Summarize Allocation Midpoints

Similar to starting data points, there are natural funnel points in an application where detail levels used in previous allocations step are no longer required. In these cases, using a pooling strategy in the middle stages of an application can help reshrink data down to a more manageable size.

This is especially useful in a stage immediately prior to allocating financial data out to market facing dimensions like Customer, Region/Territory, Product/SKU. Market facing dimensions are usually the largest dimensions in an application, and are the stage where data explosion commonly happens.

If you can slim down the data scale after operational center allocations, you will have fewer data points to allocate across market intersections, and the end result will be a smaller data set.