Costing Standard Integration

This document provides information on (1) selecting an ATUM version for Interactive Benchmarking (2) walking through settings to fetch actuals from the Costing Standard Application. The 1st section of the document focuses on Costing Standard in R12 and the 2nd section calls out fetching actuals from an R11 Costing Standard Project. The 3rd section calls out the flow for configuring when a customer logs in to Interactive Benchmarking for the first time.

IMPORTANT In this version, sub-tower actuals are not retrieved. Fetching sub-tower data will be enabled in a subsequent release.

Costing Standard in TBM Studio v12

Assumptions

• Your Apptio product is Front Door enabled.

• The R12 Costing Standard application and Interactive Benchmarking are in the same environment.

See picture below for an example of an environment with Costing Standard & Interactive Benchmarking.

NOTE You can have more than one Costing Standard Application as well as other Applications in an environment.

Using Settings for configuration

This section will walk through configuring ATUM versions & fetching actuals using the Settings pages.

The recommended sequence is to first select your ATUM Version. You do this by click on the Settings Flywheel in the top-right corner of the Interactive Benchmarking application. You will see the settings page with a set of tabs.

• Click on the Advanced Tab. Here you will see the ATUM version section (see image below with V2 selected).

  

• You can change the ATUM version. In doing so, you will see a yellow warning banner that provides information on:
  • Impact of changing the ATUM version:
    • Towers & Sub Towers are different between V1 & V2 so you will see this change the list of towers & sub towers
    • Due to this difference, volumes, actuals cost data and benchmark selections for towers and sub-towers will be discarded.
  • Recommended next steps once you make this change:
    • Retrieve your actual cost data or enter it manually
    • Update your volumes
    • Review your selections across the benchmark layers (Industry, IT OpEx and Infrastructure).

  The image below shows an example of switching over to V1. The yellow banner with the impact and recommendations is on the right.

  

• You can then proceed with this selection by clicking on Save. This results in dialog box that lists the data with the same yellow warning banner. IMPORTANT: this step doesnt as yet Fetch actuals from the Costing Standard project. It only switches the current data over to the changed ATUM version. You need to make an explicit Fetch from Actuals as called out in the next several steps.

  You need to click "Continue with these actuals" to close this dialog box.

  

• The next step is to configure the settings for Fetching from Costing Standard. For this, you click on the APPTIO Source tab in settings (see image below). This will provide a drop down list of Costing Standard Applications in your Apptio (Front Door Environment). In this screen below, there is only one Costing Standard Application (with the name Costing Standard). You then click the Validate Connection button.

  

• Once the connection is validated, you will see a screen where you can select a Costing Standard Project and a specific month. In the example image below, you see the selected project is: reference.apptio.com: Costing Standard. IMPORTANT: Please pick the specific CT project that you want to fetch actuals cost data. The yellow banner on the right is a warning note. It calls out that you need to ensure the CT project is open (as selecting a closed project will trigger a calc in CT).

  Now click "Retrieve Cost Data" to fetch actuals from the selected Costing Standard project and month/year.

  

• You will now see the fetch data in a dialog box (see image below for an example). The New Source column contains the data fetched from the selected project.

  Click on Continue with these actuals . This results in saving the retrieved cost data from the project.

  

• You can also view the retrieved cost data by selecting the Cost Data tab in Settings. The image below is a screenshot of the Cost Data. It shows the overall costs, cost pool costs & tower costs filled in. Sub-tower costs are blank and need to be typed in manually.

  

• Finally, as before, Organization Profile is manually entered (as it is not part of the Costing Standard project) as it is benchmarking specific. You can enter Organization Profile by selecting the Organization Profile tab.

  For Sub-tower Annual Costs & Volumes, you can enter them either by:

  • In the settings section; Sub-tower annual costs in the Cost Data tab and Volumes in the Volumes tab, or
  • In the individual sub-tower pages under Infrastructure metrics.

You are now ready to make your benchmark comparisons with actuals.

Costing Standard in TBM Studio v11

For Costing Standard projects in v11, there is no Frontdoor integration. This means you will need to create/use an admin user (in v11) and type in the user name/password in Interactive Benchmarking. In the Apptio Source Tab (see image below), you have the option to manually enter the URL (the hyperlink is: manually entering the URL and AdminDB credentials). Click on that hyperlink.

In the next step, you see input text boxes where you need to provide the instance URL, AdminDB Username and AdminDB Password. This video provides additional information on using this.

The other steps on selecting ATUM versions and setting volumes etc are the same as for R12.

First User Experience Setting

The Interactive Benchmarking application provides a first time user experience for customers when they log in for the 1st time. This is to guide them through the initial set-up.

• If no user has logged in to Interactive Benchmarking for a customer & configured it, the first screen that you will see (if you are the 1st user) is a Getting Started page. See image below for an example. It identifies the steps you need to take to configure it. Note: it also provides an option for you to skip the configuration in case you want to either (1) configure it later using the Settings flow mentioned above or (2) set it up manually.

  To proceed, click the Lets Get Started button.

  

• The next several steps are similar to the steps described in the above sections but with more of a guided experience. Please review the 1st two sections to familiarize yourself on the specifics. The 1st step is to select your ATUM version. Here you are asked to pick your ATUM version. Click Next .

  

• Next is to select your Costing Standard Source. The screen you see will be like the one below. Pick your Costing Standard application and click Connect. NOTE: Here you have the option to skip these steps and go to the Benchmarking screen (by clicking entering cost data manually ) or fetching from R11 (by clicking on manually entering the URL and AdminDB credentials ).

  

• Once you click Connect , you will be prompted on selecting the right project & time period. The yellow banner is the same as the one described in the 1st section.

  

• You can select your project and time period & click "Go". See below for an example screen.This retrieves actuals data from the project.

  

• The last configuration step is type in Organization Profile. See screen below for an example. Type in your Organization Profile data and click Next .

  

• At this point you have configured Interactive Benchmarking. You will see a "Done" screen like the one below. Clicking on "Explore" will take you to a configured Interactive Benchmarking application.

  

At any time, you can make modifications to your configuration by clicking on the Settings Flywheel on the top right of the screen and following the steps mentioned in the 1st section.