Author: Artem Shchaulov is a Senior Anaplan Consultant and Certified Master Anaplanner with 8+ years' experience implementing global EPM solutions.
In the first two articles, we covered why access management breaks at enterprise scale and how to build a User Access Management (UAM) model that reliably assigns permissions across many models and hierarchies. You can find those here:
In practice, once a UAM model is in place, something else becomes clear: access data is governance data.
Because the UAM model already contains the full user population, their permissions, and the structures they interact with, it naturally evolves into a broader governance and analytics platform.
Workspace and model inventory
A UAM model has visibility across the entire Anaplan landscape. This makes it the ideal place to maintain a living inventory of:
- All workspaces
- All models per workspace
- Model sizes and growth trends
- User counts per model
- Distribution of read vs write users
With minimal additional logic, teams gain a dashboard that answers questions such as:
- Where is user growth concentrated?
- Where should we concentrate our resources to make sure the performance is good?
- To which workspaces do users have access?
This information is difficult to reconstruct from individual models and nearly impossible to keep current manually.
License and cost allocation
Many enterprise Anaplan contracts are influenced by:
- Total number of users
- Number of users with write access
- Distribution of access across business units
Because the UAM model knows:
- Who has access
- What type of access they have
- Which models they touch
… it becomes the natural foundation for license cost allocation.
Costs can be attributed back to:
- Departments
- Regions
- Functions
- Cost centers
This transforms licensing from a central IT cost into a transparent, explainable business expense.
Do you want new model with 100 users? — No issue, here how much it is going to cost your department.
Role and permission analytics
Over time, access structures tend to drift:
- Roles multiply
- Permissions overlap
- No one remembers why certain roles exist
The UAM model allows teams to analyze:
- Number of users per rol
- Roles with unusually broad access
- Unused or redundant roles
- Overlapping roles that can be merged
- Users with broad access and with only nominal
- Users with overlapping access
This analysis helps clean up security design and prevents permission inflation.
Reverse access analysis
Standard access views answer:
"Which items does this user see?”
The UAM model allows the inverse question:
“Who can see this item?”
For example:
- Who has write access to Product A in Region B?
- Which users can modify a specific P&L?
- Which departments can see sensitive financial data?
- When they got this access?
This is especially valuable for audits, investigations, and governance reviews.
User activity and model usage
Access data becomes even more powerful when combined with activity data.
By loading:
- User activity reports
- Model usage statistics
- Model history extracts
The UAM model can show:
- Which users are active or inactive
- Which roles are in use and which are not
- Which models are heavily used
- Which users’ responsibility should be increased
This shifts conversations from opinion to evidence.
Risk, compliance, and audit support
Because the UAM model stores access over time, it can support:
- Audit requests
- Segregation-of-duties checks
- Reviews of sensitive data access
- Historical tracking of access changes
Instead of reconstructing access manually, teams can answer:
- Who had access
- To what
- and when
Foundation for headcount and HR governance
Since the UAM model already contains:
- Full user population
- Organizational structures
- Access boundaries
It becomes a natural gatekeeper for headcount or HR-related models.
Even if a separate HR model exists, UAM can:
- Control who sees sensitive employee data
- Enforce strict access boundaries
- Prevent accidental exposure of salary or position information
This makes UAM a security layer, not just an access tool.
UAM as a strategic asset
At this stage, the role of the UAM model changes.
It is no longer just a technical solution for access.
It becomes a:
- Governance engine
- Transparency layer
- Cost-allocation mechanism
- Compliance support tool
- Analytics foundation
- Stabilizing backbone for the entire Anaplan ecosystem
Conclusion
What starts as a solution to access complexity often ends as one of the most valuable governance assets in an enterprise Anaplan landscape.
By centralizing access logic and combining it with structural, activity, and cost data, the UAM model enables organizations to manage not just who can see what, but how the platform itself is used, governed, and evolved.
