Update Dimension Lists for Discontinued/Replacements Element

[LanceColins]

Hello All,

I thought I would see if anyone has encountered this issue before and see if there is any best practices?

I would like it to be as simple as possible and so it doesn't require a lot of maintenance.

In a Dimension I have a list of products (1000 or so) and year on year some products are discontinued and replaced with others. The problem I need to solve is to ensure the discontinued product lines are matched to their replacements in order to accurately capture product history for baseline Forecast/Budgets. Saying that, I have only come up with one idea at the moment which is below:

1. Identify replacement, create a process to load Discontinued product data into Replacement product, load discontinued product description/id into replacement product Dimension as a Alias, Delete Discontinued Product (Element).

*If anyone has done this before, please feel free to comment on my approach or provide some better suggestions??

Thanks for your time

Lance

[lotsaram]

Hi Lance,

Sorry but this does not sound like a good idea!

Your proposal might work but it has some unnecessary moving parts and the potential for data loss and/or data corruption is quite high. Here's an alternate proposal that doesn't involve deleting any elements or shuffling any data that I have implemented quite a few times.

- define a "Historical Reference Product" attribute in your product dimension
- for new products populate the "Historical Reference Product" attribute with a string equalling the name of the element to match history to
- write a TI process to cycle through products and for any products where "Historical Reference Product" is populated create a new consolidation and add both the reference product and the new product to the consolidation
- Done

For any transition product you can then review total sales of the old and new as a single unit or break it down to components. This also avoids any issues of a transition period when sales of both products might still be being recorded and makes everything transparent.

For example:
- Product ABC is replaced by a new product XYZ
- A consolidation is automatically created called "XYZ Reference History" with children ABC and XYZ

[Steve Rowe]

Hi Lance,
Just to back Mr Ram up, I would not get into moving data around. It's far easier, as he suggests, to create a parent of the old and new product so that the value can be easily compared.
It's snowing in London again, woot for global warming!
Cheers

[LanceColins]

Thanks for the input!!!!