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Streamline hierarchy management with Polaris's new ITEMLEVEL and HIERARCHYLEVEL functions
Author: Dave Smith is a Senior Product Manager at Anaplan. In the world of enterprise planning, working with hierarchical data is fundamental—whether you're dealing with product categories, organizational structures, or geographic regions, the ability to roll up and see your plans at a macro-level is essential. Until now,…
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Aggregation of text and images in Hierarchy Charts
When Hierarchy Charts were introduced to the Anaplan UX, their popularity grew very quickly. The power of the intuitive visual representation of business hierarchies, and the simplicity of setup, combined to fuel substantial adoption by hundreds of our customers. At its’ simplest, the structure of a hierarchy can be…
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Anaplan Polaris – Applying Formula Guards to Optimize Calculations
This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance. This is a deeper dive on the concept outlined in the Anaplan Polaris – Understanding Blueprint Insights and Optimizing for Populated Space article. A “guard” refers to an IF…
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Creating and distributing formatting themes in Anaplan XL Reporting (AXL)
Creating formatting themes in Anaplan XL Reporting (AXL) ensures your Grid Reports look professional, are easy to read, and match your organization’s brand standards. These tailored formats help you create visual consistency across teams and over reporting cycles.This guide covers two approaches for creating and…
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Anaplan Polaris – Getting Started
Are you a seasoned Anaplanner ready to harness the power of Polaris? You’re in the right place. Polaris, Anaplan’s next-generation calculation engine, is designed for fast, highly dimensioned calculation at scale. While the model building experience remains fundamentally similar to Classic, Polaris introduces key…
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Unlocking the power of Polaris: A guide to efficient model building
This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance. Polaris is Anaplan's next-generation calculation engine, designed for highly dimensioned calculation at scale. It represents a paradigm shift in the ability to model business…
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Anaplan Polaris – Optimizing Calculation Performance Using Inline Conditions
This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance. This article explores a technique to optimize calculations in Polaris. We examine the practice of including formula conditions directly (“inline”) in the formula itself to…
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Anaplan Polaris – Calculation Effort
This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance. What is the Calculation Effort column? The Calculation Effort column is one of the Blueprint Insights contained within the blueprint view of a module (or the line items tab)…
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SUM and LOOKUP | Model Optimization Team series
Hi! Welcome to the Model Optimization team's monthly blog post. This is an eight-part series, following the topics we see occurring most frequently in slow customer models. Our aim is to inform and guide how to build with best practice intentions for these model building topics. Each month, two of our analysts will take…
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OEG Best Practice: PLANS: This is how we model
PLANS PLANS is the new standard for Anaplan modeling—“the way we model.” This covers more than just the formulas and includes and evolves existing best practices around user experience and Data Hubs. It is a set of rules on the structure and detailed design of Anaplan models. This set of rules will provide both a clear…
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Anaplan Polaris – View Optimization for Imports and Exports
This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance. This article explores how to optimize saved module views within the modeling experience, with particular attention to data import and export processes. We’ll revisit essential…
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OEG Best Practice: Formula structure for performance
Thinking through the results of a modeling decision is a key part of ensuring good model performance; in other words, making sure the calculation engine isn’t overtaxed. This article highlights some ideas for how to lessen the load on the calculation engine. Formulas should be simple; a formula that is nested, or uses…
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LOOKUP on Time | Model Optimization Team series
Hello Anaplan Community! Welcome to the Model Optimization team's monthly blog post. This is our last post in an eight-part series, on the topics we see occurring most frequently in slow customer models. Our aim is to inform and guide how to build with best practice intentions for these model building topics. Each month,…
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Calculate once and reference | Model Optimization Team series
Hey! Welcome to the Model Optimization team's monthly blog post. This is an eight-part series, following the topics we see occurring most frequently in slow customer models. Our aim is to inform and guide how to build with best practice intentions for these model building topics. Each month, two of our analysts will take…
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Iterative Development in Polaris
This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance. As Anaplan solution architects and model builders begin to develop in Polaris, it's important to consider how you approach the development workflow. In Polaris the upper limit…
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Anaplan Polaris – Understanding Blueprint Insights and Optimizing for Populated Space
This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance. In this article, we’ll focus on understanding the blueprint columns in Polaris in more detail, and how we can use them to optimize formulas. Polaris Blueprint Insights When…
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Anaplan Polaris – Blueprint Insights
This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance. In this article we’ll review some of the blueprint insights available to help you optimize and improve efficiency in your Polaris models. Blueprint Insights defined Polaris…
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Anaplan Polaris – Populated Space
This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance. This article introduces the idea of Populated vs Empty Space and outlines why it is a key factor to keep in mind when building in the Polaris engine. Populated Space defined…
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Anaplan Polaris – Natural Dimensionality
This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance. Natural dimensionality defined Natural dimensionality can be defined as the inherent and most appropriate number of dimensions (aka “lists”) needed to accurately represent a…
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OEG Best Practice: Data Hubs: Purpose and peak performance
You may have heard about a model called a Data Hub, but perhaps you aren’t confident that you understand the fundamentals, primary functions, or considerations when architecting one. There are three main advantages to incorporating a Data Hub: Single source of truth : Stores all transactional data from the source system.…
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Convert CUMULATE functions to PREVIOUS | Model Optimization Team series
Hello! Welcome to the Model Optimization team's monthly blog post. This is an eight-part series, following the topics we see occurring most frequently in slow customer models. Our aim is to inform and guide how to build with best practice intentions for these model building topics. Each month, two of our analysts will take…
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[UPDATED] Summary Calculations with the User List
Author: Rob Marshall, Director of Architecture and Performance at Anaplan, Operational Excellence Group (OEG). Prior to the February 2024, users were not allowed to use aggregation functions (SUM, ALL, ANY, AVERAGE, FIRSTNONBLANK, LASTNONBLANK, MAX, MIN, RANK) when having the Users list in a module because the system could…
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OEG Best Practice: Imports and exports and their effects on model performance
Overview Imports are blocking operations. To maintain a consistent view of the data, the model is locked during the import, and concurrent imports run by end users will need to run one after the other and will block the model for everyone else. Exports are blocking for data entry while the export data is retrieved, and…
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Text Concatenation | Model Optimization Team series
Hello! Welcome to the Model Optimization team's monthly blog post. This is an eight-part series, following the topics we see occurring most frequently in slow customer models. Our aim is to inform and guide how to build with best practice intentions for these model building topics. Each month, two of our analysts will take…
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OEG Best Practice: Line item subsets demystified
Line item subsets are one of the most powerful and efficient features in Anaplan, yet one of the least understood. The COLLECT() function is probably the only “black box” function within Anaplan as is it not immediately apparent what it is doing or where the source values are coming from. In the following article, I will…
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Calculate with the fewest cell | Model Optimization Team series
Hello! Welcome to the Model Optimization team's monthly blog post. This is an eight-part series, following the topics we see occurring most frequently in slow customer models. Our aim is to inform and guide how to build with best practice intentions for these model building topics. Each month, two of our analysts will take…
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Introducing the Anaplan Integration Script Generator: Simplifying Anaplan Connect Scripting
Introduction Anaplan, a leading platform for enterprise planning, has revolutionized the way organizations manage their data and streamline processes. However, leveraging Anaplan's powerful features often requires scripting with Anaplan Connect—a command-line utility for interacting with the platform. To simplify this…
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RANK | Model Optimization Team series
Hello! Welcome to the Model Optimization team's monthly blog post. This is an eight-part series, following the topics we see occurring most frequently in slow customer models. Our aim is to inform and guide how to build with best practice intentions for these model building topics. Each month, two of our analysts will take…
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OEG Best Practice: Filter best practice
Filters can be very useful in model building and are widely used, but they can come at the expense of performance—often very visible to users through their use on dashboards. Performance can also hit imports and exports, which in turn may lead to the blocking of other activity, causing a poor perception of the model. There…
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Nested Ifs | Model Optimization Team series
Hello! Welcome to the Model Optimization team's monthly blog post. This is an eight-part series, following the topics we see occurring most frequently in slow customer models. Our aim is to inform and guide how to build with best practice intentions for these model building topics. Each month, two of our analysts will take…