Community perspective: Anaplan user license management

What is an Anaplan user license?

Users get access to Anaplan based on the model role provided to that user. From an Anaplan commercial perspective, each Anaplan user is consuming one active Anaplan user license.

On a high level, Anaplan has the following three types of user licenses:

1. Model builder
2. Contributor
3. Viewer

Out of these licenses, model builder is the highest cost, followed contributor, and viewer.

If the user is responsible for Anaplan model building, then the user will be consuming a model builder license. If the user is actively changing the numbers, then the user will be consuming a contributor license. If the user has "read only" access, then user will be using the viewer license.

Why we need Anaplan user license management:

Most enterprises contract with Anaplan for a certain amount of each type of user license. So, it’s very important for them to have checks and balances about their user licenses, such as how many they have contracted with Anaplan and how many they are using or planning to use. This provides:

• Better visibility of user licenses
• Better management of user licenses
• Ability to find out the impact of a new use case on Anaplan users 

What needs to be built:

1. As a pre-requisite, Central User Access Management needs to be implemented. For how to implement a Central User Access Management, please refer to this article. 
2. In the Central User Access Management model, we need to:
   1. Map all model roles to the below Anaplan license types (model builder, contributor, viewer).
   2. Create a calculation module to find which type of license a user (dimension Master User) is using based on their model role. If the user has multiple Anaplan licenses attached to them based on multiple model roles, then we have to consider their highest level Anaplan license. For example:

3. Create Anaplan components to load Anaplan Splunk report to get the actuals of Anaplan license usage.

High Level Process Flow:

How to implement Anaplan license management:

1. Implement Central User Access Management. Please see the article on Central User Access Management. As part of that implementation, the Central User Access Management model would be created where we have the details of all the Anaplan users and their model roles.
2. In the Central User Access Management model, create a module (with dimension Model_Role) and create a line item named "Mapped Anaplan User License Type" with list (Anaplan License Type) format in which you can select the Anaplan License Type from the dropdown.
3. Create a module (with dimensions Master User and Model) to find out in each model which Anaplan User License is used by each user with the help of the above mapping.
4. Create another module (with dimension Master User) to find out the highest Anaplan User License (from cost perspective) used by the user with respect to all the models.
5. Create another module (with dimension Anaplan User License Type) to find out for each license type the number of licenses consumed by using the data computed in the step above.
6. Load Anaplan Splunk report into a module.
7. Map the data with the dimensions Master User and Anaplan License Type.
8. Create one module (with dimension Master User and Anaplan User License Type) where we can calculate from the Splunk Report module what are the Anaplan User License Type been used by the users.
9. Create a line item in the module (created in Step 4) to find out the highest Anaplan User License (from cost perspective) used by the user from the module created in Step 8.
10. Create a line item in the module (created in Step 5) to find out the actual number of licenses consumed for each license type using the above line item created in Step 9.
11. Create another line item in the above module (created in Step 5) to capture the number of licenses available according to the contract for each Anaplan license type.
12. If the "Number of Licenses Used - Actual" or "Number of Licenses Used") is exceeding the "Number of Licenses Available – Contract" then the enterprise can take necessary actions to mitigate the contract breach.

 

 

Do you have feedback on this content? Let us know in the comments below!