Month: May 2018

Use case for building profitability cube in Essbase for clients having OBIEE/OBIAW license

We are recently implementing Essbase studio at a Consumer goods company that had OBIEE with OBIAW license. They do not have Hyperion Planning License.

Note that OBIEE comes with Essbase studio license. You can then use this license to create an Essbase cube based of a data warehouse schema. We used OBIEE license to spin off a profitability ASO cube based on data warehouse.

All the allocations down to product/SKU number were done in relational database. Client deferred the HPCM license for now for budget reasons.

Essbase studio implementation is quite simple. First create connection for warehouse and Essbase. Bring in all tables from warehouse and create a mini schema (connection of facts and dimension tables). Manipulate you dimension elements and hierarchy. Then create essbase cube schema and deploy Essbase cube. We used the customized SQL to build data load since SQL generated from Essbase studio was inefficient and slow. Try to make a clean join between your fact and dimension tables. Follow all rules of SQL query optimization.

One of the issue we found was that sometimes Essbase studio did not load/deploy all properties for Essbase ASO cube reflected in relational database. E.g. members formula and consolidation operators. We did refresh at dimension element and cube schema level. That did not work, We had to delete cube schema and rebuild it again from scratch. That resolved our issues. Apart from rest everything was smooth.

Many ratios were built into ASO cube to give better insights e.g. COGS/NetSales, Gross Sales/Net Sales, Net Sales/Unit, Advertising Expense as a Percentage of Net Sales, SG&A expense /net Sales etc.

Please feel to reach out to me in case of any questions on implementation.

FCCS Implementation for a manufacturing client

 

We recently implemented a consolidation solution in cloud FCCS for manufacturing firm. I would like to discuss few tips and takeaways from this implementation. From a technical perspective, this solution was implemented in 8 weeks, but validation from business users took another 1 and half month.

Some of key points while implementation FCCS cloud solution.

1)Business needs to have clean trial balance data at source. If you have different trail balance in different systems, this will delay your FCCS implementation and validation effort.

2)Validation of historical took long time. Lots of journal entries were required to match it to audit reports.

3)Elimination entries did not have matching pairs e.g. Sales/COGS combination. Because of this, no good visibility of elimination matching entries in audit report if needed. So, clean up your trail balance entries and ensure you have clean matching accounts(Sales/COGS) in source system.

4)Map Cash flow to right movement dimension from the beginning. This will help you generate Income Statement/Balance sheet/Cash flow without any rework.

5) Ownership module (used in case of companies having  subsidiaries) is new and no clear documentation is provided. We just calculated ownership outside the system and loaded it in FCCS.

6)Consolidate rules sometime have issue. We had to clear/load data and again consolidate as a workaround.

7)Exporting journals from Test to Prod is an issue.

8)Retrieval and calc time were awesome considering that it had 12 dimensions.

9)Ensure that retained earnings roll up correctly for Balance sheet.

10)Balance sheet items having rollforwards not Income statement.

11)If the mappings of Cash glow is done correctly at the beginning, Cash flow is generated without any issues. Set up cash flow exactly as shown in out of box Cash flow accounts. Parent with flip sign for child members.

12)Don’t ignore the validation effort from business when implementing FCCS.it is not like your validation of Planning system.

13)Map company chart of accounts to hierarchy given in FCCS. Don’t create anything outside this hierarchy.

14)Create Alternate hierarchy as sibling and not as child.eg

Entity

Total Entity

Entity Roll Up for Management Reporting

15)Validate entire hierarchy and each individual hierarchy in FCCS before deploying. This ensure that you are following all rules in FCCS.

Please reach to us in case of any FCCS Implementation question