Viewing Cost and Controlling

To view statistic on cost and controlling, open the Costs and Controlling view in the Business Control Center Perspective. The average costs and the status are displayed for the selected processes, itemized in today, last week and last month. The user can add new columns, as per the required timeframe, to see and compare the results for specified period.

Figure: The Costs and Controlling View

Choose Role or Organization

In the Role/Organization list select the organization or role to show according processes.

Figure: Choose the Organization or Role

Scoped Roles and Organizations

In case scoped roles are available, they are listed in the selection box as:
Role Name (department.[parent department.[..]])

Scoped Organizations are displayed as follows:
Organization Name (department.[parent department.[..]])

Default departments are marked with a ? following the organization or role name.

Figure: Scoped Roles displayed in the Selection Box

Cost and Controlling Details

The following entries are displayed in the Cost and Controlling table:

• Process Definition: process definition for which the costs are calculated.
• Today, Last Week, Last Month: period of the calculations.
• Costs
• Status

Costs

The average costs apply to the controlling property Actual Cost Per Minute, set for the respective role or organization during modeling. You can set this property in the property page of the activity. For details on this property refer to chapter Modeling the Organizational Structure of the Stardust Online Documentation - Developer Guide. Modeling the Organizational Structure of the Developer Modeler Guide.

Per default, the costs are displayed in EUR, displayed with two digits precision after the decimal point.

Status

The Status shows the status of the process definition in terms of color. Hereby the criticality is calculated with two global thresholds operating as a percentage of the target cost per execution:

• cost >= percentage threshold for yellow * target cost per execution: status is displayed in yellow color.
• cost >= percentage threshold for red * target cost per execution: status is displayed in red color.

The target cost per execution is specified via the process definition Controlling property Target Cost Per Execution, set for the respective process definition during modeling. For details on this property refer to chapter Working with Process Definitions of the Stardust Online Documentation - Developer Modeling Guide. Working with Process Definitions in the Developer Modeling Guide.

You can specify the percentage threshold for yellow and red in the businessControlCenter.properties file, residing in the WEB-INF/classes folder of your Business Control Center WAR or the ipp-resources folder of your dynamic Web project accordingly. The threshold for yellow is Carnot.InstanceCostThreshold.Yellow, the threshold for red Carnot.InstanceCostThreshold.Red respectively. The default value is 1.0, which matches 100%.

The state symbol color will change in case at least one activity or process instance exceeds the threshold.

Adding Custom Columns

Using the add new column feature, you can specify custom columns and time frames. By adding one or more column, you can compare the average cost for the specified time period. To add new column, click the Add Column icon. The Edit Column dialog gets displayed.

Figure: Edit Column

Note that custom column gets added with default start date as '0 days' and duration as '1 day' and the Edit Column dialog gives user the option to edit and save the changes. You can specify following parameters for the new column:

• Column Name - Specify new name for the column
• Start Date - Select the start date for the process instance. You can specify days, weeks, months and year.
  • Days - 0 means "Today" and 1 means "Yesterday". For example, if you select "0" and "Years", then the column would display year to todays' data.
  • Weeks - 0 means "Current Week", 1 means "Last Week" and so on.
  • Months - If current month is September, then in that case 0 means "September", 1 means "August", 2 means "July" and so on.
  • Years - 0 means "Current Year". If 2014 is current year, then select 0, select 1 for year 2013 and so on.
• Duration - Select the duration. Results are displayed based on start date to the present date.
• Switch to Start Date and End Date - Click the Switch to Start Date and End Date link to enter a static time period for the column.

  
  Figure: Select specific Date from Calendar

• Click Apply Filter to create a new column with above specifications. You can delete the column, using the Delete button.

Editing Custom Date Range Filter

To edit the custom date range filter, click Edit displayed in custom column header.

Figure: Edit Custom Date Range

You can modify date range in Edit Column dialog.

Deleting Custom Column

To delete the custom column, click Delete icon displayed in custom column header.

Figure: Delete Custom Column

Custom Columns and Column Preference

Using the Select Columns icon, you can select the columns to be displayed. Also, note that custom column selection and visibility depends on column preference set at the time of Add Column action.

For more information, please refer the chapter Selecting and Reordering Columns in Tables.

Example - Working with Custom Columns

Following example displays the custom columns with average costs comparison.

In this example, we are adding two time frames. One is for the current week and another one is from the month of July to September. So that we can compare the average cost in these periods.

For the Current Week column, specify the start date as "0" weeks. Specify Duration as "7" days.

Figure: Edit Column - Current Week

For the period, July to September, specify the start date as "2" months and duration "2" months.

Figure: Edit Column - Two Months Period

You can compare the average cost for the current week and past two months.

Figure: Compare Average Cost in Custom Columns