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Budgeting Planning & Forecasting

IBM Planning Analytics Workspace Settings – Dim Editor Index

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Have you ever looked at all elements in a dimension (via the “All” button in Perspectives or any of the prebuilt “All xxx” sets in IBM Planning Analytics) and wondered how the resulting order was defined? This is a result of a behind-the-scenes setting called an Index. Every element is assigned an index. It is used to define the default sorting / appearance of the list.

So how do you see the index number in PAW when editing a dimension? There are two ways to do this. One approach is to manually turn on the option within the dimension editor.  This is done by clicking on the settings icon and enabling the option for Element index.  

Once enabled, the index number will appear directly to the right of the element.

The second approach is to always have this setting enabled. Users with the Administrator, Modeler, or Analyst role can use the Settings editor to define global settings. To enable this setting, click on your username at the top right corner of Planning Analytics Workspace, select the option for Profile and Settings, and then select the option for Settings. The index definition is found within the Dimension Editor section. After enabling this setting, the Element Index option will be selected by default within the dimension editor screen. Users can still manually deselect the option, if preferred.

By viewing the index, it will be easy to see the order that elements will appear for various default sets.

Revelwood is an IBM Gold Business Partner with 25+ years of experience designing, developing, implementing and maintaining IBM Planning Analytics environments. Revelwood has helped clients in all sizes across all industries optimize and grow their use of Planning Analytics. Revelwood’s Planning Analytics team consists of experienced PA experts, including a multi-year IBM Champion.

Stay up to date with PA – sign up for our weekly Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks newsletter, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and join our IBM Planning Analytics All-Stars group on LinkedIn.

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks:

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How We Solve Problems Using Workday Adaptive Planning

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This post is the first post in our new blog series on how we solve problems using Workday Adaptive Planning. Each blog post focuses on a real-world client experience where Revelwood was presented with a unique or thorny problem.  We’ll explain our approach to how we solved it.

Revelwood Client: A medical technology company that works with clinicians in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Asia Pacific, Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada.

Problem: Personnel / headcount planning

Scenario: This company had unique requirements for the allocations and formulas in their personnel model. Personnel needed to be partially allocated based off of a monthly headcount by department, and then further allocated quarterly based on global assumptions.

How We Helped: Our team determined that this client needed to have a granular, clear view into how the company’s explosive growth was impacting its personnel needs. We built a personnel model to give the FP&A team – and senior management – the ability to track the timing of new hires and forecast the company’s personnel needs globally. This model – and Workday Adaptive Planning in general – is saving the company a significant amount of time.Do you have a challenge you’d like to leverage Workday Adaptive Planning for? Reach out to us – we can help!

Read the posts in our series, How We Solve Problems Using Workday Adaptive Planning

Using Workday Adaptive Planning to Model Revenue and Expenses

Workday Adaptive Planning for Budgeting and Forecasting for a SaaS Business Model

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Workday Adaptive Planning for Incorporating Foreign Transactions

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This post continues our series on how we use Workday Adaptive Planning to solve problems. Each blog post focuses on a real-world client experience where Revelwood was presented with a unique or thorny problem.  We’ll explain our approach to how we solved it.

Revelwood Client: A privately held biotech company striving to accelerate the leap to a more nature-positive era for agriculture by solving performance and delivery challenges of traditional chemical and biological crop protection. 

Problem: Inaccurate and Cumbersome Foreign Transactions

Scenario: The company is headquartered in Massachusetts, with offices and operations in North Carolina, Florida, Brazil, Italy and Switzerland. Their Workday Adaptive Planning system needed to incorporate different statutory requirements on a state and country basis in a detailed manner. With its previous Excel-based system, the company was able to factor in payroll taxes, Social Security and other details for the United States, but they had to use an assumed percentage for other countries.

How We Helped: Revelwood created a purpose-built model for payroll that incorporates a wide range of scenarios and details. For example, employees in Brazil get a lunch stipend and other payments. Italy has 14 pay periods instead of 12 pay periods. The new model in Workday Adaptive Planning models payroll differences by state, region and country. By incorporating country-level details, this biotech company gets a much more detailed – and accurate – view of payroll, and ultimately, current cash flow.

Do you have a challenge you’d like to leverage Workday Adaptive Planning for? Reach out to us – we can help!

Read the posts in our series, How We Solve Problems Using Workday Adaptive Planning

Using Workday Adaptive Planning to Model Revenue and Expenses

Workday Adaptive Planning for Budgeting and Forecasting for a SaaS Business Model

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: New Feature – Long-Running Processes in Workday’s 2024R2 Release

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A game-changing feature has been introduced in the latest Workday 2024R release: long-running processes. This new report empowers administrators with planning center permissions to monitor and manage processes that have been running for 30 seconds or longer.

Why is this important? 

Processes that linger in the background for extended periods can create bottlenecks, hindering the overall performance of your instance. With the long-running processes feature you can easily identify and address these slowdowns, ensuring your models run smoothly. When necessary, you can cancel these lengthy processes and reschedule them for times of lower traffic.

Key Benefits

This feature is beneficial for users encountering delays or performance issues with specific tasks. By providing a straightforward way to cancel these lengthy processes, you can enhance efficiency and maintain optimal performance levels.

How It Works

The long-running processes report is located in the Planning Center’s new Process Dashboard section. The long-running processes report provides a list of processes exceeding the 30-second mark, along with the usernames of the individuals who initiated them.

Modeling➜Model Management➜Planning Center➜Long-Running Processes

Types of Processes Included and Able to be Canceled:

  • Sheet loads
  • APIs
  • Admin updates
  • Excel exports
  • Imports

For instance, if you notice a large import task is dragging down performance during peak usage times, you can cancel it to allow regular processes to continue unhindered. After canceling a process, it will no longer appear in your list, providing a clear overview of your ongoing tasks.

Additionally, if you choose to cancel a process, you may want to reach out to the user who initiated it, informing them of the action taken and suggesting they try again during off-peak hours.

With the long-running processes feature, Workday is enhancing the administrative experience, allowing for better resource management and improved performance. Make the most of this new tool to keep your workflows efficient and responsive!

Revelwood is an award-winning, Platinum Solution Provider for Workday Adaptive Planning. We build solutions for the Office of Finance that minimize your risk by seamlessly incorporating business analytics into your everyday thinking. By combining the software with our best practices and out-of-the-box applications, we help businesses achieve their full potential with Workday Adaptive Planning.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Machine Learning Predictive Forecaster

Top 5 Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks from 2024

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Archived Versions For Data Freeze 2024R2

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Using Workday Adaptive Planning to Model Revenue and Expenses

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This post continues our series on how we use Workday Adaptive Planning to solve problems. Each blog post focuses on a real-world client experience where Revelwood was presented with a unique or thorny problem.  We’ll explain our approach to how we solved it.

Revelwood Client: A multi-site healthcare organization that provides human services programs at 174 sites provides individualized and compassionate services to people facing challenges with developmental disabilities, mental illness, substance abuse disorders and homelessness. The company has approximately 2,200 employees.

Problem: An Inability to Model Revenue and Expenses

Scenario: The healthcare organization had a manual, spreadsheet-based process for budgeting, planning, forecasting and reporting. The process impeded long-term budgeting and made forecasting on a strategic level problematic. 

How We Helped: The organization wanted to several big improvements from its Workday Adaptive Planning environment. One key area of focus was a Revenue Expense model. Revelwood built a custom model that enables the organization to create variable models that reveal why certain things happen. They can conduct what-if scenarios such as reducing expenses by a desired margin to see how it would impact the organization’s revenue objectives. This enables them to understand how revenue and expense structures would be impacted by changes at its sites.

Do you have a challenge you’d like to leverage Workday Adaptive Planning for? Reach out to us – we can help!

Read the posts in our series, How We Solve Problems Using Workday Adaptive Planning

Workday Adaptive Planning for Budgeting and Forecasting for a SaaS Business Model.

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IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Unpivot

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Did you know you can unpivot data in IBM Planning Analytics?

Sometimes you’ll find yourself in a situation where you need to change the layout of data from a grid format to a vertical table format, this is called unpivoting the data.

I’ll show you how to do this via some new Excel formulas.

Consider this sample data set:

A screenshot of a spreadsheet Description automatically generated

The goal is to have a table with three columns: Invoice, Month, Data. Here’s how to do that step-by-step.

Step 1

Use the EXPAND formula to create an array of Invoices.  In this case, we are creating a 5 x 12 array (5 rows x 12 columns).

=EXPAND($A$2:$A$6,5,12)

This will generate this:

A white grid with black and green text Description automatically generated

Step 2

EXPAND doesn’t know what to do with the other columns, so we can use IFERROR to fill in the errors with a specified value. In this case, if there’s an error then we want to replace the error with the first column value.

=IFERROR(EXPAND($A$2:$A$6,5,12),$A$2:$A$6)

Now we have this:

A screenshot of a computer Description automatically generated

Step 3

Now we use the TOCOL function to make the grid of invoice numbers into a column

=TOCOL(IFERROR(EXPAND($A$2:$A$6,5,12),$A$2:$A$6))

That generates:

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Step 4

We repeat the previous steps for the months. We want an array of 12 x 5 for the months. The end formula is:

=TOCOL(IFERROR(EXPAND($B$1:$M$1,5),$B$1:$M$1))

Step 5

Use TOCOL on the data points to pivot them into a columnar format.

=TOCOL($B$2:$M$6)

Now we have a live, formula-based unpivot model that will refresh when the data is changed.

A screenshot of a spreadsheet Description automatically generated

Bonus Tip!

You can make the formulas more dynamic by using COUNTA instead of hard coding the number of rows/columns in the EXPAND function.

Revelwood is an IBM Gold Business Partner with 25+ years of experience designing, developing, implementing and maintaining IBM Planning Analytics environments. Revelwood has helped clients in all sizes across all industries optimize and grow their use of Planning Analytics. Revelwood’s Planning Analytics team consists of experienced PA experts, including a multi-year IBM Champion.

Stay up to date with PA – sign up for our weekly Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks newsletter, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and join our IBM Planning Analytics All-Stars group on LinkedIn.

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks:

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: PAW Export Data

A Resolution You Should Actually Keep: Upgrade Your IBM Planning Analytics Environment

Popular IBM Planning Analytics Videos of 2024

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Machine Learning Predictive Forecaster

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Workday Adaptive Planning offers several features that allow users to achieve financial planning and analysis data solutions. One feature, predictive forecaster, leverages historical data to generate machine learning-based predictions within forecasted versions. With improved efficiency and accuracy, predictive forecasters can provide well-tuned predictions with the help of machine learning algorithms. In this blog post, we will delve into the steps needed to set up a predictive forecaster in Workday Adaptive Planning. 

Step 1: Permission Sets

In order to access the predictive forecaster, navigate to the “Permission Sets” tab of the “Administration” section. From there click edit (next to the Permission Sets of the accessing users). Finally, make sure the predictive forecaster is checked off. Now predictive forecaster will be available under “modeling.”

 

Step 2: Navigation 

In order to create a new predictive forecaster navigate to the “modeling” tab, choose “predictive forecast” and click “add new”.

Step 3: Necessary Requirements

To create the forecast, start by including a name and an optional description. Next, choose the sheet and the planned version that you want to populate with the data. Additionally, add the forecast start and end periods.

Step 4: Requirements continued

To continue filling out the necessary requirements select the accounts that you want to populate with the predicted data. There is the option to choose whether you want to populate based on levels or dimensions. Next for the “reference data” section, select the actual version that the algorithm will reference, as well as the start and end periods. Adaptive Planning requires users to maintain a 3:2 ratio of actuals to forecast.

Step 5: Algorithms

Finally, users must select which algorithm they want to deploy for their forecaster. AutoFit is the suggested algorithm because it selects the algorithm based on the seasonality of the data. Users also have the option to choose type of seasonality, add weekly seasonality, add multiplicative seasonality, to round values, and to add lever sheets. Several of these additional selections are only available for specific algorithms.

Predictive forecasting allows for users to leverage historical data to create well-defined predictions. The detailed criteria helps to create tailored data to the unique seasonality of the data. 

Revelwood is an award-winning, Platinum Solution Provider for Workday Adaptive Planning. We build solutions for the Office of Finance that minimize your risk by seamlessly incorporating business analytics into your everyday thinking. By combining the software with our best practices and out-of-the-box applications, we help businesses achieve their full potential with Workday Adaptive Planning.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Top 5 Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks from 2024

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Archived Versions For Data Freeze 2024R2

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Data Validation Rules in Modeled Sheets

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IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: PAW Export Data

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While IBM Planning Analytics is an excellent database that allows you to easily slice and dice your data, there may be situations where you want to export data from the model.  Maybe you want to share information with someone who uses different software or maybe you want to use your data in another tool? PAW version 99 introduced the ability to export a data set from the PAW interface.

To export data, right-click on a cube within a modeling workbench, select the option to Import/Export and then select the option to Export Data.  

Once selected, you will be prompted to define the name of the .csv file that will be created.  You then can define the data to be exported by using an existing view and/or by defining the dimension details. For each dimension, you can define a hierarchy to use, a subset to use, or an element to use.

A screenshot of a computer Description automatically generated

You also have the ability to define filters for your numeric and string data (example: only show values greater than or equal to 100) and the ability to skip consolidated values, rule calculated values, and zero/blank values.

Revelwood is an IBM Gold Business Partner with 25+ years of experience designing, developing, implementing and maintaining IBM Planning Analytics environments. Revelwood has helped clients in all sizes across all industries optimize and grow their use of Planning Analytics. Revelwood’s Planning Analytics team consists of experienced PA experts, including a multi-year IBM Champion.

Stay up to date with PA – sign up for our weekly Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks newsletter, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and join our IBM Planning Analytics All-Stars group on LinkedIn.

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks:

A Resolution You Should Actually Keep: Upgrade Your IBM Planning Analytics Environment

Popular IBM Planning Analytics Videos of 2024

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: PAW Export Dim Structure

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Workday Adaptive Planning for Budgeting and Forecasting for a SaaS Business Model

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This post continues our series on how we use Workday Adaptive Planning to solve problems. Each blog post focuses on a real-world client experience where Revelwood was presented with a unique or thorny problem.  We’ll explain our approach to how we solved it.

Revelwood Client: A SaaS company that is a next-generation online data provider for insurers. 

Problem: Budgeting and Forecasting for a SaaS Business Model

Scenario: This fast-growing software-as-a-service needed a sophisticated approach to budgeting, planning, forecasting and reporting. The company is a very low-asset organization with minimal CapEx requirements. As a result, they are very focused on their P&L. They needed a model that reflects annual recurring revenue and enables them to manage multi-year planning several years out.  

How We Helped: We built a revenue model that incorporates annual recurring revenue. It enables the company to drill down into P&L data. This model gives the company insights into future revenue as well as historical revenue. They are able to take all of their P&L data and provide reporting on it to senior management and to the company’s investors. 

Do you have a challenge you’d like to leverage Workday Adaptive Planning for? Reach out to us – we can help!

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