Ask Me Anything: YY Lee

YYLee

Bridging the Gap Between Connected Planning Strategy and Model Building Execution

Is your organization using Anaplan to its fullest potential for scenario planning efforts? Is your company’s DNA accurately stored within your models? Are you able to adjust accordingly at a moment’s notice to changes in the global economy? How else should your organization be planning for the future with Anaplan? How can model builders better align themselves with the Connected Planning goals of their leadership team?

The digital DNA of each organization must define the model build and “honeycombs” that are created within -- all the way down to the micro-details of dimensionality, calculations, and more. Join Anaplan Live! host Chris Weiss as he facilitates a live Ask Me Anything session with Anaplan’s Chief Strategy Officer YY Lee!

**This AMA session is now closed.**

EshwarC

Hi @YYLee 

 

I am a model builder for my company in the retail space. I have been involved in developing Sales and Operations Planning, nominating and forecasting sales by building models for our business units. We use Anaplan as an integration tool and a future replacement for our existing processes for better insights. On scalability and a Global view of our supply chain process, we are connecting the dots within Anaplan and working on significant changes to our current processes through Anaplan. I have a few questions and clarifications that I needed in order to implement Anaplan effectively. 

1. We have a need to connect several data sources and we have set up a task scheduler that connects through Anaplan API to import and export data from CSV files. We require to connect to Azure Blob Storage for imports, PowerBI for direct exports and additional reporting and also use OneDrive as a source for imports. Understanding is that we can use windows task scheduler and run a batch process manually. I would love to see if we can integrate cloud based solutions, PowerBI etc within Anaplan API and connect Anaplan as a data source directly . Is there any development on that or if there is already an existing one, how do I leverage that?  

 

2. On model synchronizations and changing mode of models to "Deployed", is there a work around where we can import files to modules without affecting the structure? We need to do certain manual uploads on modules every month and keeping our models in deployed mode will ensure that structural changes are not made. But this is affecting our import process. Any changes we make, we try it out on a COPY/ TEST model to see if its functioning and then create an action/ widget , publish to dashboard, create a revision tag and then sync the changes to all models. I personally feel that the sync capability is a bit fragile and since we have multiple model builders working on our models simultaneously we might inadvertently make structural changes and the model will break . Is there any process going on to make model synchronization more robust and liberal? Would love to see if we can import data to modules without affecting the model structure, since all fields, datatypes are similar for all models in the CSV file we are trying to import.  

 

Regards,

Eshwar.