How can you easily manage metadata in Oracle FCCS and PBCS?

Dimension maintenance can be time consuming. In Oracle FCCS and (E)PBCS – the Oracle EPM cloud products for consolidation and planning & budgeting – this is solved. The cloud products use Smart View to simplify managing your metadata. A new add-on, Smart View Add-On For Administrator, allows you to effortlessly add, remove and modify members in your metadata. How can you use this timesaving feature?

With Oracle EPM Cloud products FCCS (consolidation) and (E)PBCS (planning and budgeting), a very convenient feature is introduced for administering metadata. People who are used to working with Oracle EPM on-premise applications, such as Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) and Hyperion Planning (HPL), mostly use the dimension library (EPMA) for administering their metadata. However, they often experience dimension maintenance or management as time-consuming. Oracle has simplified this job in the EPM Cloud products; you can set up and maintain your metadata (dimensions) through the renowned Excel interface, Smart View.

New: Smart View Add-On For Administrator

A new add-on, Smart View Add-On For Administrator, allows dimension management to be performed within the Excel interface. This enables you to effortlessly add, remove and modify members in your metadata. Adding a large set of members, like a list of employees or projects, is easily done.

In the Smart View panel on the right, we can see the underlying dimensions of our application. In this example, we have opened the Scenario dimension, with currently only one member ‘Actual’ and without descriptions or an alias. We want to expand the Scenario dimension, by adding a Budget, and three Forecast Scenarios. There is one step you should take in the application, which is setting the security on the members. Often, this is not applicable, for example, if security is not set for the appropriate dimension or is only applicable for a limited number of members, like a limited number of parents.

With a few clicks, we can copy-paste the second row, and re-type the label and alias for each new member.

Like with submitting data, submit your changes.  When looking in the dimension section of our application, we can see the new members.

And -as it should be- you can deploy the changes from Smart View directly. Just right-click on ‘Dimensions’ from the Smart View panel, and you will see the deploy link (‘Refresh Database). Check ‘Database’ on the popup window and hit ’Refresh’.

You will see a new pop-up window where you can follow the progress:

And you’re done!

Importing in Smart View

Input in Smart View is also made easy as you can benefit from dropdown menus to select the valid value. In the example below when setting up the Account dimension, you can select the account settings in dropdown menus, such as Account Type.

It is also possible to import a metadata file in in FCCS. This is comparable to loading an ‘ads’ file in HFM. However, in HFM this is a very tedious job and much less intuitive than changing and loading directly from Excel as is shown in this article. As we have experienced in our implementation projects, the Smart View for Oracle cloud applications not only simplifies metadata maintenance, the feature also accelerates the initial setup of the dimensions. Especially the fact that you can copy & paste rows and change member names, aliases and parents increases the speed of metadata management.

How to install the Smart View Add-On For Administrator

The dimension section in Smart View is available after you have downloaded and installed it. You can download the tutorial to install this Smart View Add-On as follows:

Login to your cloud application. From the Home Page, select the dropdown next to your username.

Click ‘Downloads’:

From the following pop-up window, choose:

After downloading, install the add-in.

Open Excel, Smart View panel and you will see a new folder ‘Dimensions’:

Double-click on the desired dimension and choose (or enter) any member and hit refresh.

Result:

Now add, change your members, submit and do not forget to Refresh Database.

Simplify your metadata management

Using the new feature Smart View Add-On For Administrator enables you to easily manage your metadata. This new way of adding, modifying and removing members from your metadata saves you time and effort.

Oracle FCCS and (E)PBCS – the Oracle EPM cloud products for consolidation and planning & budgeting – have many more timesaving features. Would you like to know more? Please contact Bert Dotinga. He is happy to explain which features are helpful for your organization.

Text: Bert Dotinga