Reporting Strategy with Anaplan
By: Todd Galuska
Creating impactful reports, within a fully thought-out strategy, is all part of an intelligent, modern approach to data usage and organizational leadership. As your company battles to stay competitive and increase its market share, reports can fuel your decision-making.
Your choice of a planning tool gives you the bedrock on which to build your reporting strategy. This platform can not only act as a single source of data truth for your business, but it can also offer a variety of report options, allowing you to optimize your results.
Reports and Anaplan: An Introduction
At Allitix, our planning solution of choice is Anaplan, so we view reporting through an Anaplan lens. Fortunately, this solution is packed with useful reporting capabilities as well as connections to third-party business intelligence (BI) tools for when a more granular approach might be necessary.
No matter what audience within the company you're designing reports for, or what timeline you'll have to produce figures on, there is likely an option within Anaplan that can help you get the results you need. When you've worked with experts to integrate the Anaplan solution with your organization's data and BI resources, you're on the right path for value.
With that said, there's a possible intimidation factor. This software can do so much, with so many individual facets of the business to report on — where do you start and what do you focus on?
It can be clarifying to think about a few specific types of reports and their roles in overall planning and business strategy. While no two companies will end up with the same enterprise planning approach, there are adaptable categories of reporting that can apply in numerous situations, tweaked to suit the circumstances.
Administrative Reporting
No matter what type of planning tool an organization uses, administrative reporting is essential to the implementation and maintenance of the models it produces. These reports are designed to give a snapshot of how the process is proceeding.
Is there adequate data quality to draw accurate projections from the model? What should the benchmarks be for the performance of the model? How is the adjustment of the model progressing over time?
A planning model isn't a set-and-forget type of proposition. Businesses need ways to tweak and adjust their models, and ideally they won't be in the dark as they make these changes.
Administrative reporting is indispensable for the developers working on a model. What happened as a result of a manual change during the implementation phase? How has a code adjustment later on affected the performance of the planning model? An administrative report can give the real inside story about how the model is progressing.
Because of the close connection between these reports and the success of the planning system itself, it's best to keep administrative reporting within the planning tool itself if this is at all possible. Developers who want a quick look at how their actions have affected the effectiveness of the model can get those easily if the whole process is managed within Anaplan — or the company’s other planning tool of choice.
The reports and visualization types within Anaplan itself are designed to be both user-friendly and in-depth, so the administrative reports produced by the system can give clear guidance and results. The ability to assess figures at a glance helps keep personnel quick, decisive and efficient.
In cases where organizational rules force developers to use a different set of dashboards, connectors can link the tool with other productivity software. Whether the company favors Microsoft, Google or another provider, there is an add-on available.
User Entry Reporting
When considering more general reports, Anaplan also offers many options within the system itself. The placement of reports — whether users should work directly in Anaplan or take advantage of its connections with conventional business intelligence tools — comes down to a few factors.
The questions underlying the decision are:
Does the planning tool offer a report that meets business requirements? A report can be an essential part of everyday business decision-making, and in this context, it needs to be accurate, high-performing and easy to interpret. As long as the report in question can be built to this standard using the toolset within Anaplan, it may be a good match.
Do users need their dashboards to update immediately when data changes? In cases when users must react to real-time information to make their strategic choices, it's often a wise move to keep the reports within Anaplan. The data flowing through the system can affect its internal reports immediately, giving users the up-to-the-minute results that can empower them.
These reports, built with the wide variety of tools, widgets and options that are part of Anaplan, can prove to be a powerful force for data change reporting and what-if scenario planning. In these types of activities, users take the pulse of the business and see how their actions impact results. The real-time reports within Anaplan give them the insights they need.
The reports generated within Anaplan, while potentially not as polished as those created in purpose-built BI tools, are still customizable and user-friendly. The visually compelling reports produced by the system are suitable for inclusion in dashboards and target various audiences based on the facts and figures people in those roles care about most.
Reports and the advanced scenario planning possible with Anaplan go hand in hand. A dashboard that shows real vs. projected results can put an easily comprehensible and actionable face on important data insights.
No User Interaction Reporting
In some cases, users aren't looking for real-time updates based on data changes. Rather, they're interested in having a slightly longer view of the trend lines and key performance indicators (KPIs) that affect their work and reflect their planning strategies.
Sometimes companies have this lack of need for instant results and also want to either take a more in-depth look at the figures or use a feature not present within Anaplan itself. In these cases, they have the option of connecting the platform with dedicated BI solutions.
Among the many connectors and integrations that work with Anaplan, the most relevant from a BI perspective are featured within the PowerBI and Tableau software suites. These allow users of the BI tools to use Anaplan as a single source of data truth, while taking advantage of all the customizable report types and dashboard formats present in PowerBI and Tableau.
BI products have undergone years — sometimes decades — of development to offer user-friendly and refined report types. Users can access these without giving up on the single source of data truth provided by the centralizing Anaplan platform. In cases that don't call for real-time reporting, this approach may be the best of both worlds.
Even in situations without direct connectors between specific BI tools and Anaplan, the unified database created by Anaplan is exportable, allowing an organization to rely on that centralized, collated collection of its data. Having such a singular source of data truth has massive potential value — companies don't want to deal with duplicate, outdated or inconsistent data. With Anaplan as an organizing force, they don't have to.
That's the power of Anaplan when it comes to reporting: Whether this tool is generating reports, connected to BI solutions directly or simply aggregating data for separate reporting with unrelated tools, it serves as a unifying piece of the tech stack, one that powers planning efforts.
Implementing the Right Strategy for You
A main theme running through Anaplan implementation — in reporting and beyond — is choice. Users can make selections regarding the types of KPIs they target with their reports, the way they run those reports, how they access their data and more factors.
Assembling those options into a coherent reporting strategy, one that focuses on a business's objectives, is an important building block in overall organizational success. Accurate, timely reports can fuel decision-making that leads to a real competitive advantage. Then, that performance increase will be measured in further reports.
How can companies get to this point of having reporting strategies directly tailored to their needs, objectives and unique structures? This comes from working with an expert partner like Allitix on Anaplan implementation and beyond.
Out of the box, Anaplan can be a blank slate. Choosing which of its features is most relevant and configuring it to deliver maximum value are tasks best accomplished in close collaboration with third parties. These consultants have been through this process before and can achieve alignment with an organization's goals.
The Allitix way of implementing features such as reporting involves this kind of connection, adding and configuring the necessary features to both drive value and save time and effort for the company's own stakeholders and users at all levels.
When your company takes on reporting in this way — powered by Anaplan and customized by Allitix — you're ideally positioned to take maximum value from the technology and strategies involved.
Want more details about our approach to reporting strategy? Reach out; we're always happy to talk.