Automated Data Management Capabilities
You can use Costing Standard Integration to import reference data dimensions and actuals from Costing Standard. For more information, see Working with Costing Standard Integration Panel. However, importing data from Costing Standard is a manual process. Automated Data Management lets you automate this task.
Automated Data Management for Reference Data
If you are an administrator, you need to know if and when changes have taken place in the reference data on the Costing Standard side so that updated reference data is pulled whenever required in the Planning. However, there is a wait time for the Costing Standard calculations to complete and hence, the calculation queue should be actively monitored to finish before the data can be pulled into Planning. Once the data is ready, you need to manually click buttons on the Costing Standard Integration page in Planning and resolve any conflicts due to dependencies between dimensions, as described in the Reference Table Dependencies Diagram. All this may contribute to a tedious process especially when it comes to debugging and resolving conflicts. See Troubleshoot Planning data upload errors to learn more about manually fixing data import errors.
Automated Data Management solves this problem by enabling you to automatically import reference data from Costing Standard as soon as it is available. It is no longer required to coordinate between the two systems to find identify the right time to pull the data, and there is no requirement to manually click buttons to import dimensions. This, in turn, relieves you from the pain of resolving dimension dependency conflicts as well.
Automated Data Management for Actuals
To help manage spend, you can compare the budget plan or forecast with historical actuals. The source of actuals may be your financial management system, TBM Studio, or Costing Standard. Once integration is enabled, it is easy to import actuals from Costing Standard to the plan. See Import actuals from Costing Standard for more information on importing actuals. However, just like reference data, it's a manual or on-demand process to select different buttons each time you want updated actuals to be imported to the plan.
Automated Data Management helps you manage the import process by setting up a configuration so that whenever actuals are added for a specific period in Costing Standard, they can automatically be made available in the plan.
Automated Data Management for Plan Baseline Data
For the purpose of Planning, you can bring baseline data such as existing labor head count, fixed assets, existing contracts etc. from external source systems to TBM Studio. You can then utilize the modeling capability provided by TBM Studio to perform data mappings and data transformation so that data imported from external systems is consumable for financial budget planning process. At present, you have to manually export this data from Costing & Planning - Cost and then manually import to a specific plan in Costing & Planning - Plan. This is a time consuming procedure.
With the introduction of Automated Data Management for Plan Baseline Data, you can define the mapping between the dataset in TBM Studio and the expenses table in Costing & Planning - Plan using the Entity Mapping feature. This allows you to fetch data with the click of a button from within a specific plan, as and when required.