Author: Steven Kraplin is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Senior Financial Analyst at The MathWorks.
Anaplan Connect is an Anaplan native tool designed to facilitate automation leveraging Anaplan’s API. Combined with a scheduling tool, this allows for bulk processing of data with limited to no touch points. Recently, Anaplan Connect has become so much more for us.
Background
We’ve long been using Anaplan to facilitate calculation of inter-company transactions and push results of those calculations back into our ERP. While leveraging Anaplan significantly reduced processing time, it still required admin hands-on interaction with the model and the ERP. Due to the nature of the workday this resulted in a global timing impact.
As we explored automating our inter-company processes, we had identified that to interact with Anaplan we’d need to leverage new paid tools, existing tools from other teams, or Anaplan Connect. Purchasing a new tool was out of the question, and working with external teams would have extended the scope and length of the overall project. We realized that Anaplan Connect, with some innovation, could be the appropriate tool for the job.
Through investigation we realized that we would be able to achieve everything we needed through Batch/PowerShell scripts and design a complete end-to-end process with no human touch points. Anaplan Connect is primarily utilized through Batch scripts, but we were able to incorporate its use entirely through PowerShell which grants more modern commands, and we are able to utilize unique functions to be able to call Anaplan Connect as needed throughout the process.
At a high-level, we were able to leverage PowerShell script to:
- Automated token generation, report execution and process scheduling within ERP
- Perform file clean up and quality checks before import into Anaplan
- Run Anaplan processes and exports via Anaplan Connect
- Parse/update files, send notifications and kick off external workflows in ERP, Anaplan and internal reporting tools
Leveraging PowerShell and Anaplan Connect allowed us to create a singular process that we’re able to easily monitor with the proper error checks while keeping everything secure using certificates/tokens for system access. By layering a scheduling tool and error checks we’re able to remove human interaction with the inter-company calculation process entirely and run it off-hours so that users have access to the necessary.
AI as Co-Pilot
We’re seeing Anaplan beginning to leverage AI for model design. As part of the project, we tapped into our existing AI tools like ChatGPT and MS CoPilot to explore API endpoints, design error handing strategies and controls, and review and optimize our script(s).
This allowed us to parse massive amounts of written Oracle and Anaplan information, especially in areas where documentation was sparse or the use case was unique. There are many new use cases for us to leverage Anaplan Connect to import more data consistently into Anaplan as we were able to convert many of the scripts written into functions in PowerShell that we can now call with limited/no code changes.
Final thoughts and recommendations
Anaplan Connect is a powerful tool that can drive automation strategies. For us, it turned a manual workflow into a seamless, secure and scalable process and we look forward to leveraging Anaplan Connect more in the coming year(s) as a flexible alternative to other options.
