Anaplan Use-Case 7: Dependent Dropdown / Filtered Picklist (1-to-Many)
Have you ever been asked to show a limited set of selectable values (as dropdown) in a list-formatted line-item Y based (dependent) on another line-item X? Was the relationship between X and Y 1-to-Many? If yes, then you are in luck. The following article focuses on how to deal with such a use-case in Anaplan.
If the relationship between X and Y is Many-to-Many, then feel free to hop on to the article Dependent Dropdown (Many-to-Many).
NOTE: This article is a segment of the Anaplan Use-Cases Series. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to go through the introductory blog Why Anaplan Use-Cases Series? to understand the background behind this endeavor.
Context
A hypothetical firm Nutty Butty Inc. produces, packages, markets, and sells Walnuts in the USA. The firm owns multiple farms, each one dedicated to cultivating walnuts with a certain method (Organic or Inorganic) and in a certain medium (Ground or Pot). MDM (Master Data Management) team is responsible for managing and maintaining the farms data in the data lake, from where the data is sourced into Anaplan.
Until a couple of years back, Nutty Butty’s operations were manageably limited. With just a handful of farms, Supply Manager was able to manage the production operations and plan the supply forecasting all by himself. However, in the last couple of years, the firm’s business has grown considerably, leading to more effort-intensive operational planning. As indicated in the data above and shown in rectangular shapes below, currently, the firm has 18 farms across two cultivation hubs in California — Modesto and Visalia.
Considering the flourishing business, Supply Manager has decided to conceptually introduce zones within each hub and appoint a manager for each zone. This would help him offload a part of his current responsibilities to zone managers and ease his day-to-day work. Every Zone Manager would be responsible for not only overseeing the operations of walnut production on all the farms under his zone, but also providing feedback to the Supply Manager on the production planning for the upcoming future years.
User Story 1
As Supply Manager, I need to be able to create new zones for a cultivation hub, so that I can assign farms to zones later. I should be able to use the same names for different zones across different hubs. Eventually, I should be able to see all the existing zones for each hub.
User Story 2
As Supply Manager, I need to be able to assign each farm to a zone, so that the supply planning can be conducted at Zone level later. For each farm, I should be able to see only relevant zones in the dropdown — ones that fall under the same hub associated with the given farm.
Analysis & Design
1) Based on the user requirements, a new dimension needs to be incorporated in the current planning process — Zone, which conceptually fits in between Hub and Farm dimensions.
2) During Farm-to-Zone assignment, user wants to see only relevant zones for each farm — zones that fall under the same hub associated with the given farm. Hence, Zone will need to be a dropdown dependent on and filtered by Hub, implying that we will need to use the Dependent Dropdown (aka Dependent Filter or Filtered Picklist) concept.
3) Hub-to-Zone is 1-to-Many relationship. Each hub could have multiple zones under it. However, same zone could never be under two different hubs. As a result, we could declare Hub as a property (or as parent, in a hierarchical relationship) of Zone. This would come handy later while setting up Dependent Dropdown/Filter during Farm-to-Zone assignment.
4) Since two different zones in different hubs could share the same name, Zone must be declared as a numbered list.
5) In a classic dashboard, we could create an action to let the user insert new items in the numbered list. However, the action does not work with new user experience — we cannot publish the action to new UX dashboards. So, we will need to resort to Form based user input to insert/create new items in the Zone list.
Implementation
1) Create a numbered list Zone, with Hub as its list-formatted property (or as its parent). Declaring Hub as a property (or parent) of the Zone list is a pre-requisite for implementing the Dependent Filter concept to be discussed later.
2) Create and configure an Action on the new UX Board page as follows.
3) Now, user should be able to create new zones through UX page.
4) Create a module ‘SYS01 Zone’ to show all the zones with their hubs. The data grid should be pulled onto the UX page to complete User Story 1 as follows.
5) An existing module ‘DAT01 Farm’ already hosts farms master data sourced from the data lake.
6) Add a list-formatted line-item Zone in the module ‘DAT01 Farm’ to store zone assignments for each farm. To ensure that the new line-item displays only those zones that are associated to the hub of the given farm, we apply Filter on the given line-item as Dependent on the data in the Hub line-item (of the same module).
7) Create a UX board page to display data off the module ‘DAT01 Farm’, letting the user manage farm-to-zone assignments. Now, user should see only relevant items in the dropdown, thereby concluding User Story 2 as well.
Conclusion
In a data grid/module, if the range of (selectable) values in a line-item Y needs to be narrowed down based on the value in a line-item X, then the list X is supposed to be a property of list Y before applying the Dependent Filter on Y, provided the relationship between X and Y is 1-to-Many.
While declaring list X as parent of list Y is a valid alternative, the choice depends on the holistic user requirements — whether declaring X and Y as a hierarchy (parent-child relationship) caters to the overall needs of end users.
If the relationship between X and Y is Many-to-Many, feel free to dive into the article Dependent Dropdown (Many-to-Many).
