Solving Data Integration Challenges
Business users globally have developed a much broader understanding of the role data plays in a successful Connected Planning solution. While it is enormously useful for planning purposes, bringing together data from disparate sources can present challenges.
IT teams are under significant pressure to run compliant, governed, and connected data programs, while also enabling business users the freedom to own their business applications. This pressure, alongside increased collaboration to manage and execute integration processes for the business, adds to the workload for IT teams.
Data Integration for Connected Planning with Anaplan has many options and could potentially cause an additional headache for internal IT teams. Sempre Analytics has developed integration patterns to successfully expedite data integration with Anaplan, dramatically reducing this pressure.
“More and more clients are asking about ‘data approach and integration’, to fuel their extended planning journey”
– Anaplan Customer Success Team
Challenges with Data Integration
Traditional integration requires regular IT involvement and slows the business planning process. Unscheduled runs, filter changes and logic updates can all introduce delays and increase IT workload. Critical business reporting and processes can cause significant bottlenecks as IT teams are on standby to support those functions.
Trust in the Output
In order to have trust in the validity of the data and the solution, it is vital that organisations have visibility of data movements. If it is impossible to see when data was last refreshed or understand why a transaction has not been loaded, it is impossible for users to trust the output. Traditional integration approaches are often inflexible, preventing subsets of data from being updated which compromises the “Real-time” view and user’s confidence in any report generated. What is required is the secure, automated, and audited transfer of information.
“We were able to assure our IT team that we had a coherent approach to feeding our planning model(s). This sped up internal support for our project”
– Sempre Analytics Financial Services Customer
Anaplan integration from Sempre aims to deliver fast implementation with minimal IT involvement. Senior planning consultants, integration experts and data engineers design the integrations and are cognisant of the customer’s individual needs and business needs.
Separate integration processes allow the planning teams to enable/disable and execute data feeds independently, in a controlled and audited manner.
Giving the Planning team control of the data
Planning teams are given control of integration filters and selections, such as financial periods, entities and date ranges giving them much greater control and reducing dependency on IT teams. To provide further peace of mind, it’s possible to view the status and audit history of data movements and the health of data within the Anaplan Data Hub, giving all users much greater confidence in the Connected Planning models delivered.
Multiple integration options exist and the chosen route depends on an organisation’s requirements, and available technology and resources. The result is fast implementation with minimal IT involvement, all within Anaplan.
To find out more, speak to a Sempre integration specialist to understand the best fit for your organisation.
About the Author
Tom Clark With more than 25 years’ experience in technology solutions, Tom leads the Data & Analytics practice within Sempre. Tom has been with Sempre from the beginning and has worked across the full programme lifecycle to advise, scope, deliver, and manage, high-value programmes for our customers. He has a wide breadth of experience in all aspects of the data management lifecycle, including data solutions, strategy, governance, master data management and quality, having delivered transformational data solutions across multiple industry sectors.
