Hyperion Planning Basics

It has been a long time I am planning to learn Hyperion Planning. But as a typical technical person, could not do it until I started working on Hyperion Planning project for one of the clients.
To summarize my understanding, I will be updating my blog with Planning knowledge step by step.

This very first article is about Hyperion Planning Basics.

What is Planning

Oracle Hyperion Planning is defined as a Web-based planning, budgeting, and forecasting software.

The process of preparing for the future is planning. Planning is the set of activities to achieve goal in preparing the future.

Planning Types

As a part of planning, generally, an organization has two types of plans:

·         Strategic planning: A strategic plan includes the goals and objectives of an organization. It looks into its current business and aims by setting goals of what it wants to be in future. It includes a comprehensive strategic plan of how to achieve and it is at a very high level of an organization.

·         Operational planning: This is a set of detailed guidelines or a detailed plan to be executed to achieve the strategic plan. This planning involves the granular details of setting the responsibilities of people, departments and divisions. Hence, it's rightly called 'operational'.

What is Budgetting

Budgeting in an organization is planning how to spend money or how to allocate money to different departments or divisions.

Therefore, we can say that budgeting is a part of planning and without budgeting the planning cannot be successful in achieving the organizational or strategic goal.

What is Forecasting

Forecast is to predict the future. We make few assumptions about the future, which is called forecasting.

Conclusively, forecasting acts as a prerequisite to planning and budgeting is a part of planning activity. These three activities are intertwined but yet they are different.

Budgtting software – Oracle’s Hyperion Planning

Many organizations use Spreadsheets for budgeting. But Excel has some disadvantages like time taken, data integrity, cost, scalability and adaptability.

Oracle Hyperion Planning is defined by Oracle as a centralized, Web-based planning, budgeting, and forecasting solution that drives collaborative, integrated, event-based planning processes throughout the enterprise.

Planning Architecture

When we want to go for implementing Oracle’s Hyperion Planning solution, we need to purchase Planning software from Oracle. It is available in 3 packages.

Oracle Planning Product Architecture

Broadly, Planning Product Architecture is divided into three layers, shown as follows:

1. Client Layer – End users connect via a web browser or Microsoft Office
2. Web layer – the web layer provides the web content to end users
3. Application layer – the application layer contains all of the intelligence and performs all of the processing
4. Database layer – the database layer stores the data, metadata, web components, etc.
   DB layer has two kinds of DB – RDBMS and Oracle Essbase

Oracle Hyperion Planning Process Flow

Depending upon the operation performed in the Planning application, the information is stored or retrieved from a Relational source such as metadata or security information and/or from Oracle Essbase as shown in the following image:

Oracle Hyperion Planning Solution Architecture

Oracle Hyperion Planning solution includes following additional products

·         Oracle Data Integrator (ODI)

·         Financial Data Quality Management (FDQM)

·         Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI)

·         Hyperion Web Analysis

·         Hyperion Financial Reporting

EPM