Author: Piotr Weremczuk is a Certified Master Anaplanner and FinSys Application Specialist at EQT.
In the first part of this two-part article, I explored the non-technical foundations of maintaining complex Anaplan environments: leadership, governance, accountability, and the importance of building the right team. All of that came from my ten years of working with Anaplan.
Now, in this second part, I want to shift focus to the technical side: the tools, practices, and architectural decisions that make day-to-day maintenance smoother, more predictable, and far more scalable.
If the first part was about laying a stable foundation, this part is about the practical mechanics that solution architects and model builders rely on every day. These are the elements that turn a theoretically strong setup into a reliably functioning ecosystem.
Architecture starts early, and it starts from above
Even on the technical front, everything begins surprisingly early.
In Part 1, I wrote about the importance of having a leader with vision — someone who pushes the organization to evolve and sees beyond the first model. The same applies technically.
A skilled solution architect (or even better, a “Master Architect”), must look at the environment from above, not from within. Someone needs to own the blueprint: the data landscape, the model interconnections, the integration patterns, and the tools wrapped around Anaplan.
Personally, I’ve always found clarity through drawing.
Whether it's Lucidchart, Draw.io, or anything that lets you sketch system architecture, having a visual representation of your full ecosystem is invaluable. When you lay it all out — the current structure, the desired future state, and everything in between — gaps reveal themselves. Dependencies become clearer. Priorities almost arrange themselves.
My thinking shifted dramatically when I was first exposed to architectural frameworks, like TOGAF for example. You don’t need to become an enterprise architect, but a basic understanding of these methodologies teaches you to think differently: in layers, in transitions, in future states.
And in a complex Anaplan landscape, that “bird’s-eye view” is what keeps everything coherent and ensures the platform adheres to connected planning principles.
Automation: The great multiplier
If there is one technical topic I would emphasize above all else, it is automation.
Today’s Anaplan ecosystem is rich with tools that simplify orchestration, but it wasn’t always that way. I still remember the days before CloudWorks, before ADO integrations, even before ALM. We spent countless hours running manual imports, deploying changes manually, and tracking errors after the fact instead of as they happened.
Thankfully, those days are behind us.
ALM: the non-negotiable
If you follow the recommended Dev → Test → Prod setup, ALM is already at the heart of your process. If it isn’t — that’s your homework. Proper ALM structures are what make controlled development possible, especially in large environments with multiple parallel workstreams.
CloudWorks: simple, native
CloudWorks has become one of those indispensable tools even for organizations that don’t use AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Its value is in its simplicity: native scheduling, easy configuration, built-in monitoring, and the ability to push alerts through email or even a Slack channel. It immediately adds value and effortlessly enables automation in Anaplan.
External ETLs: essential for scale
Then there are the heavy-duty engines: native ADO or external ETLs; whatever the organization already owns.
A proper ETL layer is not a luxury; it is a necessity.
Yes, you can survive with Anaplan Connect or manual imports. But you will never scale with them.
Most delays and failures I have seen in Anaplan projects were rooted in data issues. A robust ETL not only moves data; it monitors, cleans, transforms, and audits it. That reliability is what allows Anaplan environments to grow without collapsing under their own weight.
Automation beyond imports
One recurring challenge I’ve encountered is giving business users the ability to trigger external processes without relying on IT each time. Exposing a simple webhook on a dashboard can fundamentally change how teams interact with the wider architecture. Suddenly, users can launch complex, multi-system workflows with a single click. Once this foundation is in place, integrations become far more accessible, connecting Anaplan to tools like Workato, for example, turns into a straightforward exercise. And from there, the automation possibilities across your tech stack expand rapidly.
When you integrate Anaplan this way, it stops being a standalone application and becomes the orchestrating center of your organization’s planning architecture.
Scaling access management through automation
As environments grow, so does the complexity of user management.
Hundreds, or even thousands, of users across multiple workspaces quickly turn into a labyrinth of manual checks, outdated permissions, and forgotten roles.
Automation is, once again, the solution.
Using the SCIM API to synchronize users, or creating a custom tool that consolidates exported user lists, makes license oversight far more manageable. Automated reporting of roles, workspace activity, and last login dates is essential.
Without these controls, organizations inevitably pay for unnecessary licenses or maintain old access assignments long after the users have stopped participating in the processes.
A well-designed access management automation not only protects the budget, it safeguards security, compliance, and operational clarity.
Best practices: Small habits with massive long-term impact
This chapter could easily be its own standalone guide. Best practices are often framed as something for junior Anaplanners, but the truth is that they protect senior teams just as much. They are the invisible scaffolding that keeps models maintainable years after they are built.
Clean builds, consistent naming conventions, and a logical DISCO structure all contribute to clarity. But there is something even more important: discipline.
Discipline to remove testing line items when you’re done.
Discipline to delete unused imports.
Discipline to keep your structure understandable not just today, but years from now.
Over time I’ve collected small tricks that may not appear in official documentation but make a huge difference in practice:
- Creating dummy actions to act as separators in the Actions tab
- Naming data sources to reflect actual integration names
- Using notes to document unexpected logic or hidden dependencies
- Marking certain backend elements (DCA, conditional formatting, filters, deletion logic) with subtle emoji identifiers
(Despite Anaplan’s caution about emojis, I’ve never found them problematic for backend work.)
These are small touches, but across dozens of models, they create an ecosystem that is intuitive, self-explanatory, and easy for new team members to adopt. And for leaders, enforcing these practices is one of the simplest ways to reduce long-term maintenance risks.
Bringing it all together
There is no single trick that magically makes an Anaplan environment easy to maintain. Instead, it is a combination of structural thinking, strategic automation, disciplined development, and architectural clarity.
The list in this article is not exhaustive — Anaplan evolves too quickly for any list to stay complete for long — but these are the elements I’ve consistently found to have the greatest impact.
And they work.
Today, together with my colleague, we maintain an environment with seven workspaces, more than ten use cases, dozens of active models, and hundreds of users. Not only do we keep it stable — we have enough capacity to expand into new processes at the same time.
That is the power of thoughtful setup, automation, and discipline.
Thank you for reading.
And if you missed it, Part 1 explores the organizational and human aspects of maintaining complex Anaplan environments; the foundations that make all of this technical work truly effective.
Questions or comments?
