HFM (Hyperion
Financial Management)
The last
release 11.1.2.2. was the most significant change to the HFM user interface for
many years, using Oracle's ADF front end.
Being so new, there have been many performance issues reported around
speed. Big message from Oracle is that
the new version is lightning fast by comparison.......hope so!
You can now
execute rules from a web form Rick click in a similar way to Hyperion Planning
which is nice.
One for the
administrators is a log to compare metadata versions. This sounds nice, handy to check exactly
which metadata change stopped your consolidation rule from working.
Data forms
and grids are a little more customizable but dot 2 was the major step change,
this one just works.........so they say.
FDM
(Financial Data Management)
FDM is going
and will and now be called FDMEE, standing for Enterprise Edition. They new product looks exactly the same as
the old product and is certified as having the same level of functionality but
is built on the ERPi platform.
Larry doesn't
play golf with Bill, so the Windows client has gone finally,but the fish are
still there. It's quicker
and can handle more so I'm quite liking the sound of this, but haven't used it
yet! In this release, you'll still get
the old FDM but its last chance saloon as from 11.1.2.4. it will be completely
dead.
FCM
(Financial Close Management)
No massive
changes with the latest release but they have added 'Tim to complete' on the
tasks so you can report on it when you do you Close debrief.
ARM (Account
Reconciliation Management)
Yes I know
this is technically bundled as part of FCM but this doesn't really make sense
as its a completely different set of users performing the month end balance
sheet reconciliations to those that control the overall month end process.
No major
improvements since its launch in the last release and still doesn't have
transactional balances but its a nice product and I can see real benefit to
those customers that need some way of controlling the monthly chore of balance
sheet recs.
DM (Disclosure
Management)
A few
enhancements here such as being able to view the dates when documents were
uploaded but general feeling is that it's closing the gap on the competition
but still behind.
Tax
Provisioning
This is a
reasonably new product to the UK market built to compete with products such as
Longview. It's effectively a pure built
HFM application that you us to collate date and then apply tax calculations to
manage your tax number and then send the journal back into the ledger at the
end.
It looks good
but list price is not cheap at $5k with minimal user number of 20. Given most tax departments are fairly small
it might have been better to price list at $20k with minimum order number of 5,
just my opinion.
This module
has led to the creation of new HFM functionality to use users to create simple
rules within the application and the VB scripting is automatically created out
of the back end. This is very much
trying to hand the control from the consultant back to the finance guy. I wonder how efficient the rules are but
maybe we're seeing the future of HFM being developed by finance, not the
consultant..........gulp!
Sustainability
Reporting
Another pure
built HFM application but this is not very expensive at all, in fact it's
completely free when you buy HFM.
It's
compliant with the Global Reporting Initiative.
To be honest, I didn't look to carefully into this product and got to be
suspicious when Larry gives something away for free...............
Smartview
So this is
where the spreadsheet jockeys stand to attention. Larry brought in a few nice touches with
11.1.2.2. and carries that forward in this release. FR reports exported into Smartview keep the
formats better now and it's faster to retrieve data.
You can now
add to metadata for Hyperion Planning using Smartview. Very funky feature and one that I hope will
be extended for other products.
Financial
Reporting
Here's a big
one...................you can now view financial reports using an iPad AND
other devices using Android operating device.
I thought Larry would be faithful to Apple for ever but he's a smart man
so he's recognizing that there's an awful lot of Android out there.
There's no
app, you just use your browser to a web address of the reports repository. Hardly any set up required, just 11.1.2.3.
installed. There are going to be a lot
of happy FDs out there soon.
OFMA (Oracle
Financial Management Application)
OFMA is the
only dashboard reporting application out there that gives you true 'real time'
reporting functionality on top of your HFM application.n The competition have
to move the data out to a DB to report on it.
The downside
is that you have to buy OBIEE and OFMA which is a fairly expensive way to get
some dash boarding out of HFM. If you
have OBIEE already then obviously the price becomes reasonable.
Obviously
OBIEE gives you access to mobile reporting but given that FR is now able to report
on mobile for free, I think it's a tricky sell. The current
release still comes working with the four custom dimensions but next release
will give you access to the new unlimited capability. Dunno - for me the jury is still out.
HP (Hyperion
Planning)
The majority
of the updates were in the bolt on applications that run on Planning. 11.1.2.3. is the version that will be used
for the cloud offering due to be released later this year.
PSPB (Public
Sector Planning & Budgeting)
Decision
packages were a great piece of functionality that were introduced in 11.1.2.2.
but being new, they were a little clunky.
New in this release is the ability to copy decision packages which is
very cool. There's also
some extra ability to upload supporting information and annotations.
PFP (Project
Financial Planning)
I'm still.
Not so sure about this module. Once it
gets a few customers singing its praises then I’ll stand up and take a bit more
notice. There is new functionality to
import metadata through relational tables but that's about it.
DRM
(Dimensional Relationship Management)
Main update
it his release was DRG, the G standing for governance. Nice logical step, well done a Oracle. I have had many discussions with customers
who have been asking for a way to manage approvals for changes......well here it
is. I haven't
used it yet but the demo looked good.
Looking forward to seeing this work.
HPCM
(Hyperion Cost & Profitability Management)
I love this
product. Back in the day when we were
struggling with Activity Based Costing using Excel and Access, it really was a
painful process. HPCM can be
used fairly out of the box which is great.
The traceability maps are wonderful, shame you still can't print them :(
In this
release there have been some major performance enhancements to ensure lighting
fast calculations. It is also now
certified to run on Exalytics if you want warp speed.
You also now
get the ability to have three ASO reporting cubes, one for each detailed
profitability model. There's a new
destination stage balancing report too.
SUMMARY
After the
mind blowing changes to 11.1.2.2. I wasn't too excited about 11.1.2.3. but
actually there has been a lot of really useful smoothing of the edges and if
the performance improvements work I might actually be recommending to my
customers a move to the bleeding edge release..............for the first time
EVER!
