Let’s talk EPM – Part 2 on Metrics Profiling

In my earlier post on Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), I had enumerated the six steps of a practical EPM strategy in an organization. They were:

1. Business Process Maps – Understand the business process
2. Metrics Identification – Get hold of the metrics
3. Metrics Profiling – Understand the metrics in depth
4. Metrics Maps – Understand the cause and effect relationships between metrics
5. Metrics Visualization – Implementation of Metric Maps on BI Tools
6. Watch and Improve – Monitor Metrics and Improve business process as required

It is important to realize that building a data warehouse (enterprise wide) or data mart (functional area wise) or simply an integrated, subject-oriented data repository (without getting lost in semantics!) is implicit in the set of steps outlined above.

Steps 1 and 2 (Business Process and Metrics identification) are self-explanatory. Though getting hold of the right metrics is easier said than done, it is fairly well understood that the measures/metrics selected for analysis should align itself with the organization’s mission, business model and value creation aspects.

Step 3 – Metrics Profiling, in my opinion, is the step often missed out in EPM implementations and arguably is a major cause of failures in such programs. Metrics Profiling stated simply is a way of understanding your metrics in depth. Given below is a sample template for profiling your metrics and can be customized for each organization.

Profiling Parameters:

1. Metric Name – Name of the metric

2.Metric Definition – Brief definition of the metric

3.Metric Type – Is it a ratio, absolute number, trended value, etc.

4.Sources of data – Identify the source of data for the metric and the owners

5.Application – Brief description of how the metric helps in managing the business better

6.Potentially Affected Metrics – Identify the other metrics that are impacted (positive or negative) by this metric.

7.Example – Provide an example of metrics usage. (For example: ABC Computers released three new product lines during the last 12 months, generating $15 million in new revenue out of total annual revenue of $125 million. New Products Index = 15 ÷ 125 = 12%)

Metrics Profiling is a very important step in the implementation of enterprise wide performance

management system. I will discuss the other aspects of EPM in my subsequent posts.

Thanks for reading .

Data Integration Challenge – Storing Timestamps

Storing timestamps along with a record indicating its new arrival or a change in its value is a must in a data warehouse. We always take it for granted, adding timestamp fields to table structures and tending to miss that the amount of storage space a timestamp field can occupy is huge, the storage occupied by timestamp is almost double against a integer data type in many databases like SQL Server, Oracle and if we have two fields one as insert timestamp and other field as update timestamp then the storage spaced required gets doubled. There are many instances where we could avoid using timestamps especially when the timestamps are being used for primarily for determining the incremental records or being stored just for audit purpose.

How to effectively manage the data storage and also leverage the benefit of a timestamp field?

One way of managing the storage of timestamp field is by introducing a process id field and a process table. Following are the steps involved in applying this method in table structures and as well as part of the ETL process.Data Structure

1. Consider a table name PAYMENT with two fields with timestamp data type like INSERT_TIMESTAMP and UPDATE_TIEMSTAMP used for capturing the changes for every present in the table
2. Create a table named PROCESS_TABLE with columns PROCESS_NAME Char(25), PROCESS_ID Integer and PROCESS_TIMESTAMP Timestamp
3. Now drop the fields of the TIMESTAMP data type from table PAYMENT
4. Create two fields of integer data type in the table PAYMENT like INSERT_PROCESS_ID and UPDATE_PROCESS_ID
5. These newly created id fields INSERT_PROCESS_ID and UPDATE_PROCESS_ID would be logically linked with the table PROCESS_NAME and its field PROCESS_ID

ETL Process

1. Let us consider an ETL process called ‘Payment Process’ that loads data into the table PAYMENT
2. Now create a pre-process which would run before the ‘payment process’, in the pre-process build the logic by which a record is inserted with the values like (‘payment process’, SEQUNCE Number, current timestamp) into the PAYMENT table. The PROCESS_ID in the payment table could be defined as a database sequence function.
3. Pass the current_prcoess_id from pre-process step to the ‘payment process’ ETL process
4. In the ‘payment process’ if a record is to inserted into the PAYMENT table then the current_prcoess_id value is set to both the columns INSERT_PROCESS_ID and UPDATE_PROCESS_ID else if a record is getting updated in the PAYMENT table then the current_process_id value is set to only the column UPDATE_PROCESS_ID
5. So now the timestamp values for the records inserted or updated in the table PAYMENT can be picked from the PROCESS_TABLE by joining by the PROCESS_ID with the INSERT_PROCESS_ID and UPDATE_PROCESS_ID columns of the PAYMENT tableBenefits
6.  

• The fields INSERT_PROCESS_ID and UPDATE_PROCESS_ID occupy less space when compared to the timestamp fields
• Both the columns INSERT_PROCESS_ID and UPDATE_PROCESS_ID are Index friendly
• Its easier to handle these process id fields in terms picking the records for determining the incremental changes or for any audit reporting.

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