...Financial reports and Shared Services

A few months ago, we were ready for our monthly submission. Everything was quiet and I was relaxed enjoying our Cloud environment...until we received an alert from our monitoring tool that the first of the two FR WebLogic servers auto-restarted. Of course, having a WebLogic server auto-restarting was not a problem since that was the process. Until five minutes later

...CPU utilisation in HFM

There are 3 settings that manage the CPU utilisation.

•  MaxNumConcurrentConsolidations: The number of concurrent consolidations that can run in a server at one time. This setting will adjust the total number of consolidations that run in one server regardless the number.

• NumConsolidationThreads: The number of CPU treads that can be used to multi-thread a consolidation. A consolidation with 32 threads will finish quicker than a consolidation with 8 threads but the first one will use all the available CPU.

• ConsolidationMultiThreadingScheme

...Memory utilisation in HFM

Since version 11.x, Oracle has released the 64-bit version of HFM. The benefit is that the 64-bit version of HFM can hold more data in memory comparing to the 32-bit version.

Based on Oracle documentation, HFM virtual address space is dictated by the OS. So, if you have an application with large subcubes (large scenarios, dense data, big number of scenario) which struggles in the 32-bit environment,

...Records & Subcubes in HFM

A few years ago, I decided to spend time to understand how HFM calculation engine works with aim to improve the performance of the rules. The first stop was the HFM manual, the basic design considerations and the section that is referring to subcubes to understand the calculation mechanism.

...loading APP files in HFM

I have not posted any thoughts recently because I am working on an amazing migration to the Cloud project and I spend most of my time there. However, recently I got in a situation which reminded me of a discussion that I had a few months ago in OTN. The discussion was related with issues that users had with loading APP files in their upgraded applications.

In my case, we were working on upgrading the applications from 11.1.2.1 to 11.1.2.4. We followed the process suggested by Oracle and we upgraded 11.1.2.1 to 11.1.2.3 and then moved the applications to 11.1.2.4. When I started testing the upgraded applications I found that in one out of the three applications it was not possible to extract and reload the extracted metadata without corrupting the application.

...Org by Period

Recently, in the OTN forum, we were discussing the functionality of Org by Period.

Org by Period specifies whether the application allows new consolidation structures to co-exist with previous consolidation structures in the same application.  If it will be set to ‘Y’, it will enable the functionality to activate or deactivate legal entities by reporting period.

As an example, let's consider entity AB which should be consolidate to parent A for period P1 to P3 and then consolidated to parent B for periods P4 to P12. In order to achieve this, in the Ownership management module the entity would be flagged as Active under parent A for periods P1 to P3 and then it will be flagged as Inactive. For periods P4 to P12, the entity will be flagged as Inactive for parent entity A and Active for parent entity B.

Based on this, the parent entity A would retain the values on a YTD basis for only the data that came from P1 to P3.  Data from periods P4 to P12 would be only consolidate to Parent B.

Finally, the metadata would show the entity underneath both Parent A and Parent B, though the various metadata selector dialogs have a "show active only" button when you want to show only the current period's active structure.

Cheers,

Thanos

... FDM batchloader

It’s been almost two months since my last post but I can say that all this time I had been working on a module that it is really interested but I had not worked before.

So in this post, I am going to describe my experience with FDM Batchloader. I know that it is a bit outdated topic since FDM has been replaced by FDMEE but in my defence not all the companies have upgraded yet.

Proem

As a summary, FDM Batchloader is a module that automates the steps that the user has to execute in order to import a text file with ERP data in the FDM tables, map the data to the HFM or Essbase members and finally load them in HFM or Essbase.

...Debugging HFM rules

Hi all,

I hope you are doing well. I just came back from a 3-weeks holidays ready for a new year hopefully full with Hyperion projects and consolidation challenges.

Proem

Last night I was discussing in the OTN forum on how to debug a complex set of rules. This discussion brought into my mind the multiple times during the last project that I was in the same situation and I was trying to find a problem in a mechanism that includes triggers, variables and multiple HFM expressions.

Unfortunately when you are working on a complex set of rules with different cases and different statements, it is really easy to make a mistake and misread or misinterpret the existing rules.

For this reason, I believe that the easiest way to find the solution to your problem is

...FDM reclassifications with logic accounts

I was recently discussing (with my wife) about the various HFM reclassification journals (VAT, Corporate tax, Cash/Overdraft) and it occurred to me that the easiest way to complete this task is with the proper configuration and design of the FDM application.

Proem

When designing an FDM – HFM solution, my understanding is that FDM should be used to replace all the manual, time consuming, non-value-added data-management steps of the ETL process while moving data from the ERP to HFM.

This design has 2 main guidelines:

• The extract query from the ERP system should not exclude any of the data. The main reason of this guideline is to prevent the exclusion of any future ERP changes to be extracted in the extract file.

...Keep calm and Hyperion a lot!!!!

Hi all,

This is not a usual post with one of my experiences or a thought that I had recently... enjoy and share!!!

..designing a scenario

Hi all,

In this post I am trying to clarify my thoughts regarding the Scenario dimension.

The scenario dimension in HFM holds the different data sets reported by the group. Despite the fact that scenario dimension has usually up to ten members, it is one of the most important dimensions of the application. The reason is that the scenario dimension defines the input frequency (month-to-date, quarter-to-date or year-to-date), the calculation sequence between Periodic and YTD for the flow accounts, the process management, the data audit and the execution of the consolidation rules.

From a functional perspective, the most common scenarios that I have seen up to today are:

• Flash
• Actual
• Budget
• Forecast
• Translation scenarios of the previous data sets

Following, I have a quick description of the scenario dimension setting. The description is based on my experience, on the HFM admin manual and on discussions that I had with other consultants.

1. Member or Label or Name:

The name or the label of the scenario. After version 11.1.1.3, the name must be unique and can contain up to 80 characters,

...locking entities in HFM

Hi all,

Recently, I was working on an assignment to start locking the entities in an HFM application with 8 scenarios, 9 years of data and 600 base entities.

The options were the following:

1. Should we lock only the base entities?
2. Should we lock both the base entities and the parents?
3. Should we not lock anything? 

In the end, we decided that the best approach is