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About Configuring Siebel Strategic Sourcing Analytics for Universal Source

Expenses has one fact table (IA_EXPENSE) and one fact aggregate table (IA_EXPENSE_A1) that support metrics and reports for examining employee expenses. Several mappings populate these tables to complete extracts, loads and updates; you may configure these to suit your organization's business rules. The following sections discuss decisions you must make before you begin adapting individual PowerCenter objects, and provide specific configuration procedures for the universal source.

Universal Source Adapter mapplets extract data from a flat file interface to populate the Siebel Customer-Centric Enterprise Warehouse. In this phase of your project, you can configure the following:

• System Flags and Indicators. You may configure various system flags to indicate record rejection settings, as well as to indicate if your employees are using your preferred vendors, if you can forward expenses to your customers, and if receipts are available for expensed items.
• Currency and Payment Options. You may configure the date used to establish your exchange rates, determine if you allow expenses to be distributed across multiple cost centers, and define payment types in your data warehouse.

Before you begin, you must make the following decisions:

• Cash Advances. Cash advance records have a unique expense item number. If your system allows multiple cash advance records for one expense report, each of these advances must have their own identifiers.
• Violations. Many organizations capture violations of company expense policies at the item level (for example, the line item airfare exceeds $2000), cash advance level (for example, cash advance exceeds $500) and at the expense report level (for example, the report's total expenses exceed $5000). Currently the Siebel Customer-Centric Enterprise Warehouse stores item level violations within the corresponding item record, but the cash advance record stores both cash advance and report-level violations. Furthermore, each record has a VIOLATION_KEY that can point to IA_REASONS, where violation details are stored. Depending on how you want your analytic system to perform, you must edit your universal business adapter file to reflect the violation counts and keys appropriately. For example:
  • If a requestor violates a cash advance policy, but there are no other violations at the report level, the VIOLATION_ID refers to the cash advance violation only. The violation count equals the cash advance violation counts.
  • If a requestor violates company policy with their expense report, but has not taken a cash advance, you must add a dummy record in the flat file for a cash advance and set the cash advance amount to zero, and enter the violation count as the total number of expense report violations. In this scenario, VIOLATION_ID refers to the expense report violation data only.
  • If a requestor violates a cash advance policy and an expense report policy, you must total the violation counts and enter them in your flat file record, and the VIOLATION_ID has no value. However, if your organization wants to prioritize the violations and have the VIOLATION_ID point to that which is most important, you may point it to the appropriate entry in IA_REASONS.
• Maintaining aggregate Information. If you plan to run the ETL process that populates IA_EXPENSES at a different frequency than the process that populates IA_EXPENSES_A1, you must build additional mappings to retain incremental data in the aggregate table NU_EXPENSES. This is used as a source during post-load processing, required for updating invoice records. See the discussion on setting the S_M_PLP_EXPENSES_INVOICE_UPD_ALT session to run when the incremental invoice load frequency differs for the expense functional area, in Domain Values and CSV Worksheet Files for Siebel Strategic Sourcing Analytics.
• Deciding to Run post-load processing Mappings. Depending on your organization's needs and source system setup, you may not need to run the post-load process mappings packaged with Expenses:
  • If your source system or flat file is set up to supply credit invoice details (invoice number, invoice date, posted_on date, and so on.) with all other information, then the required fields are populated with corresponding invoice values. As a result, you need not schedule the following PLP sessions—S_M_PLP_EXPENSES_INVOICE_DERIVE, S_M_PLP_EXPENSES_INVOICE_UPD, and S_M_PLP_EXPENSES_INVOICE_UPD_ALT.
  • If your system or file does not supply invoice details of an expense report, you must use the PLP mappings and sessions as discussed in the previous bullet point. However, you only need to run S_M_PLP_EXPENSES_INVOICE_UPD or S_M_PLP_EXPENSES_INVOICE_UPD_ALT. The alternative mapping is provided if you decide to update your existing expense records in the Siebel Customer-Centric Enterprise Warehouse at a different frequency level than you load IA_EXPENSE and IA_EXPENSE_A1.