Copyright © 2005 , SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.

SAS ABM Survey KitA Sample Usage Scenario:

Leveraging Flexible Assignment Surveys

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.

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 tasksfalls 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.

Remember to includePeriodicNote

field during the table exportif you want

to include AccountExplanations

to your ASK users.

Notice the Activity descriptions you’ve supplied in ABM (PeriodicNote)

are displayed “on-the-fly” when your user moveshis mouse over them.

Also notice your user can now “add new accounts” atthe end of each survey form (last page).

In this scenario your user devotes a significantportion of his time to “Manage Contractors”.

So he simply selects that activity from thePull-down menu and add it to his form.

Notice “Manage Contractors” activity now is “dynamically” included in the user form.

Note:This Flexible Assignment feature is availableonly for ASK version 6.3 or higher. You can

check ASK version on the bottomof the login screen.

ASK monitors each user's progress

in real-time.

Notice Joe Smith’sstatus color is

orange.

That’s becauseJoe was the one who just

added the newactivity tohis form.

So you willwant to “audit”

thenew assignment.

You simplyclick on

the orangeicon to do that.

Notice you have just 1 Assignmentto audit in this scenario.

So what happens behind the scenes whenyou approve/disapprove it?

When you click “Approve”, behind the scenes, ASK simplytags 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 withits 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%.

So as far as monitoring surveys in ASK, you simply ensure all icons are blue

before uploading data back to ABM.

Copyright © 2005 , SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.

Thank You