Handling dummy levels in a Composite Hierarchy

Hi Community!

I have a quite large organization hierarchy (12 levels) that I´ve converted from ragged to balanced. The original hierarchy has profit centers in every level, starting from level 4. So this means that I have had to create a lot of dummy levels to balance out the hierarchy.

Example:

Hierarchy Level	Original	Balanced
L3	Country	Country
L4	Profit Center	Country L4
L5		Country L5
L6		Country L6
L7		Country L7
L8		Country L8
L9		Country L9
L10		Country L10
L11		Country L11
L12		Profit Center

This of course works fine but everything looks terrible and especially from an end user perspective it´s not ideal.

So I´d like to hear how are you handling large hierarchies that have been converted from ragged to balanced. Is there a way to filter the dummy levels? Are you using parallel hierarchies for reporting?

Thanks,

- Kalle

Accepted answers

All comments

Misbah

@Kalle

In my case, I had an Org hierarchy which was 13 levels deep & was ragged. But what we discovered was that the Client was planning only at 4 levels. So we asked the client to pass that attribute with the ragged hierarchy and we converted the 13 level ragged hierarchy into 4 level balanced planning hierarchy. For reporting we had to use 13 level ragged hierarchy but there was not much reporting being done in Anaplan.

Just sharing this because if we can somehow do this, it saves a lot of space, easy to handle the model becomes scalable as well.

Thanks,

Misbah

JaredDolich

@Kalle I'm reading this post with great interest.

I had a similar situation with a client with their cost centers and their chart of accounts.

I referred to @DavidSmith and @Bob-Bachynsky excellent post on ragged lists often.

https://community.anaplan.com/t5/Best-Practices/Production-lists-and-ragged-hierarchies-logic/ta-p/33591

Ultimately, though I used a combination of what was in the best practice post and @Misbah suggestion above.

Would love to hear more examples of how people handled this. Seems like a common challenge.

Aaron82

I'm experiencing the same obstacle with a new model we are developing for Operating Expense forecasting and planning. Our corporate functions plan at the Cost Center level (not always) and if we go the balanced route our hierarchy will go down 9 levels. It creates a lot of dummy clicks for our users and something we really don't want to do.

Misbah

@Aaron82

I believe balancing the hierarchy is not always helpful since it will add more dummy levels. What you can think of doing is - check how many levels your client actually plans for Opex. See if they can pass an attribute to your ragged hierarchy and then create another hierarchy based on that attribute. This hierarchy will be balanced and at the same time will be fewer levels than the existing one and When it comes to reporting you use the original ragged hierarchy

Hope that helps

Misbah

michael_park

We have the same issue/challenge with the ragged hierarchy to balanced, but furthermore, we are importing actuals for each entity and the roll-up to each parent may not be just a sum of all children below it.

e.g Parent 1 may have its own transactions $100 with Children summed to $2000 which means the Parent 1 balance should be the sum of all children $2000 plus $100.

Since we can't use Lookup & Sum under the formula method of summary, it seems impossible to roll up differently.

Does anybody have any solution to this? Thanks.

Kalle

Hi All!

Revisiting this since I actually did found a neat solution to this by @AntonMineev .--> Solved: Re: Configuring a filter for nodal values - Anaplan Community At least by writing this here I can find the solution the next time I need it. Hopefully this is beneficial to someone else too.

The solution is based on this great article Calculating Levels in a Hierarchy for Dashboard Fi... - Anaplan Community by @Mark_W_Shemaria

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