External Source Model Benefits

The External Source Model feature set is enhanced to support a wider variety of operational Dynamic Planning use cases like Sales Operations, Marketing Operations, Customer Support Operations, and Professional Services Models. Key benefits include:

• Enhancements to support operational Dynamic Planning use cases.

• A formula engine which supports multiple functions like arithmetic, logical, date, and text. These functions allow you to perform data transformations and to define the formulas on the ESM model.

• Ability to load data from a wider variety of data sources by using data transformations at data load time instead of being required to have a perfect data load file. Contributors can transform data with formulas and functions:

  • Support for text functions like Left, Right, Concatenate, Len, Trim, Find, Lookup, Text

  • Support for arithmetic functions like Sum, Avg, Round, Floor, Ceiling, RangeLookup, + - * /

  • Support for date functions Year, Month, Day, DaysCount, DaysFactor, Days, WeekNum, Date, EOMonth, EDate, SUM, + -

  • Support for logical operations with IF, AND, OR, ISBLANK, < > =

  • Support for functions that work with multiple data types, like MIN and MAX

  • Lookup functions to refer to assumptions from driver models

• Enhanced map capabilities when loading the data from ESM to the Master model: to filter the data that is being loaded, and to detect and dynamically modify the dimension hierarchy by appending missing metadata members.

• Enhanced Drill Through functionality for loading data into a Master model from multiple different ESM models.

• Ability to define formulas that are dependent on dates (such as start_date and end_date).

• Ability to manage ESM models from Model Manager (web).

• Ability to use Views on ESM models to interact with the data that is in the ESM models.

• ESM support in both SpotlightXL and Model Manager (web).