Last week Bob Smiley, Moneka Asham and Gianluca Tatangelo led our June CEWs webinar and demonstrated how the USA Properties team uses Prophix at scale - how the team utilizes DPM for Jobs planning, consolidates their plan data across multiple divisions, and drives innovation with Prophix. They also showcased some tips and tricks customers can use to upgrade reports and maximize ROI (Recording will be made available within the next two weeks.)
Did you have any questions from the event?
Let us know down below!
Loved the session. Very informative. Definitely would love to get some more knowledge into some of the forecasting process components shared.
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I found this session incredibly interesting and feel like we needed more time as it flew by! lol
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Here are a couple of the questions that came up in the session that we didn’t have time to address immediately. I’m logging them here for now and will answer them shortly.
@amy.berry asked:
I have a question going back to the DPM. Does that report he showed just actuals or does it include any calculations for accruals within that actuals column?
@sherie.simpson asked:
Would he be willing to connect with me regarding how they have they have the personnel dpm set up? We have a need to track variance in the same way he is.
@chaya.khannukar asked:
Hello Bob, did you say you bypass the DPM and use Personnel cube to import the Actuals? I am confused, can you little bit elaborate on that. I see the Salaries variance on an Employee level. How do you accomplish that?
@jeanette.emery and @gino.l.altrella both asked (related to the Smartsheet task labels that appear at the top of our Cash Flow Forecast form for projects):
For the notes on Line 11, are they stored as row notes?
Also, thanks to everyone for the nice comments about the content. Glad to know it was helpful! Let’s continue the conversation! I’ll post answers to the above questions over the next few days right here in this thread; feel free to ask other questions about what you saw in the demo here as well.
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I would like to second Chaya’s question as it is interesting to see how that was accomplished!
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My question is…when do you sleep? The setup must’ve been very time consuming! But I agree once you put in the time, the benefits let you sit back a little and enjoy! Great examples of what Prophix can do when you think outside the box!
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Donna, I have a few project planning meetings scheduled throughout my workday where I can get in a few z’s. It’s important to put my zoom meeting on mute with an animated avatar so that it doesn’t offend people that I’m napping. (What they don’t know won’t hurt them…)
Seriously though, it does take a while to get to this level, but once we get there, it’s well automated and I can “let go” except for the pesky monthly administration to keep named sets and stuff like that updated properly. But even that becomes a quick repetitive process when using special quality-confirmation reports and administrator-assistance workflows.
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Thanks for tracking these, looking forward to the responses!
@bob.smiley, you are truly the best 
@amy.berry asked:
I have a question going back to the DPM. Does that report he showed just actuals or does it include any calculations for accruals within that actuals column?
Amy: in our case we are just showing actuals against plan. We don’t actually accrue our payroll, so we don’t have a need to report it.
That said you should be able to adapt this model to include accruals, either by importing the accruals from your system of record, or by projecting it using DPM formulas into a special set of accounts.
Here’s the thing about DPM: I find it great for planning but not so great for calculating actuals. This is because all calculations in the same scenario get posted to the same version. If i have some actuals (like accruals or actual payroll spent) I have the following options:
- Load data into my main scenario, storing calculation results in special accounts in that version. From there I either infoflex it to the ACT version or even more weird: write my reports looking for these actuals in the plan version (btw this is a terrific source of guaranteed confusion down the road if you’re looking for some way to punish yourself or someone who takes this over from you later)
- Load directly into the actuals version from the source, bypassing the DPM module.
Option 2 is how I did my actuals—direct from payroll. For accruals you could do something similar if you have special accounts for accrued values. If you don’t segregate accruals by account, you may want to use a special accruals version.
The final decision about that would depend upon what you want to end up showing.
Hope this helps. Let’s continue this discussion.
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@sherie.simpson: I’m definitely willing to connect. Send me a Private Message here on RedCarpet and we can schedule something (let’s look at sometimes mid August or later).
@dawar.siddiqui and @chaya.khannukar: I can see that my language might have been a bit confusing. Let me see if I can clarify.
A Detailed Planning Model is a set of configurations (attributes, calculations, and other rules) that feed a cube. Prophix calls this a DPM cube, but really it’s a combination of a DPM model and a standard cube. So, what I meant was that when I import my actuals, I don’t use the DPM import to bring them into the DPM model. Instead, I load them directly into the ACT version of the cube that my DPM model feeds.
The DPM scenario feeds my Personnel cube’s WPLAN version. This way the DPM forecasts future month projections based on employee profile selections (such as which benefit they’ve signed up for, their 401k election, etc.) and any salary/bonus adjustments entered by the planners.
I’m loading the payroll actuals directly into the Personnel cube’s ACT version. I get payroll data by employee, so this maps to the employee dimension, with specific accounts that I map to the same accounts we planned for above.
This gives me the ability to create a template in the Personnel cube that shows ACT and WPLAN (and even BUD, which is my “budget version”, which was created as a snapshot of the WPLAN once the annual budget was formally approved).
Hope this helps. Let’s keep the conversation going; what did I gloss over?
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Amazing, Now I understand. We have never imported actuals in our DPM cube as we always go through the DPM Import route to get the current Payroll data and use that to predict the future… Will try it out as I see great benefits in using this as it gives good analytics and ck to see if our Forecasts are accurate.
Thanks Bob.
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