TM1 Forum

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

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- define a "Historical Reference Product" attribute in your product dimension
- for new products populate the "Historical Reference Product" attribute with a string equalling the name of the element to match history to
- write a TI process to cycle through products and for any products where "Historical Reference Product" is populated create a new consolidation and add both the reference product and the new product to the consolidation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

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

Thanks for the input!!!!