This week we attended Anaplan’s first full day Partner Hub in London. It was a chance to learn more about the platform changes being planned for release in the short, near and long-term and to also hear about their vision for how they see the product evolving over the coming years.
There was too much covered during the day to share everything, but some of the highlights for us were the demonstrations we saw of the new workflow functionality and Excel add-in. Anaplan have clearly invested a lot of time and resources in redeveloping both of these – and the results are impressive.
The new Anaplan workflow, or ‘Tasks’ as we will probably come to know it, allows planning cycles to be much more task driven. Instead of accessing their planning dashboards within the models as they would have done previously, users can receive an email notification which will take them to a new Tasks portal. From here they can see all tasks assigned to themselves and complete each one in order – without leaving the portal.
The new Excel add-in currently in development has made huge improvements since the current release. One major change in the new build is that the add-in allows users to manage the data they retrieve themselves, rather than relying on a model builder to create the appropriate views within the model. As a result, users can be more selective about what data they pull in to Excel from Anaplan. We have also seen big improvements in how data can be pivoted and sliced once it is in Excel.
If you would like to understand more about upcoming changes to Anaplan, please contact us.