Note: this help article concerns units of measure. See Units of Measure for more information.

Creating flexible units of measure simplifies the entry of complicated unit conversion factors and allows value modelers to easily modify business scenarios. It also removes the chance of an error if the unit conversion factor is tied to a different calculation.

Let's take an example of a chemical company that sells an automotive coating to a vehicle manufacturer. The base customer unit of measure for this model is vehicle, and an alternative customer unit is year. The offering and competitor price units are kilogram (kg).

If a given vehicle manufacturer produces 40,000 vehicles per year, and each vehicle needs one kg of automotive coating of either the offering or competitor, then the Units & Currency dialog should look like this.

Next, go the variables tab and identify the unit conversion variables. Unit conversion variables exist for each customer unit and price unit, and new ones are automatically created when you add an alternative unit. You can identify them by the hash mark (#) in front of the variable name, and by default are on the top of the variables list.

To create flexible units, select the drop down arrow (on the far right side of the variable) to and select "Convert to subformula". This will open a dialog where you can create a flexible unit by adding variables associated with the unit conversion (see below).

This now allows for your value model to be more flexible, as well as accommodate more complicated conversion factors.