Plan comes with Infobridge, a no-code data integration, preparation, and transformation engine, transforming it into an advanced real-time collaborative and integrated planning and business reporting suite.
Infobridge lets you connect to multiple data sources and consolidate them into a single, unified report. It has a user-friendly transformation interface to perform some common data transformations on the data sources, such as appending, merge, pivot, and unpivoting columns, group by, etc.
Use cases of InfoBridge#
Common use cases of Infobridge include:
- Regional & Global Budgeting: Manage regional budgets with dedicated pages for each region, consolidated into a global budget page.
- Operational Expense Planning: Plan expenses at a granular level (e.g., salary plans at the employee level) and consolidate them into broader expense categories.
- Financial Planning and Analysis: Import sales and COGS data from product-level reports into consolidated P & L statements. Perform planning and forecasts on the consolidated data.
- Planning in Pharma & Manufacturing Industries: Plan at the material level and aggregate data to higher levels, like a plant or a product family.
- Cost Center Planning: Perform planning at detailed levels (e.g., IT maintenance costs, miscellaneous costs within specific cost centers) and aggregate the data for executive dashboards.
- Capacity Planning: Convert volume forecasts from the planning sheets into headcount and resource requirements.
Why InfoBridge?#
All the above use cases typically require composite modeling, ETL and automation tools, complex DAX & SQL scripting, extensive BI expertise, and IT overheads. This is where Infobridge can help. It combines the capabilities of Power Query, Power Automate, and Plan's Writeback engine to enable real-time data transformations inside your existing planning reports.
- No code platform: Infobridge offers a no-code experience for use cases that would normally demand intensive DAX and composite modelling.
- Visual data integration: With Infobridge, you can seamlessly access data from any EPM sheet or external file in near realtime. Pulling data from different visuals would typically require ETL expertise.
- Pivoting data: You can pivot and unpivot dimensions and measures on the fly. Adding new dimensions or pivoting data can be done with a few clicks instead of using complex SQL and DAX scripts.
- Writeback: Infobridge allows the consolidation of multiple reports into a single WB table. Without Infobridge, users would need to writeback to separate tables and maintain each of them.
Infobridge integration with plan#
The primary purpose of infobridge is to integrate data from planning sheets, powertable sheets, and other data sources, and then write the consolidated data back to a single destination table.
This process involves the following tasks:
- Create a bridge.
- Add data sources from sheets or external files.
- Transform and prepare data within the bridge.
- Write the consolidated data back to the destination table.
