During implementation, the customer may require dataflows from Oracle EBS to the Demantra worksheet that are not completed through the standard workflow. To meet specific customer requirements, Demantra has a provision in the tool called Business Modeler where you can create custom integration interfaces to populate the EBS custom data and then insert it into Demantra’s sales data table using the workflow of Demantra.
This blog provides insight into this functionality provided by Demantra-Business Modeler to import custom data into Demantra Demand Management.
Demantra integration interface design:
The Demantra integration interface is used to create the interface tables where we can populate the EBS custom data. The following basic steps we require to define the integration interface:
Create a new import integration interface with a user-defined name from Business Modeler: Navigation: Business Modeler > Tools > Integration Interface.
Select the string during the definition of this integration interface. These are the Demantra series where you want to fill in your custom data.
Define the time scale (weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly, etc.) in which we want to aggregate and load the data and also define the time range for which you want to load this data.
It also allows the selection of Demantra levels to import the data, for example, if we want to import the price data at the item and customer level, we can select the item and customer levels during its definition.
Also, you can apply filters within these selected levels, for example, we can import item prices for selected customers only by applying the appropriate filter
During the creation of the integration interface, you can decide to create the workflow automatically or manually.
The worksheet can be created automatically or manually during the definition of the integration interface.
How does the Demantra integration interface work?
Demantra’s integration interface creates view tables to store custom data.
The workflow can be created automatically during the definition of the Demantra integration interface or manually from Demantra Workflow.
The Demantra workflow is started to send the records from the interface tables, parse them, and fill in all the valid combinations in the Demantra base table, ie sales data.
Records whose error occurs during workflow executions are populated in the respective error tables.
Records with errors are corrected at the source and populated back into the interface tables.
Finally, the Demantra workflow is rerun to send all valid records to the sales data table.
previous requirements:
Make sure all the series we plan to load the data into are already defined.
Make sure all custom time levels where we want to load the data are created and imported into Demantra.
Make sure that all the Tiers where we plan to bring the data are already defined.
Conclusion
Demantra Demand Management is a powerful, flexible and feature-rich forecasting application and therefore clients are easily tempted to implement all the bells and whistles from the start. However, this approach can lead to a steep learning curve for business users and can seriously undermine the adoption of this module.
We caution and encourage our clients to take a phased approach to Demantra implementations to ensure success.