1. Administering and Working with Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management
  2. Building and Calculating Models
  3. Creating and Managing Rules
  4. Creating Allocation Rules
  5. Defining an Allocation Rule Source and Destination
  6. Best Practices for Allocation Rule Source and Destination

Best Practices for Allocation Rule Source and Destination

  • Avoid using tops of hierarchies in rule Source, Destination or Targets whenever possible.

    The database is efficient, but compact rule definitions can make it more efficient.

    For example, a source defined as "AllAccounts", "AllEntities", "AllCompanies", and " AllProducts ", where Accounts, Entities, Companies, and Products each have 1000 level 0 members requires the database to scan 10004 (1 trillion) potential locations for source data.

  • Use the "Same as Source" option in the allocation destination. See Setting the Destination to Same As Source.

    • Allows you to use a single rule to process many source combinations where you want allocations to "stay home" for some dimensions and spread across others

    • Often allows one Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management rule to replace many rules from a legacy system

  • Source member selections should favor the parent member

    • Avoid picking individual children if you can pick a parent, or use an alternate hierarchy designed for rule processing that allows you to group members in a common parent.

    • Oracle Essbase is often much faster if it can process all descendants of a parent instead of making multiple passes for each child.

  • Questionable source and destination combinations need to be challenged.

    For example, if both your Source and Desitnation is "Total Entity", you will have a large cross product of Entity combinations.

  • If you adopt allocation rule designs from a legacy system, make sure you understand the true business requiment before applying them to your rules in Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management.