How to Create a New Watcher

To create a new Watcher, you can go to Pricefx Actionable Insights Watchers. In the upper right corner you have a button, Create Watcher. Note that at the moment, the only watchers you can create are Datamart Watchers. However, a wider variety is in the pipeline and we will update the content as they appear. After you added all the necessary details, click on the Add button.

Open

Open

For this scenario, we will assume you are a pricing analyst who wants the system to scan through the data and identify customers who are at churn risk.

Walkthrough Create a Watcher

Step 1: Data Scope

Looking at the already created Watcher (see screen above), you can see the first step in the process of creation, which is Data Scope. You can use either one data sequence or more series. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will use two different series as we need to define two different time periods to se the customer’s revenue in each of these and then be able to compare them and calculate the trend.

For the first data series you must provide a label and identify the data source, typically transactional data. In this case we will choose standard sales data. For currency we opt for EUR, but you can choose whatever currency you conduct your business in.

In the next step you must define the data structure. For the purpose of this tutorial, we want to scan the data at customer level, so customer ID will be our dimension along with Group by.

For the Measures tab, we chose Revenue. Invoice price will be our measure.

Make sure you provide a name as it will be used in further calculations in the Watcher.

At this point you have the option to create another series. This will be your comparison one.

You can also set up the basic filters for defining the time period; in this case, the base series.

Note that in the comparison series, the structure is fairly similar to the base series as we want to make sure that we are looking at similar data and the comparison makes sense. You can however add a couple more dimensions for more transparency like: customer name and also customer class.

Join Series

After the comparison series, you have one more option you can use: join series. This option allows you to clearly see the revenue trend. When you choose this option, you will be prompted to define the relationship. You always join to the base series. As the definition key, we chose Customer ID and Comparison Series under the Series tab. Click Save.

Edit Measures

In the next phase you will be prompted to edit the Measures.

In this case, we want to calculate the revenue trend, so we need to provide a simple formula. You can pick the base series revenue then multiply it by the second series (the comparison series) revenue minus one, which gives you the percentage when you click Save. When you are finished with all the data, click Apply Settings.

All the series will be displayed in the table on the right side of the screen so you can have quick access to the data in one place.

How to set up the time interval for comparison

Select the filter option and set up your time interval. If you chose the last 12 months in the base series, you may want to choose at least the last 24 for the comparison series. The reason for this is that not only you want to see how you did in the past year but you also want to be able to analyse the trend and observe if there is a problem. To do this, the comparison series should be able to access more historical transaction data.

Step 2: Detection Rules

The detection rules are important as they serve as the alert conditions for the Watcher. Actions are triggered in the Watcher run when these conditions are met.

Select Conditions

The first thing to do is define the series for the selected condition. In this case we will choose the Join Series and the Revenue one (defined and named prior. This is why you need to name it something you can later find easily).

Rules

In the Rules tab you can set the limit under or over which you want to trigger the alert. In this case we chose - 0.2. This means that we want an alert to be created if the revenue trend in the past two years is under minus 20%.

You have also an option to overview the data currently meeting this criteria in a simple overview under Applied Rules.

The next step to take is set the schedule because the Watcher can and should run regularly by a set schedule. Once you have filled in all the fields, click on Continue in the upper right corner.

Step 3: Action Definition

Now you can continue to the last step of the Watcher, which is Action Definition. Here you need to determine what should happen when the previously defined criteria or the alert conditions are met.

You can create as many actions as you want from the previously defined data scope.

Create action

For our purpose right now, we will use just one action to which we will provide a label, description, due date. When you define an action you will be prompted to enter these details in an Edit Action box.

The primary assignee is a fall back kind of assignee whom the action will be assigned to in case there is no advanced assignment or if the advanced assignment conditions are not met for the particular customer.

Basically, if you want to define an advanced assignment for the actions, you can assign the users to the action based on the value of the dimensions in the data. For example, in this case, we decided that for all the cases where customers belong to customer Class B, these actions should be assigned to a particular person.

You can also let the Watcher create an action plan, which is an object grouping of all the actions created by the Watcher. If you choose this option, you will have to define in which step of this action plan the action will be assigned.

For this use case we decided not to use the action plan option.

The last step in at this stage is the dashboard definition. To set it up, you will have to click on Customer Insights in the Edit Action box.

Dashboard

In this step you will define the Dashboard to be shown in the action. Currently only Customer Insights or Sales Insights are supported. When you define the inputs of the dashboard you will notice that you can select only the specific portlets that are relevant to your analysis to be displayed in the dashboard.

In this case we are using Customer Revenue and Margin Trend last 12 months and Projection as they all suit our use case. Once you are done, click Apply in the lower right corner, as well as Apply in the Edit Action window. Once completed, click Continue in the upper right corner to move on to calculations. This step may take a couple of minutes, so be patient.

Watcher history

When accessing previously created and already run watchers, you can also explore the history around the watcher, see how many times it ran, rejections, when it was created, rejection plans and other data.

Step 4: Summary

The Summary tab allows you to review all the parameters set for the Watcher. Should you need to make adjustments, you can always go back in the step path and adjust. When you have all the information completed to your liking, you can submit the Watcher for approval.