There are three consolidation options in Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM):
- Consolidate All
- Consolidate All with Data
- Consolidate
What each option does has been appropriately discussed in many articles, which also properly suggest to use the Consolidate All option sparingly.
I wanted to share our experience on these consolidation methods.
If the application design use alternate entity hierarchies and consolidate them separately, Consolidate All with Data should only be used on the primary hierarchy. Alternate hierarchies should be consolidated using Consolidate option. To illustrate:
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After successfully using Consolidate All with Data on the primary entity hierarchy, the consolidation status would appear as follows:
If the Alternate Hierarchy was consolidated using Consolidate All with Data also, the result would be as follows:
Although the main hierarchy had been previously consolidated, the recalculations, retranslations, and reconsolidation performed on the alternate hierarchy would cause the status of the main hierarchy to be changed to CN.
The desired result shown below could be achieved if Consolidate All with data was used for the main hierarchy and Consolidate was used for all the alternate hierarchies.
Almost always, Consolidate All is not used. On one of our implementation, we modified the rules for a new entity which did not have any data loaded on Jan of the current year. Using Consolidate All with Data would not calculate the target intersections because they did not have any data at all. We used Consolidate All to allow HFM to invoke the rule that populated the targeted intersections involving the new entity. For all succeeding periods, only Consolidate All with Data was needed.
