Product Update – 30th March, 2020

30 March 2020 Vivek Bhusal & Julien Barone
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Concerto

The development team is constantly working on product improvements, stability, security enhancements, and new features to improve your Concerto experience.

Release 4 focused on general product stability, security enhancements & user experience. There were improved load times for the Launchpad, Concerto view, and the Modeller. Stability in saving model transactional data, and any changes to model transactional data. Clearer and more accessible UI for administering user permissions and role selection (i.e. security enhancements). Multiple improvements to icons, buttons, text clarity and word choice to aid in UX.

Improvement summary:

  1. Locking/unlocking performance: Issue that caused some users to have to wait upwards of 12-15s to enter in and out of ‘Change Mode’ for a model, or ‘Change Library Mode’ for a document. Now resolved to reflect overall improvement to product performance.
  2. Concerto view loading error: Inconsistent behaviour when opening a document in Concerto View has been fixed to give greater visibility of models.
  3. Added user-friendly validation on metric file upload errors: Added functionality where a user uploads a spreadsheet file with their desired model metrics and hierarchy, but has an error in the formatting, will now return an error message that lists the exact cell location of the formatting errors. This makes self-diagnosis and troubleshooting super easy!
  4. Scaling issues on Spark Bar and Line: Minor display issues with the Spark Bar and Spark Line on metric tile not dynamically scaling with respect to a user’s browser and application zoom levels.
  5. Constraint Modelling and Data save: Roughed out the edges on saving and Constraint Modelling, key functionality that allows you to optimise and ‘constrain’ an entire value stream or individual metric through simple configuration steps similar to that of Key Figures’. Users have the ability to save their ‘constraints’.
  6. Added User confirmation dialog on moving/copying models from My Drive to Team drive: Added a warning message informing user that are attempting to move any files from ‘My Drive’ to ‘Team Drive’ of associated risk in doing so, namely that the file or content that they are attempting to move will be in a shared space, potentially accessible to others.

Major Additions:

  1. Datasource has been moved to CloudSQL and automatic data sync when the user opens the model. Datasource feature is now very stable (in our internal testing) and has improved performance.
  2. Datasource now supports “Calendar Day” level data.
    • Users now have the ability to create a Datasource in Concerto against a calendar day level of time granularity
  3. Added “Expert Mode” data population. This allows users to define the data population on key figures instead of just metric levels.
    • Advanced functionality that adds a significant boost to flexibility in model building and data population. The prime function of this feature allows a user to determine the means of data population per key figure per metric allowing even more touch points for a User to link and integrate multiple sources of data in their system, to their model.
    • For example: I have Key Figures Actual, Budget, and Target. I have Metrics (nodes) Revenue, Unit Cost, and Volume.
      • I set Revenue to populate via “Calculation”, as it is a function of the Unit Cost and Volume metrics
      • I set Volume to populate via its own designated Datasource
      • Unit Cost, I check ‘Expert Mode’, now I set the Unit Cost’s key figure ‘Actual’ to populate via Datasource, ‘Budget’ to populate via “Manual Data Entry”, and ‘Target’ to populate via “Calculation”. Instead of having all three key figures for ‘Unit Cost’ populate one way, I had set them all to populate via different sources.
  4. Added Reporting feature for platform admin to download the CE and User report.