Meet Solutions Architect Karim Lameer
Meet Karim Lameer — Anaplan consultant and Certified Solutions Architect with a background in accounting in the pharma and healthcare industries. Karim was introduced to Anaplan five years ago, and once he discovered the power of the platform and ecosystem, he made the decision to consult and help other companies get started with this game-changing technology.
We asked Karim to share his thoughts on tapping into the Community for insights, advice for those just getting started on their learning journey, and the challenges Anaplan has helped him solve.
“The most useful business solution that Anaplan has helped solve is being able to involve multiple functions and multiple areas of the business when you're doing your modeling, whereas before it was a very siloed approach.” – Karim Lameer
Watch the video to hear more about this Community member’s career journey and approach to working within the Anaplan ecosystem. (Transcript also available below.) For more about Karim’s background and the impact he has made utilizing Anaplan, check out Part 1 of his story in our newsroom:
If you have a story to share about your Anaplan journey, we would love to connect. Share in the comments below or contact us at CommunityContent@anaplan.com.
Select "spoiler" to read the transcript
Interviewer: Tell us about your role and journey with Anaplan.
Karim: My name is Karim Lameer — I'm an Anaplan consultant and I'm currently working at the NHS. I have a background in accounting and I have worked around data and data analysis projects. I've been doing Anaplan for the last five years as an Anaplan consultant. I first saw Anaplan during a global implementation within the pharma industry. The pharma industry is notorious for having many projects ongoing at the same time and also those projects changing quite quickly, so they needed a system in order to capture and report on this. I really realized how powerful that whole system was and the whole ecosystem was. I decided to become an Anaplan consultant from that point onwards.
Interviewer: What are some of the challenges Anaplan has helped you solve?
Karim: To me, the most useful business solution that Anaplan has helped solve is being able to involve multiple functions and multiple areas of the business when you're doing your modeling, whereas before it was a very siloed approach here, you can build for the whole business and the more you build the more parts of the business, you can onboard.
Interviewer: What is your methodology to building in the Anaplan platform?
Karim: I build models using a UX-first approach. So this is thinking of how the user is going to interact with the model and then building the plumbing in the back end in order to facilitate that view. It means that users get to see what they are working with quite early on and then you can start building value very early in the process. The UX helps with rapid prototyping and if you want to build proofs of concept, it's a great way to start on that fast. If you think of how you're going to interact with the system and if you make as little sort of technical assumptions on what — that users can do when you're building the UX, this would be a good starting point. You would make it very easy for the end users, you'd know exactly what they want to do and then build that into the UX. Try not to make things cluttered, try not to put too much functionality in one page, and just break it down into separate solutions as much as possible.
Interviewer: How has the Anaplan Community impacted your Anaplan journey?
Karim: When you're building solutions it's good if you can have someone that you can bounce ideas off, because that way you actually define the problem better and then you have these approaches of building solutions. I have met people in the community that I could start discussions with, where we came up with the pros and the cons of the best way to solve a particular issue. So as a consultant it is something that I do quite often and I wouldn't have been able to fix a lot of the things that I have before, if not for the community and the support in the community.
Interviewer: What advice do you have for model builders starting on their Anaplan journey?
Karim: Just start building. Get to know the platform, to get to know how the solutions can be made on top of the platform. It's hard to think using hierarchies and sort of the way the models are structured, but once you push through that, and once you really internalize it, you really see the power of Anaplan and how you can model very complex, real-life situations using the platform. So just get your own models, build the solutions on top of that and just keep learning because it is a very powerful, game-changing piece of technology.