The Zen of Anaplan

rob_marshall

The Zen of Anaplan

Ten guidelines

 

• Just because you CAN doesn’t mean you SHOULD

• Calculate once, reference many times

• Simple > complex

• Only calculate when you need to

• Sparsity is not your enemy

• Big and fast > small and slow

• Booleans = great. Text = bad

• Text joins = worse

• Don’t let exceptions overcomplicate the model

• Sums and lookups are good, but never together

 

 

Olek P

Hi @rob_marshall, can you expand upon "sparsity is not your enemy?"

Thanks

rob_marshall

Hey @Olek P

Sure thing…People try to create all kinds of logic within one line item to save space (or make it more dense), but in reality, that is doing the calculation engine an injustice because the formula does not get kicked off once, but rather once for every cell defined for that line item. It is better to create calculation modules, while they may be sparse, do to the calcs because they will be faster for the engine to process because the logic is doing less.

Take a look at these articles that Dave Smith wrote several years ago.

https://community.anaplan.com/discussion/44493/the-truth-about-sparsity-part-1

https://community.anaplan.com/discussion/44736/the-truth-about-sparsity-part-2