PCMCS Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) Features: 1. Rule Balancing Reports
The other day I was taking a finance course where the topic was the impact of Interest and how it represents the value of Time. In other words, what is the cost, or value, of one’s time? – Is it high, resulting in a higher interest rate per period, or is it small, resulting in a small interest rate per period? The course went into a lot of details about Net Present Value and Future Value, and I couldn’t help but think about the concept of Time and how we constantly assign a monetary value to it. How much am I willing to work to get that new car? How much time do I have before that competitor will outrun me and snatch that market share from me?
This was how I started thinking about various out-of-the-box features (OOTB). Such features are often key in deciding whether to acquire a software/service/product because the one resource that we constantly complain about not having enough of is “Time.”
You are now reading the first blog post on OOTB features in PCMCS covering one of the most used Reports for data analysis as well as troubleshooting profitability calculation results. At the end of this blog post, you should know what Balancing reports are, where to find them, how to use them, and also how to further expand them with minimal time and effort invested.
What are Rule Balancing Reports?
Rule Balancing reports provide quick insight into the validity of the application results. These reports are powerful OOTB artifacts that can be further configured to cater to any custom application requirements in order to support validation of calculation results as well as contribution analysis and traceability.
The PCMCS OOTB Rule balancing report is initially based on a Default Model View with a standard selection of upper level members for each dimension. Starting from this Default Model View, the administrators or users of the PCMCS applications can perform a deep dive analysis on more granular intersections and configure detailed reports for a ruleset or a group of rulesets they choose to investigate.
The Default Rule Balancing report is available as soon as the application has been deployed, and it can be accessed via the Main Navigator menu under the Manage section.
I will be using the default BikesML30 application to demonstrate the capabilities of the Rule Balancing reports. If you have loaded your sample application and cannot see any results in the Rule Balancing reports, check that you ran your end-to-end calculations for any given POV from the Manage Calculation Menu. The POV I have chosen for this demonstration is FY16, January, Actual Scenario.
As you open the Rule Balancing menu, the Default Model View is the only view available when you initially set up your application and your allocation rules. Any other Rule Validation reports that you see within the Demo application besides the Default Model View have been built and configured outside of the out-of-the-box list of features.
What are PCMCS Model Views?
A Model View represents a predefined data slice within the PCMCS application; consider the model views as a set of selections of members for each dimension that displays only the relevant data points for a required intersection.
Rule Balancing Report Example
After running the entire set of allocation rules within the Demo BksML30 application, the Rule Balancing report should look like this:
The description of each rule selected will be displayed along with the rule number on the same screen. The rules will be displayed in the order that they were launched following the user-defined sequencing, regardless of the actual Rule Number/Rule ID that has been assigned.
Rule Balancing reports provide quick insight into the validity of the application. The “Input” column enables users to confirm that what was loaded into the application matches the expected values received from the source system. The Allocation In and Allocation Out columns validate the allocations performed by the application from both a balance perspective (Allocation In should be equal and opposite to Allocation Out) as well as a numeric one. The balance aspect is particularly of interest when allocations are made with custom calculation rules. In these cases, two separate rules are typically required, one for the credit out and one for the debit in. As such, there is a greater risk that the formulas for the outbound and inbound values will not produce amounts equal and opposite in total, thereby causing an undesired imbalance. In these situations, the Allocation In and Allocation Out values are shown on two separate rows, and they quickly illustrate to the user the success of their calculations.
Rule Balancing and Smart View Ad Hoc Reports
Any highlighted data point/data value in the Balancing screen will allow you to further investigate the allocation step through a Smart View ad hoc report. These hyperlinks represent pre-built/pre-defined queries that point directly to the Essbase database, allowing you to further expand your analysis of a selected data point.
When you click on the highlighted number, a Smart View link will be downloaded to your workstation.
As an example, you can see how the detail for Net Change looks like for the Custom calculation rule R0001 – Utilities Expense Adjustment in a Linked report in Smart View.
The column headers for the Rule Balancing report will list the relevant Balance dimension members. If there are members that are not populated, these will be automatically filtered out of the view. You can choose to display them by selecting View -> Columns and tagging the members you would like to display on your report – whether they have data or not.
For further information on what each of these Balance dimension members represent, check out my blog post on Demystifying the Balance dimension in PCMCS.
You can view and edit the model view definition in the collapsed area between the POV and the Balancing report.
The Input data on this customized Model View is pertinent only to Operating Expenses rather than the entire pool of data. This is the reason that the total USD value may be different from data displayed on the Default Model View report.
You can perform ad hoc edits to the Model View as you are using it, but none of the newly made selections will be stored. If you want to apply permanent changes to a specific Model View selection, you will have to edit the Model View in the corresponding menu.
Your Model Views can be defined in the same order of operations as your allocations, like the ones displayed in the Default Bikes application, or you can choose to create Model Views that are more detailed and dive deeper into a custom grouping of rules, regardless of which ruleset to which they may belong. The only dimensions displayed in your Model View selection are the Business dimensions. The data points you define in the Model view will apply to all relevant rules, being that the Rule dimension is not open for selection when building such reporting templates. POV, Balance, Rule, and Attribute dimensions are not represented and therefore are not open for selection.
Enhancing and Customizing Your Rule Balancing Reports
In the Demo BikesML30 application, there are several standard Rule Balancing reports that are split by Ruleset while others are named “Trace.” The Trace Model views are built in order to support point troubleshooting of allocation areas that are either complex or open to high variation during each run.
If you want to use the Rule Balancing report values outside of the ad hoc capacity, you can export the report into XL5, but remember that such an export will not represent a Smart View report – it will simply be a listing of the information presented on the Rule Balancing screen, as some members displayed here do not have a direct equivalent in the application (Running Remainder, Running Balance). This export option can be found in the Actions menu, export to Excel, or by selecting the button underlined in the below screen capture.
A new workbook is downloaded called RuleBalance, and the entire set of data displayed on your screen will be available in XL5.
PCMCS Rule Balancing Drawbacks
- It does not allow filtering based on Attributes, UDAs, or Names.
- It opens in SmartView in a tab called Linked View, and any new selections of links within the Rule Balancing report will overwrite the contents of the existing tab. If you start developing a report by using Rule Balancing, remember to always rename the tab in case you want to kick off another report for a secondary data point within the same workbook.
“Rule Balancing Report Links Don’t Work”
Your workstation must have Smart View installed before using the hyperlink feature within PCMCS. The latest Smart View version is available for download through the Navigator main menu under the Installations section.
When selecting a hyperlink in the Rule Balancing report, you should be able to see that a download has started. As you click on the downloaded content, a new Excel tab will open, and you will be prompted to enter your Cloud credentials in order to have access to the requested data point intersections. If you do not have Excel open at the time you are accessing the downloaded content, the prompt to enter your Cloud credentials may not appear on the screen.
“I Can’t See Any Data in the PCMCS Rule Balancing Report.”
If data is not displayed on the screen, you are looking at one of two situations:
- There is no data loaded and/or calculated for the POV at the intersections you have defined in the Rule Balancing report. Check your job console to see if such tasks have been triggered and completed successfully.
- Your security setup is restricting you from seeing any data values. Reach out to your administrator to adjust data grants or application access.
- (This used to happen occasionally during on-premise implementations) If your Business Dimensions are tagged as Label Only, check that the first child contains values. You may be able to see data at base level intersections, yet the Rule Balancing report shows no vales due to the Dimension Type, Member Storage, or Aggregation operators you have defined in your metadata.
“I Can’t Create a PCMCS Model View.”
This restriction is based on provisioning. Reach out to your PCMCS Administrator for assistance with your profile or Data Grants settings.
Rule Balancing Wrap Up
Rule Balancing reports are easy to set up and use. They retrieve data quickly, are accessible to all application users through the same menu, and they should be the first stop during a model run to quickly identify if there were any issues with data allocations.
Because Rule Balancing is a fast reporting tool with a predefined template OOTB, it is one of the commonly used troubleshooting reports for PCMCS, which can be leveraged for quick balance checks. It is also a mechanism for quick report building at detailed Rule level, a faster alternative to reading the Rule definition and manually replicating the intersections in a Smart View report. Because these reports are system generated and their hyperlinks are based on application and rules set-up, there is no room for manual errors when building validations.
Save precious time by leveraging the PCMCS OOTB functionality. In a subsequent blog post, I will talk about Intelligence screens (Analysis Views, Scatter Analysis, Profit curves, Traceability, and the setup of KPIs), so subscribe to our blog page to be kept in the loop. If you have further questions on the usage of Balancing Reports within PCMCS, please reach out to our team of PCMCS experts at infosolutions@alithya.com.