Creating your first HPCM Management Ledger Application

Sorry it has been a little while since I have posted, but it’s for good reason, I have been learning about a new product, and I think it’s time to share some of what I have learned.

So you have heard all the hype and decided that you want to start working with HPCM Management Ledger? Then this is the first step you are looking for.  You have created 100 planning applications in the past, so this should be easy for you right? Well that’s what I thought when I first started, but HCPM is a little different, it won’t just create your cube for you, you’re going to have to do a little bit of prep work. You could use EPMA to do this, but I’m going to walk through this without using EPMA and keep that theme for all of my future HPCM posts as well.

The first thing I would note, is that you should apply the latest patches to HPCM, there were a lot of improvements made early on after 11.1.2.4 release, and for my use I am using HPCM 11.1.2.4.100.

So let’s get started, first thing we need to do is create an Essbase Master Cube, this is the cube we will use as the framework for our HPCM application, it is also where we will add new members in the future.

Management Ledger Dimension Requirements:

1 Rule Dimension

1 Balance Dimension

1-4 POV Dimensions

1+ Business Dimensions

Now that we know our requirements let’s look at what each of these mean, first create a new Essbase cube, I’m going to call mine ‘MstrML’ for Master Management Ledger, but you can call it anything you want.

Next we need to create some dimensions and member. The first two dimensions, Rule and Balance are used by the HPCM ML application for allocations, you only need to create place holder dimensions and assign the dimension type UDAs, no need to create any members, HPCM will do that for us later on.

A POV is essentially a set of intersections where the rules will apply / run, as opposed to your business dimensions which are where data will move between.  Using planning as an example, Year, Period, Scenario and Version would be typical POV Dimensions, and Account and Entity would be typical Business Dimensions.  You do not need to use 4 POV dimensions, you could use just 1 if you would like, but you are capped at 4. You can also change the order as you wish.

For these dimensions we will need to build out our members as well as assigning the UDAs DIMTYPE_POV1 to POV4. Using a typical Planning structure, POV would look something like this.

Our last set of dimensions is our Business Dimensions, here you require at least one dimension, but can have as many as you wish, but remember, just because you can, doesn't mean you should, this will have direct impact on performance. For our example I’m going to add 4, Accounts, Location, Customer, Cost Center.  We need to assign the UDA DIMTYPE_GENERIC to these dimensions.

Now you can save your outline and move over to Workspace. Go ahead and open up Profitability Applications under Navigate->Administer->Profitability Applications

Next select Actions->New

Next fill in an application name, and make the selections listed below, make sure to select application type as “Management Ledger” and Dimension Source as “Master Cube”, click on Next.  If you don’t see the next button, it is there, but on some screens it is below the edge of the window you should be able to scroll down.

Since we purpose built our cube already for this application you just need to select the cube, and check the box for Select All, then click on Finish

You will get a confirmation that the job has been submitted

You can check on this in the next screen, click on the Job Library icon and make sure your application was successfully created.  The time taken will depend on your system as well as how big your outline is.

Once it is created, you can refresh your applications list and you should see your new application.

Refresh the application list in the navigate button (or log out and back in) and you will be able to launch your new application. The last step we want to do is to deploy our calculation database and check EAS to make sure it looks right.  So go ahead and select Manage Database on the Task Area of HPCM. And click on Deploy Now.

Select OK on the warning that pops up, this will only appear this time since we are creating / replacing the database, in the future you will only be updating the database.

After clicking ok you will get a note that the job is submitted, you can check the status of the job in Job Library.

It will only take a few seconds for our small database to be deployed.

 

Now that we have a database, let’s go to EAS and see what was created for us. Our ASO cube was created for us, using a default name (more on this in the next post)

And taking a look at the outline, not only are all of our members are there, but the rule and Balance dimensions have also now been populated.

Congratulations, you now have a blank HPCM Management Ledger type application to play with. Keep tuned, in my next post (here) I will go into basic configuration and setting up your first allocations.