IPM Insights: New Period Movement Variance Insight Type Available

A new insight type, period movement variance, is now available.

Applies To: Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management, FreeForm, Planning

Period movement variance insights detect significant variance between the current period and a benchmark period. This type of insight allows you to monitor an account member, measure, KPI, or metric of interest to you. For example, you might want to generate an insight when % change in Sales over the previous month is greater than or equal to 10%.

Insights are triggered when the absolute variance exceeds the administrator-defined threshold. Thresholds can be set for :

  • Absolute Variance (%)
  • Absolute Variance (Numbers)

Several benchmarks can be used for comparison, depending on how the insight definition was configured:

  • Year-on-year
  • Period-on-period for the previous period
  • Period-on-period for a custom period
  • Historical average

An insight generated for a POV combines any benchmarks that exceed the threshold into a single insight.

This insight shows benchmark comparisons for all four types of benchmarks. Click each filter chip to show details for each of the benchmark comparisons. The orange line shows the variance. The descriptive summary highlights the highest variance benchmark. You can hide or show the historical trends. The Insights AI tab provides a consolidated summary of all the benchmarks generated for the insight. The Explainability tab gives details about each benchmark comparison.

Period Movement Variance Insight

Period Movement Variance Insight

Administrators use IPM Configurator to configure period movement variance insights like any other insight type, with additional configuration options that are specific to period movement variance insights. On the Configure page, select a variance metric to use, and select the baselines for comparisons to use, along with the allowable threshold for each selected comparison type. Prior periods are defined based on the calendar selected for the insight definition.

IPM Configuration for Period Movement Variance

IPM Configuration for Period Movement Variance Insight

Business Benefit: By automatically detecting significant variances against historical, prior-period, and year-over-year benchmarks, period movement variance insights allow organizations to quickly surface emerging opportunities and risks, reduce manual monitoring efforts, and focus attention on the areas that require immediate action. Configurable thresholds ensure that alerts are tailored to business priorities, improving the relevance and accuracy of insights delivered to users.

Tips and considerations

  • IPM Insights requires an EPM Enterprise Subscription with Hybrid mode enabled.
  • Period movement variance insights compare single time-series data with the previous period to analyze variance. Future period analysis is not yet available.

Key resources