1. User's Guide
  2. Working with Standard Profitability and Cost Management Applications
  3. About Standard Profitability Models and Scenarios
  4. Overview of Standard Profitability Models

Overview of Standard Profitability Models

A model is a representation of part or all of an organization, and contains costs and revenue categories that are similar to the organization's chart of accounts.

Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management models enable you to accurately trace the processes and activities that contribute to costs and revenue within the organization.

A model is made up of the following elements:

  • Stages, which organize the steps in the allocation process within the organization

  • Dimensions, which are data categories that are used to organize business data for retrieval and preservation of values. Within Profitability and Cost Management, the following types of dimensions are used:

    • System dimensions, such as the Measure and AllocationType dimensions:

      Note:

      AllocationType dimensions are used to correctly allocate costs and revenue and to store direct allocations and genealogy.

      Measures dimension contains the dimensions and members required to build, validate, and calculate a model, such as measures for cost, revenue, and driver selections.

    • Business dimensions, which describe the objects within each stage in the model, such as products, customers, regions, and so on. The dimensions and members, which are created in the Profitability Applications Console, are the foundation of the model.

    • POV dimensions identify a specific point of view or version of the model, such as year, scenario, period, and version. Version dimensions enable you to maintain multiple versions of a model. These versions can be used to create alternate, or what-if, scenarios of the model, or different perspectives.

    • Alias dimension is used to assign alternate names, descriptions, languages, or other items that help to define dimensions.

    • Attribute dimensions enable analysis based on the attributes or qualities of dimension members. Attributes describe characteristics of data, such as the size or color of products.

    • UDAs (User-defined attributes) dimensions

  • Drivers that determine how cost or revenue source values are calculated and allocated. Selected drivers are applied to the entire dimension, a portion of the hierarchy, a single member, or even a single intersection.

  • Assignments that map source data to destinations, directly or by using defined assignment rules

  • Financial cost and revenue data, which is imported to Oracle Essbase directly through a data file, or manually entered through Profitability and Cost Management.

  • Some dimension types are available for use in Profitability and Cost Management models:

    • Account

    • Entity

    • Version

    • Time

    • Country

    • Currency

Together these elements organize the allocation points in the model into a logical flow. Careful modeling can capture the actual processes and activities, enabling you to realistically allocate costs and revenues.

The business, Measure and POV dimensions are created in the Profitability Applications Console, and are deployed to the Profitability and Cost Management relational database. Stages, drivers and assignments are created in Profitability and Cost Management.

After you create a model that reflects the current status of the organization, you can use the Copy POV feature to create alternate versions of the base model. The scenarios, or what-if scenarios, provide a risk-free method to predict the potential profitability of new opportunities and strategies, and to evaluate alternatives. or changes in the model.

See Managing Standard Profitability POVs.