Copy Branch Workaround for the User Experience
The ‘Copy Branch’ action hasn’t currently made its way onto the UX, so I was recently challenged to create a workaround. This is my relatively simple solution, which could be amended for “Assign” by deleting the items in the ‘copy from’ list once copied.
It should be noted that it is not a best practice for users to run actions as this can cause concurrency issues, so please take this into consideration when designing your process.
In this model, I am copying a department and all the employees belonging to it, to a newly created department. As you increase the size of the hierarchy then the complexity would obviously increase, but the logic should still hold.
The video below demonstrates it working:
NB:- References to a staging module in the commentary can be ignored, as the model was simplified and the actions of the staging module were moved into EMP01
To further explain the logic, I am creating a new department (Commercial in this case), which also creates a code for the new department (Comm) and ticks the branch to copy in the module.
This allows me to filter this view to act as a source for import into my L2 department list.
It also feeds into the SYS01 and EMP01 modules to allow me to highlight the employees (branch items) that I need to copy.
This, in turn, ticks the copy included line item below. The view can then be filtered to just the ticked items.
This filtered view can then be used as an import for the relevant items into the L3 Employee List and the details—then into the EMP01 module to hold all of the required details (in this case only name and salary). I am also generating a “New” code at this point, which needs to be something distinct, especially if the same branch will be copied frequently. In this case, I have added the department #No to the name eg #13Shaila Engle. For best practice see Planual Rule 2.02-05.
Once the imports are complete then the editable fields are highlighted in blue. This would be relevant in certain environments, but for others, we would be looking to list format against a flat employee module. Planual Rule 1.05-5 Display Name.
The new department field etc in DEP01 are filled with blanks to reset to a clean module (Action: EMP5).
Action details
This would be a single process button in an operational model, but I have broken it down into three processes here to demonstrate what is happening in the model. The processes create the department and filter the employees to be copied, copy the employees and then finally clear out the staging module and other temporary requirements.
Comments
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Brilliant, Paul!
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Simple, yet powerful!
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Thanks Paul. We have been asking for a solution for this for a while for a number of our customers this is stopping them from moving to the UX. It's great to have a workaround but do you know what the plan is for building the full functionality into the UX ?
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This is fantastic. Thanks, Paul! While this workaround is very helpful, having native Anaplan functionality that allows non-Workspace Admins to select the source and target members for a bulk copy without a workaround would be a game changer. The absence of this feature forces a Workspace Admin to perform critical finance control tasks—in our case, copying the "Working Version" to a named historical version that can be locked. A Workspace Admin should not have to be involved in a controlled process that should fall within the Finance function.
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Copy branch has now been released for the UX, which has fortunately now made my workaround redundant.
If you look at the actions available in the UX, you will see that Copy Branch is now an option and you should be able to configure in you model.0 -
@paul_gibson Thank you. My comment above was really about Bulk Copying, not branch copy…should probably delete from this string. Bulk copy is still not possible unless the user is a Workspace Admin. There is a Bulk Copy process/action that can be created, however it will only allow for a one time designation of source member and target member….which is not useful in most financial modeling.
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