21/07/2015
Numbered List:
Reports play crucial role in the Organization for decision making. The Report should be in a presentable and understandable manner. As the complexity of the model increases the creation of reports becomes more challenging.
For example if you have a matrix of customers by Sales Rep, each Rep may be selling different product to different customer lines. There may be some overlap on coverage, so that a customer can be served by more than one rep. If you were to implement it as a large cube with separate dimensions for Customer, Product and Reps,the cube size can be dramatically higher than it needs to be and Report creation based on this will be more difficult to present efficiently. But in practice the actual combination of customer-product-sales rep, this matrix is incredibly sparse. The sparsity is illustrated by a large number of blank cells in a grid One way to handle this is using Numbered List.
The set of valid combinations can be implemented as a numbered list with a parent hierarchy of Sales Rep, but with zero sparsity. All the invalid combinations have been removed, making it much more usable for the sales rep to see their data. Numbered lists are an elegant way of exploiting the natural sparsity of data within a business. Rather than setting up a different module with separate dimensions of products by customers we can set up a numbered list that only shows the valid combinations of products sold to customers by different sales reps.
Some of the best features of Numbered list in Anaplan are:
1. A numbered list is a special type of list that contains a system-generated ID number and an optional display name.
2. Less memory usage when many combinations of data has to be considered.
3. Reports are presentable in a organized structure.
