Introducing the Anaplan Contact Center Planning application: co‑developed by Keyrus and Anaplan
Contact centers sit at the intersection of customer experience, workforce cost, and operational performance. Yet for many organizations, mid- to long‑range planning is still managed through spreadsheets, disconnected tools, and point solutions that limit visibility, slow decision-making, and make it difficult to align operations with business goals.
With the launch of the Anaplan Contact Center Planning application, organizations now have a purpose-built solution designed to modernize how contact centers plan – strategically, collaboratively, and at scale.
Co-developed by Keyrus and Anaplan, the application brings enterprise-grade planning, forecasting, and scenario modeling to organizations seeking greater accuracy, transparency, and confidence in workforce decisions.
Read Anaplan's press release announcing the newly released suite of applications
Closing the Gap Between Strategy and Execution
Historically, contact center technology investments have focused on short-term scheduling and execution, typically delivered through Workforce Management (WFM) platforms. While essential for day-to-day operations, these tools are not designed to answer longer-range, business-critical questions such as:
How will demand, service levels, and staffing requirements evolve over the next 1 to 18 months?
What is the financial impact of different growth, hiring, outsourcing, or productivity scenarios?
How do workforce decisions align with broader business and financial plans?
The Anaplan Contact Center Planning application addresses this gap by enabling mid- to long-range capacity planning while remaining complementary to existing WFM solutions.
Contact Center Planning vs. Workforce Management
The Anaplan Contact Center Planning application is designed for strategic, forward-looking planning, while WFM platforms remain essential for tactical execution.
Anaplan's Contact Center Planning application enables:
Mid- to long-range capacity planning
Workload and volume forecasting
New hire ramp and productivity planning
Staff and capacity modeling
Internal and external allocation scenarios
Enterprise-wide scenario and "what-if" modeling
Financial and labor cost forecasting aligned to business plans
Workforce Management platforms focus on:
Short-term scheduling and intraday adjustments
Skill-based routing and real-time KPIs
Tactical execution and operational control
Together, they provide a connected planning-to-execution ecosystem for contact center organizations.
Built from Real-World Experience – and Recognized by Anaplan
The Anaplan Contact Center Planning application reflects more than five years of real-world deployment experience of this solution, shaped by:
100+ projects and implementations
Two Fortune 5 customers, along with many other global organizations
Deep collaboration between Keyrus and Anaplan across design, development, and delivery
This collaboration is further underscored by Keyrus being named Anaplan's Trailblazer Partner of the Year – a recognition of Keyrus' leadership in delivering innovative, scalable planning solutions and driving meaningful customer outcomes on the Anaplan platform.
Key Capabilities
The application provides a unified planning environment that includes:
Workload forecasting across channels and planning horizons
Ramp planning for hiring, onboarding, and productivity curves
Staff and capacity planning aligned to service and cost targets
Internal and external allocation modeling, including outsourcing
Scenario planning and "what-if" modeling to evaluate trade-offs
Labor spend forecasting, aligned with enterprise finance
Governed planning processes, including financial lock controls
All of this is delivered within Anaplan's connected planning platform, creating a single source of truth across operations, workforce, and finance.
Learn more about the solution on Anaplan's website
Purpose-Built for Complex, SLA-Driven Organizations
Not every contact center requires the same level of planning sophistication. The Anaplan Contact Center Planning application is designed for organizations operating labor‑intensive service environments where staffing accuracy directly affects service performance, labor cost, and margin. It is especially well suited for organizations with two or more of the following characteristics:
Large, distributed operations
managing multi-site contact center or back-office teams, typically with 400+ agents and often 2,000+ operational employees across regions
High-volume, variable demand
– such as customer service, claims, disputes, trust and safety, or case management – where workload volatility creates material planning risk
SLA- or turnaround-time-driven service models
where missed service levels can lead to financial penalties, revenue leakage, or degraded customer experience
Blended labor models
that include offshore, nearshore, BPO, or vendor-supported teams, requiring coordinated capacity and productivity planning across geographies
Spreadsheet-based or disconnected planning environments
that limit forecast accuracy, scenario modeling, utilization visibility, and labor cost control in margin-sensitive operations
See It Live at Anaplan Connect New York
The application was showcased at Anaplan Connect New York, where James Wilby, WFM & Contact Center Practice Lead at Keyrus, and Paul Meredith, Solution Marketing Manager at Anaplan, demonstrated how organizations can modernize mid- to long-range capacity planning and make more confident decisions for their contact centers.
We will update this article with the session link once the recording becomes available.
Connecting Strategy, Operations, and Finance
As a global Anaplan solution advisory and delivery partner, Trailblazer Partner of the Year, and co-developer of the Contact Center Planning application, Keyrus helps organizations connect strategy, operations, and finance so they can plan with greater clarity, adapt with confidence, and improve business outcomes.
If your organization is operating beyond the limits of spreadsheets and disconnected planning tools, we would welcome the conversation.