At Zooss, we believe the strength of a planning solution depends on how well it reflects the real complexity of the business it serves. Upali Wickramasinghe brings more than 15 years of enterprise planning experience to that challenge – and the technical depth to match.
Master Anaplanner in Melbourne
A Master Anaplanner, Certified Solution Architect and Certified Anaplan Trainer based in Melbourne, Upali joined Zooss in October 2025. He brings a career built across some of the most demanding planning environments in financial services, retail, telecommunication, automotive and beyond – and a rare combination of technical rigour, academic grounding and hands-on delivery experience.
From research to real-world planning
Upali holds a PhD in Computer Science from RMIT University, with earlier postgraduate study at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and has published research in multi-objective optimisation – the science of finding the best solution when multiple competing objectives are in play, using a branch of AI known as Evolutionary Algorithms. It is an academic background that translates directly into how he approaches complex business planning problems.
“Enterprise planning is, at its core, a multi-objective problem. You are trying to optimise across financial performance, operational efficiency, workforce capacity and increasingly sustainability outcomes – all at once, with incomplete information and competing priorities. My research background taught me to be rigorous about that complexity rather than simplify it away. That discipline shapes how I approach every model I design. This research background also trained me in documentation and communication to make the objectives and impacts clear to appropriate stakeholders with the necessary details.”
This combination of academic depth and hands-on delivery experience is unusual in the Anaplan ecosystem. Prior to joining Zooss, Upali spent nearly three years as Senior Customer Success Business Partner at Anaplan, before moving to Deloitte where he spent close to five years as Senior Manager in Finance and Performance.
Working on both sides of the platform – as an Anaplan practitioner and as a senior advisory consultant – gives Upali a perspective that is genuinely rare.
Designing planning models that hold up
For Upali, strong Anaplan model design is about more than technical correctness. It is about building solutions that reflect how the business actually operates – and that continue to serve the organisation as it evolves with value add features and user-friendly interactions to the system.
“A model that works on delivery day but creates problems six months later was never really finished. The questions I ask at the design stage are: how will this be maintained, how easy is it to use, how will it scale, and does it reflect how decisions are actually made in this business? If you can’t answer those questions clearly before you build, you are storing up problems for later.”
His experience spans financial planning and analysis, supply chain, workforce planning and operational forecasting – and he has led end-to-end implementations as the senior technical point of contact for major enterprise clients. In financial services and retail in particular, where planning complexity is high and the cost of poor data quality is significant, that breadth matters.
What good planning actually delivers
has reinforced a consistent view: planning transformation only delivers lasting value when the solution is built on trusted data and designed for adoption.
“The most common issue I see in planning transformations is that the tools have been built around the data that was available, rather than the decisions that needed to be made. When you flip that around – when you start from the decision and work back to what data and model design would best support it – the quality of planning output improves significantly. That shift in approach is often where the real transformation happens.”
What Upali brings to Zooss clients
For organisations working through a planning transformation – whether implementing Anaplan for the first time or looking to get more from an existing investment – Upali brings a unique combination of skills and experience. His time at Anaplan means he understands how the technology performs under real enterprise conditions. His academic grounding in optimisation and decision-making brings a level of analytical rigour to model design that goes beyond standard implementation practice – and directly supports our mission to enable better business planning and reporting for the organisations we work with.
Find out more:
- Our solutions: Connected planning for Banking & Financial Services
- Delivering better planning for businesses with Anaplan
- Planning transformation in practice: Model design for scalability, performance and adoption
- To discuss your planning transformation, contact us.
Better Planning. Better Planet.