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.
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