SAC Part 1 - Understanding Planning Models
SAC Part 1 - Understanding Planning Models
SAC Part 1 - Understanding Planning Models
What’s a model?
In SAP Analytics Cloud, models are the foundation for data exploration. Consisting
mainly of measures and dimensions, models provide a framework for the data
visualizations in your stories.
Stories are where you analyze your data. It’s here where you build your charts, tables,
graphs, and use other data visualization tools to tell the story of your business.
Analytic models allow you to clean your data and prepare it for story mode. Here, you
can define measures and dimensions, create calculations, set up hierarchical
relationships, geo-enrich your data, and more.
Planning models allow you to do everything analytic models do, but they also give you
a more control with your data such as setting up budgets and forecasts, creating your
own versions of model data, copying and pasting data, and using spreading,
distribution, and allocations features.
Within a planning scenario, individuals within your organization can create public,
private, and shared versions of data that will not overwrite a public version until
approved. These versions enable individuals to change values without compromising
public data, giving planners the ability to try different what-if scenarios within their data
before making final decisions.
NOTE: only planning licenses with allow you to access planning models.
In planning models, you need to define the settings for the Time, which determines the
range of your data such as how far into the past and how far into the future you can
plan.
To establish your time dimension, first, select the Lowest Granularity; you can choose
from Year, Quarter, Month, Day. Choosing the level of granularity determines how deep
you can view into your data. For example, you may have daily sales transactions, but see
little value in looking at that level of granularity. You therefore may decide that ‘Month’
is the lowest granularity that you require.
Next, select the start and end dates for your model. For example, you may have ten
years of data, but are only interested in looking at the last year. In this case, you can set
the start date to be one year in the past.
You can also define what types of data you can manage in your model.
In planning models, there are different categories — money you actually made (Actual),
money you’re going to make (Forecast), and money you are going to spend (Budget).
SAP Analytics Cloud allows you to choose the granularity of each of these categories.
Take budget for example, you can select whether you see a daily budget, monthly,
quarterly, or yearly.
You could easily tell a story with your data showing what are the most popular flavors,
what are your peak periods, what are the long-term sales trends i.e. Month over Month,
or Year over Year. From this analysis, you could make decisions about promotions,
introducing new flavors, and even expansion opportunities.