Speed Up Your Essbase: Optimizing Database and Calculation Settings

As Oracle Essbase has grown in popularity over the years, customers have pushed the envelope on dimensionality and quantity of data. With cubes containing more data and expected to crunch increasingly complex calculations, the update process (outline refreshes, data loads and calculations) can sometimes get bogged down.

Optimizing Essbase might seem like sorcery if you’re unfamiliar with the inner workings of the software, but it’s not so mysterious if you understand the basics and know where to look for opportunities. In other posts, we discussed some ideas for optimizing Block Storage (BSO) Essbase updates related to model design (Outlines and Calc Script basics) and data management. (more…)

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Dear Santa, Please Bring Me a Better Budget Process

If your company has a December or January fiscal year-end, you are probably just now completing your 2018 budget or you’re about to enter the final stretch of the process. It certainly doesn’t help make the yuletide merry when you’re working long days to revise and roll up yet another plan iteration, or scheduling yet another review meeting into a packed calendar. But then, maybe there’s a holiday party or two you’re happy to have a good excuse to miss!

Did this year’s budget process go as smoothly as a sleigh on snow, or was it less fun than driving to the mall in a white-out blizzard? If you were to write a letter to Santa to bring you a better process and better software (harkening back to the innocence of childhood when maybe Legos, a drum set, or a new puppy were your greatest desires), what would you ask for? (more…)

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Speed Up Your Essbase: Optimizing Data Management

In a recent article I discussed some Essbase design ideas to get your updates to run faster. I covered a few fundamental Outline design and calculation approaches, and touched on the other data storage options you have in addition to the legacy Block storage – namely, Aggregate Storage (ASO) and Hybrid.

Here I list some more ideas that could help speed up the data loading and calculation time of your Block storage cubes. I’m categorizing these as “data management” optimizations. You can use them in combination with the Outline and Calc Script ideas from the other article, to really speed things up. (more…)

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Speed Up Your Essbase: Optimizing Solution Design

Are you in a funk about slow Oracle Essbase updates? Did the prototype run at lightning speed but when the full data set was loaded to your production app, loading and calculation times started to take longer than expected? Did your Essbase app get great performance at first, then a year later your 10 minute update blossomed to more like 2 hours and 10 minutes?

Advances in computer hardware, such as multi-core processors, have enabled Essbase to more quickly load larger data sets and run more intricate calculations. (more…)

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You Built It. Now Who Will Support It?

You and your colleagues in FP&A (or whichever functional department you’re in), along with IT and maybe outside implementation consultants, have spent a quantity of blood, sweat and budget to get your spanking new Business Intelligence or Enterprise Performance Management solution up and running. The model has been built, source data integrated, dashboards and reports created. Congratulations!

Now, you might now be wondering, who’s going to support this? The implementation effort taught you the software (or SaaS cloud solution) isn’t magic, despite what the software vendor said. A certain amount of attentive care and feeding will be necessary. Who will make sure everything continues to run smoothly month in and month out? (more…)

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Oracle’s Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) Comes of Age

Oracle’s Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) is the cloud-based successor to Hyperion Planning, the industry-leading budgeting and forecasting software application. PBCS was one of the first Hyperion EPM solutions Oracle brought into the cloud in early 2014, and since then Oracle has quickly launched cloud versions of other applications in the Hyperion suite.

In its earliest iterations, PBCS didn’t offer all the functionality of Hyperion Planning and it wasn’t much easier to build and administer complex planning models in PBCS compared to its “on-premises” predecessor. The scaled-down nature of the cloud product made it a viable option for smaller organizations trading in their spreadsheet-based planning models. (more…)

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Would You Let a Computer Create Your Next Budget For You?

Predictive Analytics is an emerging field of technology and already being applied in business.   Advanced algorithms are being combined with increasing computer power to find trends and relationships in data in order to automatically predict what’s likely to happen in the future. Even CFOs and their FP&A teams are becoming fascinated with the possibilities of applying Predictive Analytics to make the naturally uncertain tasks of forecasting and planning more certain, as well as easier.

I’m fascinated by it as well. Recently I’ve been talking to data scientists, marketing professors, and an economist about how Predictive Analytics works. And I’ve realized it can be as dangerous as it is powerful. (more…)

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Finding a New Comfort Zone: Ideas for Managing Change

In an earlier article, I explained how resistance to change can doom a Business Intelligence (BI) or Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solution implementation. Fear of change can come out of any corner to reduce the efficiency of the project effort or severely limit adoption of the solution, diminishing your return on investment.

How can you improve the chances your team will engage in the effort and embrace a new way of doing things? Analysis Team’s Project Success Factors point out where effective steps can be taken. I understand that unique aspects of a given corporate culture could make specific approaches more likely or less likely to work, but here are a few ideas to consider: (more…)

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How a Client Optimizes Planning of Project Teams and Costs with Hyperion PFP

Multiple challenges make project planning, management and reporting difficult. Many of these challenges arise from the multi-disciplinary nature of projects – different departments need to share expense and capital budgets, and people from different functions need to be assigned in a timely way.

Can project headcount and costs be planned, and actual results measured, in a way that drives efficiency and accountability?  We helped the IT Project Management Office (PMO) of our client, a top-50 US bank, accomplish this. (more…)

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Essbase: Now in the Cloud

At last week’s ODTUG Kscope17 conference in San Antonio I focused on learning more about the new cloud version of Oracle Essbase, and even got a little hands-on time with it.  Oracle launched the much-anticipated Essbase Cloud Service just a few months ago in March 2017, marking a turning point in the 25-year history of this industry-leading analytic application.

You can’t buy Essbase Cloud Service alone – it’s sold as Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) and comes bundled with other business intelligence cloud products.  Oracle offers two levels: (more…)

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