The creation of this blog was born from exchanges with customers who manage several data granularities in their planning model, especially on the Date and Product dimensions.
Their (or their partners’) first reflex is to create and pack everything into a single model, the distribution of data is generally automatically done, thanks to the powerful allocation mechanisms existing in SAP Analytics Cloud, the user isn’t aware of the amount of data generated automatically and doesn’t even need for analysis at this level of detail.
This approach has perverse effects on performance that customers become aware of during user testing. A user, whose security accesses have not yet been defined, may find himself generating more than 60 million of data, for example during a strategic planning exercises that includes a 5-year with budget on a monthly basis and a comparison with 3 years of actual data, i.e. 96 periods, some of which will never be analyzed in detail.
We face the same problem for the Products dimension with a luxury of details whose disaggregation follows a protocol linked to the previous data without even taking advantage of the power of the predictive algorithms embedded in SAP Analytics Cloud.
Our customers, extending the use of SAP analytics Cloud planning to scenarios other than finance, need to think about a multi-model architecture, more in line with the needs and ease of use of their planners.
Illustrated use case
This use case is based on a real examples of customers planning on a monthly level when budgeting and on a yearly level for the Strategic Plan, the budget is the first period of the Strategic Plan.
Beside the customer needs a finer granularity when planning the Sales, the Budget is done on the Product level whereas for the Strategic Planning is done on the Family of products level.
The practical case below gives an example of the setting possibilities.
The input of data is driven by 2 models, one for the Budget and one for the Strategic Plan, the granularity of the Date and Products dimensions has been adapted to the input requirements.
The Strategic Plan is done for the next 5 years including the Budget per Product family.
Creation of the models
Details of the model Budget with monthly periods and a detailed Products dimension grouped per Family hierarchy
Details of the Model Strategic Planning with yearly periods and a Products dimension per Family of products
Both models should be configured in sharing Public dimensions.
The outcome of those models in the input stories
How to transfer the data from the Budget to the Strategic Plan model ?
Please use the cross model data action feature.
Detail of the data action configuration
Details of the rules
Dimension DATE
Dimension PRODUCT
Hope this inspires you more adapted model architecture in SAP Analytics Cloud 🙂
