Decide whether you need a calculation process

So far, the calculation logic examples have focused mostly on individual relationships: roll up these values, calculate this member, allocate this amount, or forecast these periods.

Some Essbase applications require several calc operations to work together as a repeatable business process.

For example, a budgeting process might need to:

1. Start with an existing set of actual values.

2. Apply business assumptions.

3. Calculate forecast values.

4. Allocate shared expenses.

5. Derive revenue, cost, and margin results.

6. Recalculate affected totals.

For this type of application, BSO provides calculation scripts.

A calculation script is a set of Essbase calculation instructions that you run against selected areas of a cube. Calculation scripts let you define a series of calculations as a repeatable process, rather than relying only on calculations attached to individual members.

This is an important distinction between the Essbase cube types:

• ASO emphasizes multidimensional aggregation and calculations associated with the analytical model.
• BSO supports those modeling concepts while also providing calculation scripts for more procedural, multi-step business processing.

If multi-step calculations are an important requirement, BSO is likely to be the better choice.