Hello! I’m very excited to present at the first ever Prophix Virtual Summit! My topic is “Make Data Matter.”
I will speak about data beyond typical financial statements. I will also speak about why I decided on adding particular data to Prophix and how I accomplished that task. I have built 20 different cubes with financial and non-financial data. I use each one to help solve variance analysis questions and provide detailed information to my end users.
To make data matter in all of these cubes, I always ensure that the data is accurate. I take data from our payroll system (Kronos), general ledger (Microsoft Dynamics GP), and our billing software (Carelogic). I do most of this through flat file uploads, since my only direct data connection is the one with Dynamics.
As with anything, I have faced struggles while building all of these cubes. Some are:
Leadership support
IT support - with extracting data from other systems
Data configuration
End user engagement
Testing
Training
What is your most difficult hurdle with trying to provide data that matters?
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i can’t wait to see how you got some of your cubes to work together. Our biggest problem is getting the source data from other systems cleanly. With a little trial and error getting it into Prophix is the easy part.
I would be very interested to see how you import data into a DPM cube with a flat file, if you are presently doing that. We input our financial data from Sage into our other cubes but we manually add/delete/adjust the data in our DPM (personnel) cube.
My biggest struggle is the need to get all dimensional structure, names, etc., correct from the get-go. Data modeling is important, but it’s not the full solution, and often I find that a model needs to be changed after we start looking at the workflow component, which usually comes later. Adding placeholder dimensions helps, but they are forever called placeholders!
Over the years I’ve adopted the approach of iterative development to produce quick wins early, and modify the design for new features as the business needs develop. But in Prophix I find this more difficult because the cube is the cube, and making an iterative change may be best by modifying the cube in a way that requires actually developing a new cube, which in turn means re-importing all the data (just right) and re-making all of the templates and workflows.
My biggest hurdle is finding the time to build the cubes and reports out in Prophix. There always seems to be something else to work on. Met you a year ago at Minneapolis meet-up; looking forward to attending your session!
Really looking forward to your presentation! Can’t wait to hear how you overcome Leadership Support as a struggle. Do you also import any information from other systems aside from payroll, GL and billing? Do you receive requests from end users for information they would like to see?
Hi Emily, I use DPM and manually work with a flat file to get it started; It would be great to hear on how you import data into a DPM cube with a flat files and make use of them.
Looking forward to your presentation! I sympathize with others in this thread in that one of our biggest hurdles is trying to combine data from multiple systems. Also, sometimes there are so much data to look at that it’s hard to know what indicators to focus on, I would love to hear if you have any recommendations based on your experience!
