Special List Type with Multiple Parents

edblewis_1

Lists currently only support a single Parent which forms a Composite List or Hierarchy. All supply chain planning solutions use multiple Hierarchies such as Product, Customer, Channel, etc. But since all Products are relevant to all Customers, a Module with such dimensions would have a great deal of sparsity and be very large (1000 Products x 1000 Customers x 52 weeks x 3 years [current +2] x 100 Line Items = >15B cells). This can be overcome with a Combination List (a concatenation of relevant Products and Customers) which alleviates the size issue when attached to the bottom of one of the Hierarchies (e.g. Customer). But this becomes an issue for aggregation up the other hierarchy (e.g. Product). Permissions, Dashboard navigation and record selection are all compromised when moving up the other hierarchy and require extensive workarounds, or a doubling of size, which still do not provide the expected user experience.

 

To avoid this issue, a List (or a special List) should be capable of having more than one Parent so that it can be attached to more than one Hierarchy (Product and Customer). This List would be the primary Dimension of the planning Module and would allow aggregation up any of it's Parent Hierarchies. This would minimize sparsity and provide the expected Dashboard user experience.