Since Oracle’s roll out of Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service, there have been plenty of user friendly and unique PBCS features that Oracle hasn’t heavily advertised. In this series, we will be exploring some of the tools that can make your job as a PBCS user or developer a lot simpler and provide an improved user experience.
Form Suppression for Invalid Scenario and Time Periods
Most of us are familiar with the form settings that allow us to suppress missing blocks and data within columns and rows. These settings, which are leveraged in both the PBCS web portal and the Smart View Excel add-in, allow us to focus values on forms and only include points where data is relevant or exists. Without these options enabled, we’d be seeing a lot of empty cells, which hinders user experience, increases human error, and may take a while to load depending on the form and dimension sizing.
What’s new to PBCS is the ability to additionally suppress invalid Scenario and Time Periods. This option allows us to exclude rows/columns that are outside the boundaries of a given Scenario’s start and end time values. For example – Company X needs users to plan the remainder of FY18’s revenue and costs into the beginning of FY19. The open periods for plan are from May of FY18 to April of FY19.
When a user accesses the form through Smart View, they see the following:
As you can see, the user is shown periods that are not open for entry (i.e. FY18/Jan:Apr, FY19/May->Dec). This can cause forms to take longer to load or potentially cause human errors in analysis, depending on the datasets involved.
Now with “Suppress invalid Scenario/Time Periods,” you have the option to use the same form, but only show users the row/columns that are open for entry (i.e. May FY18 through April FY19). To activate this feature, an administrator of the desired form needs to edit the form properties. Chose the form you want, then go to Grid Properties -> Other and check the box to enable “Suppress invalid Scenario/Time Periods.”
Once the form is saved, run the form through Smart View or the web, and you should see only the columns that correspond to the open periods and years of the scenario:
There you have it – Suppress Time and Period Dimensions in action! Of course there can also be value in showing users the historical data as part of their inputs, but now you have another nice option for tailoring the user experience and keeping the attention focused on the core input periods.
Next up in this series – Part 2: New Multi-Language Capability on Planning Artifacts.
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