Connected data is a strategic necessity.
As organizations invest in their connected planning capabilities, they’re increasingly running into data quality challenges. Connected planning is only as strong as the data foundation it’s built on. The entire discipline of connected planning was built on the idea that data from across the enterprise should shape business plans. Unfortunately, when a company tries to achieve connected planning without connected data, they fall into the same traps they faced before. To give enterprises a smoother approach to data management, Anaplan has released Anaplan Data Orchestrator (ADO). ADO enables organizations to unify data across finance, supply chain, marketing, and commercial teams—creating a single source of truth for planning. These new capabilities can help enterprises scale their connected planning systems, leading to faster, better decisions and laying the foundation for enterprise AI. Let’s unpack how ADO supports planning.
ADO enables agile, scalable planning.
At its core, Anaplan Data Orchestrator is a flexible tool to get data into Anaplan. Its direct connectors to data warehouses like Snowflake, GCP, and other enterprise systems streamline integration by reducing reliance on middleware, accelerating data staging, and ensuring that critical business information flows seamlessly into Anaplan models. This connectivity helps enterprises maintain data accuracy while minimizing manual intervention, allowing teams to focus on analysis and decision-making rather than data preparation.
The Anaplan Data Orchestrator leverages a relational database architecture rather than Anaplan’s in-memory engine. This design enables it to manage larger data volumes efficiently and operate independently from the core Anaplan model structure, resulting in faster performance and greater scalability. Enterprises can then support complex, high-value use cases, including profitability analysis, territory optimization, and account-level planning, all of which depend on detailed and timely data.
The platform also enables rapid data availability, with even large data sets onboarded within days. ADO promotes dynamic data movement, getting users closer to real-time or event-driven orchestration. This evolution ensures that planning models stay synchronized, supporting continuous and responsive planning. And because ADO uses reusable pipelines and modular orchestration components, enterprises can replicate their data flows to deploy new planning models faster.
ADO can help solve the integration & data quality bottleneck.
With these capabilities, organizations can overcome one of the most persistent challenges in enterprise planning: integration bottlenecks. Many enterprises today spend an outsized portion of their time and resources on data integration and cleansing before any meaningful planning can occur. ADO addresses this head-on by automating and streamlining the flow of data between systems. ADO features 11 connectors, serving two real source systems, three databases, and six warehouses and storage providers. It also eliminates the need for complex middleware layers and manual data manipulation, allowing teams to focus on generating insights rather than wrestling with data pipelines.
Data is meant to be an asset to connected planning, not a barrier. Establishing clean, timely, and unified data enables organizations to move away from disjointed, error-prone processes and toward a truly connected planning ecosystem. When finance, operations, and business units all work from a single source of truth, enterprises can fulfill the promise of connected planning, enabling confident decision-making based on an accurate view of the business landscape.
Early implementations have already demonstrated measurable efficiency gains. While specific metrics may vary by organization, early benchmarks suggest that enterprises can reduce integration and data preparation efforts from 50 to 70 percent and cut overall data onboarding time from months to weeks. These improvements translate into significant cost savings and faster time-to-value for planning initiatives. In practice, this means planning teams spend less time waiting for data and more time running scenarios, analyzing trends, and driving business outcomes. These improvements also support initiatives like improving forecast accuracy with PlanIQ, data quality and sales planning efficiency, and AI integrations.
Establish governance, transparency & data lineage.
Beyond integration efficiency and data quality improvements, many organizations continue to face significant challenges related to data governance and transparency. As enterprises scale and diversify their data sources, maintaining confidence in the accuracy and consistency of planning data becomes increasingly complex. ADO centralizes business logic, streamlining one of the most important aspects of data governance. It also includes built-in logging, monitoring, and error-handling features that allow data teams to resolve issues before they cascade into planning models. By proactively tracking system performance and data flow, organizations can maintain smoother operations and a more predictable planning cadence.
Additionally, ADO’s data lineage functionality enables users to trace data across models and sources, providing end-to-end visibility from ingestion through transformation to final output. This transparency is critical for several reasons. First, it allows for faster resolution of data quality issues. Second, it supports quick adaptation to upstream system changes, such as during mergers and acquisitions, ERP migrations, or other enterprise transformations. Finally, robust lineage tracking enhances auditability and trust in planning outputs, giving business leaders the confidence that decisions are based on complete and verifiable information.
To achieve connected data with Anaplan Data Orchestrator, follow best practices.
To fully realize the benefits of connected planning and maximize the value of their data, organizations should adopt a few simple best practices. These practices help ensure that data remains a strategic asset—trusted, consistent, and aligned across all planning processes.
- Establish a clear data strategy early in the planning journey. Before building models or designing integrations, organizations should define what “good data” looks like, where it will come from, and how it will be governed. This early alignment creates a strong foundation for scalability and ensures that every subsequent decision—from system integration to model design—supports a unified data vision.
- Align stakeholders on data ownership. Connected planning spans finance, sales, supply chain, and other domains, meaning no single function owns all the data. By defining clear data stewardship responsibilities and establishing governance frameworks across teams, organizations can minimize redundancy, prevent misalignment, and maintain confidence in shared data assets.
- Leverage modular architecture to scale use cases efficiently. ADO’s reusable pipelines and modular design make it easier to extend integrations and add new planning models without rebuilding data foundations from scratch. By structuring integrations and models in modular components, teams can scale rapidly while maintaining flexibility and consistency.
- Validate data logic before model building. This helps ensure that planning models start with clean, accurate, and properly structured data. Early validation reduces rework, accelerates model deployment, and enables planners to focus on insights rather than troubleshooting.
Together, these best practices create a sustainable framework for connected data—one that complements Anaplan Data Orchestrator’s powerful capabilities and enables enterprises to build resilient, scalable, and insight-driven planning ecosystems.
A strategic partner can help you develop a strong data foundation.
Data sits at the heart of planning, but without the right tools and structure, it can quickly become a barrier instead of an advantage. When paired with a strong data strategy, aligned ownership, and scalable design principles, ADO becomes more than a technical solution—it becomes a catalyst for smarter, faster, and more connected planning.
At Spaulding Ridge, Anaplan consulting and managed services helps organizations turn these capabilities into tangible business outcomes. Our team has deep experience guiding enterprises through every step of the ADO journey—from designing robust data architectures to implementing scalable, automated pipelines that deliver lasting value.
If you’re ready to remove data as a barrier and transform it into a strategic enabler for your planning ecosystem, connect with Spaulding Ridge. We’ll help you orchestrate your data, empower your teams, and unlock the full potential of connected planning.