4.4 Hierarchies
Some OFSAA dimensions support hierarchies. Hierarchies may be used to provide sophisticated stratification for either processing or reporting purposes. For example, an organizational hierarchy might start with a Division level containing Western Region, Eastern Region, and Southern Region; the next level down within the hierarchy might be state or county. A product hierarchy might begin with branches for Asset vs. Liability vs. Service products; under the Asset branch, you might define additional branches for Mortgage Lending, Commercial Lending, Consumer Lending, and so on. Hierarchies are used extensively in OFSAA models to assign methods to products and to support allocation methodologies.
Like dimension members, dimension hierarchies may be maintained either internally within the OFSAA Infrastructure or externally.
Internally
OFSAA Infrastructure includes functionality for Adding, Viewing, Editing, or Deleting hierarchies. Which of these functions you can access depends on your logon privilege and on the hierarchy with which you wish to work.
Externally
You may choose to source and maintain some or all of your hierarchies from external systems such as your General Ledger, a Data Warehouse, or from some other external master data management system, such as Oracle Data Relationship Management (DRM). For more information on loading hierarchy data from external systems, see the Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications Data Model Utilities User Guide.
Combination
You may also choose to maintain some hierarchies from an external source while maintaining other hierarchies internally.