Reducing number of cells

PrevContributor

I am building a POC for number of hours spent by each employee on a daily basis for different tasks. The employees and projects shares a Many-to-Many relationship. In my module, I have the following: Number of Hours spent (Line Item) Projects (List) Employees (List) Time However I am concerned that there are cells created for employees which does not add value. eg. Only 10 employees are assigned to Project ABC but in the module cells were created for all 100 employees. Is there a better approach to modelling this to reduce the number of cells?

peter_mcanena

Yes, there is a better way: you need a numbered list. If you create a numbered list called, say, Work Log, you can use this to hold only the combinations of Employee and Project that are actually required. You can then dimension your module by Work Log and Time and just have one line item Number of Hours Worked.

If you make Employee the parent list of Work Log, you can then have a Project property in the numbered list and I think the display name property should be the based on that (either the name of the project, or if you prefer, the name of the project followed by the employee name in brackets). You'll need an action to create a new entry under a given employee, specifying the project, and this will then allow each employee to log time against whichever projects they've been working on, without defining space for every possible combination.

Look at https://community.anaplan.com/anapedia/model-building/lists-and-roll-ups/numbered-lists to find out how numbered lists work, and to see exactly how to do all this.