KScope19 – Thoughts on the EPM Strategy Symposium

I had the great opportunity to head to KScope this year, and had a fantastic time meeting the crème de la crème of the EPM blogging world. My colleagues made some great presentations (and Gui and Lydia actually won an award for theirs!) and it was great engaging with Oracle in the partner forums and the roadmap update sessions.

I focused mainly on EPM and Data Integration, being my two favourites, so here’s the headlines from an interesting week!

EPM Pricing Changes

Huge changes in the EPM Pricing space, with some massive opportunities going forward. The key one is the new SKU, Enterprise EPM Cloud. This offers unlimited applications for any of the EPM Cloud suite, which have been renamed from the acronyms to their actual purpose:

• Planning (EPBCS on steroids)
• Financial Consolidation and Close (FCCS)
• Account Reconciliation (ARCS)
• Narrative Reporting (EPRCS)
• Enterprise Data Management (based on ODI)
• Profitability and Cost Management (NEW!)
• Tax Reporting
• Data Integration (facelift for Data Management based on FDMEE)
• Management Reporting (facelift for Financial Reporting)

Unlimited truly means unlimited here. You can have 10 planning apps with one of each of the others, for example, and each planning app will now support 6 custom BSO and 6 custom ASO cubes, as well as the EPBCS frameworks (now called modules). This is huge for bigger customers who want to leverage the entire cloud who could save a lot of money by moving to this SKU. The only problem is the base price, a whopping $500 per user per month, but Oracle are bound to offer discounts.

The less said about the other offering, Standard EPM Cloud, the better. It’s half the price at $250 per user per month, but each extra app costs $2500, and you’re limited to just one custom BSO and ASO cube. You can leverage the EPBCS modules as well, but these can be clunky and really suppresses the capability to lift-and-shift.

The good news is that existing PBCS and EPBCS customers can renew without changing their deal, and you can also buy PBCS through NetSuite for the usual price, meaning customers who just want a great planning solution can get that for a more reasonable price.

Free Form Planning

Holy smokes this thing looks fantastic. It’s basically Planning with no restrictions on dimensions at all, so you can create whatever crazy cubes you want. Don’t want Version? That’s fine. Want a single time dimension instead of Period/Year? That works too! This is the solution to creating Essbase style cubes on the cloud.

The main benefit is that you can also leverage all the usual great planning functions like forms, business rules and the rest on top, with the caveat that if you don’t have a scenario dimensions, you won’t be able to use workflow. The available features will be automatically assigned based on your dimensionality.

Free Form apps can also be created entirely in Excel templates, and maintains all the great Essbase features like multi-grid on one sheet, aliases in different columns and in-sheet POV’s.

On-Prem Support until 2030

This is a cloud blog, but on-premise is getting a big upgrade to version 11.2 and will continue to receive new features and be supported at least until 2030. 11.2 does require a fresh install however, which could be a pain point for big organisations.

Updates to tired features

Financial Reporting has gotten a facelift and big upgrade, and soon Management Reporting will replace it, with the big bonus that MR can have grids from various sources (ERP/EPM) all in the same report. I didn’t get to play with it too much but I understand key features like batch bursting and report scheduling are coming, and it will be the driving force behind the Narrative Reporting tool.

Machine Learning makes its way into EPM

A module named IPM (Intelligent Performance Management) is being actively developed to add machine learning style predictions to the EPM Cloud. The idea is that Forecasts will be auto-filled with a machine-predicted figure which users can then change if needed. It seems like a great future feature, but it’s not quite up to industry standards just yet.

Finally, some RIPs:

• EPMA has died a death, finally (owners will get a restricted version of DRM to replace it)
• On-Prem Workforce/Capex/Project template are dead
• The FDMEE Fish are dead (in the new Data Integration facelift for Data Management)

I'll be publishing a deeper dive into Planning and Data Integration soon and my thoughts on a bright future for the EPM world!

Until next time,

Mike

Connecting two Clouds - NetSuite to Oracle PBCS Cloud-to-Cloud Integration

Connecting a source system to a forecasting system is rarely straightforward, and typically follows a familiar pattern:

1) Hope and optimism for a beautiful direct integration

2) Your dreams being brought down to earth during design-time

3) Getting the ERP team to export an extract regularly 

4)Hoping the extract worked and scooping it up using a batch script to load.

Therefore, when an opportunity arises to ditch the shackles of extract-based integrations and migrate entirely through the cloud, one must grasp that opportunity with both hands. And that’s what a fabulous joint effort by the team at Brovanture has managed to achieve.

Why should you read this lengthy blog? Cloud-to-Cloud is cool, but it’s especially cool when you combine infinitely customisable source queries in NetSuite with the exceptional mapping capabilities of Data Management. You really can integrate anything between NetSuite and PBCS, enabling you to migrate metadata and data easily, quickly and regularly for a near-seamless system. It really is that good.

This blog is going to walk you through how it works, and how you can set it up for yourself.

1) The first step, of course, is to own the leading cloud ERP and EPM tools, NetSuite and Oracle PBCS. If you don’t own these tools, why are you reading about integrating them? Contact Brovanture for a quote!

2) NetSuite comes with a fabulous PBCS integration add-in. Ask your NetSuite rep to enable your Oracle NetSuite-PBCS Sync add-in. You may need to purchase this depending on your individual circumstances. 


3) If you have any other addiins configured for NetSuite you may be able to skip this step, but you will need to go to the SuiteCloud tab and enable the features: Custom Records, Server SuiteScript, Token-Based Authentication, Client SuiteScript. Again, ask your NetSuite vendor for assistance if needed.

4) Once you’ve got the bundle enabled, go to Customisation in NetSuite and Install it.

5) Setup the PBCS File Encryption password in NetSuite, noting the requirement to be 16,24 or 32 characters. Select Setup -> Integration -> PBCS File Encryption Password

6) Create a NetSuite user with the PBCS Integration role which will be automatically available when installing the bundle. Give your user the same password as the NS-PBCS file encryption password. We named our user cloudintegration@brovanture.com for simplicity.

7) The integrations are powered using the incredible Saved Searches functionality in Netsuite. This powerful functionality allows you to create extremely customisable queries and save them to be run by other users. There are three sample searches created to help you get started which you can use if you like:

However, you can also create any saved search you like, and provided the ID starts with: customsearch_nspbcs then it will be automatically pulled through to Data Management later in the process! This means you can connect literally any customisation of NetSuite to PBCS using entirely bespoke queries. I’ll be going further into detail in this in future blogs showing how we used this powerful technique to create specialised metadata extracts and data extracts and support the Data Management process.

8) You can use either token-based authentication or user based authentication to connect the source system. In this tutorial, we’ll be using user-based authentication and using the user we set up in step 6. When the integration is triggered, in the background the saved search will be run using this user account’s access in NetSuite, so bear that in mind and ensure it has the correct level of access for your requirements.

9) We’ve finally made it to PBCS and it only took 9 steps! Load up your PBCS instance with an administrator account and open Data Management. In Data Management, go to Setup -> Source System and select Add.

 10)Select NetSuite under Source System Type and give it a name. You can also set up the basis for a full drill-through URL here but we’ll leave that one for a future blog…

 11) Once you’ve saved your Source System, select Configure Source Connection. Here you can select Token Based if you prefer but in this tutorial we will select User Based. Enter:

• Username and password from step 6
• NetSuite Account Number (usually 7 digits)
• Data Centre - can be found in your NetSuite URL: https://system.eu2.netsuite.com/

Once you’ve entered these hit Test Connection and you should get a confirmation message.

12)Initialise your source system and you’ll be prompted for a prefix. This can be whatever you want and will help group your saved searches together. Hit OK.

13) Navigate to Target Application and you will see that all your defined saved searches have come through as individual applications ready to be connected to import formats! You can see all the fields below but don’t worry too much about them.

14) Create an Import Format associated with your PBCS cube and your chosen Saved Search. Navigate to Import Format and select Add, and you’ll be prompted to select a source and a target. Your PBCS cube of choice should be the target, and your chosen saved search should be the source. Once you’ve saved, the mappings screen will become available. It could not be simpler to map your NetSuite fields to your dimensions, just use the drop-down box to match up the fields.

I would highly recommend setting up the NetSuite saved search with a separate Month and Year field to avoid FDMEE’s period mappings.

15) We’re on the home straight! Create a Location associated with your import format and then navigate to that Location and create a Data Load Rule. 

16) At this point you can create mappings, and any time you run your data load rule it will request the data directly from NetSuite. A few fish later and you’ve got drillable NetSuite Actuals ready to inform your Forecast.

This can be automated easily using EPM Automate, but with no extract nonsense.

So that is how you connect NetSuite to PBCS seamlessly through the cloud. In future blogs I’ll be walking through a worked example for metadata specifically, since Data Management is just as powerful when handling metadata.

We’re using this to track our hours, maintain our targets and calculate commission, but what will you use it for? Find out by contacting Brovanture on our website www.brovanture.com, or leave a comment on the blog below.

Thanks to Guillaume Slee, whose blog you should already be subscribed to, for putting the framework together for this to be achieved, as well as the rest of the team at Brovanture for contributing to this development.

Until Next Time,

Mike