How to Define a Metric on a Transaction Table
As mentioned above, inventory tables are tables that represent the current inventory, such as the Buildings or Rooms tables. Transaction tables are tables that represent an event, change to the inventory (such as a Workspace Transaction or a Move Request) or a task (such as a Work Order).
You can define metrics on either inventory tables or transaction tables. Typical transaction table metrics are Work Requested (monthly) or Health and Safety Incidents: Recent (number of health and safety incidents for the month).
Example
For example, the metric definition below will count the number of Work Requests that happen within each month.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Metric Title | Work Requested (by month) |
| Metric Name | ops_WorkRequested_monthly |
| Metric Description | Total number of work requests in the past 30 days. |
| Business Implication | Indicates the number of work requests are requested, per month. Comparing to the number of work requests completed per month gives the organization information on whether demand for maintenance work matches the supply of resources. |
| Assumptions | Use the On Demand application. |
| Collect: Recurrence | Every Month, on the Last Day of the Month |
| Collect: From Table | wrhwr
|
| Collect: Formula | field:wr_id
|
| Collect: Where Clause | status NOT IN ('Rej', 'Can')
|
| Collect: Date to Filter On | date_requested
|
| Report: Aggregate As | COUNT |
| Report: Trend Direction | Smaller is Better |
| Report Limit High Warning | 650. |
| Report Limit High Critical | 800. |
| Numeric Format | Number |
| Decimal Places | 0 Places |
| Metric Granularity Assignments | All, by Problem Type |
Comments
Collect: From Table. In this metric definition, this is a transaction table. Per the above, this record represents an event, a change to apply to the database, or a task. Additionally, this record has one or more date fields that specified when this change occurred or was requested. It is this date field that the metric definition uses to filter on.
Collect: Date to Filter On. This parameter specifies the specific field to filter on. In this case, the Date Requested (date_requested) value. Since this is a monthly metric, the metric rule filters for just requests that occurred on the recurrence date (the last day of the month) or within 1 month previous to that date.
If this were a yearly metric, the metric rule would filter for just requests that occurred on the recurrence date (e.g. the last day of a fiscal year) or within 1 year previous to that date.
Report Limit High Warning. You can set this to trigger when the metric display controls display a yellow warning bar or bullet next to the metric value to indicate that it is out of the usual range. For a count metric like this one, you would size the value based on your expected work load -- in this case if you have more than 650 requests per month, the workload is outsize for your current capacity and deserves attention.
You may prefer to use ratio metrics -- such as Number of Requests per FTE -- to scale your alerts so that they are independent of other fluctuations, such as the number of full-time equivalent craftspersons you have available.
Report Limit High Critical. You can set this to trigger when the metric display controls display a red warning bar or bullet next to the metric value to indicate that it deserves critical attention.