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At ODTUG Kscope18 , Oracle has revealed new features and groundbreaking updates that are going to come in the next release in OAC. Have you ever wondered what it's going to be I was so excited that I kicked-off the promotional offer and fired up my OAC instance. But, I was surprised and felt sad after looking at the instance that is in public cloud and the instance that is going to come in the next release. Not sure if I am missing anything here which will enable me to access the newer interface / newer instance The new interface looks sleek and looks a lot better than the previous interface. I am using the instance as parts of Hands-On lab at ODTUG Kscope18. Not sure till when this environment will be available. I will update this blog and make it more comparitive with what is available right now in public cloud New JET UI. I don't know if that is the right way to call it but that's what it says when you fire up the OAC instance new interface Less clutter and wa...

Yes. You have read it right and I am talking right. There is a saying that if you understand a process end-to-end you open lot of possibilities for improvement / betterment and it suits perfect in this case As the title goes, we all have started our career in Essbase (atleast in my case) and moved to to different other tools. We might have received multiple requests / written different types of calculation scripts where we have to copy a subset of data from one combination to other combination. The real problem comes when a user who is well-versed with Essbase and even knows the technical stuff better comes with a requirement which blows your mind and you had to think / try every single possibility to convince him that this is not possible. The same thing happened with me Background We use planning application for Planning sessions, Yearly Budget and monthly forecast and initially the monthly forecasting in Excel (where they have numbers as well as text) and after moving to Ora...

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 (Mem...

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 ...

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 de...

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 i...

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 ...