Time Period Format does not have Days as an option

chris_hodge_1
chris_hodge_1
in Modeling

Hi, I am working on a retail POC which is based on daily sales. The modules I've created contain a Day timescale which works fine. However, I don't seem to be able to create a Time Period Format that contains days. Week seems to be the lowest level. What I am trying to achieve is to lookup sales from a Day in the previous year as a baseline for a given day in the current budget. The business look for a date in the prior year to correlate expected sales based on day of the week, time of year and promotional activity.  For example, the baseline Sales Budget for say 1/7/2015 will initially refer to 1/7/2014 (simple 1 year lag), however the business may want to adjust this to 2/7/2014 to align Wednesday to Wednesday (ie. lag +1). However, promotional activity will mean that this 'lag' is not constant. For example, the following Monday 6th July 2015, let's say they plan for a 1 week promotional sale. When they look back at the prior year, they determine the promotion started a week later. Therefore the the correlating dates for this week to lookup sales from the prior year will be 14/7/2014 to 20/7/2014.  Essentially the business want a Date overwrite option to lookup any given days sales in the prior year. This is done at the Country Level and then pushed down to all stores in that country. I don't seem to be able to get this to work without the Day being available in the Time Period Format. I'd be grateful for any suggestions. Thanks, Chris

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Best Answer

  • elizabeth_schaf
    elizabeth_schaf
    Answer ✓
    In the Settings tab, there is not an option for days, but in the module itself, you can select days as your time scale.

    Let me know if that still doesn't answer your question or solve your problem.

Answers

  • chris_hodge_1
    chris_hodge_1
    Hi Elizabeth,

    Unfortunately this does not help. I'm aware that Days can be set in blueprint mode for the time dimension.

    My issue is that the Format column in Blueprint mode does not allow you to select Days when the Time Period option is selected. This prevents doing a Lookup at the 'Day' grain & is somewhat restrictive & at odds with the time dimension capability. Refer to screen shot:
  • PrevContributor
    PrevContributor
    You could create a 'Day of The Week' list and have two Line Items; one selecting the Week Commencing, one selecting the DoW, a third Line Item may generate the correct date using the two. This date may then be used to perform the lookup as required.

    You could also decomission the Daily Timescale all together and move to a composition of the Weekly Timescale and DoW dimensions but that might be quite a task.

    Additionally there's no reason a user could simply put the necessary date into the module so perhaps your requirement was specifically having the nice calendar dropdown?

    Jack

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