Overview and training

obaid_ghani

Overview:

The Anaplan Optimizer aids business planning and decision making by solving complex problems involving millions of combinations quickly to provide a feasible solution.

Optimization provides a solution for selected variables within your Anaplan model that matches your objective based on your defined constraints. The Anaplan model must be structured and formatted to enable Optimizer to produce the correct solution.

You are welcome to read through the materials and watch the videos on this page, but Optimizer is a premium service offered by Anaplan. (Contact your AE if you don't see Optimizer as an action on the settings tab.) This means that you will not be able to actually do the training exercises until the feature is turned on in your system.

Training:

The training involves an exercise along with documentation and videos to help you complete it.

The goal of the exercise is to setup the optimization exercise for two use cases; network optimization and production optimization. To assist you in this process we have created an Optimization exercise guide document which will walk you through each of the steps. To further help we have created three videos you can reference:

• An exercise walk-through
• A demo of each use case
• A demo of setting up dynamic time

Follow the order of the items listed below to assist with understanding how Anaplan's optimization process works:

1. Watch the use case video which demos the Optimizer functionality in Anaplan
2. Watch the exercise walkthrough video
3. Review documentation about how Optimizer works within Anaplan
4. Attempt the Optimizer exercise
1. Download the exercise walkthrough document
2. Download the Optimizer model into your workspace
3. How to configure Dynamic Time within Optimizer
1. Download the Dynamic Time document
2. Watch the Dynamic Time video
4. Attempt Network Optimization exercise
   
5. Attempt Production Optimization exercise
   

Questions:

If you have questions or would like to share feedback, please visit the Optimizer discussion forum.

WinstonFeng

Tech question:

 

Do you know what kind of solver "engine" is behind Anaplan's optimizer?

 

I'd like to know because I'm trying to figure out how powerful it is...whether it has similar capabilities to excel's optimizer (which sometimes returns non-optimal solutions because it sometimes finds local maximums instead of global) or if it uses CPLEX or Gurobi...which are usually much more robust in figuring out solutions.

 

Not all optimization solvers are equal...

WinstonFeng

Hey Nick,

 

Imagine a "feasible region" as something like this. 

 

I am tasked to make 100 cookies and I need to minimize my cost of buying ingredients such as sugar, flour, and butter.

 

I have $100 dollars to buy sugar, flour, and butter.

 

My Anaplan optimization use case is to minimize how much I spend buying ingreidents to make 100 cookies.

 

But what if sugar costs $75, flour costs $50, and butter cost $80 per unit? And I cannot buy half-units.

If I wrote in my function that I have a $100 dollar budget but I can't even afford the ingredients to produce my 100 cookies, then I have created an infeasible model. A feasible model situation would mean that I have $500 dollars to spend, or my ingredients don't cost so much.

 

Feasible programming means that my inputs and parameters make sense, and that my model can give a real solution.

 

boris_morris

This is indeed what feasibility means.

But in the context of Anaplan, the Optimizer works in two modes:
1) Linear
2) Feasbility

In the first mode, an objective is required - you [min/max]imize this objective wrt the variables to determine the optimal solution

In the second mode, no objective is required. The solver simply finds one (of the many, potentially) solution to the constraints.

The first example is much like your production of cookies to minimize cost.

For the second example, imagine you are still making cookies but you can substitute butter for margarine 1:1, you can substitute milk for half and half or cream with some ratios, you can substitute sugar for glucose syrup, maple syrup etc etc. And you want a shopping list to make 100 cookies - you don't care about price, you just want the cookies to work. This is a problem of finding a feasible solution to the "recipe constraint".

as-luz

Hi Ghani,

 

I had the production setup completed, however, when running optimizer using linear programming, I got an error. Please see attached screen shot and please advise if it there are more that I need to configure. Feasibility is okay and giving variables. 

 

Thanks a lot.

 

Regards,

Alex

 

as-luz

Hi,
I made another test linear programming and it worked. Please ignore my previous post.

Thanks a lot.

Regards,
Alex