EPM Cloud ASO Plan Type Procedural Calcs

When learning EPM Cloud Planning, I went through a class that taught me you cannot perform ASO procedural calculations. I didn't like to hear I had to give up something so vital to Essbase ASO. While it's kind of true, I'll show you a work-around.

For an in-depth explanation of the problem, see this really old blog post HERE. In short, summing formula members across other dimensions is really, really difficult. The work-around is to run a procedural calc at level-0 thus storing the data. Then you let ASO do it's aggregation magic.

It's surprisingly easy in EPM Cloud Planning ASO Plan Types.

Step 1: Put the formula into a member.

If you're creating a bunch of calcs, I'd recommend putting these members in a hidden section of the hierarchy. For this example, I created a member in my Account dimension with two members under it.

On the ProcTestSource I put a very simple member formula of the number 9999. I'll get into more complex formulas in future posts.

Step 2: Create a business rule to run an allocation on the ASO cube.

For the formula, I put the Target on the left side and the Source on the right.

Now I run the business rule and retrieve my data in Smart View (or Dodeca). The column on the left is a formula that will evaluate to 9999 at every intersection. The column on the right has the stored value at level 0 and lets ASO handle the aggregations.

If you've got a better way of doing this, please reach out to me. I'm curious to see if there are other ways to accomplish this (other than doing the calculation in a BSO cube and moving the data over).