Assumptions and drivers can be applied globally to specific versions while excluding others

Description

This functionality allows organizations to manipulate data variables globally across the software while selectively excluding others. This flexibility enables the user to apply this feature more often, as it can accommodate exceptions and changing business requirements.

Example Use Case

Scenario: An international retail chain uses CPM software to analyze sales performance. This software has various versions of sales data which include seasonal sales, clearance sales, and regular sales. They want to make changes to cost drivers like transportation costs and customs duties, which impact most of the versions, but not those related to clearance sales since the pricing structure is different.

Solution: Using the CPM software's capability to apply assumptions and drivers globally to specific versions, the retail chain modifies the cost drivers which are then implemented across seasonal and regular sales versions, excluding the clearance sales version. This allows an accurate depiction of the respective sales performances without manual adjustments.

Considerations

Any software product's ability to handle exceptions to rules will help it gain more adoption in an organization. Nobody wants to use something that is overly rigid, as that pushes them back into Excel. This requirement is specific to versions, which can be a what-if scenarios, working budget, or anything that is considered an independent dataset.

Some products ONLY do this, meaning that their assumption tables are for a specific version only. If that is what you want, great. Most CPM products will behave that way. Some will offer a feature where one assumption table is universal (meaning it applies to all versions) whereas another table is version-specific.

Questions to Ask a Vendor

• Assumptions and Versions: If we change an assumption, will it apply to all versions in the systems, or just the one we're working on?
• Exceptions: What if we want some assumptions to apply to the version we're working on, but others apply to all versions in the system?
• Exclusion Options: How can certain versions be excluded from these changes? Is there a built-in feature to easily exclude selected versions?