Oracle routinely announces significant future changes for EPM customers in each month’s cloud readiness documentation. If you’re not aware, Oracle EPM cloud updates are published monthly. If you read the details within the ‘Important Actions and Considerations’ section (located at the bottom of each readiness release), you will notice several very interesting announcements that we’ve highlighted below.

Infolets Discontinuing

Starting sometime later in 2024 the Infolets functionality will no longer be supported by Oracle. The ability to create Infolets will cease to exist for Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management, Financial Consolidation and Close, FreeForm, Planning, and Tax Reporting applications. Nothing specifically has been announced about existing Infolets, however any issues with them will not be addressed by Oracle support once support ends.

To many of us here at Perficient, the removal of Infolets is not surprising as we’ve seen many customers prefer to use Dashboards 2.0 instead.

Smart View Native Mode Option Deprecation

Continuing with the theme of eliminating functionality not widely used, the Native Smart View option will no longer be supported later this year. Standard will continue to be the ad hoc mode for development of enhancements by Oracle. The announcement contains two additional aspects customers need to note:

• The expectation for existing Native-mode worksheets is that they will work “as is” when the setting is changed to Standard.

• Smart Forms are not supported in Standard mode and there is no plan to support them in Standard mode.

In order to avoid any negative experience by end users, administrators need to proactively start testing all mission-critical ad-hoc sheets using Standard mode. If the results of the testing results in any issues, customers need to log the issue as an enhancement request on Customer Connect.

Removal of Data Management Job Scheduling

Data Integration now has the ability to schedule jobs. This means that Oracle will soon be removing the job scheduler within Data Management. The change is expected to occur sometime in Q4 this year. This means customers need to start migrating their scheduled jobs to the EPM Job Scheduler console immediately! To help faciliate the migration, Oracle is providing a script (“Migrate Schedules to Platform Jobs Scheduler”) within System Maintenance Tasks in Data Management. This change is applicable to the following solutions: Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management, Financial Consolidation and Close, Planning, and Tax Reporting.

Have a question about the above changes, or want to understand more about Oracle EPM cloud updates, drop us a comment!

Can you believe it?… January is behind us and February is here! And with February comes Valentine’s Day… (just a friendly reminder for those of us who tend to mistakenly overlook this holiday ). But lucky for customers, Oracle is not getting distracted by Cupid and is instead providing a laundry list of enhancements for their EPM solutions. Continue reading below as we highlight a few of the items to top the list.

Enhanced Options for Migrating Data Management Artifacts

Starting this month, customers now have the ability to export and import snapshots with setup artifacts or all data. The options available are described below.

• Individual Artifact Setup Only – Use this mode to select the individual artifacts to migrate such as locations and mappings. When importing the snapshot in the target system, the data is merged with the existing data in the target system. Pleas note that this mode does not include Workbench data.
• Single Snapshot Setup Only – Importing the snapshot in the target system results in all the existing setup data being deleted and replaced with the data from the snapshot.
• Single Snapshot Setup and Data – Data in the target system is completely deleted and data from the snapshot is imported. Please note that the import duration time is dependent on the volume of the Workbench data. Additionally, this may affect the performance of the LCM backup.

These options can be set within the Data Management System Settings page and is applicable for the following solutions: Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management, Financial Consolidation and Close, FreeForm, Planning, Planning Modules, Profitability and Cost Management, and Tax Reporting.

Ability to Set Data Management Import and Export Modes

Running data load rules in Data Management has always required users to ensure selection of the correct import/export modes. “Replace” and “Merge” have long been the native defaults for import and export modes, respectively. Now, these options can be set as default within the Application Options page in Data Management: Default Import Mode and Default Export Mode.

Activity Report Expanded to Help Troubleshooting

New performance insights are available for Account Reconciliation, Financial Consolidation and Close, FreeForm, Planning, Planning Modules, and Tax Reporting applications. The Maximum Number of Calculation Threads provides customers with the exact number of Essbase threads during any specific hour. Application administrators can combine this report with the other information within the Activity Reports to proactively troubleshoot performance challenges.

Additionally, for Account Reconciliation apps, the report also now provides the Top 10 Job Types by Execution.

An example of each report is displayed below.

New Drill Down Capability

Drill down to source data is a common requirement for EPM customers. And until now, that ability was not available for summary members in Forms and Reports. Customers using the EPM Integration Agent will now have to ability to drill on summary members. The application essentially passes descendants members back to the queries used by the Agent.

Click here to read more on the Direct Drill feature available for Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management, Financial Consolidation and Close, FreeForm, Planning, Planning Modules, Profitability and Cost Management, and Tax Reporting solutions.

Smart View continues to get better and better each release, expanding on the fact that it is the best spreadsheet add-in within it’s class. The latest version (available within the coming weeks) will now allow users to perform the following:

2023 is almost here! New goals, new projects, and technological advancements are right around the corner. But before we look forward, we should reflect on the past year. There has been some great insight posted by my Perficient colleagues that can be great resources for managers, analysts, and administrators within the Enterprise Management Performance space. Below are just a few highlights that can help provide guidance and information for you all!

Perficient’s Journey to Oracle ERP and HCM Cloud

Available in both a blog post and video, Perficient’s Finance and HR leadership discuss their own experiences in modernizing from Oracle E-Business Suite to Oracle Cloud. Key highlights from include:

• Our overall strategy and approach by phases
• How the team Leveraged Accounting Hub to access transactions in legacy systems
• Overview of the Long-term global footprint which includes Oracle Projects, Accounts Receivable, Procurement, and Cloud Expenses
• How Absence Management, and Time and Labor were combined with Projects
• Integrating Kyriba for treasury management and ONESOURCE for tax
• Last but not least – Lessons learned how to build your own business case for transformation

HFM to FCC – From the Customer’s Point of View

In this four-part series, we hear directly from Perficient customers – Richard Ng, Director, Financial Systems, Cardtronics, and John Oliphant, Financial Developer Lead Allegis Group – on their experiences with replacing HFM (Hyperion Financial Management) with Oracle’s Financial Consolidation and Close cloud offering.

Part 1: Oracle Cloud Benefits From the Customer’s Point of View

Part 2: Consolidation Times

Part 3: Financial Reporting in FCC

Part 4: Looking Back What Would You Change?

Rather watch & listen than read?  Click here for the recorded webinar, which also includes commentary from Rich Wilkie, Oracle VP, EPM Product Management

Enhance Oracle EPM Reporting with Incorta Dashboards

In 2022, Perficient and Incorta announced a new partnership. Our practice lead, Mazen Manasseh, provides a very informative post on the benefits of combining Incorta dashboards with Oracle EPM.  For those EPM techies who may not be familiar with Incorta – it is a truly unified data analytics platform that aggregates large complex data in real time with no data warehouse required.  Powered by Direct Data Mapping, Incorta can make tens of billions of rows of data across multiple source databases analytics-ready in a matter of minutes.

Interested in a live demo of Incorta? Feel free to contact Mazen!

Bonus! – Also be sure to check out Mazen’s post on Implementing Incorta for Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP

Finance leaders from Cardtronics and Allegis Group with more than three years of combined experience using Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close joined Perficient and Oracle for a panel discussion regarding their cloud journey. 

Richard Ng, Director, Financial Systems, Cardtronics, and John Oliphant, Financial Developer Lead Allegis Group, shared the stories of their organizations’ migration from Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) to Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close. In the first blog post of a four-part series, Richard and John discuss Oracle Cloud Benefits from a Customer’s Point of View. In part 2, read about Consolidation Times in HFM vs FCC. In part 3, Richard and John discuss financial reporting in FCC. In this fourth blog post of a four-part series, Richard and John discuss what they would change if they had to do it all over again.

To view the spotlight video on this topic, click on the link below. To view the entire webinar, click here.

If you had to do this all over again, what would you change?

[John Oliphant] We would have done a proof of concept on our data set. Also, we would’ve learned where we didn’t have parity, for certain things like constant currency, and the multiple alternate hierarchies for entity. Some of these things are just not possible because FCC is meant for eliminations and consolidations. It shouldn’t necessarily become the reporting tool for your organization, especially if you have a large number of dimensions.

Taking the extra time is hard to do, but give yourself some time so that you can analyze and understand how the data should look in the product and if you want to push other components to another product. For reporting, understand what you want each one of your products to do, because if your data set is large, FCC can handle it, but it’s going to be a journey to get where you want to be.

[Richard Ng] I think there’s a lot of expectations that FCC is just like HFM, but that is not the case. I would lay out all your functions that you have customized today in HFM and then map it to the FCC. How does it work in FCC? People think, I thought FCC is supposed to work like HFM but in reality it does not.

It also has new features like the movement dimension. So that’s where the cash flow report comes into play.  We could have involved that side of the house earlier because like many, many companies I’ve been to, the cash flow usually is an offline process.  In FCC, the movement dimension helps to make it become more of a system-driven process. I wish I involved the controller earlier just to understand their cash flow process so that we can map out a movement dimension to see what could be done. I wish we would have done that sooner instead of having to shorten the discussion during the project when we grew short of time. And looking back, we, we are not able to truly utilize all the movement dimension, but I think this is something I would go back and start this process much, much earlier. For us, our functional users/business partners are always busy with closing and other activities. You only can get so much of their time. So get out in front of them as early as possible.

Perficient’s Perspective

Hindsight is always 20/20 and our panel certainly called out some considerations for implementing Cloud Consolidations (FCC).  To address some of the items identified above, keep these things in mind:

• Cloud Consolidations performs wonderfully in accepting disparate data, performing translations, eliminations, consolidating and reporting. Focus on those capabilities.
• Look at your legacy Consolidation application and what it is doing. Many applications become “specialized” over the years and their purpose and use change from the original intent.  Your consolidation application is not a budgeting application or management reporting application.  We’ve seen multiple legacy applications with custom dimensions to capture low-level product detail (sometimes to the SKU!), project data, and multiple hierarchies to facilitate budget to actual reporting.
• Look at your data set. Not only custom dimensions and multiple hierarchies, look at your historical data requirements.  This is almost always a key discussion point as companies think they need to have a detailed history for years, which is often not the case.  If years of history are required, invest the time to understand what level of data is required and for what years.  Historical data saved off to reports or a historical cube or application is often times the easier and cheaper alternative.  Remember that any historical data needs to be validated and that often delays projects.  As a general rule, we typically suggest two years of history, plus the current year in an application.  There are other excellent tools in the Oracle suite of products to do Budget and Management Reporting.
• If you are a legacy HFM customer, remember that Cloud Consolidations is NOT HFM in the cloud. It is a net new product with extended capabilities and parameters.
• Invest the time on the front end of your project to understand the new capabilities and coordinate with your business stakeholders what they need the application to do and how it will be done in the new system, especially taking into account new features like the flow dimension.
• If you have concerns about any area of an implementing, trust your instincts and invest the time to perform a prototype of how the application will perform that function. This will take additional time and potentially additional budget, but it is better to understand any challenges earlier rather than later.

These are some considerations for implementing Cloud Consolidations as well as any Oracle product.  Looking back is 20/20, but most project leaders can tell you before a project starts where the issues will be.  Lack of participation, highly specialized legacy applications, not understanding or communicating the capabilities of the new applications all fit in this category.

Proactive planning as you prepare for a project and working closely with your implementation partner will help identify potential risks and formulate the appropriate approach.

Finance leaders from Cardtronics and Allegis Group with more than three years of combined experience using Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close joined Perficient and Oracle for a panel discussion regarding their cloud journey. 

Richard Ng, Director, Financial Systems, Cardtronics, and John Oliphant, Financial Developer Lead Allegis Group, shared the stories of their organizations’ migration from Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) to Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close. In this first blog post of a four-part series, Richard and John discuss Oracle Cloud benefits.

To view the spotlight video on this topic, click on the video link below. To view the entire webinar, click here.

Being on the cloud, what benefits have you seen yourselves?

[Richard Ng] There are lot of benefits being on the cloud – First is data management. It has become very easy to integrate between different cloud systems and we have functionality to integrate without extracting and importing files. Another tool which is useful for us is Enterprise Data Management (EDMCS). It is a great tool for metadata management, and we can manage metadata centrally for all cloud applications.

Oracle also releases monthly patches which provides new features and keeps you up to date.

[John Oliphant] Oracle Cloud benefits for us have been similar. EDMCS is a great product, and we have lot of success with it. We make update at one place, and it flows down to our different applications.

Oracle EPM Cloud monthly updates have been a great benefit as well. We receive notifications and we can test enhancements before it is released in production.

We don’t have to deal with any on-prem vulnerabilities and apply patches as Oracle takes care of that for us. That is a huge benefit as well.

Perficient’s Perspective

Cloud applications are designed to provide a rapid return on investment, with less risk than a traditional implementation. For example, intercompany eliminations, ownership, currency translations are standard functionalities provided by Oracle which can be configured quickly for faster deployment.

Lower Total Cost of Ownership

As cloud environments are managed by Oracle, no infrastructure is required by companies to use Oracle Cloud EPM which is considerable benefit for large and small- to medium-sized companies.  Oracle provides incremental updates to the cloud environments removing the need for companies to perform upgrades.

Scalability

The flexibility of cloud, and the ease with which you can scale, allows you to move faster. When your current environment no longer meets your requirements, you can quickly add capacity at a cost that won’t break the bank. You don’t need to add more servers when more seats are required.

Frequent Upgrades and New Features

An upgrade of a legacy application is no small endeavor and it’s not uncommon for organizations to put off the upgrade decision as long as possible. The expense is a huge consideration, but the time involved is equally daunting. Major upgrades are complex and the pain of the upgrade process is all too real for those who have been through it. You cannot sustain a permanent implementation team to update on-premises applications with each release. With cloud, you don’t have to. Unlike a major release of a legacy application, cloud applications are upgraded with relative ease. For example, as Oracle adds new features and functionality to its cloud offerings, there’s limited disruption to business users. Furthermore, this ensures you have the latest security patches.

Productivity Gains

The cloud offers increased employee productivity through better information flow and collaboration capabilities and by automating routine processes. With Oracle Financial Close and Consolidation you can replace manual, spreadsheet-based financial processes with automated, centralized systems for   consolidated financial reporting.

The user interface is intuitive and easy to follow, the same user experience is extended to all Oracle solutions in the cloud making the transition from one application or module to another seamless and fluid. The modules and applications can be incrementally configured to meet the ever-changing needs of the finance organization. i.e. you can start your EPM cloud journey with a simple Consolidation solution and gradually add Close Manager, Account Reconciliations and Profitability modules as your processes mature.

Minimal IT Involvement

By migrating to Oracle Cloud, the role of your company’s IT department will change. No longer tasked with “keeping the lights on,” they’ll instead be able to focus on more strategic initiatives such as the functionality needed by the business, analyzing what modules to implement, prioritizing upcoming initiatives, and analyzing the success of the implementations.

BETTER DATA MOVEMENT ACROSS APPLICATIONS

Smart Push is a Forms feature available in Planning, Financial Consolidation and Close, and Tax Reporting which permits the movement of data from one cube to another. This movement, or push, occurs instantaneously during execution (click here for options on configuring when the push occurs). Smart Push uses Data Maps to facilitate the mapping of source & target dimensions. Oracle provides a really good video explaining the configuration on their YouTube channel. I highly recommend checking it out!

Up until now, Smart Push has been limited to the cubes within a single application. But starting this month, customers have the ability to Push data across applications!

Setting this up is simple… within the Data Map definition click “Select Remote Cube” in the Cube Name drop down:

Please note, only the Planning Modules and FreeForm Planning are available as both a source & target. The other applications are target-only.

IMPROVING PLANNING TASK MANAGEMENT

The EPM Task Manager provides customers the ability to monitor and report on the various activities within the Planning process. While Task List is a well known feature in Planning, the new EPM Task Manager permits the following advanced capabilities:

• Define the tasks and schedule to ensure the most efficient task flow
• Automate the business process, track status, and provide notifications and alerts
• Notify users by email for delinquencies, due dates, status changes
• Monitor business process status from a dashboard
• Act quickly to fix errors and delays
• Analyze the effectiveness of the business process

Additional information on setting up EPM Task Manager and its capabilities can be found here!

The EPM Task Manager can be enabled via the application creation wizard. Please note, applications currently using Task Lists will not be affected by this new feature.

Are you looking to supplement your Oracle EPM applications with enhanced analytics capabilities?

If you find yourself trying to achieve one of the following, this blog post introduces you to a Perficient solution that leverages the Incorta Direct Data Mapping technology.

• Mash up EPM data with data from other systems like ERP, Sales, etc…
• Drill down from EPM summaries to journals and transaction level details
• Reconcile your EPM summaries against various source systems
• Expand your horizon beyond EPM reporting capabilities and achieve modern-style analytics

Perficient has partnered with Incorta to provide integrated dynamic reporting across both Oracle EPM  and ERP sourced data sets. The Incorta Oracle EPM Connector enables direct connectivity into Oracle EPM applications. Perficient’s Incorta blueprint enables you to leverage the Incorta EPM Connector to not only import EPM metadata and data into Incorta, but also model it together with ERP sourced detail transactions, such as General Ledger Account Balances, Journal Lines and Sales Invoices. The coexistence of EPM and ERP data sets in Incorta enhances financial reporting by providing richer insights across several financial applications.

How can Incorta Supplement Oracle EPM Reporting?

Following are some of the key benefits available in Perficient’s Incorta blueprint for financial analytics.

1. Drill down from EPM consolidated account balances sourced from Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close to ERP application specific General Ledger balances and journals. The Incorta semantic modeling layer covers multiple ERP source applications together with the consolidated EPM financial results. Consequently, one can drill down from a consolidated EPM Account balance to reconcile it against GL balances and journals sourced from one or more source ERP systems. With Incorta’s scalability to handle billions of rows, there are no limitations when it comes to reconciling EPM account summaries to ERP General Ledger journal lines consisting of large data volumes.
2. Compare actual sales from ERP receivables to EPM budgets and forecasts maintained in Oracle Planning and Budgeting. Often times there is a need to track revenue or spending performance on a more frequent basis than what is maintained in the EPM Planning application. With the Incorta blueprint, we are able to track sales performance in comparison to plans defined in EPM, on a near-real time basis. The Incorta model provides a comparative analysis of up to the hour actuals, sourced from one or more ERP systems, with respect to various planning scenarios defined in EPM.
3. Obtain deeper insights by drilling down from EPM financial summaries into more granular levels of detail that only exist in the source ERP systems. While financial information maintained in Oracle EPM provides a high-level view of financial performance results, it doesn’t cover a detailed analysis of various aspects of your business, such as customer specific characteristics or Item/SKU level of detail. Perficient’s Incorta-based dashboard solution offers seamless navigation from an EPM financial summary to transaction level detail sourced from ERP sub-ledgers. For example, when comparing income variance to plans and forecasts, you will be able to drill down to invoice details to identify drivers of profitability on a granular level. For instance, this will help identify which product or service offerings, or what groups of customers are contributing to higher and lower revenue and margin.

Implementing Incorta for Oracle EPM and ERP General Ledger and Sub-ledger reporting delivers several other benefits as well:

1. Consolidated reporting against large volumes of data, such as invoice lines and multi-year historical analyses
2. Dynamic reporting that enables multi-scenario comparisons and interactive drill-throughs to detail
3. Point-in-time financial reporting (such as MTD, QTD & YTD) and compare against prior periods, budgets and forecasts throughout the month, and not just after completion of monthly close and consolidation cycles
4. Easy access to critical reporting on financial operations like GL to subledger reconciliation, intercompany eliminations, manual journal entries, unapproved invoices, etc
5. Automated alerts on KPIs that are deviating from expected benchmarks
6. Secure access to up-to-date financial information on mobile devices

To get a closer look at this solution and see a live demo of the Incorta dashboard, you may reach me at mazen.manasseh@perficient.com.

If your organization is either currently on, or considering a move to, Oracle Cloud EPM Financial Consolidation and Close, we have assembled an outstanding panel of finance leaders from various industries who will share their experience implementing and deploying Financial Consolidation and Close, as well as tangible business outcomes.

Join us for a live virtual panel that will be moderated by Perficient’s Priyankant Rami, Project Manager, Oracle EPM. Panelists include:

• Cardtronics – Richard Ng, Director, Financial Systems
• CVR Energy – John Holeman, Hyperion Financial Manager
• Allegis Group –  John Oliphant, Financials Developer Lead

Also joining us will be Rich Wilkie, Oracle VP, EPM Product Management, who will share his perspective on best practices and the roadmap for Financial Consolidation and Close.

Attend this informative session and have your questions answered by our expert panel. Register today!

Oracle is introducing major enhancements to its EPM reporting capabilities with the February 2021 update. These enhancements will undoubtedly provide Oracle EPM customers the opportunity to expand their current reporting abilities to meet the challenges facing organizations today. Continue reading below as we touch on three things every customer must know about the new functionality now available.

The Introduction of FR’s (Financial Reporting) Replacement: Embedded Reports

Per Oracle’s readiness release: “Management Reporting within Oracle’s Narrative Reporting offering has been available for the past few years. It is now embedded in the EPM Cloud Platform applications (Planning, Financial Consolidation and Close, Tax Reporting, and Free Form) alongside, and eventually replacing, Financial Reporting.”

The new Reports provides several advantages including an easy-to-use drag and drop interface for designing and editing reports, bundling of reports into Books, and report Bursting (the ability to run a report or book for more than one member of a single dimension for one data source).

The New Embedded Reports Offering Provides a Better User Experience

Customers will NOT have to wait for future releases in order to see new functionality that directly improves the reporting experience. The following lists immediate features/advantages of using the new embedded reports option over continuing to use FR reports:

• • • New Charts – Waterfall, doughnut, scatter, bubble, etc.
    • User Interaction – Selectable alias tables, member label display, ad-hoc zoom mode,
    • Narration – Intelligent Narrative Generation is available

Migrating from FR to the New Reports is Possible

Customers can perform an in-place (on the same instance) migration of existing FR reports . Users can select either all or individual reports to migrate. Not all elements of the FR reports will migrate automatically;  any the errors requiring resolution when opening a migrated report are shown to the users. The error messages will be provided in an easy-to-understand explanation of the issue.

Note: Due to architecture differences, migration from Narrative Reporting is not supported at this time.

As you can see, the next generation is here! Perficient recommends that Oracle EPM customers evaluate their reporting capabilities, experiences, and goals against these new developments.

Contact us today if you have questions, or would like to understand how Perficient can help!

Did you notice that accounts defined outside the balance sheet hierarchy has started to roll forward since Nov close ?  That’s because of the previously communicated 20.11 upgrade feature that extends account scope of translation and consolidation.  Since you have certain customization needs and you wish to not have these accounts to roll forward outside the balance sheet hierarchy, you can set up a new variable called “ExtendAccountScope”  and set the value to “False”.  You may need to reconsolidate if you haven’t locked prior periods as needed.

Stay tuned!

More details on this oracle documentation :  Extend Account Scope of Translation and Consolidation Logic Feature (Doc ID 2736408.1)

Oracle’s support for composite forms will be stopped from May 2021 according to oracle’s update for future.  There are dashboard features that you can take advantage of to convert your composite forms sooner than later.

And also if you are executing rulesets using Automate command “runBusinessRule” – you may want to explore “runRuleset” command as applicable before May 2021.

Here are some news from oracle regarding the October 2020 patch update for FCCS: The much awaited changes to approval / review process are coming up.  Titbits from today’s Oracle webcast – FCCS related to approval process for you are,

• In the approval process, when you add new entities you no longed need to unlock and re-lock prior periods anymore in order to lock the new entities for current period.
• The auto lock will be applied from the inception period of the application till the last period when the parent of the new entity was locked last.
• The new entity will inherit its lock status from its parents for the prior periods.
• For any entity that participates in the review process, the system is going to allow data entry to the entity after the review process is started.

Note, from what I understand:

-> The key is that all the prior periods expected to be in locked state for all the ancestors of  this new entity for this enhancement to work as expected.

-> The approvals unit synchronization will be triggering the features introduced in Oct 2020 to work I guess so remember to synch your approvals unit as soon as you add a new entity to your application.