Author: Marc Donegan is a Product Manager at Anaplan.
Anaplan Workflow can be thought of an indispensable workhorse: numerous teams rely on it to turn a planning process into a series of steps someone can follow, approve, and trust. But a workflow is only as good as the experience of running it and building it. If approvers can't tell whether a task is completed, or builders can't recover from a wrong click, or feedback gets lost the moment a decision is made, the process still relies on people working around the tool instead of through it.
A few recent releases close those gaps. Auto refresh keeps UX pages current the moment a workflow step finishes. Undo and redo bring a familiar safety net to Workflow Builder. And decision task feedback means an approval or rejection now carries context, not just a status change.
Here's what's new.
No more page-refreshing to confirm it’s updated
Anyone who's run a data write task in a workflow has done this: the task finishes, but the grids, charts, and KPIs on the page don't reflect it yet, so you refresh the page manually just to confirm the numbers moved. It's a small step, but it's another small task added to your work, another few seconds lost.
Auto refresh removes that step. A new page refresh toggle in the data write task configuration automatically refreshes grids, charts, and KPIs on a UX page as soon as the workflow completes successfully.
Auto refresh matters most in exactly the moments where trust matters most: right after an approval cycle runs, right after a bulk import lands, right when someone is about to make a call based on what's on screen.
Please note that auto refresh will need to be switched on (it does not turn on by default).
Build with confidence, not caution
In Workflow templates so far, you would add a step, reorder a task, realize a branch doesn't belong where you put it, and want to back out one change without starting over. Until now, Workflow Builders didn't have a safety net for that kind of iteration: every change was final the moment you made it.
Undo and redo functionality changes that. You can now step backward through recent changes in a workflow template, and step forward again if you undo something you didn't mean to. It is the same pattern you already rely on in most other tools, brought to Workflow Builder, so you can experiment with a template's structure without the risk of a mistake being expensive to fix.
The practical effect is builders spend less time being careful and more time being fast: testing an alternate task order, trying a different branch structure, or cleaning up a template, all without the fear of having to rebuild from scratch.
Approvals that carry context
If a task gets sent back, the approver usually explains themselves somewhere else entirely (an email, a Slack message, a hallway conversation) and that reasoning may not make it back into the model where the rest of the process lives.
With decision task feedback, approvers can now add a comment directly when they approve, reject, or send back a task. That comment is saved straight back into the model, linked to the specific line item it belongs to, and it works with batch approvals too.
To turn it on:
- Create or edit a decision task.
- In the Approver section, select Assign to users from a line item in a module > Select.
- Select a module.
- Under Approver settings, choose a line item in the Line item for feedback notes dropdown. This line item must be formatted as text in your model.
Once the workflow template is published, approvers will see a text pop-up the next time they approve, reject, or send back a task in that workflow, where they can enter up to 500 characters of feedback. That comment writes back to the module you configured. Note that a new comment will overwrite whatever was there before, and feedback can't be captured when a task is approved or rejected via email.
One thing worth planning for: populating a lot of text cells adds density to your model and can slow it down, so it's worth being deliberate about which decision tasks need feedback captured this way.
Workflows that keep up with how you work
Auto refresh, undo/redo, and decision task feedback are three features meant to further enhance your experience on Anaplan. Together they work to bridge what a workflow does and what the people running or building it can see, trust, and act on.
If you haven't already, it's worth revisiting your existing workflow templates: turning on page refresh for your key data write tasks, and adding feedback notes to the decision points where context tends to get lost today.
