1. Working with Profitability and Cost Management
  2. Getting Started with Profitability and Cost Management
  3. About Profitability and Cost Management Applications
  4. Guidelines for Working With a Profitability and Cost Management Application

Guidelines for Working With a Profitability and Cost Management Application

Overview

This topic describes an approach to designing and building applications based on your security role and the tasks it enables you to perform.

For Service Administrators and Power Users

Service Administrators and Power Users of Profitability and Cost Management can perform the following steps to set up an application (only Service Administrators can actually create an application):

  1. Define the requirements and the allocation methods required before creating the application.

    You should establish the business requirements for the application and the reporting expectations. Using pencil and paper, discussion among stakeholders, flowcharting, diagramming software and other tools, draft the conception of what the application needs to contain in order to accomplish the goals. In some instances, it may be useful to identify the results you want to achieve first, and then work backwards to formulate the best strategy to meet these goals.

    When designing the dimension outline, carefully define the reporting objectives and requirements. The effort expended in designing the outline is rewarded when generating reports.

  2. Define dimensions (such as Rule, Balance, business dimensions, POV dimensions, and so on) using Profitability Application Console to build the main objects within the application.

  3. Deploy the Profitability and Cost Management database.

    After an application is deployed, users with appropriate security provisioning can perform modeling tasks to show the flow of funds to specific cost and revenue allocations. Both the source and destination ranges of allocations are defined as allocation and custom calculation rules using the Profitability and Cost Management user interface. Points of view (POVs) represent specific modeling conditions and can be used, for example, to view values for different months or quarters, to compare budget versus actual figures, or to play scenarios to measure the impact of various changes on the bottom line.

  4. Populate the underlying Oracle Essbase database with cost and revenue data, through Profitability and Cost Management or directly into the database.

  5. Identify drivers to specify how to calculate cost and revenue data. These will be added as you define allocations (rules).

  6. Create rule sets and rules.

    All modeling structure is controlled through the organization of rule sets and rules under POVs. For each POV, rules are organized into groups that run against the same or similar region of the database and at the same or similar time. These groups are called rule sets. They determine the order in which rules run. Rules can inherit default member selections from the POV or rule set level so users can define a region of the database once and use it many times without having to specify it each time. These defaults are called "contexts".

  7. Validate the Profitability and Cost Management application structure to ensure that the application structure conforms to validation rules.

    The modeling structure of the application is validated after creation to ensure that all allocations are have been accounted for, and calculations are balanced. Following validation, you deploy the database, and then calculate the application, and analyze the results.

  8. Set up analysis views and other analytic tools so those with User and Viewer roles can use them.

  9. Calculate the application.

For Users and Viewers

All users, including Users and Viewers, can do most of the following:

  • Analyze the calculated results. You can use the trace allocation feature to visually follow the flow of funds throughout the entire application, either forward or backward.

  • Use the analytics features to track and report on revenue and cost allocations.

Tip:

Descriptions are an important way to document the allocation process and are used in the Program Documentation report. They are also guides to Users and Viewers when selecting analysis views and other analytic tools. For easy of use, include a meaningful and complete description whenever you can.

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