Cognos PowerPlay Transformer Guide - Create Customer dimensions

In this lesson we will create two dimensions: Customers and Customer Region. Each of the dimensions will have its own levels and categories and a single drill-down path.

The Customers dimension will have the following hierarchy:
Customer Segment -> Customer Group -> Customer Name -> Customer ID

And the Customer_Region dimension will have the following hierarchy:
Customer Region -> Customer Country -> Customer ID

It is a good practice to have a look at source data in the Data Source viewer and check if all the columns are displayed correctly before starting building the dimensions.

Follow the steps below to add a new dimension:

1. Drag & Drop CUST_SEGMENT column to the Dimension Map next to the TIME dimension. This will create a new dimension called CUST_SEGMENT. This is not the name we want so double-click on the header and change its name to CUSTOMERS.

2. Now move the other customer Levels to the dimension map and place them underneath CUST_SEGMENT. Those are CUST_GROUP, CUST_NAME and CUST_ID

3. We will use CUST_ID as a key for the customers dimension. Go to the Customer ID column property and tick the Unique checkbox to indicate uniqueness of the categories.

Customers dimension with the source data preview:

Our source data contains also Countries which we want to see in the cube.
But at this stage we don't want to have Customers grouped by Region, Country and then by Segment becuase it would be not intuitive for the end users. We will create two separate dimensions for customers instead, to be able to analyze the data in a more user-friendly way.

We also make the names more user-friendly by clicking on each of the levels and changing the Level Name

Customer regions dimension:

<-- 3. Time dimension

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