In TM1 10.2, an added enhancement to allow the same approval hierarchy to be used in multiple applications. This enhancement can bring lots of benefits to the business and efficiency to TM1 models are designed. No doubt, this change most of you had been waited for. This change in conjunction with control dimension provides numerous possibilities of easily creating new TM1 application.
Business Benefits
This enhancement is very useful when a business operates different budget cycle to forecast cycle, or different budget deadlines for different regions or geographical locations. The flexibility is here to meet those business requirements.
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- Separate applications can be deployed based on the same data cube
For example, separate applications for budgeting and forecasting, since they may have different deadlines and contributed by different users. In this case, both applications can be updated simultaneously by different users, without the need to taking ownerships from each other. While cube data is kept centrally in the same cube, makes analysis much easier, such as variance analysis.
- Ability to utilise different element groups within the same approval hierarchy
- Separate applications can be deployed based on the same data cube
Different regions or business groups may have different reporting deadlines and operates with different planning cycles. Having separate applications using the same approval dimension can be helpful, while all business groups or regions rolls up to company total for consolidation and analysis purposes.
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- Same set of information is shared between all applications based on the same cube.
Since all applications are setup to link to the same cube, multiple applications can be updated simultaneously (not interferences with each other). And at the same time, any updates made to one application (eg. a scenario version) can potentially viewed immediately other applications, provide it has read access to that scenario version.
Of course, there may be a lot more other use and benefits for having the flexibility of reusing the same approval hierarchy dimension.
A note, although the same approval hierarchy can be reused, the key constraint is that the cube slices between different applications can not be overlapped, since you can not have multiple users updating the same cell value at the same time. When Performance Modeller identifies an overlap during application creation and update, user will get an error regarding that.
Control Dimension
Another new feature has been added in this new release of TM1 10.2, Control Dimension. This feature allows applications to further trim down to specific region of the cube(s) that needs updating (or reviewing). The main intended use of the control dimension is to allow different scenario versions to be deployed in different applications.
For example, Budget Version 1 is only deployed in 2013 July Budget Plan, while Budget Version 2 is deployed in 2013 October Budget Plan (July Budget Plan as read only in the same application).
Once the control dimension subset is added to an application, you can update the access to available elements within the subset for the selected application.
This new feature adds flexibility on how applications and TM1 models are designed, and adds further usability for business planning application.
