What is Production Data?

Part 1: Production Lists

5 min readMar 3, 2025

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is managing your Anaplan models from design to deployment. Having development (dev), testing and production(prod) environments is an essential part of this.

Before we start, let’s break down production data and structural data in Anaplan.

Production Data vs. Structural Data

Production data changes often and is part of daily business operations.

Examples:

Distribution Centers List
Employee List (and its Active Employees subset)
2025 Forecast Numbers
Today’s Date

Structural Data defines the structure of your model and doesn’t change in deployed mode.

Examples:

Model years and time ranges
Formulas
Module and line item names
Line Item Subsets
Native Time and Versions
Notes
Non-production lists

Production data is not synced from dev to prod, it’s updated directly in prod.
Structural data is updated in dev, saved as a revision tag, and then synced to prod.

Types of Production Data in Anaplan

There are two categories:

Default Production Data:

Modules and Saved Views: Cell values
Model Calendar: Current Period value
Users: All available settings under the Users tab

2. Optional (or Selective) Production Data:
While deploying a model, you have the option to determine if some information are going to be structural data or production data.

Production Lists
Production Imports
Production Import Data Sources (IDS)

In Part 1 of What is production Data? article, I explain Production Lists.

In Part 2 of What is production Data? article, I explain Production Imports and Import Data Sources.

Production Lists:

These lists store operational data that changes during day-to-day business operations, like:

Stores
Employees
Dynamic time lists

Structural lists don’t change often, so we change them in dev model and push the changes to prod model instead of directly updating them in the prod model.

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Examples include:

States
Days of the week
The countries which the company operates

You can mark a list as production data by selecting a Boolean checkbox.

In a hierarchy, if a parent list is set as a production list, all its child lists will be production lists, too.

Important Considerations

If you mark a list as production data, then create a newly deployed prod model, lists in the new model will be empty.
If a list is marked as production data, formulas cannot reference specific list items. Because if you write a formula based on list items, your formula will not work when list items change.

Formulas can only reference the top levels of production lists because top levels of production lists are structural data.

Anaplan throws an error if you try to make a list production data when its items are used in formulas.

Anaplan prevents you from setting up a production list if a list item is referenced by a formula by throwing this error message:

You cannot mark [List Name] as Production Data because [List Name.List Item Name] is referenced by the line item formula for [Module Name.Line Item Name].

Anaplan also prevents you from referencing a list item if a list is flagged as Production Databy throwing this error message:

The formula for [Module Name. Line Item Name] is invalid because it contains a reference to [List Name.List Item Name]. All items in [List Name] are marked as Production Data and cannot be referenced.

3. If you cannot decide if a list should be a structural list or a production list, keep it as a structural list. It is easier to convert a structural list to a production list than the other way around. If you convert a production list into a structural list, the dev model list will replace the prod model list when you sync models. This can lead to data loss or unintended changes in prod.

That’s why converting production lists back into structural lists is not recommended.

4. If a list is production data, avoid applying hiding/showing, filtering, and sorting in saved views.

For Example:

Imagine your Level 1 model is your dev model, and your employee list is marked as production data. You create a saved view in the dev model by hiding Shala Engle because she is not employed.

However, when you open the prod model and view the same saved view, it may not display the same way because the prod model’s employee list may not include Shala Engle.

Additionally, employee lists are always numbered lists, which can further complicate data discrepancies.

Directly hiding or showing list items is similar to hardcoding list items, but in this case, Anaplan doesn’t throw an error like it does for formula references. To avoid inconsistencies, you should not use hide/show on production lists in saved views.