Clarity

Hello guys,

Just wanted to know is there any impact on system if we create too many fiscal time periods in Clarity like for future 20 years?

I don't think creation of large number of fiscal time periods by themselves will create any problems.. But if these time periods start getting used, then the range of time slices would have to be increased, and the impact of that is something that needs to be considered.

Also, once these periods start getting used, they cannot be deleted, and that has the potential of creating Business related problems, if a decision is taken sometime in the future to change the time periods setup etc. Here is a good KB around this point: Is there a way to modify, archive or deactivate Fiscal Time Periods that have already been used? 

And lets see what others have to say

Hi Giriraj

If you have too many fiscal periods in Active state, the range of the DWH fiscal slices will be expanded for the duration and will affect Load Data Warehouse job performance and likely other jobs such as Timeslicing and Datamart.

Also, as Jeevan mentioned, once the fiscal period is created, and cost plans posted on it, the period cannot be changed or deleted any more. This would mean that if in 10 years you decide to change the fiscal periods ranges, dates, model etc. you will have an issue.

If your future periods are Closed, then there shouldn't be a major impact, however they would not be of big use whilst Closed.

Hope this helps -Nika

Hi Nika.  Couple questions:

1. What number of periods is considered "Too many?" 
   1. Suspect this might be dependent on numbers of projects and resources fiscally enabled, number of cost plans/budgets, etc. 
   2. Guideline might not be easy to assemble, but must helpful - perhaps based on record counts in source tables?  Something that could be measured, evaluated, perhaps monitored in a portlet.
2. How much history to leave open? 
   1. Suspect guideline might be:  When first populating the DWH, if one wants fiscal history in it, turn on as many historic periods as are needed.  Let's say 10 years history, so activate fiscal  periods back thru 2007.
   2. After the initial population of the DWH, close the historic fiscal periods, say up to but not including 2017, as data in 2016 and past years will not be changing.

Thanks, Dale

Hi Dale,

You are correct, "too many" is a subjective term. There is no recommended number though, all depends on your setup and acceptable job performance for you. We would recommend to run tests in a Test environment and compare the jobs performance after adding the extra periods and test plans. Just for info, usually I have seen about 3-6 years of open fiscal periods, especially for smaller companies. I would say based on my experience, 20 years would usually be considered "many", especially if that's in future. The environment and conditions in our world change so quickly that it's not an easy task to plan costs that much ahead.

Not sure if I would recommend creating a portlet - there is a lot of slice data involved and it would be an effort to develop it.

Same would be for historic data, if the total of periods spans over 20 years, this is an indication to do some performance testing beforehands. Unfortunately you would not be able to run Load DWH once and then close the periods and keep data in DWH db, as the job will truncate the tables before reimporting the data. At this point I'd say if data is needed but performance suffers, get the data copied to a DWH table, create a domain and a report for it. Alternatively just directly use PPM BEAN for a domain and base your report on the source database.

Hope this helps -Nika

Nika – will it truncate even when performing an incremental?  Otherwise, yes, helpful!

Dale

Hi Dale,

Starting 15.1 and in 15.2 there were changes to the algorithm in place to check the amount of time needed to process the records for the Incremental job. If the time is too much comparatively, the job will truncate the records as opposed to delete only selected ones. This change was done to improve the Incremental's performance, especially compared to Full Load, as for some large customers Incremental could take more than a Full Load. The difference was due to the fact 'truncate' is less resource consuming as 'delete from' and the database executes this operation faster without having to scan through the tables etc.

Thanks -Nika

One client I have has Financial Periods 60 years in the future.  This client has projects which run for this length of time, where they need to have cost and benefit plans that far in the future.

They are still on v13.3 so aren't using DWH fiscal periods, but when they do move to V15, their JasperSoft reports will not be DWH based, so can continue to using the existing timeslices which have been configured also to be this duration.

Hello Roland,

We are also not using DWH fiscal periods. So it will not impact much on performance if using for financial periods only.. Right?

When you say "we are also not using DWH fiscal periods," have you left the DWH fiscal period option fields blank under Admin\System Options\Data Warehouse Options?  If you have an entity identified there and checkboxes for fiscal period are marked, the fiscal period data is going to go to the DWH whether you use it there or not.