Business units can inherit standard dimensions from a standard set that corporate may maintain, but Extensible Dimensionality® also allows them to extend those dimensions to suit their own process and reporting needs. This allows for operational significance for the business units yet grants control of the overall process to corporate.
The diagram below shows an example of how a certain account can be extended differently across a service business unit vs. a manufacturing business unit as well as across the Actual and Budget scenarios. Notice how each business unit can look at Gross Sales differently in the Actual scenario. Also, the Services business unit can look at Gross Sales at an even greater level of detail in their Budget scenario.
This is possible due to three reasons:
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Extensible Dimensionality® can inherit dimensions and extend them. In the example above, there are four different Account dimensions that inherit from each other like this:
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Corporate Accounts
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Club Manufacturing Accounts
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Services Accounts
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Services Budget Accounts
Corporate Accounts is the main chart of accounts. Club Manufacturing takes that dimension and extends it to add its own accounts, but it cannot change what is in Corporate Accounts. Services also takes Corporate Accounts and extends it to meet its needs for the Actual scenario and extends its own Services Accounts to meet its need for more detail in its Budget scenario in the Services Budget Accounts dimension. However, when designing an extended dimension, members are either added below inherited members (for additional detail), or to an alternate rollup by creating new parent members and then referencing inherited members below the new parents. Both actions cannot be done at the same time in the same section of the hierarchy.
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Different dimensions can be assigned to different cubes and that dimensional assignment can be different for each Scenario type. In the above example, there are three cubes: Corporate, Clubs, and Services. When looking at the Corporate cube, data from the three cubes is all there for analysis. In Corporate, the Corporate Accounts dimension is assigned to all Scenario types. In Clubs, the Clubs Manufacturing Accounts dimension is assigned to all Scenario types. In the Services cube, the Services Accounts dimension is assigned to every dimension except for Budget, which is where the Services Budget Accounts dimension is assigned.
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The Clubs and Services cubes have their own respective Entity dimensions referenced in the Corporate cube. The Entity dimensions tie the data together.
NOTE: Other dimensions such as Flow and the User Defined dimensions can also be extended and have flexible cube assignment if needed.
NOTE: Using Extensible Dimensionality to extend accounts used in the Intercompany Matching process is not a recommended practice.
Extensible Cube
There can also be separate cubes for different uses, such as Human Resource data or Cost Drivers. These cubes can still reference other cube data through the CB# qualifier in Member formulas.
Extensible Workflow
There can be different Workflow Profile hierarchies per Scenario cype which is defined at the cube level. For example, an Actual scenario might be loaded from 12 GL systems across 500 entities, and Budget Forecast, and Variance can define a Workflow for each of the 500 entities with regional review and signoff levels.
