Siebel Consumer Sector Guide > Sales Volume Planning > Initial SVP Administrator Procedures >

Performing the Initial Aggregation

The Sales Volume Planning Aggregate action executes and builds the account-category relationships defined earlier in the physical database. After this process is complete, Sales Volume Planning users can navigate the associated account-category hierarchy to understand or change periodic product movement data.

You can specify the Aggregate action to aggregate baseline data and roll up incremental volume from any level of the hierarchy across the entire account-category-product hierarchy. You can also choose to aggregate particular source fields (such as incremental volume) rather than the entire source table.

Make sure that products are associated with their respective account's authorized product distribution list. For more information, see Creating and Modifying Distribution Lists.

Maximizing Aggregation Performance

The Aggregate action is the most resource-intensive action in the SVP module. To maximize performance, run Aggregate for select period ranges only. Also, keep the intervals small and run Aggregate only as frequently as dictated by your business requirements. For example, if you are storing volume data by week, it is preferable to run the aggregation at the end of each week, and then only for the week just completed.

Running Aggregate for the first time creates a large amount of transaction records. It is recommended that you perform this function in an environment that allows optimum performance.

To maximize aggregation performance

1. Make sure that the Siebel database is configured according to the recommendations in Siebel Installation Guide for the operating system you are using.
2. Switch off transaction logging during Aggregate.
3. Re-extract all mobile clients. See Siebel Remote and Replication Manager Administration Guide for details.

To perform an aggregation

1. Navigate to the Sales Volume Planning Administration screen.
2. Click the Aggregate view tab.
3. In the Aggregate form, create a new record.
4. From the Action Type field drop-down list, select Aggregate.
5. Complete the necessary fields.

   Some fields are described in the following table.

   Field	Comments
   Description	The name of the sales volume plan.
   Source Table	The complete data set (baseline, shipment, consumption, or target) that you want to aggregate. Select a source table if you want to aggregate the entire data set.
   Source Field	The subset of data (for example, incremental quantity or shipped quantity) that you want to aggregate. Select a source field if you want to limit the aggregation to a specific "column" of sales volume planning data.
   Start Period	The starting period of the source field or table.
   End Period	The ending period of the source field or table.
   Starting Account Level	The level of the hierarchy from which you want to begin the aggregation. If left blank, aggregation starts at the lowest level of the account hierarchy.

6. Click Execute Action.

   Pending appears in the Status field, and changes to Executing after processing begins.

   NOTE:  If you are preparing sales volume data for multiple periods and want to track the progress of the Aggregate action, click on the Action Name hyperlink in the Actions list. The Sub-Action tab appears, showing the status of the periods as they are processed.

   After the aggregation is built, the Status field changes to Complete and a dialog box appears, confirming that the action was successful.

Optional: Parallel Aggregation Processing on Multiple Servers

If you have a multiple Siebel server environment, you can expedite aggregation processing by running parallel SVP aggregation actions.

NOTE:  Each Siebel server must have the Workflow Process Manager component enabled. For more information, see Siebel System Administration Guide and System Monitoring and Diagnostics Guide for Siebel eBusiness Applications.

To facilitate parallel processing, you must partition your desired aggregation into multiple aggregation actions. For example, if you want to aggregate Consumption data for the first 12 weeks of the year, instead of creating a single 12-week SVP action (Aggregate) record, you create four Aggregate action records of three weeks each.

After you create the aggregation actions, the actions can be run separately on the multiple servers until each aggregation action is complete. The following procedure describes how to perform parallel processing.

To perform parallel aggregation processing:

1. Determine how you want to break up the aggregation into sub-periods.
2. Following the instructions described in To perform an aggregation, create an SVP action record for each sub-period aggregation.
3. For each Siebel server running Consumer Sector that you want to use to process this aggregation, log in and launch a new instance of the Consumer Sector application Web client.
4. On each client, navigate to the Sales Volume Planning Administration screen.
5. From the Aggregate view tab, click Mass Invoke.

   Repeat this step for each client.

6. Close each client.
7. To monitor the progress of your parallel aggregations, launch a new instance of the Consumer Sector application Web client and navigate to the Sales Volume Planning Administration screen. The SVP Action list displays the status of each Aggregate action.