E.List Determination in peculiar situation

[araryes]

I have a situation where there are five regions and also 4 product groups. Each region has all these four product groups. To give you an example: the regions are Texas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and California. The product groups are Switchgears, Motors, Drives & Service.

Each of the region has a head - responsible for all product groups that it caters to. Similarly each of the product groups have a head - responsible for his particular product group across all regions.

In this case, both of them will want to view their portion of the budget/plan - cutting across regions / product groups.

So how should I define the Elist. I tried a combination - i.e. each elist item is a unique combination of region and product groups. But it is not working, when i try to total. i.e. i gave TEXAS TOTAL which is total of all four product groups in Texas. Similarly i gave MOTORS TOTAL which is total of all Motors in all regions. But since one item is getting totalled into more than one head, it is creating conflict while creating contributor application. Hope my problem is understood. Please help.

[mrobby]

Ah yes the old problem of being unable to have multiple hierarchies.

Can both Regional Managers and Product Mangers edit data in the application?  IE would their user rights overlap?  If not and only product managers can input data then you can create a dummy elist which would allow you to have region and product dimensions in your model.

You create an elist structure that allows product managers to go in by their e list item.  Regional Managers would would not see the input e list items, only be able to view the top level which would be an aggregate of the product managers inputs.  They could then slice and dice  on the aggregate data by region or product.

If you you dont want certain inputers to see certain products or regions then use access tables to set NO DATA on the items they shouldnt see.


Now it gets more tricky if both people need to enter and edit data.  In this case your regional managers would be reviewers of the input e list items as well as be able to have view level of the top Node or the TOTAL.  To edit data they would have to go under the detail e list item where the data was input.  This can be tricky to tell unless there is some business rule that lets that person know who/where the data was input.


This is probably confusing to understand as Im trying to explain but its easier to see visually.  If you want a little more help to see this I can take some screen shots of a fake application.

Let me know

[tcucen]

mrobby is right, I have tried to put a few pictures together about your question and possible solutions in my blog.

http://performanagement.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/cognos-planning-modelling/