Discontinued Ops BKM

[mattgoff]

Question for the group on best methods for handling discontinued operations in a department dimension. Accounting wants to leave the dimension intact to be able to show "as reported" figures. But, they also want an easy way to pull "as reported excl discontinued ops". Below are two options I'm considering-- wanted to get feedback to see if there are others and if I'm missing pros/cons. In all cases I would add an attribute to the dept dimension that indicates if a dept is discontinued and use that to automate.

Option 1: Build a Hierarchy Create a new top-level consol "Corp ex Discontinued Ops" with the old top-level consol rolling into it along with a new consol with a -1 weight and all discontinued depts (duplicated). I'd use the discontinued ops attribute in a process to tear down and rebuild the hierarchy periodically.

Option 2: Single Element w/Static Values Since discontinued ops won't have daily activity in them, I don't really need dynamic structures like consolidations or rules. I could just create an n-level element and use the discontinued ops attribute to pre-compute values whenever I load from Oracle (or nightly).

Thoughts? Which way would you go? I'm leaning towards #2 as I think it will keep the hierarchy simpler and less confusing for end users. It will require some trickiness on the load/process side though.

Thanks,
Matt

[Alan Kirk]

Question for the group on best methods for handling discontinued operations in a department dimension. Accounting wants to leave the dimension intact to be able to show "as reported" figures. But, they also want an easy way to pull "as reported excl discontinued ops". Below are two options I'm considering-- wanted to get feedback to see if there are others and if I'm missing pros/cons. In all cases I would add an attribute to the dept dimension that indicates if a dept is discontinued and use that to automate.

Option 1: Build a Hierarchy Create a new top-level consol "Corp ex Discontinued Ops" with the old top-level consol rolling into it along with a new consol with a -1 weight and all discontinued depts (duplicated). I'd use the discontinued ops attribute in a process to tear down and rebuild the hierarchy periodically.

Option 2: Single Element w/Static Values Since discontinued ops won't have daily activity in them, I don't really need dynamic structures like consolidations or rules. I could just create an n-level element and use the discontinued ops attribute to pre-compute values whenever I load from Oracle (or nightly).

Thoughts? Which way would you go? I'm leaning towards #2 as I think it will keep the hierarchy simpler and less confusing for end users. It will require some trickiness on the load/process side though.

Thanks,
Matt

Perhaps I'm missing something, but wouldn't it be easier just to build the hierarchy so that a new consolidation called Discontinued Departments sits as a consolidation outside of "Corp" so that you have the best of both worlds, retaining a simple hierarchy yet allowing users to go back to granular level if they need to?

Thus:
Corp + Discontinued Departments (new)
-- Corp Departments (with all of the Discontinued ones removed)
-- Discontinued Departments (new)

[mattgoff]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but wouldn't it be easier just to build the hierarchy so that a new consolidation called Discontinued Departments sits as a consolidation outside of "Corp" so that you have the best of both worlds, retaining a simple hierarchy yet allowing users to go back to granular level if they need to?

Can't do that as Accounting wants to be able to report both ways (both including and excluding discontinued ops in place). They only need discontinued ops adjustment at a top-line (corp) level though, so I don't need to replicate the sub-consolidations in corp, just lump them into one group.

[Alan Kirk]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but wouldn't it be easier just to build the hierarchy so that a new consolidation called Discontinued Departments sits as a consolidation outside of "Corp" so that you have the best of both worlds, retaining a simple hierarchy yet allowing users to go back to granular level if they need to?

Can't do that as Accounting wants to be able to report both ways (both including and excluding discontinued ops in place). They only need discontinued ops adjustment at a top-line (corp) level though, so I don't need to replicate the sub-consolidations in corp, just lump them into one group.

Ah, gotcha.

OK, I'd lean toward option 1 then. Not so much for technical reasons as simply to ensure complete transparency. If you extract it as a single amount behind the scenes you run the chances of some innumerate bozo who doesn't know how to read attributes mis-adding the discontinued departments (missing one or counting one twice) and saying "hey, the numbers don't match!". If they're deducted as part of a hierarchy, it provides an added bonus in that it allows users to see "at a glance" which of the departments are no longer in use, as well as what their values were.