About Scoreboards

The Scoreboard offers a rich set of features and provides strong business solution designs. Scoreboards are primarily used by Exception based demand planning solutions as entry points for identifying and navigating exceptions. Budgets, forecast metrics and alarms can be constructed to fit almost any condition.

Scoreboard records can be defined by all users. Scoreboard records are stored centrally on the server database. Even Online users and Offline users would be able to synchronize their scoreboard records with the server. Each scoreboard has unique values stored for each user because calculation of the scoreboard value is depending on the users data domain.

The Scoreboard area can be reached from the drop-down list in the main menu bar where you can switch between Favorite Views area, Version Control area and Scoreboard area. Select Scoreboard and click on the Actions menu to access the following available actions for the Scoreboard panel:


Action	Description
New Scoreboard record	Opens the New Scoreboard dialog box.
Open Scoreboard record	Opens the Scoreboard record in the Workbench.
Properties for Scoreboard record	Opens the Scoreboard Properties dialog.
Copy Scoreboard record	Makes a copy of the selected Scoreboard record. When a scoreboard record is copied the calculation data is not copied. The user must calculate the new scoreboard to get the score. When a favorite view is copied, all scoreboard records based on that favorite view are also copied.
Delete Scoreboard record	Deletes a Scoreboard.
Calculate Scoreboard record	Opens the Scoreboard-Calculate dialog.
Set Filter Conditions	Enables filtering on the Scoreboard panel. The filtering feature in the Scoreboard panel makes it easy to handle multiple scoreboards. All the columns displayed on the Scoreboard panel can be filtered on freely.
Clear Filter Conditions	Removes filtering from the selected columns.
Print Scoreboard	Prints the Scoreboard panel.
Help	Opens the "About Scoreboards" page of the Online Help system.

Note: You can also reach these Actions by right-clicking a scoreboard record in the Scoreboard area.

The Scoreboard panel comprises of several columns, they are listed as follows:


Column	Description
Type	Displays the icon to identify the Scoreboard record type.
Name	Displays the user defined name to identify the Scoreboard record.
Category	Displays the user defined category for filtering the Scoreboard display.
NC	Displays a calculator symbol if the scoreboard record needs a new calculation.
Current Score	Displays the number of key records from the Dataset that match a condition.
Changes	Displays the difference between current and previous score. A green up or down arrow indicates whether the changes is a rise or a fall compared to the previous value.
Favorite	Displays the Favorite view names against the respective Scoreboard.
Dataset	Displays the Dataset names against the respective Scoreboard.
Public	Indicates whether a Scoreboard is public and can be viewed by all users. By default, a Scoreboard record is always made private. This is independent of user and availability.

The Scoreboard panel can be filtered to show only the subset of the scoreboard records, exactly as the favorite view panel in earlier versions of M3 DMP. The Scoreboard panel contains a list of the defined Scoreboard records. Scoreboard records are created by the user and display aggregated totals for key performance indicators.

Each Scoreboard record represents a certain type of calculation on the underlying data. By double-clicking on the record you can access this data which will open in the form of a pivot sheet in the Workbench area.

To view the content of a Scoreboard

right click and choose Open, or
double-click on the Scoreboard record, or
select one Scoreboard and press Return.

Most Scoreboards and exceptions are calculated and records are searched for in the database. Therefore, they have a number of characteristics to consider:

using scoreboards require a large memory usage
some scoreboard types only require calculation after import and some scoreboard types requires a few iterations during the forecasting cycle.
scoreboards contain information on the entries in "Base XKey" table matching the specified criteria; when an entry in actual sales matches the criteria, then all entries on that specific key combination will be selected regardless of the data type (data type = accumulator + transaction type)

Forecast alarms in Scoreboards

Forecast Alarms in Scoreboards enables the user to observe the demand without being restricted by Changeable Time Horizon. M3 DMP offers these types of alarms:

Forecast Alarm 1 - Demand Check
Forecast Alarm 1 is used to check whether the actual demand values in the system are reasonable or not.

Forecast Alarm 1 is activated when the absolute difference between base demand for a period and the applicable base forecast is greater than a specified margin. The error margin is calculated by multiplying forecast alarm factor 1 by the Forecast Margin. The factor can be set to activate an alarm, when demand values are out of a reasonable bound.

Another consideration for setting the forecast alarm factor is the amount of manual processing that may be necessary to review fresh demand information. As a general guideline forecast alarm factor 1 can be to set at or near 3. This means that actual demand is periodically checked to make sure the values in the system are reasonable. For example, the alarm can be activated when input is entered incorrectly. However, this can also occur when a single unusually large customer order is made.

M3 DMP will have the following scoreboard: Forecast Alarm 1 – Demand Check

One of the three calculated Margins (Margin1, Margin2 or Margin3) can be selected and Factor1 can be entered as the Upper Factor for Outside bounds check. Lower Factor can also be used but that is uncommon for this type of alarm.

FORMULA : FA1 = Abs ([Demand Fcst]-[CF Fcst]) > Factor1 * Margin

In M3 DMP, Demand Fcst = UCDEMA with Transaction Type 34

CF Fcst = MFCFOR with Transaction Type 34.
Forecast Alarm 2 - Forecast Error Check
Forecast Alarm 2 is used to check for forecast errors. The forecast error is calculated and checked on a continual basis. This is done by comparing mean forecast error to a specified margin. When the forecast error exceeds the margin, then Forecast Alarm 2 is activated.

The margin is calculated by multiplying Forecast Alarm factor 2 by the Forecast Margin. This factor is set to check cases where forecast quality is becoming unacceptably low. Another consideration for setting the forecast alarm factor is to reduce the amount of manual corrections. As a general guideline, forecast alarm factor 2 can be to set at or near 0.6.

In M3 DMP this is possible by selecting the formula Forecast Alarm 2- Forecast Error Check and setting the Upper Factor to F2 and then selecting Outside bound. Margin type determines how the margin is calculated and Mean Forecast Error Period controls the smoothing.

FORMULA : FA2 = Avg( n, ([Demand Fcst]-[CF Fcst]) ) >= Factor2 * Margin

In the formula,
- n = Number of periods
- Demand Fcst = UCDEMA with Transaction Type 34
- CF Fcst = MFCFOR with Transaction Type 34.

Cleaning of statistical data

Alarm scoreboards allow the users to adjust the demand (UCDEMA) without being restricted by changeable time horizon (CTH). This ability makes it possible to adjust the demand used for the advanced statistical forecast calculation that in turn yield the correct forecast and prevent alarms from re-appearing. For example: Adjusting Statistical Data can be used when outliers such as large one time orders or promotions need to ignored in forecast calculations.

The ability to allow changes outside the changeable time horizon (CTH) is controlled by the table AccSelListLink with 4 new columns to define the change horizon (PeriodFrom, PeriodTo, YearFrom and YearTo). If these are not set CTH is controlling the time range where data can be updated, but if these are set they take precedence.

For example, to enable UCDEMA to be changed in the history outside CTH, we must also change table "AccSelListLink". Records with 95 already exist since UCDEMA has been imported from Dataset. Now we only need to specify the PeriodFrom, YearFrom and PeriodTo, YearTo with the range we want to make updateable and set AccUpdate = -1 ( checkbox on).

Each AccSelID number matches the Dataset imported. AccSelList and Baselist tables hold more information if needed. By placing the change horizon fields in this table we can control exactly on which Dataset we will allow data types to updateable. Its possible to have AccID = 95 (i.e. TT34+UCDEMA) set differently on the different Datasets in the solution by only setting the change horizon columns for some of the AccSelID.

Setting "Updateable" = -1 will indicate that UCDEMA will be updateable when future Datasets are imported.

Note: Only cells with values in the Dataset will be open for changes. Changing CTH will generate missing cells for the data types that can be modified. However, missing cells are still only generated with the range of CTH.