What are multi actions? Multi actions help you orchestrate a set of planning operations across multiple models and versions. They link together a sequence of steps such as data actions and version management steps, which all run from a single starter. Multi actions can help planning users save time when they need to run multiple data actions in a sequence, publish versions, or both.
Multi actions can be added to both basic and advanced stories to carry out complex or repetitive planning operations more quickly and accurately. They can be triggered from a starter, a script, or scheduled from the calendar.
You can add parameters to your multi actions to prompt you for values while running the operations and to make them easier to update and reuse.
Consider using multi actions if your planning process involves running data actions on multiple versions or models or publishing data between data action steps.
Use Multi Actions in a Planning Story
You are working on your forecast income statement and you learn of a labor rate increase from HR. You need to quickly rerun multiple data actions at once so you create and run multi actions in your planning story.
Multi Action Steps
Multi actions allow for a simpler end-user experience and have a lower cost-of-development. Using multi actions, you can orchestrate the execution of various tasks in SAP Analytics Cloud components.
- Data Action Step: Runs a data action with parameter values that you specify in the step, either by setting fixed values or by applying parameters from the multi action.
- Data Locking Step: Allows data locks to be set directly from the multi action starter. Setting data locks protects your data from unwanted changes.
- Version Management Step: Publishes a version from the model that you specify. You can set the version, or apply a parameter from the multi action.
- Predictive Step: Runs a time series forecast predictive scenario to answer business questions using a predictive model. This step retrains a predictive model based on the current state of your data, and then writes a forecast to a public or private planning version.
- Data Import Step: Import master data and transaction data from SAP source systems.
- API Step: Integrates on-premise and cloud-based external applications using an HTTP Application Programming Interface (API).
When should you use a multi action instead of a data action?
A data action consists of one or more steps for the same model. A data step can have another data action embedded into it as long as they all belong to the same model.
You can use an embedded data action step to run another data action as part of the one you’re working on. Combining these steps with dynamic parameters lets you reuse data actions from the same model and set different source or target members.
A multi action bundles multiple data actions into one.
In the following example, you can see that one multi action has been created to run five separate data actions using two different models. The Copy Hours HR → Expense data action actually copies labor hours from the HR model to the Expense model.
Multi Actions vs. Data Actions
| Use Case | Example | Solution |
|---|---|---|
| Run a data action multiple times on the same version and publish it at the end | Run depreciation on several fixed assets for a single version | Data Action or Multi Action |
| Run data actions on multiple target versions | Plan on multiple versions simultaneously and populate them with initial data | Multi Action |
| Run data actions on multiple models | Copy data from a strategic planning model to multiple models such as workforce and finance | Multi Action |
| Run a data action, publish data and then run another data action | Copy the initial data to a version, publish it and then run an advanced formula | Multi Action |
Performance Considerations
If you are adding multiple data actions based on the same model and version, then it is recommended to embed these data actions into a new data action first. You can then add the new embedded data action to your multi action to improve performance.
