February Updates for Oracle EPM

Can you believe it?… January is behind us and February is here! And with February comes Valentine’s Day… (just a friendly reminder for those of us who tend to mistakenly overlook this holiday ). But lucky for customers, Oracle is not getting distracted by Cupid and is instead providing a laundry list of enhancements for their EPM solutions. Continue reading below as we highlight a few of the items to top the list.

Enhanced Options for Migrating Data Management Artifacts

Starting this month, customers now have the ability to export and import snapshots with setup artifacts or all data. The options available are described below.

Individual Artifact Setup Only – Use this mode to select the individual artifacts to migrate such as locations and mappings. When importing the snapshot in the target system, the data is merged with the existing data in the target system. Pleas note that this mode does not include Workbench data.
Single Snapshot Setup Only – Importing the snapshot in the target system results in all the existing setup data being deleted and replaced with the data from the snapshot.
Single Snapshot Setup and Data – Data in the target system is completely deleted and data from the snapshot is imported. Please note that the import duration time is dependent on the volume of the Workbench data. Additionally, this may affect the performance of the LCM backup.

These options can be set within the Data Management System Settings page and is applicable for the following solutions: Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management, Financial Consolidation and Close, FreeForm, Planning, Planning Modules, Profitability and Cost Management, and Tax Reporting.

Ability to Set Data Management Import and Export Modes

Running data load rules in Data Management has always required users to ensure selection of the correct import/export modes. “Replace” and “Merge” have long been the native defaults for import and export modes, respectively. Now, these options can be set as default within the Application Options page in Data Management: Default Import Mode and Default Export Mode.

Activity Report Expanded to Help Troubleshooting

New performance insights are available for Account Reconciliation, Financial Consolidation and Close, FreeForm, Planning, Planning Modules, and Tax Reporting applications. The Maximum Number of Calculation Threads provides customers with the exact number of Essbase threads during any specific hour. Application administrators can combine this report with the other information within the Activity Reports to proactively troubleshoot performance challenges.

Additionally, for Account Reconciliation apps, the report also now provides the Top 10 Job Types by Execution.

An example of each report is displayed below.

New Drill Down Capability

Drill down to source data is a common requirement for EPM customers. And until now, that ability was not available for summary members in Forms and Reports. Customers using the EPM Integration Agent will now have to ability to drill on summary members. The application essentially passes descendants members back to the queries used by the Agent.

Click here to read more on the Direct Drill feature available for Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management, Financial Consolidation and Close, FreeForm, Planning, Planning Modules, Profitability and Cost Management, and Tax Reporting solutions.

Smart View continues to get better and better each release, expanding on the fact that it is the best spreadsheet add-in within it’s class. The latest version (available within the coming weeks) will now allow users to perform the following: