Oracle Expands Its Performance Management OfferingsOracle Expands Its Performance Management Offerings

The new Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting — EPB — is the hub of Oracle's corporate performance management offerings. You'll want to look at this product if you need to control the business processes of planning, budgeting, forecasting, monitoring and analysis, especially if you're already using the Oracle e-Business Suite or Oracle Financial Analyzer (OFA). EPB enables definitions of business drivers and models to be shared across the enterprise, providing consistency, control and accountability.

Architectural Advantages

EPB is the successor to Oracle's analytic applications, OFA and Oracle Sales Analyzer (OSA). EPB includes OFA and OSA features but also provides new capabilities such as report and worksheet annotations, allocation, and additional calculation templates.

Being part of the Oracle e-Business Suite gives EPB two big advantages: It can be presented in 28 different human languages, and it leverages the Oracle Applications development framework. This framework provides a set of standards and components for the user interface and middle tier, ensuring compatibility with other Oracle-based applications. This is a benefit for existing Oracle e-Business Suite customers, who will find it relatively easy to learn. E-Business Suite organizations can run EPB in the same instance or separate from other e-Business Suite applications. Organizations without the Oracle e-Business Suite can install EPB as a stand-alone application.

EPB is the first Oracle application to utilize Oracle OLAP. EPB stores all data and structures in a multidimensional Analytic Workspace that facilitates fast and sophisticated multidimensional calculation and query capabilities required by planning and forecasting applications. Oracle OLAP is the next generation of the Oracle Express multidimensional OLAP Server; the Express technology has been integrated into the Oracle Database kernel. EPB is deployed using 100 percent HTML, and Oracle BI Beans technology enables EPB to provide end-user business functionality such as reports, graphs, queries and calculations. (For more about these functions, see "Ad Hoc Express" in the May 31, 2003 issue, online at www.intelligententerprise.com/030531/609products1_1.jhtml?_requestid=683622.)

EPB is built on the unified Enterprise Performance Foundation (EPF), which amalgamates financial and operational data. EPF is a relational schema comprising predefined and user tables that store business facts (such as monetary balances and statistics), general ledger balances, dimensions, hierarchies and attributes. Open interface tables, with a predefined layout, act as a staging area. The interface tables are populated by the schema administrator (typically a member of the IT organization) using relational tools such as Oracle SQL Loader or any tool that can load data into Oracle RDBMS tables. This approach lets organizations take advantage of accessible expertise rather than having to learn a vendor-specific programming language or data loading interface. The Schema Administrator uses EPF's Loader Engines to make data available to EPB. Directly integrating EPB with Oracle General Ledger obviates the loading step.

What You Get

At the core of an EPB implementation lies one or more business processes. (See the screen capture below.) A business process is a defined set of tasks that generates data for analysis and reporting. When you run a business process, EPB gives you a logical "view," which is a representation of the physical data, shielding you from having to know how and where the data is stored.

Business users are the ones who define the processes, and they do so in terms of tasks and schedules. Examples of tasks are loading data, generating and distributing worksheets, solving data and alerting to exceptions. Oracle Workflow, which is integrated into EPB, automates these processes.

EPB has a lot of the sophisticated functions you'd expect of an enterprise planning and budgeting tool. When creating a business process, you can specify the data (actuals, for example), or just the dimensions if the data is to be entered via worksheets (such as forecast data). You can also specify whether EPB should create a new (versioned) view of the data or append to an existing view. You can, furthermore, determine whether the time horizon should be fixed (such as all months in 2005) or relative (such as 18 months forward from the current time period).

You create "solve" tasks to provide the rules on how to initialize, calculate, aggregate and allocate each individual Line Item (natural accounts such as revenue, expenses and gross margin) to be processed. For the other dimensions (such as Organization and Time), you select the hierarchical levels at which the data will be acquired (input) and the levels of the required result (output). If input is, say, at the corporate level while output is at the departmental level, EPB will perform an automatic allocation based on the rule specified. If input is at a lower level than output, it will perform an aggregation.

A unique and differentiating feature of EPB is that it automatically creates the initialization, calculation, aggregation and allocation procedures once the business process and tasks are defined — thus eliminating the development time and cost of IT developers or consultants. If the business process involves data entry tasks, EPB automatically generates the worksheets based on the data ownership specified by the Security Administrator. Targets (mandatory or advisory) can be associated with worksheet cells. For example, it could be mandatory that planned travel expenses for Marketing not exceed $20,000 per month.

Auto fill functions such as Grow, Increase, Spread and Aggregate can be used to populate worksheet cells. However, the main weakness with EPB is the lack of integration with Excel — which is the mainstay for planning and forecasting in many finance departments. Although a worksheet or report can be exported to Excel, EPB provides no facilities to report from, enter data directly from, or copy and paste data from Excel into a worksheet.

Migration from OFA and OSA

Oracle will support OFA and OSA until mid 2008, with error correction support until the end of 2006. Existing OFA customers looking to migrate should consider two approaches. The first is to identify the business processes and tasks in OFA, and then implement EPB. The second is to load information from OFA into EPB and then define processes and tasks. In both cases, Oracle provides migration tools to transport data, structures, users and reports from OFA to EPB. Placeholders are created for OFA formulas so migrated reports will open. However, formulas require redefinition in EPB using calculation templates. Models, solves, worksheets and data entry forms are not migrated, because EPB automatically defines these components when you define business processes.

• Oracle EPB is priced by named user and includes a run-time version of Oracle9i Database with OLAP Option. A full user license is $2,995 and a read-only license is $595. Existing OFA/OSA licenses migrate free of charge to EPB or Discoverer, and the underlying Oracle Express Server licenses migrate free of charge to a run-time version of Oracle9i Database with OLAP Option. Contact Oracle at 1-800-633-0615 or www.oracle.com.

Paul Dean is an independent consultant providing OLAP product evaluation and selection, implementation and training services. Write to him at [email protected].