Asset Management on BPC: scripts using dates

Question

Hi all,
I wonder whether any of you have already implemented any logic that uses dates, such as a calculation of asset's depreciation based on properties with acquisition dates (to put an example, I'm not exactly doing that). Basically I need to do some calculations about assets taking into account dates (like "begin calculation from date xx/xx/xxxx).
Among the different functions available I don't find any to manage dates and calculate periods from dates. Could you please advice on any best practice/strategy on how to handle this?
Regards,
Rafa

Answer 1

If you're running it as batch logic, you have a lot of flexibility using the *SELECT to retrieve just about anything that's in the database (except what's in the fact tables), into a variable. (I do this when I have a FirstPlanMonth of my forecast categories, and I only want certain logic to apply for plan months in the future, not months that have passed.) *SELECT also gives you access to pretty much the full SQL string manipulation capabilities, but again it's not working against data, just master data in member tables and the like. (Otherwise, string manipulation is limited. This is an OLAP cube with numbers, not a transactional system, so the logic focuses on numbers.)
Another option is to *LOOKUP in a different time period, but the problem here is, you need to know what time period to look up in, before you look it up. Pretty hard to see how that could work.
And then you can possibly compare one time period in the data, against another time period in your *SELECT or *LOOKUP, using a series of *WHEN *IS clauses, but it wouldn't be easy.
The basic checking of whether a JUN < SEP is supported, though. This syntax works to do some basic conditional checking on the time period of the data submission, compared to FirstPlanMonth.
*XDIM_MEMBERSET TIME = PRIOR(4),%TIME_SET%,NEXT(23)
*WHEN TIME
*IS PRIOR
// do nothing for the months before the submitted time period.
*IS Category.FirstPlanMonth
// do something special for the first month -- have a sale!
// and we might need to bring in the PRIOR(4) above, if we wanted to, for example, calculate A/R based on the prior 3 months' sales.
*ELSE
// do something boring for the next 23 months
And I don't believe that you can change the member IDs of the time dimension, at least on BPC MS, to 200801. There are a number of places in the logic where it considers a PREFIX (the year) and a SUFFIX, and wants to see a period as the separator between these two. You can always try, and it's not documented anywhere that I've seen that it must be a certain way, but I learned to live with .JAN .FEB etc.