Announcing the 2020 Master Anaplanner of the Year!

Beauram
Beauram
in Blog

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Each year the Master Anaplanner Program recognizes a customer who exemplifies the qualities of an ideal Certified Master Anaplanner — including technical Anaplan ability, contributions within the broader Anaplan ecosystem, and a dedication to enabling Connected Planning within their company.

We turned to the community of Certified Master Anaplanners to decide which of their peers performed the best in 2019. We’re proud to announce who they chose: the winner of the 2020 Master Anaplanner of the Year award is Serena Zhang, Sales Operations Manager at Splunk.

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Serena is an exceptional Certified Master Anaplanner who has been at the forefront of many of Anaplan’s initiatives over the past five years. In addition to maintaining her role as the lead Solution Architect of Splunk’s Center of Excellence, she spent 2019 making use of the thousands of additional licenses she secured, dedicating extra time to accommodating product testing and further demonstrating her willingness to help the broader ecosystem.

With her mastery in Anaplan, Serena has built very effective and scalable solutions for her team. These solutions have allowed her team to optimize their business planning — and, thanks to her architecture, one person can now manage the plan for 2/3 of the company headcount!

Her expertise has also led to the development of several exciting new product features: dynamic chart, customized sorting, and process builder. Serena identified ways to further enhance dynamic charts and collaborated with our product team to help with the roll-out. In 2019, she designed a customized sorting feature that helped optimize the user experience; the users are now able to sort people through the reporting hierarchy to do better and faster planning. This custom feature also caught the attention of an Anaplan partner who quickly adopted it for future use. 

Splunk was involved in an early user research and testing project, and Serena went above and beyond in how she followed through with the implementation, giving Anaplan rich insights into the tested features and providing guidance that will improve future platform capabilities. The insights she helped uncover are being used to further develop the Anaplan user experience. Due to her key involvement with the product team, Serena presented at CPX on Anaplan’s platform enhancement and process management and participated in several User Groups to share best practices.

On top of all of this, she enthusiastically engaged with other customers as a reference on many occasions and completed additional customer surveys. She never hesitates to make time for those who need additional help on model building and is responsible for enabling over 20 Anaplan users over the course of her career — 5 of whom were mentored directly by her last year.

The Master Anaplanner Program has high expectations for the recipient of this award, and we couldn’t be more pleased to recognize Serena as she embodies all the qualities of an ideal Certified Master Anaplanner. A huge thank you to the Splunk account team as well for enabling and supporting Serena on her journey.

Selecting this award winner has become an incredibly competitive process, and we had five highly-qualified finalists in consideration. We would also like to recognize these finalists for their remarkable accomplishments over the past year. We are thankful for their continued commitment and contributions and are sure they will continue to make their mark on the Anaplan ecosystem.

Please don’t hesitate to extend your congratulations to Serena (@serena.zhang) on this achievement!

 

Next up: The University Connect Program will announce the Student Anaplanner of the Year. Don’t forget to check back in  June to find out who won this recognition.

 

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