Formulas in SimCorp Dimension system: Part – I

📐 Today we’ll talk about Formulas in SimCorp Dimension. Even though a platform constantly proposes the best practice regarding standard ratios and scenarios, many clients still benefit from using formulas across different Dimension modules. With a passage of years, the variety of formulas evolved so much that now almost every Dimension module has such possibilities. I would like to emphasize on a few aspects, which might help you to succeed in your Dimension projects effectively.

🚦 Be careful with getsum & distrib formulas

There is a reason of why in Formulas window there is a check box that indicates if formulas uses “getsum”. Even though this check box is called “Formulas uses getsum” it also covers the indication of formulas with “distrib” function. These 2 functions, from my experience, are used by clients often within front office applications where they look attractive as can provide a sum or even distribution of values from the certain portfolio manager view. However, they also might be used actively in e.g. Portfolio Calculation for reporting purposes. The problem is that as nowadays the clients actively use Load balancing technology from SimCorp Dimension to speed-up the calculations of significant volume of data – such formulas results are sensitive to load balancing loop sizes. In other word, if you aim to base the formulas on a sum of specific ratios per portfolio, whereas you activate a looping per positions bulk – then such sums or distributions would be incomplete, introducing the deviations in the results, which might be difficult to catch from the final user report position.

Besides, for the Front Office purposes there was added a check box “Read getsum from main view ” – for example, if you have a few views open in the FO applications – then the same formula might be used in all of them but still would be based on the sum or distribution of all elements from the “main” view.

💫 A new analytics function was already introduced some time ago, and is often a better replacement for secanalytics function (of course, if the considered application supports “analytics” function in formulas). The main advantage is that “analytics” may inherit the pricing structure, used in your application rather than requires an explicit parameter of the pricing definition (like in the case of “secanalytics” function). That’s a big step forward, because nowadays the pricing profiles consists of many pricing definition according to hierarchies, and in some situations building formulas per pricing definition is simply not possible.

😉 Next time we will tell you about special kind of formulas in Dimension, which let the calculation of ratios to be centralized across different Dimension applications.

Best regards,

Unitso team