Spendata has always made it easy to understand and control complex functions. For example, instead of generating mapping results that nobody understands and nobody can explain, Spendata's auto-family and auto-mapping functions produce understandable rules that anyone can understand and modify. Spendata's RER (Reverse-Engineering of Rules) can take your existing spend cube and figure out how to map it simply and straightforwardly, leaving you with an understandable rules set and the ability to easily change anything that's not right.

Every constituent group of analysts can modify a base cube — without limit — to suit their own purposes; yet still onboard and make use of any and all future enhancements to the base cube.

Now Spendata Enterprise takes this to the next level — managing and orchestrating this ease-of-use across users who may have deeply different analysis goals. We call this new and industry-unique feature "inheritance", because it allows those users to freely modify a base cube, yet take advantage of and onboard all future enhancements made by the base cube maintainer.

When a core team produces a spend cube for the organization, it's of course a pipe dream to expect that a spend cube produced by consensus will be useful to all of its consumers. Everything produced by a committee is a compromise; dimensions, mappings, everything. Of course the cube has value, but its value for many specific analysis purposes is effectively nil. That's why serious analysts immediately start extracting raw data from the cube so that they can analyze it using Excel or other external tools.

Instead, imagine that each constituent group of analysts takes this cube and modifies it without limit to suit their own purposes — changing mappings, for example, and deriving new dimensions and measures. They might load entirely new datasets and link them into the existing cube. They would most likely create their own dashboards and reports, their own filters, charts, and so on. Their work would leverage all of the components of the existing cube, extending it and improving it for the purposes of their own analysis.

Inevitably, the core team must refresh the base cube. They'll certainly add new transactions. It's probable also that they'll add new dimensions and measures, perhaps even removing existing dimensions. Certainly there will be new mapping rules added; rules that undoubtedly will conflict with the custom rules added by various constituencies to their private cubes.

Normally, that's the end of the road for the custom cubes. They'll have to be re-engineered from scratch. But not with Spendata. When the refreshed cube is re-shared, owners of private copies of the cube who have modified and extended it are notified automatically; and if they wish, Spendata will merge their changes into the new cube, preserving anything the core team has removed, and adding back custom rules, dashboards, dimensions, filters, etc. The net effect is that the custom cube lives on, replete with all the enhancements made by the core team, with no loss of the custom work.

More here: Spendata Enterprise vs. Basic Spendata