Shape Business Views with Dimensions and Hierarchies

Dimensions and hierarchies in Essbase let you organize business data in ways that reflect how different users need to analyze it.

For example, sales data can be viewed by:

• Product
• Market
• Time
• Scenario
• Customer
• Channel
• Organization

Each of these business perspectives can become a dimension in the Essbase outline.

Within a dimension, you arrange members into hierarchies that show their business relationships. For example:

Total Market → Americas → United States → California

or:

Total Products → Electronics → Computers → Laptops

These hierarchies let your users begin with a summarized business view and drill down to increasingly detailed levels. The same data can also be pivoted across dimensions, such as viewing Product by Market, Market by Time, or Actual versus Budget by Product and Quarter.

Design dimensions around business perspectives

Choose dimensions based on how users naturally ask questions about the business.

For example:

Business question	Dimension
Which products are selling?	Product
Where are they selling?	Market
When did sales occur?	Time
Are results actual, budgeted, or forecast?	Scenario
Who bought products?	Customer
Through which sales channel?	Channel

A well-designed dimension gives users a consistent vocabulary for analyzing data. Instead of defining the same grouping logic separately in different queries or reports, you establish the business structure once in the Essbase outline.

Use hierarchies to move between summary and detail

Hierarchies define parent-child relationships between members.

For example, a Market hierarchy could contain:

Total Market → North America → United States → California

At a high level, users can analyze Total Market. When more detail is needed, they can drill down through the hierarchy to North America, the United States, and California.

Hierarchies can also reflect reporting structures that are specific to your organization. A Product hierarchy might group products by family and category, while an Organization hierarchy might group departments by division and business unit.

By defining these relationships in the outline, you provide reusable drill-down paths and aggregation structures that are useful for analysis.

Provide alternate business views

Sometimes, the same members need to be organized in more than one way.

For example, products could be analyzed by product category for merchandising purposes and by brand for marketing purposes. Alternate hierarchies let the same underlying members be viewed through different organizational structures.

This gives users different perspectives on the same business data without requiring a separate copy of the data for each view.

Add attributes for additional ways to analyze members

Attributes let you describe characteristics of dimension members and analyze data by those characteristics.

For example, members of a Product dimension might have attributes such as color, size, package type, or brand. You can then analyze product data according to those characteristics without creating another standard business dimension for each one.

Customers might also have attributes, such as age range or customer segment.

Attributes enable users of the Essbase cube to analyze data according to such characteristics. For example, you can do a comparison of sales of red cars versus blue cars, or analyze purchasing patterns by consumer age range.

In Essbase, an attribute is always associated with members of a base dimension. For example, the Product dimension could be the base dimension for Color or Size attributes.

For a deeper dive on designing and using attributes, see Work with Essbase Attributes.

Recap

• Dimensions are core elements of an Essbase outline. They define the primary business perspectives for analysis.

• Hierarchies organize members within those dimensions, and provide the structure for navigation from summary to detail.

• Attributes are optional, and add an extra layer of analysis based on member characteristics.