As we get more advanced into utilizing PMF for not only traditional scorecard reporting, but also for real time metric dashboards, I'm coming to terms with a dilemma that I'm looking for help addressing.

Currently, in system settings we have the Today Date option set to Fixed Time with that time being the current month. This serves the need of operational dashboards as the users want to see current month data as the default whenever a new month begins. They look at these dashboards every day to monitor key activity drivers.

However, since several of our BSC measures are user entered on our product line and corporate balanced scorecards, they generally are not ready for view until the 2nd week of the new month. Therefore when they go to view the scorecards on the today page they see no data for the current month (due to the system date setting), and see as the previous month their most recent scorecard. Plus, the strategy map cannot be viewed for the previous month unless I change the system setting back to the previous month.

I really could use some help in being able to serve the needs of both categories of users without having to juggle the system date. In a perfect world, a routine that would base the "current month" on the scorecard name would be a huge help.

Any thoughts or assistance greatly appreciated.

PMF 5.1.1

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Bob Jude Ferrante,

There is a mechanism to do this in PMF.

In the PMF 'Settings' form there is an option at the very bottom to set the 'Today' Date. One of the options is 'Use custom procedure'. If you select this option, PMF will execute any code in focexec pmf_set_date.fex. We provide sample code in the apps/mainstreet folder which shows how to set the current date to the previous month. It should be a fairly simple matter to adjust this code to only execute for certain scorecards, certain users, etc.

If you do customize this procedure, I recommend putting it in your own dedicated folder and putting this folder in front of your APP PATH. This way, it will not be overlaid when you migrate to the next PMF release.

Dear jsp_lbf,
I'm curios if you were able to code the suggested solution in the pmf_set_date.fex procedure.
At a POC demo to a major university today I was asked a similar question by the evaluating committee. Except they wanted to know if that Today Date window could be customised to suite each College's requirements. Some might be actual current month, some previous month and some previous quarter.
If you had success, would you mind sharing?
Bob, any input from you would also be welcomed.
Kind regards,

There's doc on this in both the PMF main doc and the PMF developer Guide. Recommend you obtain these books.

thanks

Also note; you can set up Dashboards with specific date windows and parms without having to write code to customize the Today Date. This might be an easier task and allow for you to change the defaults infinitely for each stakeholder (who'd have a separate scorecard, probably, and separate dashboards to view those scorecards, probably).

Note that the Today date points to a single point in time, not to a range of dates, and not to higher levels of Time. Its purpose is to set the anchor point used for "current." For example, previous 5 quarters and previous 9 quarters means "the 5 or 9 quarters previous to the current point in time." If that were a range it would be really confusing.

Hope that makes it clearer.

thanks

Thx Bob,
I felt corrected with your 1st response. Point taken.
However much appreciated your emails and this last post that cleares things up much more.
Thank you.