Oracle EPM V11.2 Installers Overview

 At Oracle Open World 2019, Al Marciante presented on the latest information related to the EPM On-Premises Applications Update.  Much awaited Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) V11.2 is available from Dec 2019.

Since then, Oracle is announcing a “Continuous Innovation” release model for Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System 11.2, delivering ongoing applications and underlying technology stack updates without a major upgrade.

All EPM 11.2 for Windows download packages are available for download on Oracle Software Delivery Cloud.

Before diving into installation and configuration, we should understand installers of V11.2 well and here is an attempt.

Installers overview

We will be going through those components which are required to be unzipped to install and configure HFM and Planning/Essbase system either on single server or in distributed environment. Rest of the installers will be documented later.

 1)  V998755-01 - Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System Release Client Installers

This zip file contains following clients. As a result, we will end up in downloading the entire file even if we are interested in single client. It is similar to V11.1.2.4 client installers zip. The only difference is number of clients are reduced as most of components are discontinued in V11.2.2.

• Planning (Planning SV Extension)
• EAS Console
• Essbase Client
• CloseMgrSupplementalData SmartView extension
• TaxOpsTaxSupplemental SmartView Extension

 Following clients from V11.1.2.4 are not present in V11.2.2.

• Disclosure Management
• EPMA client
• Essbase Studio
• HFM Client
• FR studio
• Oracle Interactive reporting client
• Production reporting remote client
• Predictive planning
• Smart View
• Strategic Finance Client

 This is different than V11.1.2.1 which was having separate installer for clients. (e.g. Essbase client was involved with Essbase installer)

 The combined zip for clients is started from v11.1.2.2. But IR and PR clients were in separate zip in V11.1.2.2.

 This installer zip is present in both HFM plus and Planning Plus.

 2)  V998784-01- Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System Release Installation Documents and Readmes

As name specifies, it contains all documentation part for Hyperion EPM V11.2.2.

It is present in both Planning Plus and HFM Plus suites

 3)  V933015-01, V933018-01_1of2, V933018-01_2of2

This set of 3 installers zip files contain FMW – Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c (12.2.1.3.0) is the latest release of the Fusion Middleware 12c (12.2.1) software

Oracle Fusion Middleware is a comprehensive family of products ranging from application development tools and integration solutions to identity management, collaboration, and business intelligence reporting.

 This has replaced Oracle Identity management in V11.2.4 - V37387-01

In v11.1.2.4, FMW 11g was present – 11.1.1.7.0 OIM – Oracle Identity Manager - Provides provisioning, reconciliation, request-based provisioning, self-service, and integration with heterogenous identity systems through connectors (LDAP, operating systems, mainframe/midrange, ERP packages, email/collaboration suites, databases, etc.)..

 4)  V998756-01- Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System Release Oracle HTTP Server

This file contains separate Oracle HTTP server. We can skip this component if we are planning to use weblogic server as web server. Weblogic server comes along with our Foundation services.

Ø  OHS

 5)  V998761-01- Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System Release Part 1

This is similar to the EPM System Installer and it contains

• Installer (InstallTool.cmd)
• Common products
• Product common components
• Essbase common components
• Opmn

6)  V998765-01- Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System Release Part 2

This zip file contains:

• Static Contents
• Shared Services
• Oracle Common Home
• Tools – HSS Migration Utility

 7)  V998766-01- Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System Release Part 3

This file contains

• DB client – 32 bit and 64 bit
• Calc Manager
• BIplus core services
• BIplus financial reporting
• BPM Architect

 8)  V998769-01- Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System Release Part 4

All the applications are bundled in this file.  In this upgrade case, We are interested only in HFM as those are used in our application, but we will still need to download Planning, strategic finance and all listed components. It then shows all these components while installation. Don’t get confused with unwanted components and ignore them while installation.

• AIF
• ARM
• Financial Close
• HFM
• HPM
• HSF
• ODI
• Planning
• SDM
• TaxOP
• TaxProvisioning
• TSS

This is very similar to v11.1.2.4 installer “Part 5 V74044-01 “

In v11.1.2.1, applications were distinguished among different installers zip files and we could download only required applications.

This did not cause any confusion while installing or configuring among applications

9)  V998771-01- Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System Release Part 5

This installer zip is present only in Planning Plus and not in HFM plus.

It contains Essbase related assemblies

• Essbase services
• EAS webapp
• Essbase webapp

10)   V998779-01- Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System Release Part 6

This installer is all about Weblogic. It contains:

• Weblogic Common components

 11)                   V998780-01- Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System Release Part 7

It contains setup files

 12)                   V998783-01- DRM

This is separate installer for DRM component which comes bundled with HFM plus or planning plus  

 

Oracle EPM 11.2 discontinued and new features

They say “The most important adage and the only adage is, the customer comes first, whatever the business, the customer comes first.”

While answering to client queries, came up with list of features discontinued and added to Oracle EPM V11.2.x

Below are the features which will be discontinued in EPM V11.2 version as compared to the earlier versions.

 Hyperion Financial Management

• Financial Management Analytics
• Essbase Analytics Link for Hyperion Financial Management
• Quantitative Management and Reporting for Solvency

Hyperion BI+ (Hyperion Business Intelligence applications)

• Interactive Reporting (IR)
• Production Reporting (SQR)
• Web Analysis (WA)

Hyperion Planning

• Hyperion Strategic Finance
• Crystal Ball (replaced by Predictive Planning)
• Simplified User Interface (SUI)
• Workforce Planning
• Capital Expense Planning
• Project Financial Planning
• Offline Planning

Additional

• EPM Architect (EPMA)
• Disclosure Management
• EPM Mobile

Below are the new features which will be available with 11.2 version release.

Hyperion Financial Management

• Automated Consolidations will be added
• Configurable by admin
• Native Metadata Editor
• Replaces metadata management
• Purging source tables after import
• Performance improvements
• SV, DB batch processing, etc.

EPM Infrastructure

• Additional 3rd party certifications

Hyperion Planning

• Smart Push
• Dimension Editor SV extension
• Extended Attribute support
• Valid Intersections

Data Relationship Management

• Batch scripts to ease EPMA replacement
• Enhanced DRG Experience
• DRG Mass Approvals
• SFTP Connection

The new era of AI for EPM

Recently after the reorg in Capgemini , EPM is now part of “AI&A” ( Artificial Intelligence and Analytics). So thought to spin the thinking towards interconnection of EPM n AI.

 Oracle Hyperion EPM has been the leading EPM vendor in last 5 years and I guess it still continues in 2022. Apologies, being Oracle EPM consultant for over a decade, I feel a bit inclined towards Oracle Hyperion EPM 😊
However, An effective business strategy (along with pricing) targeted to get hold of existing potential customers is absolutely necessary and many new EPM vendors are coming up with a business strategy to get hold of these potential customers. Onestream, Anaplan and Tagetik are growing very fast and acquiring some big clients using different vendor for EPM.

Further, many of the EPM implementations serve the purpose of a central tool to capture user inputs and thereafter consolidate the data. Such implementations does help the organizations to avoid the pain of maintaining and synchronizing discrete excel sheets but these EPM implementation neither provide any intelligence nor does it changes the manual nature of arriving at various assumptions.

Artificial Intelligence is one such capability which if imbibed thoughtfully into EPM products can enrich the capabilities of the EPM product and at the same time make the tasks easy for planners.

With Machine Learning algorithms, various assumptions such as interest rate, runoff rate, growth% etc can be methodically derived. Artificial Intelligence can help further by learning from the past predictions and continuously improve the predictions accuracy.

With these advanced technologies, Finance organizations are now at a pilotable place in the lifecycle of budgeting, planning, and corporate performance management (CPM) tools.  Much like when spreadsheets “ruled the Earth” on small disks, and when we went from linked spreadsheets to Essbase, learning new software and predictive analytics will place immense power into the hands of the high performers and decision makers of your company.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Thinking of the things we generally miss…

OK – what is AI?  At its core, Artificial Intelligence (AI) replicates how humans think at a rate of speed and with quality and consistency humans cannot match.   Embedded into AI are algorithms that recognize patterns, correlations, and which can then predict trends, events, etc.  The promise of AI is that it makes the technology layer perceptively “less technical” to the end users.  AI adds transparency to the data and automates tasks that previously required human interaction – and thus opened up the chances of errors.

 Often, artificial intelligence technology is presented through the use of “bots.”  These bots ask questions.  Using lexical technologies, bots are able to understand how people in different professions, such as Finance, talk and write.  Various bots are embedded at different points to ask the user what they want to do or where they want to go.  This is used from the point the installation has begun and drives how the application will be laid out.  It drives how the data will interrelate for meeting the specific needs of the enterprise.  It helps define reports, alerts, rules, etc.

 How AI Is Changing Finance

Artificial Intelligence offers an incredible functional jump forward for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).  AI functionality means that the finance model can warehouse all our legacy institutional knowledge, and use it to learn more institutional knowledge.  It can do this more efficiently and much faster than we ever could. 

In theory, one could staff to a level where every transaction is reviewed individually.  Realistically, this is highly unlikely – and it’s cost prohibitive.  AI can review every financial transaction in fractions of a second.  What’s more, AI can examine the relationships between these millions of transactions.

 AI and Predictive Analytics

In addition to AI, we now have very powerful predictive analytics tools.  The proliferation of R (a language and environment for computing and graphics) and its different flavors has turned IT report writers into financial analysts.  Period over period corporate performance in relation to the variables that effect this performance creates true, event-based predictive analytics.  Using trending functions (linear, polynomial, etc.) is like throwing rocks at the moon, compared to a robust and well thought out R-based analytics package.

 The power of these new tools greatly shrinks the effort of gathering data.  We now have the real tools to shrink the work that goes into the true value-add effort of analyzing the data.  AI sees the cuts of the data that highlight questions to be asked, so now we’ve got the technology to truly cut what we held aside as human value-add.

So, AI will be the new Era of EPM irrespective of vendor.