SAS ABM Survey Kit A Sample Usage Scenario: Leveraging Flexible Assignment Surveys

1. SAS ABM Survey Kit A Sample Usage Scenario: Leveraging Flexible Assignment Surveys

2. Problem: Due to recent re-organizations and company-mergers, you need to allow the flexibility for your survey users to add additional activities if you haven’t established the assignment in ABM. In addition, you need to be able to “audit” these new assignments before you upload them back to ABM. Solution: ASK will present the option to add additional activities (or cost-objects for Activity Driver surveys) on the last page of each survey form. When users have added new assignments, the users’ status icons will turn orange. This provides a simple cue for you to audit the new assignments.

3. You assigned “Administrative Salaries” to the first 2 activities in your Activity Module. To the best of your knowledge these are the only relevant activities for Administration people. Notice you can provide a detailed explanation for each Activity using PeriodicNote column. If PeriodicNote is provided, ASK can display that description in the survey forms. This is very useful so your survey users can know precisely what type of tasks falls under each activity. However, due to recent organizational changes in your company, you are not aware that part of “Manage Contractors” responsibility now falls under Administrative Salaries as well. But that’s ok. As you’ll notice later on, ASK will allow the flexibility for users to “dynamically” establish the assignment.

4. Remember to include PeriodicNote field during the table export if you want to include Account Explanations to your ASK users.

5. Notice the Activity descriptions you’ve supplied in ABM (PeriodicNote) are displayed “on-the-fly” when your user moves his mouse over them. Also notice your user can now “add new accounts” at the end of each survey form (last page).

6. In this scenario your user devotes a significant portion of his time to “Manage Contractors”. So he simply selects that activity from the Pull-down menu and add it to his form.

7. Notice “Manage Contractors” activity now is “dynamically” included in the user form. Note: This Flexible Assignment feature is available only for ASK version 6.3 or higher. You can check ASK version on the bottom of the login screen.

8. ASK monitors each user's progress in real-time. Notice Joe Smith’s status color is orange. That’s because Joe was the one who just added the new activity to his form. So you will want to “audit” the new assignment. You simply click on the orange icon to do that.

9. Notice you have just 1 Assignment to audit in this scenario. So what happens behind the scenes when you approve/disapprove it?

10. When you click “Approve”, behind the scenes, ASK simply tags the “NewAssignmentBy” variable (a variable automatically generated by ASK) with keyword “APPROVED”. But that’s not all it’s doing. If the Account does not exist in that particular period/scenario, ASK will also automatically create it in the corresponding “Account” Staging table – complete with its dimensional signatures. This must be done otherwise the assignment won’t show up in ABM for that period/scenario. What if you disapprove it? ASK simply removes that row from the Assignment dataset. You should email the user to review the survey again. Especially if you use “Percentage”-type drivers where the quantities should add up to 100%.

11. So as far as monitoring surveys in ASK, you simply ensure all icons are blue before uploading data back to ABM.

12. Thank You