PerformancePoint Server Planning and Management Reporter - Further Considerations

When I originally listed a few things that one should bear in mind when designing a PPS Planning Model which will ultimately be used for reporting via the Management Reporter I forgot to mention this little tit-bit of information.

One should be very careful in naming your Entity Dimensions especially if you require Management Reporter Designer to self generate your reporting tree definitions. As in our situation it is quite possible to have a number of entities that have unique labels but duplicate names or descriptions. So as an example you may have the entity called “Finance” in a number of your entity hierarchies pertaining to various companies or divisions within your structure. Because these are identified separately in PPS Planning due to the label being different the problem is not immediate. The problem becomes apparent when you try and import all your entities into a Management Reporter Reporting Tree. The system identifies that you have duplicate Unit Names and will not allow you to save the Reporting Tree. (Ours lit up like a red Xmas Tree)

How to fix this. Luckily it is quite easy to create your descriptions in SQL or Excel and then just copy and paste them into the Reporting Tree Grid in the designer. All we did was concatenate the label and the name with a hyphen in between from SQL. This way you are assured of name and description uniqueness in your reporting structure. Or make sure that your Entity dimension names are unique.

- Paul Steynberg