Rollback or View Changes by Contributor?

[cbeycwright]

Another Contributor question. I'm full of them lately. I'm not a Cognos BI customer, this is TM1 only.

Having gotten Contributor hobbling along, I do like that it has some true workflow characteristics. One thing I was hoping to see is rollback or change audit detail. For example, if Ms. Budget Submitter changes a value from 100 to 800 in a given cell, I'd like to know - as an approver - what she changed and what the old value was. From IBM's documentation:

If you are not happy with the contents of a node, and you have appropriate rights, you can reject
it, either from the workflow screen, or from the grid by clicking the Reject button . The state of
a rejected node changes from Locked to Work in progress .

When you have submitted all contribution nodes in a review, it has a ready state . If you are
happy with all the contents, submit the node .

That makes me think that there is no change audit detail or rollback functionality and I don't see them in the interface. I suppose I could get around that by adding an element to an appropriate dimension and having Contributor apply adjustments to a base scenario only, then rolling base + adjustments into a final budget, but that's not really what I was hoping for. I'd like for Contributor to stage the submissions for approvers to see, but not touch the main forecasting scenario. Then when all of the approvals are in, the staged submissions flow into the real forecast scenario.

A few questions: how do other people use Contributor for managing change submissions? Do you use rollups? If not, how do you view changed values?

Thanks!
Chris

[Martin Ryan]

There is the audit log, but that is an administrator tool and won't be available via the Contributor front end.

The only other suggestion I might have is to use archive scenarios to copy data across to on a regular or ad hoc basis, so you can compare new numbers with archived versions.

Or perhaps have your users work within a "Forecast Draft" and once Forecast Draft has been approved, a scheduled TI process could copy the data from there into "Forecast Final".

Martin