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The InfoBridge component of plan (preview) is a no-code data integration, preparation, and transformation engine that lets you connect to multiple data sources and consolidate them into a single, unified report. You can also perform common data transformations on data sources, such as appending, merging, pivoting, un-pivoting, and grouping data.
Important
This feature is in preview.
Why use InfoBridge?
Business reporting and planning often involve multi-page reports with data at varying granularities. InfoBridge enables you to consolidate data from multiple visuals into a single writeback table. This simplifies data management and ensures consistency across reports. Without InfoBridge, each visual would need to write back to its own table, requiring you to maintain multiple tables separately. InfoBridge solves many use cases that typically require composite modeling, ETL and automation tools, complex DAX and SQL scripting, extensive BI expertise, and IT overheads.
Note
Best practice
Use a single writeback table whenever possible. This approach minimizes maintenance overhead and makes it easier to consume data in consolidated P&L statements or executive dashboards.
Use cases for InfoBridge
- Regional and global budgeting: Manage regional budgets with dedicated pages for each region, consolidated into a global budget page.
- Operational expense planning: Plan expenses at a granular level (for example, salary plans at the employee level) and consolidate them into broader expense categories.
- Financial planning and analysis: Import sales and COGS data from product-level reports into consolidated P & L statements. Perform planning and forecasts on the consolidated data.
- Planning in pharmaceutical and manufacturing industries: Plan at the material level and aggregate data to higher levels like plant or product family.
- Cost center planning: Perform planning at detailed levels (for example, IT maintenance costs, miscellaneous costs within specific cost centers) and aggregate the data for executive dashboards.
- Capacity planning: Convert volume forecasts from the planning sheets into headcount and resource requirements.
Key capabilities
The following table lists the core capabilities of InfoBridge.
| Capability | Description |
|---|---|
| Centralized data access | Access business data from multiple systems in a single platform, reducing the need to switch between tools. |
| Data integration | Combine and harmonize data from different types of sources to create unified reports. |
| Collaborative planning | Create forecasts, budgets, and plans across multiple planning sheets and integrate them with InfoBridge. |
| Advanced data transformation | Join, merge, append, group, and pivot rows and columns. |
| Data cleansing functions | Built-in data cleansing functions, such as rounding, text manipulation, find-and-replace, and sorting to help standardize, clean, and organize datasets. |
Next steps
Learn how to use InfoBridge in the following articles: