Hi All -
Looking for suggestions to innovate DPM to allow standard users to access information from DPM schedules year round… or maybe get some of the below pain points addressed in product updates.
Anyone else think that these product features would be helpful?
- allow Standard Users to access/favorite a read-only version of the DPM schedules.
- allow for simple filtering/sorting of columns in report templates
- allow for ad-hoc detailed planning drill-through from report templates
I think any one of these could help me with the below. Any other suggestions?
We have been using DPM for annual budgeting the last two years using individual employee details like expected salary increases, benefits packages and expected education and professional development to build up the annual budget.
Our biggest pain point right now is that managers (about 40) don’t have access to all of this great detail that they used to build up (and support/notes to justify) the budget.
As an administrator - I can favorite and/or navigate to these schedules like I would with reports made in Template Studio. However, as standard users, they no longer have access to the DPM schedules that were in their workflows during budgeting season - once they hit Submit.
I believe my current work around options are:
1) Restart their original workflows for entering details into the schedules (but with write permissions for all managers turned off throughout the year). Problems with this:
- It clutters up their workflows and doesn’t represent true status of he workflow (they would need to leave it as work in progress to continue accessing).
- When budget season comes up later in the year, I am going to need to give everyone write permissions again (and don’t want people to accidentally make changes to the current year schedules.)
2) Pass all of the fields/columns from the DPM schedules to the Employee cube, then recreate the schedule as a report template. Problems with this:
- Lot of work adding all of the fields to the cube and recreating these schedules in standard template and takes away a lot of the advantages of having the detail schedules.
- Would create a gigantic cube that would undoubtedly slow down performance.
- There is no simple sort/filter functionality for the columns in the report templates, which is really helpful especially for managers with multiple departments/sub-departments. Filters could be potentially built in as pages - but this would not be simple or quick for the user (filters/sorting in DPM is very quick).
3) Create an ad-hoc drill-to Detailed Planning from the linked OPEX budget template. The “Drill-to Detailed Planning” is great… and once you have clicked through to it, there is flexibility to adjust what you see and add other employee cube fields.
- There currently is not a way to save build in an ad-hoc view for the user to replicate information from their DPM Schedule.
- If Prophix did add this functionality, it would still require adding all of the DPM schedule columns into the cube to replicate the schedules for the user - which would be work to setup and would most likely slow down performance.
Looking forward to hearing how others have dealt with this issue!
Thank you
Upgrading users to advanced will allow for the same thing. No need to use workflows to enable access to schedules for advanced users. That’s a license/cost question of value.
Since we are talking wishes for DPM advancement, I’m hoping for excel contributor style integration of DPM schedules. DPM schedules are great but very limited in formatting and calculations. I’d like them to be more like a standard template, where we can format rows and columns, calculate values, etc.
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Hi Wayne,
You’re right. DPM is great but does pose some challenges in some of it’s functionality.
One way you could circumvent this (in extension of your #2) is to send these templates out via Report Binder to all managers (that would need it). This way they have it in their inbox for viewing all through the year, and you wouldn’t need to have a workflow for read-only. In the offline excel they receive, they can still use drop-down and other features that they would use in Schedules.
You could even use the Security section of DPM for folks to View (and thereby revoke permission to Edit). This way you will not have to fear changes after budget season.
Cheers,
Navin
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Forgot to add the screenshot to my second point
Instead of using the schedule - could you build the analysis on the DPM object & report out that way? I’ve done this in the past.
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Thanks Bob. Agreed that Advanced Licenses would be another option. At this time, cost/benefit doesn’t warrant the advanced licensing… but as we continue on the Prophix journey - it may be worth it.
ah ha!.. I have not tried this (haven’t used report binder before). I will test this out and see if it works. Thanks!
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Also on DPM advancement - yes, more flexible calculations and formatting!.. the more excel like the better.
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I tried to send a Report Binder with a DPM template but I didn’t seem to be able to do that. What could I be doing wrong?
I provide these valuable details to my end users in a template report. The big pain point with that is building out all of the attributes that I need.
I also have a Personnel Analysis cube (generic) where I take some of the attributes from Personnel DPM and make them into dimensions in the new cube.
I do the same thing for a Revenue Analysis cube as well.
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Hi Imtiaz,
DPM stands for Detailed Planning Manager. I am pretty certain your organization is currently using DPM for Personnel Planning. If you’re interested in learning more, we have short demo videos on our website as well.
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Thanks Emily - I just tried with report binder as well and seems like you would have to convert to excel first… which doesn’t help me as much since I would then need to create a separate excel file for each manager. @tim.ouimet is there another way?
And what you have done with the template report - has that worked well for the users? I have been really hesitant to go that route due to the work to build out the Personnel cube.
thanks!
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Hi Wayne,
Thank you for your suggestions.
Could you add these as items in the feedback forum so it can be visible to the product team?
Thank you
I’m not sure what you mean about converting to excel for a report Binder? Can you elaborate on that?
The template report works very well. The nice thing with that is once it’s built, if built with best practices, there is very little to no maintenance. I also like that I can write the report to show employee allocations across multiple departments.
If you would like to see what I’ve done with my template report, please connect with me
I also vote for more flexibilities, like calculations and formatting, etc. to Detailed Planning Manager.
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Interesting to read through other users informative feedback.
I haven’t used DPM yet, but I’m reading everyone’s comments to get ideas. Thank you for sharing them with me.
Great conversation. I may try so of these ideas with our data.
Hello! I missed this question. It does work well for my end users. I do not load staff names into the analysis cube. Instead, I load data in by position. Then we can see budget be actual variances organization wide and filter by job, PT/FT, payroll code.
If someone wants to know why a specific position has a high variance, I have the details in excel to back that up for actuals and the DPM cube for budget.
What kind of data are your users most interested in seeing? Once I identified that, I could determine which DPM attributes I needed to create into dimensions in my analysis cube(s).
Also, I have been keeping a stat budget scenario once budget season is done. I mark it as complete so we can’t manipulate it. Then I have my standard budget scenario that is available for editing/manipulation whenever needed.
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