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Oracle has announced the public availability of "Planning and Budgeting on the cloud" known as "Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service" (PCBS). You can find the press release :  Hyperion Planning and Budgeting on Oracle Cloud Service ( Link ) It is offered at $120/user with a minimum of 10 users. Not bad for small and mid-size organizations with little user base ----------------------------Excert Taken from EMEA Partner BI EPM Blog------------------------------------------------- You can also  JOIN THE WEBCAST  for a  Partner Deep-Dive  on  Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service .This live 120 minutes technical and functional deep-dive into the upcoming PBCS offering webcast will be on Wednesday February 26, 2014 at 09:00 UK / 10:00 CET. Oracle Hyperion EPM experts will not be disappointed, but novices are welcome. We assume you are already familiar with the Hyperion Planning & Budgeting Application, and need to know how the Cloud ...

Quite a few patch updates from Oracle related to Oracle EPM Suite. You can find more about this on Support blog at " December EPM "Patch Set Updates" released (updated) ".  You need to have a support ID to actually download the patches. Would recommend you to update these patches to avoid any issues that you might face. We had an issue recently and the Essbase Database (we are on 11.1.2.2) was corrupted and we had to restore it from Backup. We have not seen that issue before and we went through the patch readme document and we are in the process of applying that patch to our system. Hope this information helps.

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 ...