Project Control - Forecasts Real Time enhancement

StuartHibbert

Organization Name

Highways England

Description

We currently produce a lot of reporting around forecasts using BI Publisher due to limitations with data availability in OTBI and not being able to replicate our business logic with the measures available, this is primarily around identification of last months forecast as using the prior forecast version does not mesh with our business needs.  It would be really helpful if the 'Project Control - Forecasts Real Time' subject area is updated to align to content available in the 'Projects Control - Budgets Real Time' to allow reporting of cost measures from any forecast type not just the Current/Original/Prior. 

To fully enable OTBI use for forecasting reporting we would also require the 'baselined date' to be included in the subject area against each forecast version to allow replication of our last months forecast logic.  I currently achieve this by pulling back all forecasts which were approved before last months cut-off point and selecting the most recent one, it could be the prior version or current version or in some cases a version outside of the standard measures. 

Having access to this dimension for reporting would enable us to move a lot of reporting from BI Publisher into OTBI to leverage the value this product offers in terms of visualizations and the general user experience.

Use Case and Business Need

We currently have a set of project reports in BI Publisher using custom SQL statements , Excel templates and VBA macros to achieve the formatting required by our end users.  Recently we have started to explore OTBI for different reporting options, this has resulted in a build of most of our Project based reports however it is impossible to include our business definition of 'last months forecast' due to missing data/attributes in the Project Control - Forecasts Real Time subject area.  This places us in a position where the reporting of forecast movement would have to be separated from the OTBI reports and provided via BI Publisher which restricts the user experience when compared to generally working with OTBI analysis.

Having the subject area updated would allow us as a company to streamline and improve our reporting and make best use of the products we have.

More details

There are no measures available from other forecasting versions and the date the versions were baselined, this prevents us from replicating BI Publisher report content in OTBI.  From a user perspective this will change the end user experience and adoption of a series of new reports as movement reporting would have to be done disconnected from the OTBI dataset whereas with BI Publisher we are able to form the data in one single report (but miss out on the additional enhancements working in OTBI brings in terms of visualisation/accessibility) 

Original Idea Number: 223881b1cd