PMF gives you a lot of flexibility in dealing with measurements. It supports quick one-off measurements you might add when prototyping a new scorecard, and it also allows you to design deeply loaded measures that span multiple time periods.

PMF supports measure pooling, which enables you to create measures independent of specific scorecards. You can create a measure and link it to every scorecard in your organization, or unlink a measure and hold it for later use. Linked measures are controlled by data access security, which allows users to view only measures to which they have been granted access (for example, through an optional Organization dimension).

There are two types of measures in PMF:

• Loaded measures are multi-dimensional production measures designed to change over time. You can load them regularly from external data sources into PMF. They can be fully commented and can support the robust multi-dimensional cascading model of the product. You can view the production measures for your scorecard in several ways from the Author and Manage tabs. For more information, see Loading Production Measures.
• User-entered measures enable users to manually input measures and their targets when doing so is either desirable or the metrics are not available in a data source. These measures are also multi-dimensional production measures designed to change over time. To view or edit existing user-entered measures for your scorecard, click the Measures panel button in the Author or Manage tab, and in the tree structure that appears, select the desired measure in the User Entered Measures folder. To create a new user-entered measure, click the Measures panel button in the Author or Manage tab, and click the New button to open the New Measure Wizard. For more information, see Working with User-Entered Measures.