Hyperion Data Relationship Manager

(DRM)

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DRM at Cash America

• Overview

– DRM Version: 11.1.2.1 and 9.3.1

– Environment: Production, QA, Dev

• Why?

– 9.3.1 was installed first and was used to solve our hierarchy

maintenance issues with our Entities dimension.

– 11.1.2.1 was installed on a fresh machine and we used it to solve

our hierarchy issues with our Accounts dimension.

– Migrating Entities to 11.1.2.1 keeps getting pushed back in favor

of other priorities

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Business Case - Entity Hierarchy Mgmt

• Management Reporting Team (within Finance) is

responsible for managing Entity Alternate Tracks (i.e.

Responsibility Track, Geography Track, etc)

• Legacy process highly manual and prone to errors:

– Mgmt Rptg Team using a QA Essbase cube for managing

hierarchies

– Validating in Excel using Lock and Sends

– Asking IT to copy from QA Essbase cube to Production cubes on

monthly basis

• We needed something automated that could become the

system of record for these Hierarchies that many other

Cubes/Rptg sources could benefit from

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Business Case – Account Hierarchy Mgmt

• Management Reporting Team has a legacy application for

mapping internal Chart of Accounts into External Account

structure

• Chart of Accounts and Mapping has been simplified over

last five years and legacy application is becoming overkill

• Business needs a way to make the External Account

Hierarchy available to more cubes

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DRM Solution

• Source Primary Hierarchy from ERP (Lawson) – store in

DRM as read only

• Management Reporting Team maintain “Alternate

Hierarchies” using DRM as a front end tool

• Team can also maintain Essbase properties, UDAs and

even formulas

• Validation reports can be run to look for common errors

• Hierarchies export daily from DRM to relational “staging

table”

• One source for cubes to build from

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DRM Flow Diagram

Data

Warehouse Text FileDRM

Temp

Hierarchy

DRM

Main

Hierarchy

Staging

Table

Prod

Cubes

QA

Cubes

Lawson DRM Server DRM Internal

Schema

Essbase

Users

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Lawson to DRM Server

• A Windows .BAT script executes a SQL query to generate

text files with Entity and Accounts hierarchies.

• Script also adds header and footer records needed for

DRM Import in next step

• Need manual entries in main hierarchy? Also can be

added here.

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DRM Server to DRM

• DRM comes with a DRM batch command line client

(drm-batch-client.exe) and we can feed a config file to this

to import our metadata text file into DRM

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Inside DRM

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Inside DRM - Imports

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DRM – Why Temp Hierarchy?

A DRM import must be done to a brand new hierarchy. You

cannot import into an existing hierarchy.

This necessitates the step of “blending” which takes

hierarchy A and blends its differences into hierarchy B.

At Cash America, once we blend our temporary hierarchy

into the current primary hierarchy, we delete the temporary

hierarchy.

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DRM Flow Diagram

Data

Warehouse Text FileDRM

Temp

Hierarchy

DRM

Main

Hierarchy

Staging

Table

Prod

Cubes

QA

Cubes

Lawson DRM Server DRM Internal

Schema

Essbase

Users

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Inside DRM - Blends

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Inside DRM – the Hierarchy

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Inside DRM – User Edits

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Inside DRM – Exports

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DRM Flow Diagram

Data

Warehouse Text FileDRM

Temp

Hierarchy

DRM

Main

Hierarchy

Staging

Table

Prod

Cubes

QA

Cubes

Lawson DRM Server DRM Internal

Schema

Essbase

Users

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DRM – Formulas

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DRM – Compares

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DRM – Queries

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DRM – Publish Flags

Our alternate hierarchies have custom Boolean properties we call our

“publish flags”. Before our script will export these hierarchies to QA or

Prod, we check to see that the flag is set to True. This allows users to

work on them without affecting cubes and then, when ready, to first

update QA only.

DRM Benefits at Cash America

• Allows the Business users to build alternate hierarchies

outside of EAS and validate against the main hierarchy

systematically

• Allows the Business users to manually control certain UDAs

whose associations IT used to keep updated in text files

• Users can experiment with the hierarchy in different ways,

validating each one, prior to deciding which one to publish

to the EDW/cubes

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DRM 11.1.2.3

New features we’re looking forward to:

• Workflow

• Scripting with JavaScript for derived properties and

validations

• Imports from relational tables

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DRM at Cash America

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