Alias Names for Time, Versions, Modules, Line Items and Dashboards

usman.zia

Hi Anaplan,

 

It would be great for Anaplan to allow users to create alias names for: time, versions, modules, dashboard, list and lineitems. 

 

Thanks,

Usman

Miran

Status changed to: In Review

Rebecca

Thanks for your idea Usman and for all the kudos! Can you please comment with some reasons why this would be useful for you? 

What business process is this improving? What problem will this solve?

usman.zia

Hi @Rebecca 

 

Most of the influence for this functionality comes from a usability and reporting perspectives, not modelling capability.

Users want greater flexibility in customising anaplan for themselves.

 

Some of the uses come from specifications our clients have: 

- Centre of Excellence Naming conventions versus what some users actually - for example the coding of module names / lists may not be informative to a user in the same way it is to a model builder.

- Renaming list item names for a to user friendly names instead of codes

- Renaming the time dimensions to Jan instead of Jan 19 

- Different Naming conventions for different business functions

 

 

DavidSmith

I would also add that this would allow:

• language support where structural elements can have different language aliases for different users 
• More flexible display of list names/code (e.g. Code only, Name only, Name + code, Code + name

In general extend the display name concept to all structural elements

David 

CallumW

It would certainly be useful to have a unqiue identifer for line items that wasn't it's own name.

 

Having a "display name property" for each line item would allow us to duplicate names for line items which would be useful.

david.savarin

I +1 this idea.

Custom Naming for Time would be great as for instance maintaining a multi-language alias names

Alessio_Pagliano

Hi @Miran and @Rebecca ,

Are there any updates on this ? I believe other tools like TM1 have this type of functionality as default.

I have seen several use cases where this functionality would really benefit from it.In a more recent process this is causing some "noise" and not so positive feedback from end users on their user adoption journey.

There are workarounds but this requires, IMHO, extra development and complexities that we would really like to avoid.

Thanks!

Alessio

tomgilbert

Agreed, having the ability to change the display name of a line item in the UX would really improve reporting.

jepley

Bumping this back up—- Alias for line items and for time would be exceptional—

Use cases— line items— sometimes we need to 2 different line items in the same module for similar reasons but with different formulas (For a waterfall chart we need the formula to be a summary but a calculation may be needed for formulaic summary methods) — in this case we have two "ending value" line items that are both important to show but right now we need to add a non-sensical naming methodology.

For time— many users want to see "Start of Plan" and "End of Plan" rather than Q1 FY24. For consistent reporting not having the time change would assist other tools.

Having an alias that could be structural or "production data" would be a very helpful function and would not require logic references to change.