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johannes_huhn
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert




This blog post shows some tips and tricks around the SAP Analytics Cloud Calendar. The intention is to educate about features and functionality and simplify modelling your planning process!

 

Tip #1 – Add multiple review rounds

Planning is about accuracy. The more accurate forecasts and planning activities happen, the higher the quality of the planning period. To ensure accuracy and quality, it is valuable to involve multiple eyes on planned data (‘multiple eyes principle in finance’). To support this coherence SAC calendars allows to model multiple rounds of review – as part of the planning workflow. Each review round serves as a level of approval. To make an example: A planner (here: Teresa E. Smith) concluded her planning activity on a certain cost center. The first review happens by Gladys Kendricks who is the Head of controlling and the manager of Teresa. To further ensure quality, a second review round can be done by the manager (who is in charge of the cost center and hence accountable) of the business department.


 

Tip #2 – substitute an involved user


Users of the planning process can easily be substituted. Imagine a user (who is assigned for a certain planning task) cannot fulfill the activity – reasons can be broad, the user might be sick, just left the company or is just the wrong pick for the associated task. To overcome this, SAC calendar provides a substitute functionality to change involved users of certain activities. To be more specific, within an event another assignee (or even another reviewer) for the task can be selected by choosing Change as shown below. This will open a list of all available users of the SAC tenant. In the example below we change the assignee of the Composite Task from ‘Mittie Patton’ to ‘Sophie Miller’. Afterwards, the owner needs to update the task to make changes active and visible. A notification will be sent as well inform the new assignee. In fact, the assignee of a task can make use of this functionality, too. Hence, ‘Mittie Patton’ could have delegated this task to ‘Sophie Miller’ – even without being the owner of the Composite Task.


 

Tip #3 – usage of styles

Sometimes it’s needed to visually group (or even separate) calendar content. A common use case would be to use one style for one group of events. For instance, calendar content organizing one planning process can use one style definition. A second scenario could use a different style. Styles are very flexible and can also be applied within a process. Styles can be used to visually extend modeled calendar content. Every event can possibly associate to one style.

In the example below, we’ll assign styles based on the region of two processes. The region East US will be linked to a purple styles and West US will be linked to a blue style.


This can be achieved by clicking on one of the involved events and choosing one of the available styles. If there aren’t any styles yet (next to the Default style) – create a style by choosing a name, a color and a font style.


 

Tip #4 - refresh calendar content

Some actions during modelling the planning process in SAC calendar take time. For instance, if a user chooses to generate a fully-fledged planning process based on a data model, lots of tasks and processes will be created just in time. Especially, if the hierarchy is large the creation of events takes some time. Sometimes it is useful to reload the calendar content to the current progress and to make further manual adjustments to the generated process. In fact, the calendar content can be reloaded if the user clicks on Day, Week, Month or Year. In the screenshot below Week is selected. Hence, the user could click again on Week and the calendar content will be reloaded. In case you look for a way to reload the details panel of a certain event, just click the icon on the top-left corner and only the details according to the event will be reloaded.



Check out more enablement material here!

 

 
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