Infobridge

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:

1. Regional & Global Budgeting: Manage regional budgets with dedicated pages for each region, consolidated into a global budget page.

2. Operational Expense Planning: Plan expenses at a granular level (e.g., salary plans at the employee level) and consolidate them into broader expense categories.

3. 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.

4. Planning in Pharma & Manufacturing Industries: Plan at the material level and aggregate data to higher levels, like a plant or a product family.

5. 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.

6. 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.