“A picture is worth a thousand words” is an adage that rings very true to those of us who are vision-driven learners. Simply hearing and reading about a solution is usually not enough. Many of us “need to see to believe” the benefits being promised by any solution. Oracle and Perficient understand this concept very well. Many times we have partnered to provide insightful demos of a multitude of solutions to organizations across various industries. As valuable as demos are for customers, they sometimes require a high level of effort to coordinate schedules, attendee lists, video conferencing technology, etc. It’s not uncommon that weeks go by before the demo actually occurs. However, there are other valuable resources available that provide immediate visual illustration.

For Oracle EPM customers, one such option is the Oracle EPM in the Cloud YouTube channel. It’s a great channel with videos covering customer stories, developments at Oracle, Solution Overviews and Tutorials. If you haven’t checked it out, we highly suggested you do so!

There are literally hundreds of videos available on the channel, and over 50 dedicated specifically to Oracle Enterprise Data Management (EDM). Below, we’ve highlighted three key videos that can help organizations gain a better understanding of the value of Oracle EDM.

Overview: Tour of Enterprise Data Management Cloud

Provides a great introduction to EDM’s purpose and explains the benefits that the solution offers. Ends with a nice quick demo from the business user’s perspective.

Getting Started with Enterprise Data Management Cloud for Users

A great demo covering user navigation, workflow experience (both requestor and approver perspectives), change visualization features, data integrity validations, subscription processing, and various other valuable components of the solution.

Workflow Approvals in Enterprise Data Management

Explanation of EDM’s approval policies, workflow stages, collaboration features, and how each contributes to a next-generation workflow experience.

Bonus!! Concurrent Request Editing in Enterprise Data Management – Expands on the collaboration features mentioned in the above mentioned Workflow Approvals video.

Contact us today if you’d like to learn more about Oracle EDM, other Oracle products, or how Perficient is helping clients transform to meet challenges today & in the future!

Oracle’s EPM Cloud December release contains some exciting new features for EDM. Many of the features are centered on enhancing the capabilities of building Expressions within the solution. For those not familiar with expressions in EDM… Expressions enable developers to define business logic to manage data. Expressions can be used within properties to transform data, derive the property values, or even create custom validations to enforce data integrity. The ability to build expressions is a key aspect of EDM and empowers organizations to customize the application to meet their unique needs.

Ok, so back to EDM’s latest features…

Expression Enhancement: Identify Parents for Node Locations

The parent for each location of a node (a location is simply a point in the hierarchy where the node exists…can be the primary or shared instance) can now be returned in an expression. This can greatly benefit organizations which have special rules for nodes dependent on their location within the dimension/hierarchy.

Expression Enhancement: Return Previous and Next Sibling for Nodes

Sometimes it’s not the parent that is needed for an expression, but rather the ability to identify the siblings of a node. Sibling nodes are those surrounding a specific node. Starting this month, the expression builder now provides new methods for return information for sibling nodes.

• PreviousSibing – returns the sibling node before the current node under the common parent
• NextSibling – method returns the sibling node after the current node under the common parent

Expression Enhancement: Save & Load Expressions

Until now, the migration of expressions between EDM environments has been a tedious and manual process. Oracle has addressed this by now providing the ability to save expressions to a JSON file and upload them into the expression builder in a different environment. All types of expressions (derived properties, property transformations, custom validations, subscription filters, policy filters, and extract filters) are supported.

The file is downloaded to the user’s browser default download location. Be aware, edited or manually created JSON files are not supported.

The steps for loading an expression are as follows:

1. In the expression builder, click Load from File .
2. In the File Open dialog, select the JSON file to load, and then click Open.

   Note: If an expression is already open in the expression builder, the existing expression is overridden. Any unknown object references or syntax errors are omitted when the expression is loaded. Incomplete expression terms are displayed with a red outline, indicating an error.

3. Optional: Click Cancel to cancel the load and retain the current expression

Validation Enhancement: Shared Member Before Base Member Validation

It’s long been a requirement for Oracle Planning and Financial Consolidation & Close applications that shared members are located after base members in the dimensions. This month we see the introduction of a new standard validation for these applications types to ensure this requirement is meant systematically.

The full listing of the standard Planning validations can be found here. And here for Financial Consolidation & Close.

Migration Enhancement: Template Import Preview

The application template feature was introduced in a previous release. Templates allow for the transferring of individual applications and their metadata objects across environments (for example, from a test environment to a production environment). Templates produce an offline file with application configurations. A really important feature for organizations looking to expand EDM’s footprint.

Template files can now be previewed by the user prior to importing into a target environment. The preview provides users the ability to can identify the artifacts in the template, determine which are new, modified, unchanged, or will be skipped by the import process. Artifacts marked as skipped include error messages indicating problems to be resolved before or after the template import.

See below for an example of the template preview feature…

Migration Enhancement: Update Existing Applications During Template Import

This may be the most impactful enhancement listed. Since it’s introduction, EDM has been missing the ability to migrate individual artifacts. Migration has simply been a “all or nothing” path. However, the solution now allows for the migration through the template import feature. The applications in the target environment and their respective artifacts can be modified during the template import. Additionally, new artifacts can be created through this feature as well.

There you have it; Oracle’s most recent new features for EDM customers. Contact us today to learn more about EDM and how organizations across the globe are its reaping benefits daily!

Oracle EPM customers need to prepare for several upcoming changes for November 2021. These changes are mentioned in the Important Actions and Considerations section of the October Update documentation. The documentation can be found here. While the updates highlighted in this post are not critical in nature, administrators and power users should be aware in order to avoid any potential conflicts.

Dashboards/Infolets Can No Longer Be Default Page

With next month’s update (21.11), the ability to use Dashboards or Infolets as the default page for Oracle EPM services. Per Oracle’s statement, this change is intended to provide a improved user experience. We recommend that application administrators notify their users of this upcoming change so that any questions about how to access the dashboards/infolets from the home page are answered.

Logos and Background URL Images Must Be Secure

The ability to customize the look and feel of an application has become such a standard feature for today’s world. Aspects such as colors, layout, and logos can improve the usability for users across the organization. Oracle understands this and is continually improving the customization capabilities across the cloud offerings. One such improvement coming in November is that only secured URLs will be permitted for use as logos and background images. If you’re not familiar with these settings, look to the Appearance page in your applications to options on these settings.

Copy Version Capabilities Restricted/Secured

Over the last few years we’ve seen Oracle place an increased importance on customer feedback. Whether it’s increasing the capabilities of EPM applications, improving performance, enhancing existing features, etc. Oracle is interested in hearing from and engaging with the customers. And this change is a direct reflection of that effort. The ‘Copy Version’ feature in Planning, Financial Consolidation and Close, and Tax Reporting has caused headache for many customers due to the fact that it’s available to end users. This has resulted in some unintended data issues for some customers. And if one thinks about it, copying large sets of data is typically (and in many institutions a requirement) of an administrator only. Therefore, next month’s update will restrict this feature to administrators.

BONUS:

Below are a few upcoming announcements that deserve an ‘honorable mention’.

FINANCIAL CONSOLIDATION AND CLOSE

Sometime in the future (exact timing unknown), the following changes will be applied for Consolidation Journals:

• Submit, Post and Unpost actions will require a user to have write access to the DataSource member.
• Approve and Reject actions will require the user to have read or write access to the Data Source dimension members used in Journals.

PROFITABILITY AND COST MANAGEMENT

Purging historical job logs is a best practice task that has been around for decades. So this upcoming change for PCM is not surprising. Beginning in November, only the most recent 10,000 jobs will be kept in the application. The daily maintenance window will delete any jobs beyond this number each day. Understandably, some organizations may have a requirement to keep job information beyond this threshold. We suggest that those administrators begin downloading the Job Library on a recurring basis to ensure they have this information readily available.

Starting with the 20.09 update, Oracle will cease supporting Internet Explorer as a compatible browser for EPM Cloud applications. This will leave Edge, Chrome, and Firefox ESR as the remaining supported browsers for Windows users. The move away from Internet Explorer is due to the fact that Microsoft has announced that Internet Explorer 11 is the last major version of the browser.

The following table outlines the current supported browsers. This information can be found in the “Getting Started with Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud for Administrators” guide.

Click here to access Oracle’s Getting Started Guide.

Click here to read more about Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Lifecycle FAQ.

Have questions about browser compatibility or other EPM cloud topics, contact us today!

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) cloud roadmaps are expanding rapidly across organizations and industries. It’s becoming more and more common to see multiple cloud EPM applications being implemented; Oracle Planning, Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close, Oracle Profitability and Cost Management, etc. And while the number of applications being implemented by organizations are increasing, so is the need to efficiently manage the dimensions within and across the EPM footprint. Continue below to learn why Oracle Enterprise Data Management Cloud (EDM) is critical for managing dimensions for cloud EPM applications.

EDM Provides Time Savings – In an EPM cloud environment without  EDM, administrators have to apply dimension updates to each application individually. However, with EDM dimension management is centralized. Dimension updates can be applied with a few clicks within EDM – no need to log into each cloud application & apply the update separately. EDM also enables the synchronization of updates for dimensions shared across applications; meaning that users enter the update only once and EDM does the work of aligning the dimension for all the impacted applications!

EDM Empowers Business Users – EDM’s workflow components allow for business users to submit requests. Simply enough, but it provides a truly unique feature for users – change visualization. Within a request in EDM, users can see & interact with future-state dimensions as they apply updates. The target applications are not updated until the request passes final approval – ensuring data integrity remains. Gone are the days where business users are required to “mock up” the future-state of a dimension so that administrators can comprehend & apply the updates.

EDM Enforces Data Governance and Reduces Errors – In a traditional EPM cloud setting, business users submit a request to administrators who are responsible for analyzing & applying the updates. Does the request meet system requirements? Does the request meet organizational data standards, such as naming conventions? Has all the required supporting information been provided withe request to ensure is applied correctly? Has the request been approved by data stewards? – All questions that typically are left to administrators to ensure are answered. And what happens if the administrators miss something? The time lost to correct the issue could be significant. EDM removes this bottleneck by systematically enforcing data governance requirements on the front end – when the request is initiated by the users. EDM workflow policies can also be configured to ensure requests are reviewed & approved by required personnel.

There you have it. Three major reasons why EDM is critical for EPM cloud environments. Contact us today to learn more about EDM!

Financial analysts are often looking for a daily tracker of their organization’s sales. Daily sales tracking requires bench-marking against budgets and forecasts. However, it is often the case that plans are defined at a higher level compared to actuals. In addition, while actuals are available from ERP, plans are maintained in a separate application for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).

If you would like to learn more how to consolidate daily sales tracking to incorporate actuals from ERP and plans from Oracle EPM, join this OATUG’s Online Forum session scheduled for next Tuesday.

In this session I will talk about how to leverage Oracle Analytics to directly source data from Oracle EPM Cloud or Hyperion. Several sample dashboards will be presented to enable dynamic reporting against ERP and EPM data. I will also go into how to connect to and model data from EPM (such as PBCS, HFM, Hyperion Planning and Essbase) together with Data Warehouse actual sales data from ERP or Sales.

Interested in enabling OAC or OAS/OBIEE reporting against EPM?
Check out my two other related blog posts:
See How Adding Oracle Analytics Can Elevate Your EPM Experience
Supplement Oracle EPM with Oracle Analytics and Autonomous Data Warehouse in 10 Weeks

More upcoming OATUG online sessions on Oracle Analytics and EPM are available here.

Daily Sales Tracker in Oracle Analytics

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

At Perficient, we have successfully implemented analytics solutions that complement both on-premises Hyperion applications as well as Oracle EPM Cloud business processes: Planning and Budget Cloud Service, Financial Consolidation & Close Service, and Essbase Cloud. Our methodology requires minimal data movement leveraging direct connectivity from Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) or Server (on-premises OBIEE).

Following are some of the common solutions we have helped establish for several of our clients:

• Deliver road-maps of the future-state of analytics combining EPM and Oracle Analytics in a complementary and value-add manner
• Consolidated reporting of EPM financials with other data sources, such ERP, CX, HCM or a Data Warehouse.
• Dashboard style analytics with modern graphics such as tiles, waterfalls and map layouts
• Dynamic reporting that enables multi-scenario comparisons and interactive drill-throughs to detail
• Comparing actuals to budget or forecast and explaining variances and understanding drivers of profitability by going beyond GL level data to rich detail from sub-ledgers such as Order Management, AP, AR, Procurement, Fixed Assets, Manufacturing, or Supply Chain
• Comparing sales bookings to actual revenue as per the ‘books and records’ of the firm
• Perform 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.
• Easy access to critical reporting on financial operations like GL to subledger reconciliation, intercompany eliminations, manual journal entries, unapproved invoices, etc
• Facilitated reporting against large volumes of data such as multi-year historical analyses
• Automated alerts on KPIs that are off benchmarks like common averages and standard deviations
• Enable secure access to up-to-date financial information on mobile devices
• Leveraging detailed business data within machine learning models to enable predictive forecasting

What to Expect to Happen in 10 Weeks

The Perficient team can implement our solution offering in 10 weeks. Here is what you would expect to happen during that time:

• Activate Test and Production subscriptions of Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) and Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC).
• Integrate an EPM application/cube into the Oracle Analytics model.
• Create OAC Data Flows to load transaction data into ADW from another data source (could be Oracle or non-Oracle, Cloud or on-premises application).
• Deliver a reporting data model consisting of 2 fact tables, 5 dimensions, and 1 EPM application.
• Develop 2 dynamic OAC dashboards that combine EPM data with ADW data and enable drill-down to detail reports.
• Test functionality and accuracy of reported data between OAC, EPM and other source systems.
• Demo to the business OAC capabilities for self-service reporting, advanced analytics and built-in machine learning.

Perficient’s service offering lays the foundation for an analytics road map that combines EPM, OAC and ADW in a complementary and value-add manner.

Are you heading to Collaborate in Las Vegas?

I will be presenting on a closely related topic: Daily Sales Tracking for Financial Analytics. If you are interested to explore your options with a similar solution, leave me a message.

You may also want to check out 6 must-attend sessions at Collaborate. Attend sessions, enter to win an Amazon gift card, and stop by booth #641 and drop off your entry form found in the OATUG Coupon Book for your chance to win an Oracle EPM Upgrade vs. Cloud Migration Workshop!

The Oracle EPM suite provides best-in-class business process applications when it comes to activities such as financial planning, consolidation and period-end close. Organizations are often looking for ways to easily incorporate financial information, out of EPM applications, into consolidated reporting with other systems (such as ERP, Sales, HR, and others). Also, there is great value in enabling navigation from summarized financials out of EPM, to more detailed transaction-level data out of other applications. Together Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) and Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) supplement the Oracle EPM suite, therefore providing an integrated view of EPM financials with other applications data.

OAC is an enterprise-level analytics platform that is well-known for its highly governable data modeling capability, thus providing reliable and company-wide standardized reporting. At the same time, OAC offers the agility often needed by business analysts to perform self-service data integration, data preparation and reporting. And ADW offers the fastest time to value when it comes to data consolidation across multiple sources for cross-functional analytics.

How Can Oracle Analytics Cloud and Autonomous Data Warehouse Supplement Oracle EPM?

At Perficient, we have successfully implemented several analytics solutions that seamlessly integrate with Oracle EPM.  Our methodology requires minimal data movement, leveraging direct connectivity from OAC to either EPM Cloud suite or on-premises Hyperion. Following are some of the benefits that are key to this solution:

• Perform multi-scenario comparisons (such as actual to forecast to budget), explain variances, and understand drivers of profitability by going beyond GL level data to rich detail from sub-ledgers (such as Order Management, Payables, Receivables, Procurement, Projects, etc.).
• Perform point-in-time and daily financial reporting (such as MTD, QTD & YTD) and compare against prior periods, and plans, throughout the month, and not just after completion of financial close.
• Drill down to ADW transaction detail that is loaded from one or more source applications and optimized for reporting.
• Consolidated reporting against large volumes of data, such as multi-year historical analyses.
• Leverage existing investments in Oracle EPM technologies to perform federated reporting of non-EPM data sources against EPM dimensions (such as Product Hierarchy, Entity, Cost Center, etc.)
• Dynamic dashboard-style analytics with modern graphics such as tiles, waterfalls and map layouts

In my next blog, I will present our quick start service offering to supplement Oracle EPM with Oracle Analytics and Autonomous Data Warehouse.

Are you heading to Collaborate in Las Vegas?

I will be presenting on a closely related topic: Daily Sales Tracking for Financial Analytics. If you are interested to explore your options with a similar solution, leave me a message.

You may also want to check out 6 must-attend sessions at Collaborate. Attend sessions, enter to win an Amazon gift card, and stop by booth #641 and drop off your entry form found in the OATUG Coupon Book for your chance to win an Oracle EPM Upgrade vs. Cloud Migration Workshop!

Perficient presents at Oracle OpenWorld 2019 – live from the show floor, the GM of Perficient’s EPM practice summarizes what’s supported, which features are being deprecated, and what’s coming in the future.

If you are an existing Hyperion customer, this 10-minute video will be time well spent. Oracle is making a commitment to its customers by moving the Hyperion 11.2 instance to Applications Unlimited. What that means for customers is premier support through 2030 at a minimum and that may get extended. This is the last major out of place upgrade you will have to do. To learn more, watch the video now!

Whatever tools you may be using today, our team can help you by introducing best practices to the financial close, forecasting, reporting, and compliance cycles. Whether your company chooses to stay on-premises or move to the cloud, Perficient can help.

The recent updates for Oracle’s Enterprise Data Management platform offers a few new features to be aware if considering implementing the tool.

Inclusion of Financials Cloud General Ledger

Users can now manage descriptive flexfields (DFFs) for Financials Cloud General Ledger. Descriptive flexfields can be registered for Financials Cloud General Ledger applications and/or segments. The registration creates additional properties to house descriptive flexfield data within node types defined for the Financials Cloud General Ledger application or segment.

Descriptive flexfield values are managed by these properties in viewpoints for Financials Cloud General Ledger. Descriptive flexfield values can be imported and exported along with the segment values they are associated with.

Sample Application and Recreating the Service

Starting with the July 2019 update, a sample application is provided with the tool. The sample application contains pre-loaded sample data and related artifacts for Enterprise Data Management. Users can explore the capabilities of Enterprise Data Management, get familiar with its features, and use tutorials before they start working with their own data.  The sample application includes examples for Financials Cloud General Ledger, Planning, and Financial Consolidation application types.

From a new option on the Settings and Actions menu, the Service administrator can recreate the service which removes all applications and artifacts. The administrator can then create a sample application, new application, or import a snapshot.

New Statistical Properties

Two new properties, Last Modified By and Last Modified Date are now available. The properties allow users to identify the user who last performed a request action to a node and when the user made the change. These properties can be added to node types and used in viewpoints where this information is necessary.

Stay tuned to future posts where we’ll take a deeper dive into each of these features from Oracle’s recent enterprise data management updates. More to come on those soon. Until next time!

Using substitution variables to store folder directories and then referencing the variables in calc scripts/business rules has long been a best practice in the world of on-prem applications. For example, using a variable to store the path to a shared folder for a dataexport command.

DATAEXPORT “File” “|” “&ExportServer/Sample.TXT” “#mi”;

But cloud applications do not have visibility or access to the on-prem servers, folders, shared drives, etc. And so users may encounter the following error when launching a data export rule in PBCS:

Cannot calculate. Essbase Error(1005000): Ascii Backup: Failed to open…

Note: The ExportServer substitution variable is set to a directory on an on-prem server.

It’s worth noting that simply validating the rule will NOT identify the error (see below), the rule has to be launched in order to encounter the problem.

The Fix

The rule(s) must be updated to place the export file in the Inbox/Outbox Explorer within PBCS. This can be accomplished by replacing the substitution variable with /u03/lcm/.

The users can download the file from the Inbox/Outbox Explorer and place in the appropriate location. Or better yet, an EPM Automate script can easily be written to facilitate the running of the rule and downloading of the file.

To read more on PBCS Business Rules, click here.

Oracle’s commitment to rapidly expanding Enterprise Data Management Cloud Service (EDMCS) features can be seen in the latest updates to the SaaS offering. The enhancements outlined below represent a significant advancement in EDMCS’s ability to simplify dimension and hierarchy administration facing many organizations today.

Subscriptions

Systematically applying dimension alignment across target systems is a goal of any dimension management system. Since the initial release, EDMCS has provided this capability. EDMCS’s use of views provides the ability to compare and align across viewpoints, but it’s been dependent on the user to manually perform those alignments. To address this, EDMCS now offers the option to configure Subscriptions between viewpoints.

Subscriptions enable sharing nodes between source and target viewpoints. An update made to the source viewpoint automatically generates a request to apply the change in the target viewpoint. For example, when a node is added in the general ledger viewpoint (such as adding a new account), EDMCS automatically generates a request to add that node to the Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service account viewpoint. Additionally, the subscribing viewpoint can be configured to auto-submit the request (if the request passes validations) or require an assigned user to review and submit. Last, but not least, EDMCS can send email notifications to users assigned to the subscribing viewpoints. Subscriptions represent a significant advancement in the maturation of EDMCS. Not only does the feature improve dimension alignment efforts, but also lays the framework for advanced governance capabilities!

Inheritance

It was quite surprising (and a bit disappointing) to see property inheritance functionality missing from EDMCS when first released. However, property values of parent nodes are now inheritable by descendant nodes. Inheritance significantly reduces the manual effort of maintaining properties and ensures consistency. And yes, inherited values can be overridden at a lower level to handle exceptions.

Please note that there are some caveats. Inheritance works only for nodes in a given hierarchy node set and is not enabled for existing applications with Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud, Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting Cloud, or Oracle Financials Cloud General Ledger applications. Even with these restrictions, the inheritance function greatly simplifies property management for customers.

Oracle Financials Cloud GL Adapter

Did you catch our the enhancement in the previous paragraph? Oracle Financials Cloud GL is now a supported out-of-box application! The application adapter provides the following:

• Registration of Segments and Trees using a new application type
• General Ledger properties and validations
• Import of segment values and tree versions
• Export segment values and tree versions to Financials Cloud

Managing dimensions within ERP to EPM integrations is a challenge for many organizations. EDMCS alleviates that headache and streamlines this integration with the new adapter.

These are just a few of the latest enhancements to EDMCS. Many more exist and are coming. Feel free to contact us for more information!