HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
Understanding a Business Unit
A business unit is a quantity that reflects the kind of business you do
and its activity. It is something a business planning department
understands; it is not a computer metric.
Most businesses are complex. Your business probably can be thought of as
having numerous business units. For instance, your company may receive
orders that it must fill. The number of orders received is a potential
business unit. So is the number of units shipped. Other possible
business units might be the number of mail messages processed, the number
of customers handled, or the number of users. Defining the business unit
can be difficult and deceptive. For instance, your business may be
processing orders, but the business unit may be line items.
Of course, your interest in these business units begins when they impact
one or more computer systems. Suppose your company expects to double its
shipments within the next year. You know that system capacity is going
to be impacted. But how?
HP RXForecast includes a Business Units trending method that can help you
forecast the impact of changes in a business unit upon your system. But
to be meaningful, this method requires careful work on your part. You
will need to do the following:
1. Identify the business unit.
2. Gather historic data on the business unit.
You may experience a delay between the time you identify the
business unit and the time when enough historic values of the unit
are available to generate a reliable forecast.
3. Collect expected future values for the business unit.
Typically, this forecast would be derived from a business plan or
projections made by a planning group.
4. Construct a business unit file.
A business unit file is a flat ASCII file that can be created
using any editor.
5. Correlate the business unit to a metric.
For example, the number of orders received in a factory could be
expected to have a high correlation with the CPU Utilization of an
order processing system.