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Root cause events are situations or occurrences that can affect key performance indicators in Planning and Consolidation.

Example Example

If you have a key performance indicator called Produce Sales in Florida, December 2007, root cause events might be the following:

  • Rainfall in Florida of 3.2 inches on December 14, 2007

  • A temperature of 43 degrees Fahrenheit in Florida on December 12, 2007

  • Humidity of 98 percent in Florida on December 1, 2007

End of the example.

Integration

Before key performance indicators can reflect changes caused by root cause events, you must set up the events by loading them from an external source into Insight using Data Manager. You must do this for each application set for which you want to correlate root causes and KPIs.

For Insight to associate an event in the RootCauseEvent table with a KPI, the event must conform to the following rules:

  • The EventTime value must fall within the previous time period specification of the KPI, as defined by the SampleSize.

  • Each dimension value of the event must be empty, a child of the KPI dimension constraint value, or equal to the KPI dimension constraint value.

    Example Example

    A KPI could have the following dimension constraints:

    ACCOUNT.[NetIncome], DATASRC.[TotWithAlloc], DEPARTMENT.[SalesMkt], ENTITY.[NorthAmerica]

    Its event dimension constraints for the event dimensions are the following:

    ACCOUNT.[PreTaxIncome], DATASRC.[TotWithAlloc],(no DEPARTMENT value),ENTITY.[Florida]

    The system ignores the other event dimensions that are not in the KPI, and this event becomes associated with the KPI.

    End of the example.

  • Insight calculates the correlation between the associated event and the KPI by doing the following:

    • Aggregating the associated event Measure values by time period

    • Retrieving previous time periods (SampleSize) actual data for the KPI

    • Calculating the correlation using linear regression

  • If the correlation coefficient is greater than or equal to the threshold, Insight retrieves the top three events based on MeasureType according to the correlation and performance band of the KPI variance. If the variance is greater than zero and the linear regression slope is greater than zero, or the variance is less than zero and the linear regression slope is less than zero, it retrieves the top three events with the maximum Measure value. If the variance is less than zero and the linear regression slope is greater than zero, or the variance is greater than zero and the linear regression slope is less than zero, it retrieves the top three events with the minimum Measure value.

Activities

To load root cause event data using Data Manager, you import a text file into a SQL table using the sample package LoadRootCause DTS. After modifying and running the LoadRootCause.DTS package, you import the data into Insight by synchronizing Planning and Consolidation and the Insight database.

You set up one root cause table per application set. The root cause table must contain at least 12 months of data, prior to the current month. Insight needs 12 months of data because it scans all the previous data to find a linear correlation between all KPIs for the current time period.

The following table explains the information within the RootCauseEvent table:

Field

Description

Example

EventID

(Required) A unique number for the event

00001

EventName

(Required) The name of the event

Weather

MeasureType

(Required) The type, or category, of event

Rainfall

Measure

(Required) The data value

3.2

EventTime

(Required) The time of the event, in the format mm/dd/yyyy

12/12/2004

EventAttribute 1-n

One field is required for each dimension in the application set (except for the Time dimension). For example, if you have three dimensions, Entity, Product, and DataSrc, you must create three fields, one field for each dimension. The data values for these fields can be empty.

Entity, DataSrc, Product

MeasureUnit

The unit of measure related to the measure value. This is for display purposes only.

Inches

AggregateFunction

(Required) The method of aggregation used to calculate the root cause value. For example, if SUM, the daily values in the root cause table are added together in the same aggregation as used by the KPI. If the KPI aggregates monthly, the root cause events aggregate monthly.

SUM (default) or AVG