Hi All,  our APPTIO configuration is 10 months old now.  To date we have found missing data (such as a new Cost Center) by observing fallout.  We would like to be much more proactive.  We would be interested in how TBM Offices have managed to keep inline with data changes 'real time'.  Have some of you become part of the processes to edit and add data?

In my org; all data requests have to go through me.  No one can add new costs centers or projects in the GL; except for me.  Therefore, the requests come to me to add into Apptio.  I forward the requests to the GL team.  Once I receive the notification that the cost center is added to PeopleSoft; I add them into Apptio.

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Hi Steve,

I hope the SEQ Water model is going well. Generally speaking maintaining a strong relationship with the data owners, specifically Finance data owners through regular steering committee meetings and regular catch ups is the approach that I have seen. One of the tactics I have used in the past is to demonstrate and report the outputs of the model back to the original data owners, this then add value and gives them skin in the game so to speak.

All the best mate.

Hi Steve,

this is a difficult question given the data required is coming from a number of different stakeholders and departments within any organisation. The obvious answer is to have a strong relationship with all of the stakeholders and ensure they understand the consequence of changing or adding new data with what they provide through to your TBMA office (as @Paul Melican has suggested). Unfortunately staff turnover and organisational restructuring will make this a challenge.

In Apptio, we provide Managed Services to those businesses that do not have the current capabilities of maintaining an internal TBMA office. Data validation is part of this solution, and is managed in a couple of ways:

1. having a spreadsheet of all data sources and information about them (eg. how often they are uploaded, by what date, how is the data owner, what is the data source system, number of columns, rows, etc). This makes it easy to check and keep on top of your data required for month end processes.

2. a "data validation" mechanism, that allows you to review new data sets and compare with previous ones. The focus here is not so much on the individual values in your data set, but the format (ie. columns headers match, row counts look comparable, types of data in each column, etc). While this wont highlight if a new cost centre has been introduced, it will show you if data has changed from the source system.

3. review reports, the data quality reports are an excellent resource to highlight issues within your model (particularly the Summary report). When comparing against previous months, check what values have changed. This will help you understand where your model is different and if the underlying data is the driving force.

I hope you have found a few skills here and from the previous responses to make SEQ successful.

Regards Mark

Hi Steve, I fully agree with Mark's comment.

We maintain a task list with all the master data that is loaded into Apptio and basically update them every month. Simultaneusly, we have a strong partnership with the finance department and for all other data sources (CMDB, ticketing etc.) at least one person in our TBM office has access to directly pull the data from the system.

On top, we build dedicated data quality and drop-out reports to monitor the allocation success within the model. To review the reports is part of the monthly quality assurance process and they are configured to point out directly the root cause of each drop-out.

Hope this helps,

Chris

I echo @Mark Johnson and @Christopher Lehr

While I'd love the arrangement @Matthew Vanacore has, the reality is I'm often the last to know...  The best defense for that are things like @Mark Johnson and @Christopher Lehr have listed.  

I agree this is a never ending story as the world keep on spinning and you have to try to be on top of it all the time.

We just have some fallout reports where we catch not recognized cost centers, accounts and other reasons for not flowing in the model.

I guess we could do much more. I would like to have some pre-check of file headers in the files we upload etc.

@Lars Peterson: the check of headers, you have in the import step. I always keep the Excel file open in another window, upload the file, check the import step for errors, change the excel and reupload. This process just takes me a few seconds per file.

Thanks @Christopher Lehr for the tip. I can most certainly use this method for the uploads I do manually.

The tricky ones will be where I use Datalink. I realize I have a loophole in the process as I don't save a copy in an Archive folder on our side before sending the file to Apptio. This result in a lot of extra work when something goes wrong and I have to re-send the file. This became the number one on my action list today!

@Lars Peterson: Couldn't you script something that does automatically the archiving for you?
We are using sharepoint and there is this microsoft app called "flow" where you can create simple "IF-this-then-that" commands. e.g. when a new file is stored in folder A it gets automatically copied to folder B. Works well for us.

Hi @Christopher Lehr, @Lars Peterson and @Matthew Vanacore,

I have developed an excel macro that actually compares two data sets to ensure columns headers are the same. It also does some further validation on number of rows, data types, duplicates, blanks, to make it easy to quickly check your new data at a high level. Again this will not pick up if new cost centres have been introduced, but is more designed to ensure that a data set is "consistent" with previous sets. Please send me a message if you want more detail here, however note this is an unsupported tool and being self-taught in VB the code is not flawless.

Regards Mark

In R12, if you do not maintain a Company Cost Center Master table, then in January of the current year download your GL.  Create a pivot table with a row for cost center.  Create a new file with just the cost center and load into January. 

Then on your GL table create a formula, Is New =Lookup(Cost Center,Company Cost Center Master,Cost Center,Cost Center).  Then go to the current month and filter Company Cost Center Master.Cost Center on BLANK.  You should see a list of all new cost centers.  

Add your new cost centers to Company Cost Center Master table as you add them.

Hope this helps.

-m