Support for Planned, Actual, Previous and Forecast

VitaraCharts supports the following scenarios as described in IBCS

  • Actual
  • Forecast
  • Previous
  • Planned
Actual and Forecast are treated as the primary scenarios. Planned and Previous are treated as the secondary scenarios. At least one element (metric or attribute) of the primary scenario should exist in the mapping for the charts to work correctly. For the absolute and relative variances (deltas) to be shown on the chart, at least one element of the primary scenario and one element of the secondary scenario should be mapped.

For all of the charts, actual data is always assigned the highest priority. If for a certain category, the actual data is not available, then we look at the forecast data for that same category. In order to compare scenarios, you can compare

  • Actual/Forecast vs Previous
  • Actual/Forecast vs Planned

In each of the comparisons above, representing deltas and delta percentages becomes possible.


Mapping data to the scenarios


Automatic detection

VitaraCharts can auto detect metrics or attributes as falling into specific scenario based on the name. You can define what the name pattern should be in the global.txt file The file is located under VitaraCharts\custom folder and the default setting look as follows

#Data Types as per IBCS standard data classification
#usage: DT.<dataType> = metricTitle1, metricTitle2 (can be both metric titles and attribute values)
#defaults included below add/change values with comma seperated
DT.AC= AC, Actual
DT.FC= FC, Forecast
DT.PL= PL, Planned
DT.PY= PY, Previous Year

The lines beginning with the # mark are comments and describe what types of data are possible here. In the set of the lines, you can configure the right side to include all possible formats of the metrics or attribute names that fall in each of the scenarios. Regular expressions are also allowed. The strings using regular expressions need to be wrapped inside [] brackets.

Examples

As an example, if you’d like to add _AC as a suffix for all metrics that fall in the Actual scenario we can add that as follows

#Data Types as per IBCS standard data classification
#usage: DT.<dataType> = metricTitle1, metricTitle2 (can be both metric titles and attribute values)
#defaults included below add/change values with comma seperated
DT.AC= AC, Actual, [.*_AC]
DT.FC= FC, Forecast
DT.PL= PL, Planned
DT.PY= PY, Previous Year

Here’s another sample that adds different strings and patterns to each of the scenarios

#Data Types as per IBCS standard data classification
#usage: DT.<dataType> = metricTitle1, metricTitle2 (can be both metric titles and attribute values)
#defaults included below add/change values with comma seperated
DT.AC= AC, Actual, Current, TY, [.*_AC]
DT.FC= FC, Forecast, [.*_FC]
DT.PL= PL, Planned, [.*_PL]
DT.PY= PY, Previous Year, Previous, [.*_PY]

Once this mapping is done, in all of the charts, whenever this pattern is recognized, the metrics and attributes are automatically placed in each of these scenarios.

Note : The names of the scenarios in this file (i.e the left side that mentions DT.AC, DT.FC etc) should not be changed. While PY for instance seems to indicate ‘Previous Year’, this scneario can be used to represent anything from the past (previous quarter, previous day etc).

Manual mapping in the properties editor

In addition to allowing configuration of the scenarios globally, you can also recategrized metrics into scenarios in each individual chart. This is done in the properties editor of the particular chart. For instance, here’s a multi-tier bar chart where the scenario mapping can be changed

multi-tier bar