Metric Dimension

A metric dimension contains your collection of important measures or key performance indicators (KPI) that you want to monitor in your business or organization. In IBM® Cognos® TM1® Scorecarding, these measures are called metrics. For example, an individual metric in a metric dimension identifies one aspect of performance, such as Profit, Revenue, or Expenses. Other examples include Product Sales and Research Funding.

You can use TM1 scorecarding to monitor the actual performance of a metric and compare it to expected or target values. When you monitor the performance of a metric, you combine it with metric indicators that provide the additional details about a metric’s status, score, and trend. Metrics are typically shown in the row dimension title of a cube view.

Figure 1. Metric dimension in a metrics cube

Designing your metric dimension

Because metric dimension definitions might not be stored in your existing TM1 data, you might need to create the dimension and related metric members. You use the metric dimension editor in Cognos TM1 Performance Modeler to build your metric dimension.

The users of your scorecarding solution need an understanding of the expected performance patterns for each metric. For example, revenue above a set target is a positive indicator that a business is exceeding its revenue forecast. However, expenses above a set target are a negative indicator and immediate attention is needed to find out why the expenses are higher than forecasted.

Metric dimension properties

A Metric dimension has the following properties that you configure in the dimension editor.

Format property

Specifies the numerical or date/time display format.

Performance Pattern

How the metric is applied. Choose from:

Above target is favorable
On target is favorable
Below target is favorable

Choosing a Performance Pattern depends on the specific metric you want to monitor. For example, profit above target is favorable, while expenses below target are favorable.

Tolerance Type

Tolerance type indicates how to interpret the value in the tolerance indicator.

Choose Absolute to indicate that the value in the tolerance indicator is the tolerance and is used as is.
Choose Percent to indicate that the value in the tolerance indicator is be used to calculate the tolerance as a percentage of target.

Metric dimension calculations

You can use standard TM1 functions when you define Metric dimensions. For example:

Profit = Revenue - Expenses

You can set separate calculations for leaf and consolidated level cells.

N Calculation: A simple calculation that is computed at the leaf level.
C Calculation: A calculation that is computed on aggregated results.

For more information, see Creating calculations for Metric and Metric indicator dimensions.