps in the parallel block, there may be concurrency limits built into Anaplan Data Orchestrator that impact the workflow. If there are more ADO steps in the parallel block than what Anaplan Data Orchestrator can run in parallel, the steps will be queued to run at the earliest opportunity.
Branch and Reconnect
What it does: Allows steps to be added to both the approval and rejection branch of a decision steps, as well as the reconnection of a branch to another step to bring two branches together.
Benefits: Expands how approvals and rejections can be handled in a workflow, enabling more sophisticated workflows with complex branching logic — steps can be added to a rejection branch in Workflow Advanced and nested decision steps can also be used.
Use cases
- When a request is rejected by the L1 approver, the feature can be used to facilitate remediation steps and another L1 approval.
- If the same final step needs to occur regardless of which branch a workflow initially follows, the branches can be reconnected to show that the final step is the same.
Technical considerations
- If reconnecting to a parallel block, you must first collapse the block to reconnect a branch to the parallel block.
Send Back Loops
What it is: When a request reaches a decision step, the request can be sent back to a previous step in the workflow, providing a third response option for an approver (Approve, Reject, and Send Back).
Benefits: Provides additional flexibility with the standard decision step — if only small revisions are required for an item to move into an approvable state, the item can be sent back for revisions instead of requiring a new request be run through the entire approval workflow again.
Use cases
- Budget adjustment requests: The organization wants to allow the requester to make small revisions without moving the revised request through the entire approval process again.
- New job requisitions: It’s common for a manager submitting a job requisition to select the wrong cost center, resulting in Finance rejecting the request and asking the manager to fix and resubmit the request.
Technical considerations
- It’s best practice to use Dynamic Cell Access (DCA) with Anaplan Workflow to prevent the original user from editing an item after the workflow has started. If using Send Back Loops, a machine step to unset DCA will need to be included so the request can be revised.
Value-based decision steps
What it is: This feature operates similarly to a decision task, but instead of requiring a user to make the decision, a workflow owner can use a value-based decision step to query model data and make the decision based on the model value.
Benefits: Automates the decision process, reducing the time it takes to make the decision and allowing someone who would normally have been an approver to instead focus on other work.
Use cases
- Budget adjustment requests: The organization may require Legal Review for budget requests depending on the requesting department.
- Finance budget: Initiating action if variance exceeds a tolerable amount.
Technical considerations
- Value-based decision steps are based on a Boolean formatted line item; this line item must be created before it can be used in a value-based decision step.
Optimizing your use of the feature
- Pair nested value-based decision steps with IF THEN ELSE logic in the model.
- Use with send-back loops to handle the revised item slightly differently that if it were the first time the item was going through approval.
- Use with workflow scheduling to check if a Boolean line item is true on a set cadence (example: Check if variance has exceeded the allowable threshold on an hourly cadence).
Additional resources
Get enabled on Workflow Advanced
Workflow Advanced is separate from Workflow Standard and is tenant-specific, so in a multi-tenant environment the Workflow Advanced features only display on tenants that are enabled for Workflow Advanced. Speak with your Account Executive to learn more about Workflow Advanced.
Questions? Leave a comment!
