Integrate Automatic Data Locking for Your Planning...

roman_moehl · ‎09-20-2022

Motivation

Recent innovations of SAP Analytics Cloud calendar provide a powerful toolset to take your planning process to the next level. Features like dependencies and automatic data locking tasks give you control to lock and open data slices just at the right point in time during your planning workflow.

In this blog, we will look at how you can enrich your data collection and review tasks with automatic data locking.

Scenario

Inspired by the ABC computer scenario, there are two personas that we want to support in our scenario:

A country manager plans budget for the respective country and submits the data for review. Once the country manager has submitted the data, no further data changes should be possible for their data slice.

A region manager reviews the budget submitted by the country manager. The region manager wants to make sure that data that has been submitted remains locked and is protected against further data changes.

How do we achieve that? Let’s examine the required modeling steps in SAP Analytics Cloud calendar.

Modeling

The data collection step of the country manager fits perfectly well to a general task. We can add a story as a work file and set up a context for the correct country.

General task with work file and context

So far, so good – but how can we make sure that once the general task is submitted, the data is locked before the region manager can start their assessment? We need dependencies and automatic data locking tasks to get that working.

Let’s start with the data locking task. Since we’ve chosen an automatic execution, the data lock will be applied behind the scenes without any user interaction. As a next step, we need to decide on the timing. The lock should be applied after the general task has been submitted, that’s why we add a dependency in the create dialog.

Setup of a dependency in the create dialog

Before activating the data locking task, a few more adjustments are required. The data slice that should be locked is defined in the Context section. By default, the data will be locked.

Context and data lock states

What is the purpose of the Reverted State in the Context section? If the regional manager rejects the submitted data, then the general task should be reopened. To give the country manager a chance to adjust budget values, the data lock needs to be reverted as well. To achieve that, we set the Reverted State to Open. At runtime, locking data and opening data locks is performed automatically without any user interaction.

As a last step, we need to add a review task for the region manager. A story and a context make sure that the reviewer has the right data for their approval step. We add a dependency to the automatic data locking task.

Dependency for the review task

We’re set and done. Here’s the full sequence of tasks:

Tasks chained by dependencies

Summary

Event-based triggering of data locking tasks makes sure that the data is locked and opened at the right point in time. It is a powerful asset for enterprise planning workflows.

Check out further resources: