The I.T. Side

On premise update from Collaborate.

According to Oracle, EPM today has achieved fantastic adoption in Finance. However, spreadsheets still dominate outside of finance. EPM has been widely adopted for larger companies, however not nearly as much in mid-sized organizations. While the push for low cost cloud options present more opportunities for the mid market, it also poses some new challenges as organizations try to align all LOBs with corporate EPM efforts.

So to expand Oracle’s footprint, the push is for

• Adopting EPM outside of finance – ie operational planning
• Pushing down usage lower in the organization
• Striving for easier adoption, rapid value, mobile
• Flexibility and seamlessness between on-prem and cloud

We see these themes in modern releases, patches, and roadmap – notable highlights

• Enhanced user experience… user interface, valid combinations, excel type grids capabilities
• Sandboxing, excel based grids, write back enabled dashboards, integrated real time reporting
• Advanced member function support
• Cloud innovations and integrations

We also see the dedication to Excel as a major platform for data interactions

Excel workbooks and worksheets

• vertical and horizontal tabs

Interactivity with larger data sets

• Rapid loading of large forms
• Support for shortcuts
• Sandboxing
• X-sheet/Work book references through HSGetVal and HsSetVal

Instantaneous calculations

• excel formulas in through smart forms
• auto calculations
• smart push – combine ASO ad BSO into 1Hybrid BSO

And of course, the inclusion of the simplified interface

• modern
• intuitive
• simple
• relevant
• engaging

The next major release of the EPM suite will be version 12. It should be April/May/June next year. It will have a complete new support matrix, and will rev down version 11 on the support lifeline. However, there is much more to come in the way of patches still in the 11.1.2.4 code set. On-premise customers are reaping the benefits of Oracle’s accelerated software development lifecycle due to cloud innovations. While all new functionality is developed on the cloud first, it’s not long before its pushed to on-premise customers. This new model is having customers rethink their patching strategy by making it a core frequent function of IT administration – or they outsource it as a managed service.

Future releases will also become more in line with Fusion middleware stack. We should see common platform certifications with FMW12c as well as a simplification of the relational repositories.

Financial Reporting

You may have heard, there will be a new web based financial reporting studio. This is great news for those that use the studio over long WAN distances or have challenges pushing out fat applications to end users that do not have administrative access to their desktops. The studio should be introduced in the .300 patch. The first release is slated to have 85% features of FR studio client. The initial release will be missing some key items such as row/column templates, linked objects, and related content. In the short term, users will have the option to use both until Oracle achieves 100% parity, and then they will sunset the studio for good.

The updated FR tool will have a completely updated charts/graphs engine. They will probably have demos of this at Kscope.

Planning Roadmap

 The Planning roadmap and new functionality are focused in three major categories: The User interface, “agile planning”, and Enterprise Readiness

Planning Roadmap 0-12 months:

Enhanced User Interface

• Enhanced User Interface
• Valid Combinations
• Excel-type grid capabilities
• Robust Dimension Management
• Document Upload & Duplicate Alias
• Attributes as a separate dimension
• Out of the Box Custom Currency support
• Custom Localization
• Customizable Navigation By Roles
• Advanced member function support

“Agile Planning”

• Sandboxing
• Excel based grids with formula and formats
• Write back empowered dashboards
• Integrated Real Time Reporting

Enterprise Readiness

• REST Web Service for external Integration
• Groovy Scripting for customizations

Planning Roadmap Post 12 months cycle:

Enhanced user interface

• Build from scratch dashboards, charts, and conditional formats from Excel
• Adhoc dashboards

“Agile Planning”

• predict model drivers
• web based predictive planning
• forecast simulation and Optimization
• build models from user excel templates

Enterprise Readiness

• Usage audit reports.

Financial Consolidation and Close Roadmap

As you may or may not know, there have been some recent Highlights, most notably the once Exalytics-only HFM Insights and rules profiler are now supported on Commodity hardware in the way of patches.

HFM Insights provides visibility into the running of HFM, resource consumption, CPU utilization, Per-application activities, user loads, etc. You can even restart HFM from the App.

Rules Profiling shows time spent Calculating, translating, and consolidating. It gives insight into where the time is bing spent and assist with application tuning by identifying bottlenecks.

11.1.2.4.200 introduced a web based application copy which quickly quelled the proverbial riot in the industry after removing the copyapp utility. Going forward we will see continued improvements to this web based copy app program as well as Enhanced visualizations and

For the roadmap, 11.1.2.4.300 will be released in the summer. We will see:

• A very interesting feature called auto consolidations that will run consolidations automatically when there is available CPU
• Dashboard improvements
  • Allow consolation of multi- form/grid dashboards
  • Make dashboards 1^st class objects
• Updated FR Charts and Graphs

In future HFM releases, the following are on the roadmap:

• Real time consolidations
• Journals enhancements: impact analysis
• Web based member list editor
• Updated intercompany and journal reporting
• Auto archive of data audit
• Multithreaded metadata load
• More web based utilities
• Web metadata editor

For the Financial Close Manager (FCM) roadmap we should see:

• Archiving, updated rules configuration
• Migrations utility to the cloud.
• Transaction matching

For Hyperion Tax Provisioning:

• Upgrade automation enhancement’s
• Apportionment calculation

For Disclosure management we should expect tagging into EPRCS

Data Integration

For metadata, lets be clear: in spite of all the rumors, EPMA is not going away. It does what it is supposed to do – simple metadata between the Hyperion products. What Oracle is hearing is that customers want DRM-like capabilities put into EPMA, and they are simply not going to do that. They will not be investing in more features in EPMA. Use it or not, but if you have functional needs outside of EPMA, the direction is for you to purchase DRM.

FDMEE will continue to be the single place to move data. They realize data sync in EPMA is leaves a lot to be desired. Oracle is clearly investing in and selecting FDMEE as the main data movement tool across on-prem, cloud, etc

Case in point: FDM before only allowed Hyperion products to be used as a target. Oracle wants FDMEE to have any system be a source or target to the point that even non Hyperion customers could consider implementing FDMEE for orchestration to other technologies.

• ERP to EPM
• EPM to EPM
• EPM to ERP
  • write back supports budget or actual
  • EBS and PeopleSoft only
• ERP to ERP came in at 11.1.2.4.100 (already out)

Also in 11.1.2.4.100 we received a FDM to FDMEE conversion utility which moves classic FDM applications to FDMEE (minus custom scripting). Also we received a universal data adapter that allows users to connect and map and drill back to any database. We also got FCM integration and the ability to load exchange rates to HFM.

The .200 patch just came out recently.  In this patch we got Hybrid cloud integration so we can use FDMEE to load PBCS, however you have to buy FDMEE it and run it on prem.

We got DRM integration so we can:

• Extract hierarchies from EBS and PeopleSoft (select DRM as target for metadata rule)
• Load mapping rules from DRM to FDMEE
  • Generate “explicit” mapping rules from DRM
  • Load directly to FDMEE

Future patches are coming for the close suite that will have more cloud integration, specifically with FCCS. Future releases should support cloud-to-cloud integration.

For the future Roadmap of FDMEE:

• Metadata loading (it will be interesting to see another viable metadata option along with EPMA and DRM)
• Non-numeric planning data
• Mapping review mode
• Mobile access to drill-through page
• Filter balance sheet and income statement account
• Additional minor parity items and selected enhancements.

Future DRM enhancements:

• Data Relationship Governance enhancements
• DRG approvals in the EPM mobile App
• DRM Support for the Financial Consolidation and close Cloud (FCCS) and BI cloud service (BICS)

HPCM

HPCM Roadmap. We are going to see some great improvements in the HPCM suite since it will be coming to the Oracle SaaS cloud soon. Some key items:

• Big time New UI for design and management
  • Rules oriented
  • Rules sequencing and documentation
  • Improved design flexibility
  • Simpler ad more immediate reporting
• Same Product user focus
  • Business analyst skill set
  • Point and click design
  • Zero coding
  • Easy calculation control (unlimited reverse and redo)
• New ledger model type for expanded coverage of management reporting
• Parallel calculation improvements for performance
• Operation transfer pricing solution
• Financial Close Manager (FCM) integration

The main focus is to make HPCM business user managed and limit the burden of administrators by making it UI and rule driven, easily validated, and easily auditable.

The move to Embedded Analytics

Embedding Analytics in EPM all applications is a big push. For DRM, we are seeing some great analytical capabilities delivered out of the box:

Master data change analysis & Growth trends

• In-flight governance request monitoring
• Workflow model analysis
• Security and administration reports

For HPCM the embedded analytics will tool provide:

• Population Profit Performance Charting via Whale Curve and Scatter Plots
• Dimensional Contribution reports
• Allocation trace
• Pre-built KPIs and dashboards

Essbase

We will also see some Essbase improvement since Essbase Cloud service is right around the corner as well (end of year or beginning). Some notable items are:

• Enhanced parallel scripting
• Multi-user scalability for concurrent query and calculation operations
• BSO/ASO hybrid aggregation mode
• In-memory enhancements

Essbase will be re-designed a bit to use a J2EE-based Essbase agent, which will eliminate the essbase.sec security file which will most certainly be met with cheers from the entire community.

We will also see an Oracle R plugin to Essbase.

Other things coming soon to Essbase:

• Sandboxing
• Lightweight workflow
• See how a cell was modified (loaded, input, derived, dynamic, calculated)
• Run time variables that are POV aware so you can select variables in a calc script in smartview.

In the distant future we can expect more integration with Oracle R, such as embedded R in calc scripts, and generic capability to allow extensibility with 3^rd party languages.

Credit: Information, excerpts, and screen shots taken from public presentation by Oracle at Collaborate in Las Vegas, NV.

~ by Eric Helmer on April 19, 2016.

Posted in 11.1.2.4, Collaborate, Rumor Mill, upgrade, what's new
Tags: O-, roadmap