“Is this something that can also be used in version 9.4 of RDF?
In our installation, if one DC alerts for an item, the automatically built workbook shows all the DCs for that item even those DCs that were not alerted. We wonder if we could sort the alerts so the alerted DCs will show up first, and the non alerted will show at the end.”

To answer the question, yes you can use the master alert approach in 9.4.
(For this example I’ll refer to the DC as the final location level, but this could be interchanged with Store as the location level.)

But just to be clear, even with the use of the Master Alert, you’ll still have “All” DC’s show up in the workbook, if the DC was part of any SKU/DC combination that was alerted.

As for sorting, it’s rather easy to do it manually in a pre-formatted workbook. The user will want to make sure that they have the hierarchies “synchronized”, and then in the SKU/DC workbook, they should have the SKU’s in the upper left, the metrics (including the master alert) in the upper right, and then the DC’s listed down the left (the dimension would reside in the lower left). The user would then choose to sort by the master alert and/or whichever measure you want to prioritize by. This approach will only sort the locations for that SKU displayed in the upper left. It wouldn’t be helpful to rollup the product dimension (if you could); because all DC’s will display as having as least one product in the workbook being alerted, so sorting will be of limited value. The process step is rather clean though, every time the user moves to the next SKU, they just go to the menu bar and sort again.

As for having the combinations sorted in the workbook, I haven’t verified that it can be done with a complex customization, but it’s likely that it can be accomplished by coding a batch process that opens the pre-formatted workbook and then systematically performs the sort action after the auto workbook build, but again this would have to be done such that the DC’s are sorted for the first SKU. Because the user will likely need to sort each time they move to the next SKU, I don’t know if coding the customization will be that valuable in the end.