After using Anaplan for ~6 years now, I find that building consolidated reports that are concise and polished for business partners (especially executives) seem to be a lacking feature in Anaplan. The data that we want to put on the report is contained across many modules, and often times share many dimensions but not all. The current solution is to either aggregate everything onto a single module which can be space taxing, or to make separate grids if all the dimensions aren't the same which makes reporting disorganized. What I'm proposing for a new idea is a report builder that can be a composite of multiple modules that has sections so that data with different dimensionality can show up in the same place. One of Anaplan's competitors has a solution that's easily "adaptive" 😉 to these kinds of cases which I've found to be much more effective with management reporting.
I've attached an image on how I imagine the report builder to look and behave.
- You can see in Row Section 1 that the dimensions Sales Channel and Region are applied. These dimensions span across all columns in that section
- Column Section 1 contains a mix of different fields that were pulled in from different modules.
- Column Section 2 has a time dimension applied. This time dimension by month does not apply to the other column sections and is critical because many times we want to see properties and attributes that are not time specific.
- You can add column or row sections as needed and be independent of each other depending on dimension intersections.
Additionally these are features I'd love to see in the report builder:
- Ability to custom format individual lines. Underlining, bolding, font size, color
- Table calculations: create calculation fields on the face of the report that refresh when dimensions are changed, rather than building the calculation in the module itself which spans across all dimensions (in-memory calc). Would be super useful for variance reporting.