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It has come out of surprise that ASO doesn't have a Boolean function similar to @ISIDESC function in BSO for writing MDX formulas. But, how can I achieve it? There are two different ways of doing it. Using ISANCESTOR Function Using CONTAINS function with a combination of Descendants function [1] Using ISANCESTOR Function [ IsAncestor (Member1, Member2) ] As the name says, this function will check if Member1 is ancestor of Member2 . Let's take a simple example IsAncestor ([Market].CurrentMember, [Florida]) -    This will check if the CurrentMember in the retrieve is Ancestor for [Florida] . Now, If we switch the member1, member2 we will be able to achieve the @ISDESC functionality. IsAncestor ([Florida], [Market].CurrentMember) - This will check if [Florida] is ancestor of your CurrentMember and this condition will satisfy for all the members that fall under [Florida] . Using CONTAINS function with a combination of Descendants Function [ CONTAINS (Memb

TWOPASS... Why do i need TWO PASSES for a calculation to get it right? One of my colleague who was new to Essbase asked me.. What is TWOPASS?  As usual, I took the standard example of % Calculation and said that  "When you are performing % calculation using a member formula, you have to calculate again at Total level than to aggregate the percentages from child to parent. In such case, you have to re-calculate again at total level and in order for the essbase to do this, we tag the member as TWOPASS so that it will calculate again in the End. Below is the example i gave Calculation Without TWOPASS                  Jan        Feb      Mar      Q1 Sales        1000      1200    800      3000      Profit          20          50      20        90 Profit %      50          24     40        114 Profit % has to be re-calculated again at Q1 to provide the correct results Calculation With TWOPASS                   Jan        Feb      Mar      Q1

In the Last series of Posts Here (Part I) and Here (Part II), we have talked about the basics of Variance Reporting (Part I) and Variance Reporting Across Time Periods (Part II).  In this post, we will talk about variance reporting Across Scenarios (Actual, Plan, Forecast). Most of the Organizations who have been using Oracle EPM set of tools as part of their financial process would have the below process setup Fetch the Actuals (transaction level data) from different source systems for their reporting & analysis. Most of the actual data comes from oracle GL, Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft or any type of an OLTP system or it could even come from flatfiles or excel or could be any readable format Have a Planning application where users can input their PLAN data. Most of the organizations have long-term goals and target and plan to achieve it. What are the steps that are involved to achieve their goals and targets is part of their planning. I am not going to talk in detail

In the last post here , we have talked about the basics of Variance Reporting. In this post, we will talk a bit detail about the variances scenarios that fall under two categories that we mentioned in the Part I of this series.  Exert from the last post You can categorize the Variance Reporting as Variance Reporting across Time Periods Variance Reporting across Scenarios (Actual, Plan, Forecast) Variance Reporting across Time Periods Most of the organizations often compare data across Time Periods to know where exactly their stand and how are they progressing. For Example, a sales organization want to see  How much their sales has increased from Last Quarter/Month What is their revenue when compared to Last Quarter/Month what are the companies expenses when compared to Last Quarter/Month What is the profit margin when compared to Last Quarter/Month When a company releases their Quarter Results, you might have heard that Our company profits have increased

Looking at the word Variance Reporting reminds us about the @VAR and @VARPER functions available in Essbase with which you can do variance reporting. One of my good friend wrote a blog post how to perform variance reporting Here. I would not re-invent the wheel but rather would speak about what are the different ways of performing variance analysis. I would split this in to three parts and woudl cover the basics in Part I. These days, Essbase applications are not used just for analysis and reporting. They are used even for Planning, Forecasting and Actuals for baseline. It so happens that you might have to do a lot of Variance Reporting and it is not just restricted to Act Vs Bud but rather a more complex and advanced way of variance reporting. We have recently upgdraded our application from sys9 to EPM11 and we were given requirement to build pre-built reports using Hyperion Financial Reports which they are currently using in Excel and they are even doing Variance Analysis

Most of the Essbase ASO Applications have View dimension for handling Dynamic Time Series (Mostly Q-T-D and Y-T-D). As you all know that ASO application does not have an in-built functionality to handle Dynamic Time Series . We have a DTS Dimension with 3 members. MTD,QTD and YTD.  All the data is loaded at MTD member QTD and YTD have MDX formulas to calculate the Qurater-To-Date and Year-To-Date as we have both Balance Sheet Accounts and P&L Accounts I was working on a report which is pretty simple but the combination of the data that has to be displayed is varied. Below is the layout of the report ROWS - Legal Entities (around 600+), Analysis Codes (1200+) and 19 BS Accounts and 25 P&L Accounts COLUMNS - Current Month, Last Month of Prior Quarter, Variance, Variance % This is a Y-T-D report and when i am trying to retrieve the report it is taking very long time. I didn't knew what was the issue.Tried couple of things Changed from YTD to MTD and the report

Oracle Hyperion DRM 11.1.2.2 enables you to export the hierarchies with different encodings (ASCII, Unicode, UTF-8, and so on).  We had our environment setup where we send the Metadata Feed from DRM to a Staging environment and then it goes to Hyperion Essbase Application. This is an ASO Application and we had a lot of Key Metric Formulas which are very huge and we thought of having a seperate feed in Parent, Child,Formula format and send it directly to Essbase Server which is sitting on a UNIX Box and somehow the metadata build is not happening. After a lot of hits and trials, we could finally find out that the issue was with the encoding which was set to UTF-8 by default.  We changed the Encoding to ASCII and when the file was FTPed to the UNIX box and ran the Metadata built, it ran successfully.  There are a couple of things that you can do to overcome this issue.   Change the Encoding of file to ASCII if you are sure that your members does not have any special

It's good to start blogging after many years but this time it's all about technical. This is my first blog on Oracle EPM. I have been working on Essbase, Planning, HFR, DRM and ODI (All tools part of Oracle EPM Product Suite) from quite a long time and I still feel that I am a beginnler. Oracle EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) is a set of analytical process and business tools that allow a business to track, measure and achieve goals. The core components of Oracle EPM are Hyperion Financial Management, Oracle Hyperion Planning and powerful analytical tool Essbase. Oracle EPM has undergone lot of changes from it's inception (from v11.1.1.1) to current version (v11.1.2.3) and new tools were added. EPM Stack is bundled with Performance Managenemt Applications and with powerful analytics to align financial close, planning, reporting, analysis, and modeling and unlock business potential. There has also been lot of integration between ERP Systems to EPM applications