Drill Through in FDMEE – Why I love it

Well, in this blog I would be talking about drill through in Hyperion Planning. This would be one of my many blogs on the subjects so I am planning to take baby steps out here. Drill through basically allows a business user to navigate from one system to another while analyzing the same set of data. The term system that I use here is at a high level of abstraction. It can be from one report to another. One source system to another. In this case, it is from Hyperion Planning to Data Management.

Well let’s see how drill through looks in action.

FINREP a Hyperion Planning application that I have created and after adding it as a Target application in FDMEE.

To enable the drill through functionality for a Planning application, click on the Drill Region and set the value as YES(1). This indicates that the drill region needs to be created for the Planning application.

Now a Planning application does not allow to choose the dimensions to be included in a drill region. However, for an Essbase application, as shown below I can choose which dimensions to include in the drill region. 

(When I say a planning application, please note that I mean an on-premise Planning application. In PBCS application, it is possible to choose the dimensions to be included in drill region. More on this later)

The next snapshot shows the data has been imported, mapped and exported to the Planning application using the Data load workbench.

I have created this data form to test that the drill through is working as expected in the Planning application FINREP.

Right click on a cell that has the handle on the upper right corner to activate the default menu which is shown in the next snapshot. Choose drill through and click on it.

 

Once you click on drill through above, you will get a hyperlink as shown in the next snapshot which asks “Drill Through to source”. Click on the hyperlink.

This will take you to a Drill through landing page which shows the Rule name and location from which this data was loaded. It also indicates the source columns that are used to derive the target value. This is shown in the next snapshot.

But the real advantage of drill through is evident when you have a complicated mapping as shown in the next snapshot. 

Observe that all source accounts (PL1500, PL1510, PL1520, PL1530) are tagged to the Target value (PL1500).

Now this is a very simple example. Assume a company that has approximately 1000 accounts in the chart of accounts. Assume such a scenario where I can have say 30 accounts mapped to one account. And to make things a bit more interesting, some accounts can be negative. And based on certain other conditions, I may choose to IGNORE the accounts or map it differently. This is where the drill through is useful since I can now basically understand how the data flows from my monthly ledger into an EPM application. And any time not spent in identifying source of data is time spent analyzing the data. So it’s a big plus for business users.

The next snapshots show the data mapped based on the new mapping rules that will map all the PL15 data to PL1500 and exported to the Planning application. 

  

The next snapshot shows the planning data form. Observe that the value is 3367. Not equal to any of the source data that we loaded. Drill through to source to see how we get the value of 3367.

As shown in the next snapshot, the value of 3367 is derived as the sum of PL1500, PL1510, PL1520 and PL1530.

As shown above, this can be valuable insight for business users especially in an application where we can have multiple data sources or simply complicated mappings. Drill through is a cool feature that allows users to explore data flow across source systems.