Is the strategy for allowing targets to be loaded or entered and actuals to be loaded or entered now available?

Hi dcorp,

Yes. PMF 5.3.2, the brand-new release of PMF, allows targets to be entered... however you will need to adopt the new metrics studio features to take advantage of this new capability. that means if you're using the legacy measure system, you will need to migrate to metrics studio, and this currently require some manual work.

Automated migration is planned for a near-future hotfix on top of 5.3.2.

Also note, if you currently set targets at a higher dimensional level than you measure (which is a fairly common practice), PMF does not have the capability to allocate the higher-level targets down to match up with the lower-level actuals. This means your measures would stop at the lowest common dimensional level. You'd need to perform the allocation outside PMF.

Let us know your plans, we're happy to help.

thanks

Is the measure migration needed for all measures or only to loaded measures?

I would say it's needed for all.

Although you can run both models (the old measure loader/user entered measures, and the new, where all measures link to sources and datapoints) at the same time, it's probably easier for you if you just go to the new for everything... we have deprecated the old model, and shortly will be automatically migrating everyone to the new in a logical, sensible way.

The benefits of the new model:

1. Data entry and ETL now are mixable in a single Measure.
2. Counting & special summarizing on harvesting is built-in.
3. You can base a Measure on a Measure
4. Measures load on Sources, no going back to DB for each load; faster, easier on RDBMS resources.
5. Dimension reloads can now cascade to Measures.
6. Easy for folks to create new demos / models – We have data generation, no more Excel!
7. User-Entered data auto-relinks when Dimensionality changes, as long as keys are not deleted or totally changed
8. PMF knows data lineage as it passes through the system.
9. Loaders now much simpler and take less steps.
10.Loaders rewritten for new Web UI technology

thanks

Allowing targets to be entered is a huge benefit, however with having a large number of measures, we are going to wait for the automatic migration. Great job on providing targets to now be entered!

Just to get back to you and close the loop on this.

PMF has been able to migrate its data mart for many releases; this specific migration capability we're talking about here is the ability to change how your existing measures are set up. If you upgraded to PMF 5.3.2 right now, you'd get migration to the new PMF from your existing data mart. What would happen with your measures is they'd be supported the way they are now; that's because, for a limited time, we're allowing both measure models to work.

In 5.3.2 hotfix 3, we are planning to introduce the ability to migrate from the legacy "classic" measure model to the new model based on sources and datapoints.

This will be a one-time operation you can perform by clicking a button from the Manage > Data Mart sub-tab.

It will only work if you are running 5.3.2.03 or higher and have only classic measures in your data mart. In other words, it will quit if you go in and try to set some new ones up manually. This is to prevent the migrator from deleting or duplicating anything you create with the new model. So if you plan to run the Measure migrator, you probably want to do it before you start adding any Sources manually.

We will not force this migration for the time being. This will give us a chance to make sure migration runs perfectly and ideally. Note that if you don't like what the migrator does, you can always take a snapshot before migrating, and restore it after migrating, to restore things back to that point.

In 2014, we will announce a release where the legacy measure model is no longer supported. Right now it is deprecated - we recommend going to the new model and getting used to it. It's the way things now work, and most people who have seen it think it's far superior. But since we're still ironing out some edge cases, migrating to it is not yet compulsory.

thanks for using PMF. We're always working hard to make it better.

Bob, Thanks. The new measure features will provide us with more flexibility in developing our plan and forecasting analysis.