ECE - calculation issues when using sum

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aly.mccourt
aly.mccourt Member, ALL USERS, GroupMember, Partner, Certified Model Builder Posts: 4 Occasional Contributor
in Anaplan Community

I've started to test the ECE, created a model with some very large lists for a price-volume-mix analysis, which involves sku x customer level detail, previously have had to fold a lot of dimensions for this. 

To test, I created some very large modules (44 trillion cells) and it worked great - but when I started to do some calculations I started having performance issues - e.g. trying to do a sum formula my model crashed. Anyone else having issues with SUM or other functions? 

 

 

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  • aly.mccourt
    aly.mccourt Member, ALL USERS, GroupMember, Partner, Certified Model Builder Posts: 4 Occasional Contributor

    Hi Rob 

     

    I'm not sure this is the issue. I have a module that is dimensionalized by two lists - SKU (150k members) and Customer (18k members), plus two line items (will need to add more though). The lists are both flat lists (for simplicity, for now), not numbered, and loaded like this: Name= Code_Description, Parent: none, Code: Code . When I created the module, it created fine (large, but ECE worked). Then I went to bring in sales by customer x sku from an invoice staging module, and the sum in that formula is what crashed my model and I had to have it rolled back. Is there anything I can do to prevent this? 

     

    Thanks

    Aly 

  • aly.mccourt
    aly.mccourt Member, ALL USERS, GroupMember, Partner, Certified Model Builder Posts: 4 Occasional Contributor

    The target module is SKU and Customer. The source module is Transaction ID, which includes line items for customer and sku. 

     

    Thanks

    Aly 

     

     

  • aly.mccourt
    aly.mccourt Member, ALL USERS, GroupMember, Partner, Certified Model Builder Posts: 4 Occasional Contributor

    I haven't tried it yet, but that would be the best workaround - I've not had any problems with data imports so far so it should work. It just means that there's an extra step in the ETL process to bring data into Anaplan, as the source data is not structured that way. Thanks for the suggestion!

  • CommunityMember113856
    CommunityMember113856 Member, ALL USERS, GroupMember, Community Member Posts: 5 Occasional Contributor

    I was also one of the users who encountered the challenge with the SUM formula.  The second formula I tried within my highly dimensioned module included a Boolean logic where an ITEM formula was nested within a PARENT formula.  It got hung up similar to the SUM formula.

     

    For me, there will be two primary functions I would see as ideal...

    (1) The ability to use SUM calcs.  SUM calcs will be the most common way I would engage having this much dimensionality.  As a user, I would want to upload a raw data table and then assign and aggregate dimensionality to it via a system module

    (2) I would want to use logic and DCA to control what users see and don't see.  It would need to be done with logic rather than running imports and such and will include with high level of dimensionality.

     

    Thanks.  This is an exciting direction for the product and I'm hoping the formulas component gets worked out.

  • seb_mcmillan
    seb_mcmillan Member, ALL USERS, GroupMember, Employee, Certified Model Builder Posts: 5 Master Anaplanner of the Year

    Good point ECE will be a big shift in thinking.  I can't wait we have had to do some serious model gymnastics to get some driver calculations working with a 5 dimensional concatenated list at Orkla.  It would be easy to do in ECE. 

  • CommunityMember113856
    CommunityMember113856 Member, ALL USERS, GroupMember, Community Member Posts: 5 Occasional Contributor

    Hi David,

     

    Let me address your questions...

     

    Q - If you split the ITEM out from the parent formula, do you still see the same issue?

    A - Yes, I just tested and am running into the same issue.  It's been churning for over 45 minutes.

     

    Q - Is it not an option to import it directly into a highly dimensioned data module?

    A - To a degree, yes... but the data set is incomplete..  The data will not come out of our source system with all of the required attributes/dimensionality and, ideally, we would assign these using a SYSMOD combined with a SUM formula.  For example, my source data will provide the basics like Time, Amount, Company Code, Cost Center and Account but would not have characteristics like Function and several other company-specific ways in which we dimension our data.  The dimensionality would allows users to perform an "any by any" kind of query where they can set the criteria for each dimension.  It also allows us to set up any report fairly easily and these reports can take advantage of level-selection.

     

    I'm guessing that the issue is the zeroes are all "counted" when formulas come into play and it is too much to process.

     

    Hopefully that helps.  Happy to connect if you'd like to discuss.  I meet with one of the engineers tomorrow.

     

    Regards,

    Brad

  • seb_mcmillan
    seb_mcmillan Member, ALL USERS, GroupMember, Employee, Certified Model Builder Posts: 5 Master Anaplanner of the Year

    A workaround would be to load into a transactional table so validation and error correction could be performed then have a process to load the data into a multi-dimensional module from the transactional one rather than using sum

  • jason.reich
    jason.reich Member, ALL USERS, GroupMember, Employee Posts: 3 Occasional Contributor
    Hey Brad. I've restored your model to the previous state. Looking forward to chatting to you tomorrow.

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