Enterprise Transformations, It's all About Performance Management

Oracle EPM Cloud Or No Cloud With Oracle EPM 11.1.2.4 premier support ending in Dec 2021, there are a lot of organizations that are still dealing with questions like: Should we move to  11.2.X Is it the right move Is it possible to move to 11.2.X in such a short span of time Can we move directly with Cloud and never deal with infra issues again What should be our move strategy, would a cloud be able to support our on-prem layout What will be the transition plan If you are asking these questions you are not alone and you are asking the right questions.  For details on support end dates:  https://blogs.oracle.com/proactivesupportepm/essbase-1112x-updates-to-the-extended-support-end-date Organizations are focusing on IT landscape that is leaner and fitter, with reduced Infrastructure deployment and maintenance costs with simpler and faster implementations. Oracle’s survey mentioned that about 78% of organizations who already have one or more EPM processes in the cloud said t...

An emotionally intelligent leader is a leader who is aware of his/her emotions and seeing how those impact others. These leaders go beyond being sensible, they are the masters of having difficult conversations, mentoring, and leading during a crisis. There are multiple dimensions of leadership, some of them are useful for building strong teams and others help with being confident, courageous, and compassionate.  On a similar spectrum, for being an emotionally intelligent leader, awareness and self-reflection are considered a few of the key traits of leadership. As per the mixed model of Goleman, he came up with 5 Elements of EI, here are five of his constructs  2 : Self Awareness Self Regulation Social Skill  Empathy  Motivation  Dr. Tasha Euric took a deep dive in Self Awareness and further zoomed in on internal vs external self-awareness. She came up with the below 2x2 self-awareness matrix. Where individuals fall in Pleasers, Skeers, Introspectors, and Aware....

The first thought might be: Agile and Finance, really?  Isn't Finance bounded by statutory guidelines and timelines which finance can't afford to miss?  Is anyone using Agile Finance? If yes, is success envisioned?  How Finance can relate to Agile manifestos?  How to know If I am heading towards Agile Finance?  How EPM can help? We will try to address these in today's blog post. Today, successful CFOs are thinking Agile, they empowered with tools and technology to make informed decisions quickly, adapt to constant change, and implement new strategies with accelerated speed. The Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA) surveyed nearly 500 senior finance executives in organizations across the USA and Canada and found that 89% of businesses embracing an agile finance approach are more likely to report positive revenue growth, and 95% are more likely to report increasing profitability 1. Am I magically and logically heading towards Agi...

Sales Planning - "What you plan now, you will harvest later!" - Og Mandino, Author of The Greatest Salesman in the World Sales planning is about allocating resources, aligning markets, and managing quotas to attain strategic goals by leveraging resources, capabilities, and opportunities. The strategy is executed by resources on the ground level, so it is crucial that the leadership sets achievable-stretch goals by considering drivers such as customer behaviors, market trends, and demographics. An organization is setting itself for failure if reps are not optimistic about their targets or if markets are over or underserved. In theory, it sounds simple to organically grow or balance territories to serve the best client with the best reps, however, bigger the business, more complex it's resource and market allocations become. Quota assignment is both - art and science, in addition to resource and territory assignment one must figure out if a) top-down targets are realistic, ...

  Chesterton and Cabrera I am a big proponent of leveraging learnings from different fields and apply them for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). In today's post, I have picked up insights from - GK Chesterton, a well-known English writer, philosopher, and critic & cognitive scientist - Derek Cabrera. For starters here are some views of Chesterton from his book "The Thing" " There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."  The simplification of anything is always sensational, and the rewa...

History of ZERO-BASED Budgeting ZBB is five-decade old concept which was popularized by Pete Pyhrr when he was working as a young manager for Texas Instrument. In his words, “especially in times of economic problems, when you need to make reductions, or when you have significant and rapid technological change.” Here we break the budget down to small categories and then decisions are made on the tradeoffs of what return of investment, what do we lose, and what do we gain with the investment. It is looking at the expenses at a deeper level to derive the cost management and performance management, we are thinking about the resource allocation. In the modern world, we can do what-if and scenario analysis on aligning the resources to different priorities and ensuring they still align with higher corporate strategy and vision. Traversing in Turbulent Times We help our clients thrive in VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) environment by empowering them with word-class perfor...

“It's not going to be an easy ride, there will be rough patches, but we will get there”- said one of the project managers while explaining the benefits of a new technology implementation project kick-off meeting with VPs and C Suite leadership. A few months after project implementation, odds were in his favor, he delivered a quality product, under budget & on time! One can leverage a five-step methodology of Design, Deployment, Stabilization, Improvement, and Transformation to facilitate the expectation discussion.      Figure by: Professor  Dr. Salman A. Mufti,  Smith School of Business, Queens University Truly setting expectations on when a technology implementation will deliver results and when it will start creating impact is the key. During the design phase, most of the stakeholders are closely involved, the team is talking about the future and shaping future blueprints. This raises expectations, anticipation and magnifies the positive im...

The first major manifestation of digital technology was mainframe computers, they cost millions of dollars, and in order to use them, it required hours of training. Since then, we took a big leap from mainframes to desktops, to laptops, to smartphones, and now we have democratized technology where a majority of folks in the world have technology access.  The disruptive innovation model transforms products that are historically very expensive, complicated and makes them affordable and accessible. It helps in thinking about innovation-driven growth by keeping customers in mind, and highlighting how the progression of original innovation and disruptive innovation works. These customers range from Performance customers (who can be satisfied with the minimal viable products) to Demanding Performance Customers (who like to have the best of the experience). Disruptive innovation model helps us in answering questions like:  Why are some companies being so successful for so long?...

Adopting new technology can be considered one of the pillars of progressive thinking, however, next crucial step is to effectively leverage the technology to drive value for customers, business, stakeholders, technology users and enhance their capabilities. This can be achieved by:    Choosing tech with internal/external customer focus ·     Planning effective change management to increase adoption and usage of tech through a focus on varying learning needs by a group of users such as age, preference, impact on their work etc.     Planning for lag effect and investing in building readily available resources and tools to support learning and adoption and a greater focus on users who have no willingness to adopt    Being open-minded to bring in new talent to help and support the transition From my finance transformation journeys I remember two cases of gross margin financial planning implementation where the client wanted to o...

Knowing enterprise planning application (ePBCS) supports many models including Financials, Workforce, Capex, Project and Strategic planning. Each of them contains some model-specific dimensions and supports 3 custom dimensions.  This will make you question the old number of dimension limits in a planning application overall, earlier this limit was 20. We put some time in exploring these limits and found that the limit is 32!. Obviously, we are not an advocate of having such a high number of dimensions, however its good to know the supported number of dimensions while designing the overall architecture considering long term strategy for the entire landscape.  We tried to tick the application by creating 30 odd custom dimensions and then initializing a module, as anticipated we got following error message: "Number of Dimensions Cannot be more than 32. Enabling the module will exceed allowed number of dimensions" Again note, these limits are at the applicatio...

Out of box, EPBCS provides an option to set a monthly rolling forecast, we can enable it while creating an EPBCS planning application. Here is a little more information on that: https://docs.oracle.com/cloud/preview/pbcs_common/EPBCA/creating_the_application.htm#EPBCA-GUID-8B8D80E4-F64F-49D9-BF99-16781F6E7BA5 However, If we want to use a Quarterly rolling forecast instead of a Monthly one, there is no out of box way, but you can use a simple valid intersection to make it work, however, you have to ensure that all data forms are set to suppress on invalid data. Here is a default Scenario Year valid intersection, if you look at Rolling Forecast valid intersection it was auto-created for a valid year against a scenario for Rolling Forecast. We can add something similar to that, by bring periods in  picture as well. Data form will not suppress rows based on valid intersections automatically, please ensure suppression on invalid data is checked

We have faced a couple of issues which were related to this topic and root cause for all of them was the same. Issue: In a data form when you go for page member selection, it shows one default member but if you want to change the page member, there are no options! In this situation you will check the data form layout and try to see what  is the selection criteria in our case especially entity. Our layout was correct, value for this variable was "Total Entity", it should show all options. We looked at the grid properties, there was no suppression on. Even recreation of form didn't help. Finally, we figured even if we don't check any suppression option in Data form layout, PBCS/EPBCS still consider the Valid Intersections. We fixed the valid intersections and got our members back for Page selection. Cheers..!! Rahul S.

In today's post we will talk about improve asset OOB feature of ePBCS' Capex Model. Let's take a use case where we have an existing building and we are planning to improve that building by adding a conference room and a stairwell. We have multiple ways to improve that asset, some of them are: 1. Plan for two new assets using add new asset rule under investments or 2. Using Improve Asset feature Here will talk about the second approach, if you want to use improve asset functionality you have to think through following asset structure Existing Building ABC     - Existing Building ABC Base     - ABC Conference Room     - ABC Stairwell Let's take a step by step approach to achieve such scenarios: Assuming from our Actual source system we got just one existing asset Existing Building ABC, if you are try to improve asset you will probably run to following issue: Error occurred during pre processing of business rule. Cannot add member <...

If you have landed on this page, you may want to look at this blog post which talks about new features of ePBCS Financial where you can bring in your chart of accounts instead of trying to fit in your chart of accounts with OOB. Let's start with first option where you have just enabled accounts option: After enabling above option, you will find following members in Account hierarchy: If you truly want to use your own set of account, this option is of no major use, because it still creates above accounts. Though you are saving on number of drivers.  If you want to check number of accounts, just for expense it creates 169 compare to 26 when you are not going with out of box accounts at all.  On the positive side, it still creates old hierarchies of drivers, probability of running into issues will be little lower as compared to going without Accounts or Drivers.  Now let's just check drivers and related account option option: ...

     ePBCS 18.2, a release to remember! We were waiting for this release quite anxiously, this is filled with a lot of bug fixes and a few new features. It solves one of the biggest Financial Model’s problem which I am sure any one who has either implemented or trying to implement must have faced.  How to bring in your chart of account and how to make it work with out of box(OOB) Account hierarchy ?  In above aspect, there were quite a few issues, some of them but not limited to: You have to map your COA with OOB Account categories Completely ignore OOB and start creating your own rollup and deal with consequences Go hybrid with the combination of above two Use existing members and Rename alias Add/Delete option disabled for member creation and deletion (Because of obvious reasons),  It creates a lot of additional unused accounts, leads to additional increased block size If you dont want to confuse planners with additional unu...

The member "" does not exist for the specified cube or you do not have access to it. Issue:  If you are running into a issue, where for a RTP member selection is throwing an error for a missing member, this regardless of the member you have selected in RTP or regardless of rule. You may be able to execute the rule from Calc Manager and not from Planning. Reason: You may run into this issue if: 1. You have added members in Planning and have not refreshed the cube 2. For the default value of a RTP in calc member you have a member which is not valid any more for planning application 3. For the default value of a RTP in calc member you have a member which is not valid any more for a plan type Solution: 1. Refresh cube 2. Update Default value of RTP which is causing issue to member which exists 3. Deploy the rule Rahul S.

We have witnessed an issue where application migration or sometimes service restart in PBCS/EPBCS activates multiple navigation flows.  If multiple navigation flows are active you wont be able make changes in any of them, because in order to make change in navigation flow you have to make it inactive. Typically you may end up in following situation:  Solution is pretty simple: 1. Create a copy of any of the existing navigation flow:  2. Give it any desired name:  3. Now, you will see one additional navigation flow, with inactive status: 4.  Make it active: 5.  At this point of time you will have one active navigation flow and two inactive  6. Select the additional navigation flow you have created and delete it  7. Now you are back in business: Rahul S.

If you are using On Prem FDMEE to connect with PBCS/EPBCS you may run into the issue where ASO cubes are not showing up in On Prem FDMEE. In order to solve this issue you have to go to PBCS Data Management and create a ASO Target Application. Once this application is created, ASO cube should show up in On Prem FDMEE. 1. Go to Data Management in PBCS 2. Click on Add, select Local  3. Select Essbase from the drop down 4. ASO Cubes will show up with "A" and "A_ "  prefix  5. Save the ASO Target Application, you should see it as essbase application 6. Now login to On Prem FDMEE , you should see ASO cube in the list now: Rahul S.