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!

Oracle EPM cloud customers who utilize solutions which using non-hybrid Essbase versions will be upgraded to hybrid version soon. According to Oracle’s March release notes, this upgrade will occur in the next 2 months. It’s important to note that this upgrade does not force non-hybrid configured cubes to now become hybrid. It’s simply updating the Essbase version within the application as part of Oracle’s effort to upgrade all environments to an Oracle Essbase version which supports hybrid cubes. Quoting Oracle “…if the application is configured to use non-hybrid cubes, this update will not change it to use hybrid cubes.” I know, I know.. Whew!

Now, if you’re not sure if your application is hybrid Admins can easily find this by checking the Activity Report in each application. If you find a “Yes” value in the Essbase Version supports Hybrid Block Storage Option field, then the application is hybrid enabled (see below image for where to find this information).

Non-hybrid Oracle EPM cloud customers who have concerns about potential issues – have no fear. Oracle provides a new utility to validate the outlines in your cubes. The utility can be found under the Actions menu in Application Overview. Select the “Pre validate Outline” option, then select Outline Pre-validation Report to view a list of incompatible member formulas. Customers with hybrid capable applications will not see this option.

This upgrade applies to the following application types: Financial Consolidation and Close, FreeForm, Planning, Planning Modules, Tax Reporting

Have questions about this update or need help with fixing incompatible formulas – contact us today! We’d love to help!

Oracle’s release notes for the March update includes a very important feature for Oracle EPM Cloud customers. The Daily Maintenance can now be configured to any minute within any hour (i.e. HH:MM format). Previously, the window could only be configured to start at the top of the hour. This allows customers to have more control over the maintenance processes. See below for an example of the this new format in use.

Additionally, the release notes include the following notice…

“Starting with the April Update (24.04), the daily maintenance start time of EPM Cloud environments will be updated by assigning a random minute at which the maintenance process will start. Currently, the daily maintenance starts at the top of the hour, for example at 2:00 p.m. UTC (14.00 on a 24 hour clock). This change will modify the start time by adding a value for minute (for example, 2:24 p.m. UTC (14.24 on a 24 hour clock) so that the daily maintenance load on EPM Cloud infrastructure is distributed throughout the hour.”

The start time can be changed by Oracle EPM cloud Admins after the update is applied. Therefore, we recommend that customers review their Daily Maintenance settings for all EPM applications after the April updates have been applied.

Oracle’s product development team for EDM (Enterprise Data Management) continues to provide highly valuable new features each quarter, and the release earlier this month is no different. With 30 enhancements on the list all providing immense benefits to customers, it’s a challenge to narrow it down to the top 3. However, after some debate by our Oracle EDM specialists, we were able to agree on the following!

Node Name Calculation

This feature is easily the one that sticks out. The inability to auto-populate node names for simple uses cases (such as using the next logical sequential number for Accounts) has been an annoyance. Not to mention a huge time waste for many users. I personally can recall numerous clients expressing grief about having to rely on manual intervention for something so trivial. Can’t say I don’t agree with them. But that changes this month!

Now, node names can now be automatically generated. The automation can be configured based on node properties or hierarchical relationships (such as using the name of a parent node to derive the name). Customers who rely heavily on custom validations to enforce naming standards can now use this new feature to further enhance the user experience by removing manual (and many times frustrating) involvement in simply naming nodes.

Validation Severity Enhance Workflows

Not every violation of a validation rule can be resolved by users submitting a request. This could be due to users not having enough information, or it may be sensitive information for which they are not privy to based on their role. However, for many Oracle EDM customers these situations should not deter the users request from advancing. For these situations, validations can now be configured as Warnings. The user is still notified of the issue, but the request can be submitted and the violation can be resolved in later workflow stages. Additionally, the validations can be outright ignored for certain workflow stages if needed.

Providing the flexibility of how/when validations are enforced greatly enhances the user experience. We are excited to see customers using this new feature in the coming months & years!

Select Multiple Nodes for Moves and Inserts

Starting this month users can now select multiple nodes when performing Insert or Move. Nodes can be from a single parent or multiple parents. This removes many many “clicks of the mouse” to perform mass changes. Plus, the feature enhances the user experience while leading to an increase in efficiency.

Want to learn more about Oracle EDM’s latest features, or have questions about the solution’s capabilities? Contact us or leave a comment and we’ll be happy to answer!

Earlier this month Oracle released a long list of new features for EDM (Oracle Enterprise Data Management). The enhancements address several areas that great improve the tool for both administrators and business users. Follow below as we take a look at a few of the features which we believe are most beneficial.

Customized Navigation and Information

Since the initial release of EDM, the home page has contained been the same layout and options for both administrators and business users. But now, Oracle is providing the ability to customize the home page to specific users to help reduce confusion and streamline efficiency in navigation. This now puts EDM on par with the other Oracle EPM cloud offerings in regards to tailoring the user experience. Existing customers should note the presence of a new card named “Information Model” that will now contain the Node Types, Hierarchy Sets, Node Sets, Properties and Lookup Sets cards within the default layout.

Additionally, EDM now provides Announcements to be displayed on the home page. Administrators can create announcements to communicate various information to the user community. Users view announcements from the welcome panel on the home page. Announcements can include hyperlinks and can be effective dated as well.

Oracle Financials Cloud General Ledger Integration Processing Gains

The pre-built integration with Financials GL now allows for only the specific trees and tree versions contained in EDM to selected for processing . This results in for a reduction in processing time for Financials GL customers with multiple tress/tree versions.  The ‘Process Segment Values and Hierarchies’ task and the ‘Publish Hierarchies to Cube’ task are limited to process only the trees/tree versions managed in EDM (export options in EDM control these tasks).

Test of Expressions Reduces Time-to-Build

The ability to customize properties and validations within EDM through derived expressions is a major benefit to all EDM customers. However, unit testing the expressions has always required the developer to navigate away from the expression builder screen and view the data. But that is no longer the case! EDM now has the ability to test the expression directly in the expression builder. Talk to any EDM developer and they will undoubtedly give you an earful of just how much this streamlines their ability to build custom derive properties and validations.

In the image below, the Expression Tester tab can be viewed on the right. The result of the expression is displayed to the right of the ‘Evaluate’ button at the bottom.

If you’ve been following Oracle’s monthly updates for Cloud EPM, then you are aware that they had previously announced that the Data Management user interface was slowly being replaced with the newer Oracle Data Integration screen (found under the Data Exchange tile). The move does not mean the deprecation of functionality overall, but rather an enhancement to the user experience overall. The Data Management UI is largely a tribute to the on-prem equivalents. And to be honest, looks just as antiquated… and boring. Yes, I know I can hear all of you long time Oracle EPM techies yelling… it works, why mess with it?!  But in response, I’ll say what I was once told by an old girlfriend …. looks matter. Or maybe a saying from the sports world is better fitting – “look good, feel good, play good”. Jokes aside, the newer interface is better and is much more intuitive for users in my opinion. And September’s Cloud update contains a few key items to note regarding this change.

First, the following Data Management screens are no longer available. And are now accessible via the corresponding Data Integration page.

Second, the update notes state that all Data Management features will eventually move to Data Integration except the following:

• The batch feature will be replaced by the new Pipeline feature. The Pipeline feature was available in the June (23.06) update.
• The Report Definition feature will not be migrated, only the Report Execution feature.
• The ability to create new Custom Applications in Data Management will no longer available, and customers should use the “Data Export to File” application type instead.

Regarding the last bullet, for customers still using custom target applications, Oracle recommends using the Upgrade Custom Applications option to migrate the custom target application to a data export to file application. Additional documentation on topic can be found here. But don’t worry, this change doesn’t need to happen immediately as “Existing integrations that use a custom target application will not be impacted, and will still run without any changes” according to the release notes.

Are you already using Oracle’s Data Integration interface? Have you familiarized yourself with the new interface? Or have questions about it? Comment and let us know!

Oracle’s list of new features for EDM (Oracle Enterprise Data Management) in the September release are quite long. It seems they’ve really place focus on a few key areas to ensure an improved experience for the business user. Follow below as we take a look at three of the features which we believe are most beneficial to most organizations using EDM.

Validation Warnings vs Errors

Validations in the EDM application have long been a “line in the sand” type of approach. Either the item being requested passes the validation or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, then the update being cannot be applied. However, in practice there are plenty of customers who need to instead provide a warning to allow the request to proceed for an initial submission and approval, but enforced before the update is finally committed. EDM now provides the ability to configure whether a validation produces a warning or an error. Warnings allow requests to proceed to the next stage in the workflow, while errors prevent this. The configuration is defined on the validation itself (see below image). It should be noted that this functionality applies only to custom validations.

Approval Policy Visualization

Business users need to have visibility to workflow models defined by approval policies within EDM. The new Policy tab within the Request inspection window in EDM provides users with a visual diagram of all the approval policies for the request once submitted. Additionally, the tab displays the progress of in-flight requests in relation to the stage and policies. This feature will greatly help customers who have complex approval policy models to reduce confusion when trying to understand the approval paths of requests.

Chart of Accounts Redesign Enhanced

EDM has been used extensively to support mappings between all kinds of applications. One common use case is chart of accounts redesigns as part of ERP modernization projects. Oracle is now providing a specific node type (Legacy GL Node Type) for customers to use for mapping the legacy accounts to the new chart of accounts. This node type has a limit on properties that cannot be customized. However, the node type does have flexibility in how it is used. Customers can either create a new application to store the legacy nodes, or create a separate dimension within the registered ERP application in EDM, or even use the node type within the same dimension as the new chart of accounts.

A nice added touch for customers looking to use this new approach is that nodes assigned this new node type do NOT count against subscription record counts for EDM.

The following screen shows the configuration screen for how to utilize the Legacy GL node type.

Oracle has recently announced that Enterprise Data Management (EDM) is now included in the Oracle Implementation Success Program (ISP). For those not familiar with the program, it is helps to ensure customer success by engaging Oracle Development teams in implementations. In addition to EDM, the program is also available to customers who use Planning, Financial Consolidation and Close, Profitability and Cost Management, and Account Reconciliation. The ISP provides direct interaction with Oracle Development through several unique aspects of the program.

Implementation Success Program at a Glance

The ISP provides a framework for collaboration between customers, their partners, and Oracle. The program involves several key meetings between all parties.

First, a kick-off meeting between Oracle, the customer, and the customer’s implementation partner occurs to ensure that everyone has a basic understanding of the customer’s requirements and background. Also, the meeting allows for a discussion of the key milestones for the project. Lastly, the communication plan between all parties is also agreed upon.

Once the kick-off has occurred, the next major step in the program is for Oracle to review the Solution Design document(s). The customer provides the documents to Oracle via a SR. The document should include requirements, technical design, and technical architecture diagram(s). As part of Oracle’s review process, a formal feedback document will be provided to the customer at the conclusion of the review. Oracle’s feedback is typically provided within two weeks of receiving the documentation from the customer. Oracle will then collaborate with the customer on the feedback.

The collaboration will allow for a joint understanding of the design, a discussion on best practices being applied, and any challenges that may need to be closely monitored during the remainder of the project. Once the solution enters the “go-live” phase of the project, Oracle proactively monitors the application(s). Any issues identified are presented to the customer (and their partner) to help provide awareness and resolution. This helps avoid bigger issues, prolonged “band-aiding” and overall dissatisfaction with the solution.

Conclusion

At Perficient, we highly suggest to all of our clients to utilize Oracle’s ISP. The program costs nothing to join and can greatly aid in ensuring a successful adoption of Oracle solutions throughout the enterprise. Lastly, it’s very exciting to see that the ISP now includes EDM. This speaks to the increasing pace of EDM being adopted by organizations across the globe.

In my recent blog, Efficiency Redefined: How Oracle Cloud EPM Pipelines Can Streamline Your Business Process, I discussed how Perficient implemented a single streamlined process to organize the daily data load and processing jobs of one of our clients. Now, let’s review editing an existing Pipeline to add a new job, how to execute the Pipeline, and review the log file.

Editing a Pipeline to Add a New Variable

1.  From the Data Integration home page under Data Exchange, click to the right of the Pipeline you want to edit, and then select ‘Pipeline Details‘.

2. Click the icon and ‘Details’ tab to edit the Pipeline details like name and number of parallel jobs.

3. Click ‘Variables‘ tab to add/update/delete Variables.

4. Click to add a new variable. A new row is added to the bottom of the page. Enter the following details:

• • Variable name: CopyScenario
  • Display Name: Copy Scenario
  • Display Sequence: 8
  • Required: Yes
  • Validation Type: Custom List

5. To add custom values to be available for selection during run time for this variable, click the icon. Enter the list values in the below format.

6. Below is the available values we want for the CopyScenario variable during run time. Click ‘OK‘. Click ‘Save‘.

Editing a Pipeline to Add a New Job

1. On the Pipeline page, expand the stage to which you want to add a new job.

2. Click the add job icon.

3. To add a new job to run the data copy rule, select the below:

• • Type: Business Rule
  • Connection: Local
  • Name (Select the business rule to launch in this job): Copy Working to Final
  • Title (Name of the job): Copy Working to Final
  • Sequence: 2
  • Label (runtime prompt as it is defined in the selected business rule): Not Applicable
  • Value (custom value type for a runtime prompt, specify the actual value): Not Applicable

4. The new job is auto-saved to the Pipeline.

Running a Pipeline

1. You can open the Pipeline and Click to run the Pipeline.
2. Or you can run it on the Data Integrations page.
3. On the Run Pipeline page, complete any runtime prompts and then click ‘Run‘.

4. When the Pipeline is running, the system shows the status as . You can click the status icon to download the log.

5. When a job has been successfully executed, a checkmark appears in the job card.
6. You can see the status of the Pipeline in Process Details. You can click on the icon to download the log files for each job.

With the above detailed steps, Perficient was able to convert a manual and time-consuming data load process into a streamlined Pipeline that can be executed end to end with a single click. Mastering the process of editing and running EPM Pipelines can be crucial to your organization achieving efficiency and streamlined data management, thus harnessing the full potential of Oracle EPM Cloud for your business endeavors.

Oracle’s new Pipelines feature in the Enterprise Performance Management Cloud (EPM) applications was made available with the June 2023 update. Pipelines allow for organizing individual jobs into one overall procedure directly within the EPM application, even across multiple EPM applications. You can learn more about this new feature in a recent Perficient blog Oracle EPM Cloud Feature Spotlight – Pipelines.

Below I’ll detail how Perficient used Pipelines to organize and automate the complete end-to-end data load process for one of our clients.

The daily load process of our client’s EPBCS application includes three steps:

• Actuals data load from the ERP Cloud into the Reporting and Financials cubes
• Copy of Actuals to Forecast scenario
• Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Calculation

Each of these steps in the load process needs to be run in a specific order and is contingent upon the success of the previous step. But since the client did not own a remote server to host EPM Automate scripts that would facilitate the sequential execution of these jobs, the Administrator was forced to perform each step manually.

With the new Pipelines feature, we could organize the three steps into one workflow or “Pipeline” within the application, thus simplifying the load process. Here’s how we did it!

Creating a Pipeline

 Here are the steps that were used to create a Pipeline for the daily load process:

1. From the Data Exchange page, Data Integration tab, click , and then select Pipeline.
   Note: Only Service Administrators can create and run a Pipeline.
2. From the Create Pipeline page, click ‘Details’, and in the ‘Pipeline Name’ enter the process name: “Daily Actuals Load”.
3. In ‘Pipeline Code’, specify a Pipeline code: “DailyActuals” (Alphanumeric characters with minimum size 3 to maximum 30. No special characters or space is allowed).
4. All jobs in the process run in a sequence so enter Maximum Parallel Jobs for each stage as 1.
5. Click ‘Save and Continue‘.
6. On the Variables page, a set of out-of-box variables (global values) for the Pipeline is available from which you can set parameters at runtime (You can delete variables you do not need or create new variables. Variables can be pre-defined types like: “Period,” “Import Mode,” “Export Mode,” etc., or they can be custom values used as job parameters).
7. Keep the below default runtime variables included with a Pipeline. Click ‘Save‘.
8. On the Pipeline page, click  to create a new stage card. It contains jobs that you want to run in the Pipeline at that stage and can include jobs of any type and for multiple target applications.
9. In the Stage Editor, enter the following:
   • Stage Name: Loads
   • Title: ERP Actuals Load
   • Sequence (A number to define the chronological order in which a stage is executed): 1
   • Parallel: Off
10. On the stage card, click ‘>‘ to add a new job to the stage.
11. On the stage card, click (Create Job icon).
12. A new job card is displayed on the stage card.
13. In the Job Editor, from ‘Type‘ drop-down, select the ‘Integration‘ type job to add to the stage card.
14. From the ‘Connection‘ drop-down, select ‘Locali if the data integration is in the current environment.
15. Enter the following details for the Job:

• • Name (Select the Data Integration that loads from Cloud ERP to this EPBCS instance): Fusion US to EPBCS
  • Title (Enter the title of job name to appear on the job card): RPT Actuals Load
  • Sequence: 1
  • Job Parameters: select any job parameters associated with the job like Import Mode, Export Mode, Start & End Period, Data load POV.

16. Similarly, create a second job in this stage card to load data to the Financials cube.
17. Create the second stage to copy Actuals to the Forecast scenario by clicking on . Provide a stage sequence 2.
18. Add a Business Rule type job and enter the following details:

• • Connection: Local
  • Name (Select the business rule to launch in this job): Copy Actuals to OEP_FS
  • Title (Name of the job): Copy Actuals to Forecast
  • Sequence: 1
  • Label (runtime prompt as it is defined in the selected business rule): CurMonth
  • Value (custom value type for a runtime prompt, specify the actual value): Not Applicable

19. Create the third and final stage of the Pipeline to calculate Balance Sheet and Cashflow at the Forecast level and add a Business rule type Job to use the desired rule. Close the Pipeline.

          Note: The Pipeline is auto-saved while you are creating stages and jobs.

20. The new Pipeline is added to the Data Integration homepage. Each Pipeline is identified with a under the ‘Type’ header.

With a few simple steps, we organized the different types of jobs that needed to run for the data to load and process into one Pipeline. I will discuss how you can edit an existing pipeline, run it, and review the log files in my next blog!

Jobs are organized into Stages within a Pipeline. Stages are “containers” for the jobs and allow for the addition, managing, and deletion of job(s) contained in each stage. Stages be configured to execute jobs serially or in parallel. Below is an example of a Pipeline with several Stages and Jobs.

As you can see, Pipelines provide an advancement in daily job processing. The ability to manage jobs across applications is a huge plus for organizations with multiple applications. Additionally, the visualization that Oracle is providing within the Pipeline screen helps customers to easily understand what processes are occurring and in what order! It will be interesting to see what new job types are added over the next few months.

The June 2023 update for Oracle EDM (Enterprise Data Management) contains several new features that greatly enhance the current user experience within the solution. Continue reading below for an overview of the features which we are most excited about here at Perficient.

Security Enhancements – New Roles Provide Improved Segregation of Duties

Two new roles are now available for EDM. The Access Control Manager role permits the managing of groups and application role assignment for users. The Migration Administrator role addresses the ability to import and export migration snapshots as well as the cloning of environments. Many times organizations have strict policies to segregate these types of activities for all applications. Now, EDM provides that ability!

Additionally, EDM now contains a new Metadata Manager permission. This permission allows users to create and modify objects without allowing visibility to the actual data in the application. The permission can be assigned to users and/or groups at the application and dimension levels. Node Types, Hierarchy Sets, Custom Validations, etc. are all able to be managed by users who have this permission.

Downloadable Compare Results

The ability to quickly and easily compare data between different applications, time-frames, hierarchies, dimensions, etc. is a huge benefit of EDM. Organizations use EDM to compare to identify and troubleshoot differences as well as similarities quite often. Starting this month, the results of compares can now be downloaded to file for sharing with others… with the click of a button (see image below).

Extracts for Every User

Extracts enable users to retrieve data from a viewpoint into a formatted file or a global connection. They can be configured for any viewpoint and for any properties. Extracts can provide full data sets or incrementally between two different dates. EDM now offers the ability for any user (with the Participant permission) to create and run an extract for the viewpoint. No longer do users have to collaborate with Application Owners/System Admins to create simple report!

Require Request Reasoning

An organization’s master data needs to be managed with scrutiny to avoid many pitfalls associated with unregulated data. It’s not uncommon for organizations to require an explanation of the reasoning behind a request to modify master data. EDM’s product development team understands this and has enabled a feature within EDM to help capture this upfront. EDM requests have a description field, which can now be configured to require input from users before submission of the request. The field can also be configured with default instructions to help guide users appropriately.