Clarity

We do not have a specific workflow as such to move from cost plan to Budget plan in our organization. So In Clarity, I have created two cost plans in my project, one that I keep for my budgets and the other that I keep for the project forecast. The cost plan that I have for budgets is the one we manually submit and approve to make it a budget. When something changes on the budget, we update the same cost plan again and approve it to make it a budget. We are looking to automate this in some way. I thought a process would be the best way to achieve this. So I created a process on the cost plan object that triggers on update of the 'Total Cost' attribute. The problem however is that an update is not directly occuring on this attribute but on the 'Cost Total' attribute of the Cost Plan Detail sub-object which in turns flows back into the Total Cost attribute on the Cost plan object. As per CA support, I cannot compare old and current attributes values for a subobject. So I 'm stuck as to how to get this process triggered. Has anyone seen this and has a resolution for me?

The problem statement is that I need a way to trigger a process based on the cost plan detail update. Is there a way to achieve this?

Hello Tarun,

You can create a database trigger on odf_ca_costplans table. Whenever, a new budget record will be inserted in this table, its status will be updated to "Approved" in FIN_PLANS table..

Thanks,

Pragya Singh

Thanks for your response Pragya. However, this would only mark a budget plan as approved once created. I'm looking to trigger the process on updation of a cost plan so that it CREATES and APPROVES the corresponding budget plan.

We can create a budget plan by xogging out the costplan and populing the details in budgetplan tags

But it is giving only replaced budgetplan but not merged budgetplan

Hi Naga,

Again, this does not answer my question as to how to trigger the process that does this XOG.

Hi Tarun,

I would suggest that you initiate the process on the update of the attributes - Last Updated By and Last Updated Date within the Cost Plan object. Any changes made to the Cost Plan Detail sub-object will update the ootb attributes - Last Updated By and Last Updated Date within the Cost Plan object. However, these changes will not just be restricted to the Cost Total or Total Cost attributes within the Cost Plan Detail sub-object and Cost Plan object respectively. Your requirements can be improved to include changes to any attribute within the Cost Plan Detail sub-object and the Cost Plan object as there could be a possibility of adding a new Cost Plan Transaction (after the Budget Plan gets approved) within the Cost Plan Detail sub-object based on the Grouping Attributes selected. Alternatively, you can write a custom gel script to include audit table updates/changes related to the Cost Total attribute within the Cost Plan Detail sub-object and then approving the Budget Plan thereafter.

Hope this helps.

Suhail.

Hi Suhail,

Thanks for the tip but I did try that already and it did not work. As I mentioned in my original post, a process doesn't trigger on update of any attribute of a sub-object (in this case cost plan).

Would you consider adding an attribute that the project manager could update when ready for the 'budget' cost plan to be submitted for budget approval?  This approach would allow the PM total control for when the update is ready for submission and has the benefit of making the 'triggering event' simpler to create and maintain.  This attribute could be added to the Cost Plan Properties page or the Project Budget page..

Hi Richard,

This certainly sounds a lot simpler but again, a manual intervention is needed. As I said that we do not have a process in the organization to get your project budget approved so it just would not make sense to ask PMs to update the flag. Thanks for your suggestion though.

Just wanted to update you all that since we couldn't find a way to trigger the automated process, we created an on demand process that checks all projects for any updates on the cost plans and for the ones updated, creates a corresponding budget plan and approves it through XOG. We have scheduled this process to run every night. It fully automates the budget plan creation and approval with the only limitation of latency of a day which the business is okay with.

We have created the process to xog in the budget plan. But it is creating budget plan which replaces the original plan.

Could you please let me know, if we can xog in the budget plan which will merge with the existing budget plan.

I have tried the attribute foreceReplace="false" in budgetPlan write xml. But it is not working.