SAP BusinessObjects Cloud – Hichert Rules

As part of Cloud for Analytics, SAP implemented a few concepts based on the rules published by Hichert as part of the standard products. To be able to use those concepts your data model needs to meet a few requirements:

• You need to enable the model for planning
• You need to have at least one time dimension (requirement for the planning enablement)
• You will need a dimension to differentiate the values – for example Actual and Budget

Assuming your data model does fulfil those requirements, you can then easily use those features based on the Hichert rules.

In the first step I am configuring a Column / Bar chart and I am using the key figure Revenue for the measure axis.

For the Categories I am choosing my time dimension – in this example Calendar Month – and for the Color I can then choose dimension “Category” which is the dimension separating the key figure values in Actual and Budget values.

The end result is a column chart for 24 months showing the actual values in black (filled) and the budget values in white (to be filled). Yes – the values from the past should be color coded differently but to be honest I was not able to find a way in Cloud for Analytics to define color / pattern for specific members and as I am showing 2 years of data in the chart there was no particular option to setup three different color / pattern option with black for actual, grey for past, white for future.

Because we have a time based chart and because we do have the Category in our model, we are also able to setup a variance.

In my example I am configuring the variance to show the difference in absolute values.

As you can see – assuming you do have the right information in the underlying model, you can make use of those features following the Hichert rules.

My wish here would be that in the future we will be able to use the concepts also without those specific requirements towards the data model itself and for example uploading data from a Google Sheet that contains actual and budget numbers and use these features without having to have a “Category” dimension in the actual model.