BOXI / Excel info for data load

 Requirements ============

Anne (F) and Mike have looked at Julia's spreadsheet. 

It appears to be reasonably clear as to what the Corp Plan Team want from the account balances in eFinancials, however there are a few things we would need the Corp Plan Team to confirm:

1.  At what level (Cost Centre, Job Code, Account code) do they want the balances reported at? 2. How often they expect the requirements to change (IE how often do new codes get added) 3. The list of Account Codes, is it everything under the point in the hierarchy?  If they need some exclusions this will complicate the extraction SQL. 4. How often do they expect to need to extract the data and import it into Corporate Planner?

These don't need immediate answers to form an idea of how we can do this, but if we want to agree a solution then it would be best to discuss these with the Corp Plan Team and get the answers to pick the most appropriate one.  

Options for Corporate Planner =========================

A couple of options where discussed.

FIRST     -              To take Corp Plan Team requirements and create the Business Object reports that get the data (there are 48 in total).  Anne F suggested these could be scheduled to run automatically. 

'+ve'      The advantage here is that the users could maintain the criteria that is being extracted in each report. 

                This would mean someone uploading the extracted data into CP, but if this only quarterly would this be a problem for the Corporate Planner Team?

Corporate Planner team are already using an existing universe in Business Objects so it's likely we wouldn't need to create a new one - although we could do this if we felt it was the best option. 

One thing we did think about was if there was anyway of automating the upload of data into CP?  If the reports created spreadsheets in a specific folder, could CP pick these up and load them?  We didn't know if CP had any functionality to do this - or if the users actually want this, they may want to manually control the updating?

SECOND               -             Another option would be to create a number of views within eFinancials (or in a new database instance) to generate the data required.  We would still need a way of getting the data out of these views and into CP - this could be a single Business Objects report, or we could look at a solution to automatically pass the data into CP.

'-ve'       One issue with this solution will be how often the criteria for the views needs to be changed.  Every time they want to make a change they would need to request this via support.  This might not be too much of an issue if they are only extracting data quarterly, but it would be depending on the availability in Apps Mgt at the time they needed the changes done.

Either solution would not be too difficult to put in place - based on what we currently know - and if all we are doing for the moment is giving the Corporate Planner Team the ability to get the data via one or more Business Object reports then it shouldn't take too long to create.  If this was the option you wanted to find out more about we would have to clarify the amount of time required to build up the reports. 

ONLY RESERVATION right now is the fact we also have Collaborative Planner from ABS being demo'd by the FIS team.  My understanding is that this product was poor, but that ABS has done quite a lot of work on this and we have this in Live just now (there is an issue with the scheduler that automatically pushes the data from eFinancials but that is about to get looked at).  The impression I have is that Collaborative Planner and Corporate Planner are designed to do the same things, but I don't think Douglas in FIS has seen Corporate Planner and the management accountants haven't seen Collaborative Planner so I don't think there is a common understanding of the similiarities/differences in the 2 products.  As Collaborative Planner is maintained by ABS and already has data feed from eFinancials we may be doing work to get the data into Corporate Planner for nothing. 

Douglas will be demoing this to the accountants very soon  - this month.  I think we should have some guidance from Finance as to what solution we will actually be going forward with - having 2 solutions for the same information might not be the best idea.

If you are progressing this work it will require to be estimated for the chosen option with more design work required as indicated above. However I believe you were only requiring to know what was possible. Please let me know if would like more information for this or if we have provided sufficient information for you or feedback to PRAM?