Data Strategy with Allitix
By: Todd Galuska
An effective data strategy allows your business to use its digital information efficiently. Sharing business intelligence across the various departments and infrastructure of your organization allows teams to streamline workflows and increase efficiency.
But how can you prepare and position your data to ensure it moves effortlessly across your organization?
Allitix helps companies overcome their data movement challenges and create comprehensive data strategy solutions.
We combine our connected planning expertise with the Anaplan platform to optimize your data flow. But before we get there, ask yourself: Is your data clean enough to get the most out of this hyperscale modeling technology?
We go beyond just providing the necessary technology. We also educate and drive the data readiness process that will help streamline operational efficiency in three key avenues:
Data governance and cleanliness.
Data transfer and management.
Reporting.
This article will explain how your organization can leverage the Anaplan planning tool to create a ‘single source of truth’ for data insights, forecasts and business strategies.
Data Governance and Cleanliness
The first step in our end-to-end data management strategy is to prepare your data for the Anaplan platform. When a business partners with Allitix to deploy an updated data strategy, one of the most commonly asked questions is “What have you learned from other customers we can take advantage of to make our project successful?”
The answer is always the same: Provide clean data to the Anaplan platform.
“A data management strategy is crucial for a project to be successful in the end. One of the leading issues with projects I see today has nothing to do with tool capability but with bad or inconsistent data across an organization.”
-Todd Galuska, Senior Consultant, Allitix
So, what makes data inefficient?
Inconsistent data across SaaS applications, manual or offline calculation, and broken transactional processing are just a few items that will cause data to be inaccurate. If bad or inconsistent data goes into the forecasting process, bad or inconsistent data will also come out of it.
That’s why Allitix partners with your IT professionals to understand the state of their data before integrating with the Anaplan platform. By highlighting data readiness processes that can resolve these issues, you’ll maximize the efficiency of your connected planning strategy.
“Data cleansing is the most difficult part of the transformation process. Allitix spends time upfront to ‘speak the language’ with IT departments and other necessary resources to design and deploy an effective data management strategy that illuminates a company’s specific needs and vulnerabilities.”
-Todd Galuska, Senior Consultant, Allitix
By lending a keen eye and expertise into the state of your data, our professionals help your IT teams to create a data schema that will get the most out of Anaplan. We’ll provide behind-the-curtain insight into what the platform requires from a data readiness perspective. Leveraging the talents of your IT resources can help ensure your data strategy is a sound one. Our team is happy to take a deep dive into the river of information with your team.
The result?
Clean data that’s ready for analysis and management in new and exciting ways.
Data Transfer and Management
The next step in an effective data management process is to transfer your data into Anaplan.
There are three ways to carry over your valuable resources and information: a direct database connection; an extract, transform and load (ETL) tool or a cloud storage solution.
Pre-built connectors ensure tools such as Informatica, Mulesoft, Dell’s Boomi or Snaplogic can interface easily with your new connected planning resource. This helps to keep your costs down and makes the administration of your pipeline easier.
Other ETL tools work as well, if you own a cloud storage solution Cloudworks is often the best way to facilitate an easy data transfer. Use your ETL or FTP tool to move data into cloud storage on Amazon S3, Azure Blob or Google BigQuery. Cloudworks takes care of the rest, establishing processes and schedules to update your data in Anaplan.
Virtually every organization has its own unique ecosystem, and no two companies are alike. Regardless of the infrastructure your company has historically relied on, Anaplan’s connector tools will work with your applications to deliver and administer data flights into the connected planning platform. The versatility provided by being able to leverage your existing architecture makes the data process transfer as easy as possible.
If any delays in your data cleaning efforts emerge, Anaplan models can be built to assist you in identifying errors in the application and work towards fixing them.
When it comes to the effective management of your newly transferred data, Allitix illuminates your current strategy’s pain points. Regardless of whether it’s a particular department or period that is muddying your visibility, we’ll work to identify and streamline any inconsistencies within the platform.
Anaplan is a blank slate, presenting innumerable ways to interpret your data. Allitix will help you mold administrative dashboards that have the greatest positive impact on your business, so that you’re not left looking at figures and metrics that can cloud your vision. Together, we’ll eliminate the noise and drill down to the data that matters most.
Reporting
The last step in our shared data journey is to determine whether data needs to be taken back out of Anaplan. Even with Anaplan’s robust dashboarding and management reporting capabilities, some organizations will need to get data back into a source system for additional insight.
To ensure the data transfer process works effectively both ways, Anaplan has partnered with Microsoft Power BI and Tableau for built-in connectors that allow users to interact directly with the platform. This creates real-time analytics across shared resources, so your business leadership and departments can leverage the power of multiple applications without suffering downtime while data is being transferred.
The Anaplan DocuSign connector provides signing capabilities as well, so that you can execute any of your approval processes, agreements or digital transactions with ease.
“We custom-build our data strategy with layers that don’t exist with other solutions. Not only can we get you up and running, but it’s the customization after that makes the difference! We’re always working with our partners to finesse their monitoring and reporting capabilities, so that any data in or out of Anaplan seamlessly integrates with their established operational architecture.”
-Todd Galuska, Senior Consultant, Allitix
Anaplan’s intuitive nature is invaluable for creating reports that better drive business decisions. If you find something wrong with your information, the platform provides the ability to course correct. You’ll be free to make updates across your datasets so that you can get your metrics where you need them to be.
The precision and speed with which you can inform and interpret your data make Anaplan the preferred modeling solution for Allitix and its network of trusted partners.
From data management to implementation and reporting, we’ll work together to develop a bespoke data strategy for your business.
Your KPIs, management reports and graphs will be intuitive and easy to use, thanks to data that’s built into a ‘single source of truth’. To learn more about how we can partner with you to create an end-to-end data strategy, we encourage you to request a full demo and experience the power of a connected planning solution for yourself!