Data Ingestion Automation in Anaplan

About Client

The client is a global event management company based in Chicago with a strong presence in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East.

Background

  • The client wanted to develop a budgeting solution on a reliable and secure platform, as well as automate the process of integration which reduces manual error and increases the efficiency of the budgeting team.

Challenge

Seamlessly integrating all the systems and importing all the data to required places in one go.

  • Ability to load data from multiple sources which includes industry-specific data and excel data sheets.
  • Providing access to an external system from Oracle, which is behind a closed network system.
  • Providing automation to move finance data into Anaplan.
  • Capabilities to load data on demand from the Finance Planning team
  • Data security concerns while moving to Anaplan.

Our Solution

  • The existing data warehouse was used as the source instead of connecting to multiple data sources.
  • Daily ETL loads ensured that the data was updated from all the separate sources.
  • Apart from the data movement from source to destination, Anaplan Data Integration tool was used.
  • Generic scripts were used and parameters set at run time.
  • Inside Anaplan, a module is designed to act as a staging area before importing the rest of the modules with business logic.
  • Sensitive data is loaded using same batch scripts in conjunction with network drives and controlling the access to the network space.
  • Anaplan’s internal Actions/Processes are called from within the job to avoid any missing data. Errors are handled using similar error handling procedures of ETL jobs. This makes maintenance and running the jobs easy.

Outcome

The entire process led to an increase in ROI by

235%
for the client.

An overall efficiency of

14.5%
was observed in the client’s Budgeting Team.

  • The process is a quick and easy way to populate data in Anaplan.
  • When data is updated in the source, the same is visible in Anaplan. This avoids any errors that creep up while loading the same data at different places.
  • Any new actions created can be added to existing processes which results in easy changes to the system.