Question related to the use of multiple EVDRE's in one sheet

Question

I am trying to create an input schedule/report (input schedule that has history attached to it for users to reference) which would allow users to input their sales forecasts directly into BPC. However, our challenge is that we have roughly 5,000+ items and 3,000+ customers.  After many attempts, this input schedule will not run/re-fresh when using a single evdre report.  So, I tried to create 2 evdre's.  The first would pull only the customers that had data for the given time period for this particular sales person.  Then, the second evdre report references these customers using the evrng formula within the memberset.  This seems to work great, however, whenever I change the sales person in the current view, then I need to query the report twice (the first time it seems only the first evdre is populated with the current view change, while the second evdre report is queried but not updated for the info from the first.  Then when I query the report the second time the second evdre finally gets updated with the info from the first query.)  This is a slow process, as each time the query runs takes about 2 minutes.  If I break the first evdre report into a separate sheet, then the first query runs fine (in about 10 seconds).  Then, I can query the second report and wait the two minutes for that report.  However, this process is cumbersome (having users access and query two reports rather than one to get the info they need). 
Can anyone offer any suggestions on how I can get this report/input schedule to work better?

Answer 1

Hi Todd,
I fully understand your dilema, we have a lot of development work in this area.  I would have to say though in our experience, the report/input schedule while nice to have has caused more issues than it really solved.  If I had my way, actuals and other memo fields would be removed from the input templates altogether.
Things to consider are:  the getonly range (for your reported area) is fragile.  No matter how hard you try, a user will find a way to break your input template and over write actuals or other fields they shouldn't.  A fully formatted report is much better than a combined report/template..  Our users are pretty much sold on the all singing, all dancing report we created for them to tie out their inputed numbers.  The input template has become a vehicle to get the numbers in, and as such has been set up to allow for cross referencing their offline models leveraging vlookup, or index etc.
I haven't helped you iin your quest, but I hope my findings over the past couple of years can help you decide if you cannot find the performance you are looking for.
Cheers,
Mark
Edited by: Mark Tyson on Nov 24, 2009 1:55 PM