Enterprise Transformations, It's all About Performance Management

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...