Hello, Anaplan Community!
What an amazing year it’s been! As we look back on 2025, I am absolutely blown away by the spirit of collaboration and support that defines our community. Every single day, you all show up for each other, sharing knowledge, solving complex challenges, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
This year, you collectively posted over 1,500 questions and provided an incredible 4,000+ answers! That represents thousands of moments of connection, learning, and progress. Thank you for making this community the vibrant, helpful, and indispensable resource that it is.
⭐️ Community Champions of 2025!
I want to give a special shout-out to some of our most active and helpful members this year. Your contributions have not gone unnoticed, and your willingness to jump in and help others is the bedrock of this community. A huge round of applause for a few of our top commenters: @devrathahuja @Dikshant @rob_marshall @seymatas1 @Tiffany.Rice @Prajjwal88 @andrewtye @SriNitya @logikalyan and @alexpavel.
🏆️ Perspectives from Anaplan Certified Master Anaplanners
One of my favorite parts of this community is learning from the best of the best. To celebrate the year, I asked five of our brilliant Certified Master Anaplanners to share their biggest wins from 2025 and what they’re aiming for in 2026.
I hope their stories inspire you as much as they’ve inspired me!
Junqi Xue, Certified Master Anaplanner and Solution Architect at valantic
For Junqi, 2025 was all about building a deeper, more versatile skill set and giving back to the community. Here's what he had to say:
"Here are my learnings from 2025:
Built my foundational knowledge:
a. Completed trainings on ADO, Polaris, Workflow, and tried finding their use cases in our projects and proposals across functions, e.g. finance and supply chain.
b. Attended the workshop for the Anaplan SC APP, getting to understand the capabilities of Anaplan Apps more in details, advocated and shared the knowledge with my internal colleagues.
Enhanced capability: I implemented two complicated use cases of Optimizer (production planning, resource allocation and planning), including the analysis of the results.
Community growth: Some interesting new functions were suggested and added to the valantic Anaplan extension this year, namely the visualization of the line items, list items, or anything, that is used as filter in saved views. Along with the visualization of actions/processed used on the UX. As a result, now the model clean up is even easier, especially solving the pain point of not being blind anymore."
Junqi's target for 2026: "Gather more hands-on experience on the Polaris engine."
Julie Ziemer, Business Solutions Architect at Royalty Pharma, LLC
Julie and her team drove a true transformation in how their organization approaches planning. In her own words:
"This past year has been a truly transitional step forward in our Anaplan journey, driven by myself and my team. What began as an effort to modernize financial modeling has evolved into a full-blown transformation in how we plan, connect data, and collaborate across departments.
We've successfully built and streamlined the foundation of our models, providing a clearer, real-time view of performance and forecasts. This means significantly fewer spreadsheets (win!) and far more confidence in our numbers. Along the way, we rigorously tested, refined our logic, and constantly reminded ourselves that “version control” is not a lifestyle choice, but a life-saving best practice. The progress hasn’t just been about automation; it’s been about building a sustainable framework that enables us to work smarter, not harder.
Looking ahead, our team's focus is on expanding Anaplan’s role in financial reporting, bringing greater automation, transparency, and storytelling to our data. To ensure long-term success, we’re laying the groundwork for a Center of Excellence (CoE) to help our models, processes, and people thrive as a connected Anaplan community."
Julie's goals for 2026:
- "To ensure 100% adoption of Anaplan by all finance team members, completely moving away from legacy systems to establish a single source of truth for planning and reporting.
- To lead the integration of Anaplan beyond the finance function into a new business area, such as research or HR planning, to foster true connected planning across the entire organization."
Wenwei Liu, Anaplan Systems Architect at Atlassian
Wenwei’s journey from consulting to an internal role gave her a powerful new perspective. She shares:
"Through my transition from Anaplan Consulting to the internal Anaplan team, I gained a fundamentally different perspective on how Anaplan supports business connected planning from the customer side. A key accomplishment was contributing to a large-scale model rebuild project that deepened my understanding of the platform's capabilities and identified critical customer needs. This shift from external consultant to internal team member positioned me to bridge consulting expertise with product strategy, uncovering pain points and opportunities that will drive more customer-centric solutions."
Wenwei's goal for next year: "Leverage emerging AI capabilities and new Anaplan features to enhance the connected planning experience for our users, while improving efficiency in model building and internal support processes."
Dmitry Sorokin, Senior Software Engineer at lululemon
Dmitry focused on the power of collaboration and technical excellence to elevate his company's Anaplan ecosystem. He reflects:
"2025 was a year of collaboration and learning. I focused on simplifying complex model logic to reduce calculation times and enhance the user experience across our Anaplan Connected Planning ecosystem. I also partnered with engineering to streamline integration pipelines, improving data refresh speed and overall reliability."
Dmitry's goal for 2026: "I’m excited to continue mentoring new model builders while expanding my architecture expertise. I plan to explore new ways to leverage AI in model building, automated testing, and planning workflows."
Ekaterina Garina, EPM Consultant at Keyrus
Ekaterina spent her year strengthening Connected Planning by bridging the gap between finance and procurement for her clients. She explains:
"This year, I worked closely with clients to strengthen their FP&A capabilities in Anaplan, helping leaders gain clearer insights and make more confident, data-driven decisions. A major highlight was delivering equipment-level variance analysis that improved visibility into cost drivers and simplified performance explanations for stakeholders. Procurement reporting was enhanced through the introduction of clear price and volume impact breakdowns, enabling a deeper understanding of spend movements. These initiatives strengthened Connected Planning by aligning finance and procurement around shared outcomes and consistent insights."
Ekaterina's goal for 2026: "I look forward to continuing to deliver scalable, high-impact solutions that help organizations plan faster and respond more effectively to change."
Now, it's your turn!
What an inspiring collection of achievements! Now, I want to hear from YOU.
What was your biggest win of 2025? What are you looking forward to tackling in 2026? Share your story in the comments below!
Happy planning,
Ginger Anderson
Sr. Manager, Community & Engagement Programs
