KScope19 – Deep-Dive into Data Integration

There were a lot of big announcements about the future direction data management is taking, and except for the proposed loss of our favourite FDMEE fish, they were all absolutely fantastic, and there is so much to be excited about. I’m going to give my views on the biggest announcements and the direction Data Integration is taking, and I’ll be getting some tutorials together once these features are available. But first:

Jargon Buster

• FDMEE – on-premise Financial Data Management Extended Edition, amazing ETL tool for mappings, data import and export.
• Data Management – the cloud version of FDMEE, built into PBCS etc
• Data Integration – the shiny, fishless facelift of Data Management

Data Integration

Be ready, the new world is coming, and eventually it will replace the Data Management we all know and love. Data Integration functions the same as Data Management in the background, but it’s been designed to be a lot more user friendly. For example, rather than creating a source, target, then location, then import format, then load rule you will in the future just create an integration which encompasses most of those steps in one place.

They’ve applied the same logic to the options, which currently are spread all over the place but will now be accessible in one window. There are also some great new features coming with the facelift, such as Target Expressions which will allow you to apply several mappings at the load stage, including some mappings that were much more complicated to perform before. Target Expressions are complicated enough to deserve their own tutorial blog, so I’ll dive into those later, but another great feature is an official processing order for data maps, so no more alphabetical processing of data maps, you can get a like mapping to process first and then have explicit maps after if you want. This is a big Quality-Of-Life (QOL) update for admins and really shows Oracle are listening to feedback when it comes to data integrations.

You can also choose to skip the workbench stage, which can massively speed up integrations for day-to-day running if drill-through isn’t required, although you can then switch it back on and re-run an integration to troubleshoot any weirdness. I can see customers using this feature a lot. This is coming in version 19.05 for cloud.

You can start using Data Integration right now in PBCS, although full parity with Data Management doesn’t exist yet. As a result, you can create an integration in Data Integration and then jump into the more familiar Data Management interface to see how it all works in the background, and you can run an integration in either interface with no issues.

Data Export Updates

A recent highlight update for Data Management was the massive upgrade to flat file exports, which has given us several great options. These include:

• Import a file template to create a flat file export
• Include/Exclude the file header
• Sort the data in a file export
• Attributes can be exported into flat files
• Easy reordering of output columns
• Pivot specific dimensions into the columns
• Choosing the accumulate (aggregate) data or not based on preference
• Changing the data file parameter (we love a | in our csv files)

John Goodwin has blogged about it, so you know it’s great (check that out here) and there’s no point covering the same ground, so let’s move on!

Future Integrations to follow NetSuite to PBCS model

For those that haven’t read me gushing about the NetSuite integration, check my tutorial out here, but Mike Casey has confirmed that future direct integrations are planned to follow the NetSuite model. This means that they will support designing a query in the source system, pulling that specific query over to Data Management and mapping that query individually from other queries. This is AMAZING for importing metadata vs importing data which usually need completely different queries, all in the cloud, all on demand, all SIMPLY DELIGHTFUL

On-Premises Agent

The new on-premises agent will allow direct connections to on-premises systems, with a variety of configurable options to ensure all system admins can get on board with it. It will offer synchronous mode which is tougher to set up and requires more IT involvement but is constantly listening for requests, or asynchronous mode which can be run on a schedule and will execute any queued requests when it’s run on the server-side. Asynchronous doesn’t need a network port or any additional network infrastructure than EPM Automate needs now, so it will be less of a headache to set up.

Direct connections to on-prem databases from the cloud have been a massive request for a long time and it’s going to be a game-changer when this delightful tool comes out. It sounds seriously powerful!

Other Roadmap

Below is the roadmap which was shown at KScope19, under the usual Oracle Safe Harbour statement, so this represents their planned direction but no official commitment to release this stuff. Regardless, there’s plenty to keep guys like me excited and busy in here!

There was so much new and exciting content in the Data Management roadmap, that I haven’t even got around to discussing the direct HCM Cloud integration, including write-back, or the fact that data integration has been upgraded to allow a 5 million row limit!

Expect plenty of blogs giving blow-by-blow walkthroughs of the above once they’re released, but until next time, adios!

Mike

KScope19 – Deep-Dive into the future of Planning

PBCS as we know it is changing, with some seriously exciting opportunities in the new world of Enterprise EPM Cloud, or the more familiar world of NetSuite PBCS. There are also new pre-built applications in the works aimed at strategic workforce planning and sales planning, which aims to give the great Hyperion Planning functionality to new areas of your company. 

Below is a comparison from Oracle between the various flavours of traditional Planning, including the exciting Free-Form and the capability for up to 6 BSO cubes in a single application using the new Enterprise SKU.

Hybrid BSO

Hybrid BSO is available right now for EPBCS customers – by creating an SR you can request that this is turned on for you. This effectively gives you the power of BSO calculations at level-0 with the aggregations of ASO, leveraging the best of both worlds! Once you’ve turned it on, you apply it by creating sparse dynamic parents, and you will need to tune it to some extent (like how ASO uses aggregate views to pre-aggregate some data). PBCS can’t get this feature yet, sadly! ☹

Free-Form Planning

Free Form Planning functions like Essbase, but in the Cloud and with all the extra bells and whistles of Planning. Currently each free-form application can only support one cube, but since you’re only likely to use it with the new Enterprise SKU which gives you unlimited apps, you can really take advantage of this new tool.

Free Form means that there is no requirement on dimensionality whatsoever, and therefore you can create all sorts of wacky models for very specific parts of your business, and then use data management tools to migrate into your forecast or budget.

Smart View for Office 365 Browser and Mac

Smart View can now be deployed centrally to your web browser, which is a massive improvement. It paves the way to a much better process for quicker plan updates – saving forms in Excel workbooks on SharePoint, so your users can click a link in an email to open their form in the browser, in Excel rather than the PBCS online wizard. There are great online resources to walk you through this process here, or you can wait for my blog post after I’ve implemented it internally for us! 😊

IFRS16 Full Support in Capex Module

This was big news for me, as I recently developed a custom IFRS16 application in PBCS. Pretty soon full IFRS16 functionality will be available by default in the capex module, although it remains to be seen how configurable it will be.

Groovy dude

Groovy is going to the big time, as more and more customers move to Enterprise. I’m personally going to start migrating my EPM Automate scripts to start using Groovy instead, and business rules can also include Groovy in Enterprise Cloud or EPBCS, which gives you a lot more power and control over your business rules. The best example, courtesy of Kyle Goodfriend of in2Hyperion (who has put an immense amount of work into creating publically available Groovy tutorials) is to use Groovy to only run aggregations for specific cells on a form that have changed, which massively reduces the calculation overhead. Using Groovy gives you the power to loop through these cells and create FIX statements on the fly, which is extremely powerful.

There’s loads more that Groovy can do, and you can look forward to more Groovy functions becoming available as it’s on the strategic roadmap.

Cloud Features

A quick note – go to this link to access Oracle’s new tool for announcing and searching new features – it’s fantastic and has great links to the documentation, so that you can find out about key new features without having to wait for us to blog about it.

The future of Planning is bright, and I’m looking forward to it!

Until next time,

Mike

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