By Dr. Berg
In this blog we look at how Xcelsius can be used for localized budgeting for a company. The example is intended to show how developers can add interactive features to their dashboards, instead of merely presenting actuals in a graphical format.
The Importance of Interactivity
Analysis is an interactive process that includes what-if scenarios, exploring how changes affect results and planning for the future. It is not reviewing nicely formatted reports on-line. For that purpose, we have Crystal Reports. However, unlike this tool, Xcelsius is intended to be the next generation of dashboard tools that go one-step further in supporting the analysis process on-line.
To accomplish this, we have to take advantage of the inherent features of Xcelsius and be creative in our approach to adding functionality to the dashboards. Let me show you what I mean:
In this example, the company creates a system generated budget for travel expenses in SAP BPC and presents the data in a simple dashboard together with the actual expenses on a monthly basis.
The company, does not care how each manager allocates, or changes, the budget for each 6 month period, as long as the total budgeted amount is not exceeded. So, the dashboard needs to accommodate flexible localized budgeting. To do so, we have built 3 example features into the tool. Let us take a look:
Finally, the manager can save his budgeting scenarios, see the impacts graphically in many different ways, sort the result columns and work on budgeting for his lower level organizational units. Every month the actuals arrive and he can track how his local budget is performing.
Also, at any time he can track against the system generated budget and see if he is exceeding the overall budgeting numbers. This is true BI self-service that can be integrated in BI 4.x to be shared by others in the department. The only limitation is your imagination…
More examples to follow...
Dr. Berg