Introduction
I’ve covered the Essbase, Planning, and EPM Foundations and Data Management side of the house in parts one, two and three of this series. Those subjects are all about getting data and metadata into the EPM world. What about reporting it out? That is sort of the point, right?
ODTUG realizes that and created a reporting track just for this very purpose. And that’s a good thing as the EPM reporting options and solutions have gotten more and more complicated and sophisticated over time. When I started out with an Essbase report meant an Essbase report script. We’ve come a long way. The best way to make sense of all of that is to take a look at some of these sessions.
Whoops, before I continue, I should mention that I am friends with, or at least am acquainted with most of the people below. Am I just shilling for them? Nope, these are good sessions. Of course you pick and decide what you want to attend – this is what I am interested in.
EPM Reporting sessions (stolen right off of Kscope13.com) with my commentsThe Art of Ad-Hoc Analysis with Essbase
When: Jun 25, 2013, Session 8, 11:15 am - 12:15 pm
Topic: EPM Reporting - Subtopic: No Subtopic
"Where is this number coming from?" "Why doesn't this look right?" "How do I explain these variances?" "Can you show me this data in a different way?" These are all questions our managers ask, and we are expected to answer with Essbase. Yet sometimes, staring at an empty spreadsheet or at a report someone else created, we may not know what do to next. Watching someone else do analysis may leave our heads spinning. Even if things aren't quite that bad, we may feel we're taking the long route to our answers, or that there might be technique we're missing from our repertoire. This session covers the basic methods of ad-hoc analysis for different modes of exploration. The session will discuss the various options, when to use them, and when not to. The session will talk about what kinds of questions lead to what kinds of analysis modes. The session will review techniques for efficiency and lesser-known features. While the session is aimed at the less experienced, there's a good chance even experts will hear something they didn't know. Smart View and Classic Add-In will also be covered.
Old school, but still what makes Essbase great. Are you getting all that you could of Essbase? Also, Joe is a great speaker.
The Top Five Things You Should Know When Migrating from an Old BI Technology to OBIEE
Co-presenter(s): John McGale, Performance Architects, Inc.
When: Jun 26, 2013, Session 11, 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Topic: EPM Reporting - Subtopic: No Subtopic
Upgrades and migrations are the perfect time to not only evaluate the latest and greatest technology features, but also to review your organization's business intelligence processes to make sure that you are working effectively and efficiently. The session will review how to "sell" your leadership on why to migrate; thoughts on best practices in upgrades; the difference between a "migration" and an "upgrade"; important items to note as you're thinking about this major change for your organization; migrating existing Oracle Hyperion Intelligence or Discoverer reports...or content from another vendor's BI solution...to OBIEE or BI Foundation; and much more!
Interactive Reports is dead, long live OBIEE! Time to switch, folks, if you haven't already. And if you haven't already, this would be a great session to attend.
Best Practice Methodologies with Oracle/Hyperion Financial Reporting
When: Jun 24, 2013, Session 4, 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm
Topic: EPM Reporting - Subtopic: Financial Reporting
Learn how developing financial reports with best practice methodologies results in successful implementations and efficient solutions. This session will utilize Oracle/Hyperion Financial Reports to demonstrate time-saving features including Row & Column Templates, Saved Objects, and Rolling Year Reports. Attendees will realize the benefit to using Annotations for commenting on results and related content to provide additional detail. Efficiency accelerators aimed at Reporting Standards and Change Impact will be covered and distributed. Attendees will leave this session with collateral and concepts that can be quickly applied into their environment.
I have seen good FR reporting approaches, and bad ones. The bad ones suck. A lot. If you have any doubts about what you are doing with FR, or want to improve your reporting solution, you should be here.
Smart View Query Tools: So Many Tools, So Little Time
When: Jun 24, 2013, Session 1, 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Topic: EPM Reporting - Subtopic: Smart View
Stuck in the same old rut in how you create Essbase reports in Smart View? Did you know that there are six different Smart View tools for querying Essbase data? In one short session, learn how, when, and why to use each tool. Get out of the rut and expand your horizons with all of the Smart View query tools.
Smart View has a lot of functionality beyond an ad-hoc query. Most of us (including me) don’t take advantage of said functionality. So let’s show up at Craig’s session and move on.
Leveraging Office and Smart View to Create a Data Entry Experience
When: Jun 26, 2013, Session 15, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Topic: EPM Reporting - Subtopic: Smart View
This session will take you though the steps necessary for creating advanced input templates for distribution to end users. The templates will include data from multiple sources and the examples shown will leverage new features in Office 2010 and 2013 along with Excel features have been around for many versions. (charting, functions, sparkles, outline, and formatting) It will touch on the use of VBA to automate common tasks and we will go through some of the challenges of template distribution and maintenance.
Matt is an excellent speaker and of course as Product Manager knows Smart View really well. Highly recommended.
Smart View's New Features
When: Jun 26, 2013, Session 16, 4:15 pm - 5:15 pm
Topic: EPM Reporting - Subtopic: Smart View
In this session we will get you up to speed on all the new features available in the latest version of Smart View. We will discuss general client features like sheet level options, re-designed function builder, or platform support like Office 2013 as well as provider specific features like in-cell Point of View or improved Planning Smart Lists. This session will also contain details on, and show demos of new extensions; most notably the OBI (Oracle Business Intelligence) extension.
What, you didn’t see my comments above? Matt is a great speaker, highly knowledgeable, and knows Smart View better than anyone. I predict (and this is a pretty safe prediction) that this will be SRO.
Customizing the Smart View Framework
Co-presenter(s): Martin Slack, Ernst & Young
When: Jun 26, 2013, Session 12, 9:45 am - 10:45 am
Topic: EPM Reporting - Subtopic: No Subtopic
Smart View for Office provides a dynamic framework for customizing the functionality and capabilities to suit a client's deployment. This session provides practical, deployed examples of using customizing Smart View for both Planning and Essbase.
Fellow Developing Essbase Applications author Mike Nader is a great speaker and does really interesting work.
Hyperion Financial Reports: A Love and Hate Relationship
When: Jun 24, 2013, Session 3, 11:30 am - 12:30 pm
Topic: EPM Reporting - Subtopic: Financial Reporting
Hyperion Financial Reporting (FR) has been around for a long time. In spite of rumors, FR has been a go-to reporting tool for Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, and various other financial reports. The simplicity of the tool, the user-friendly design, and easy training of the users have made FR a very popular reporting tool in the Enterprise Performance Management field.
This sounds like a good basic (sorry, Mehmet if this is super advanced, let me know and I will edit accordingly) session on FR. If you’re starting out with FR, this is the place to be.
Automating Hyperion Reporting for the Rest of Your Organization
When: Jun 24, 2013, Session 5, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Topic: EPM Reporting - Subtopic: Smart View
Everyone realizes that Hyperion users should be utilizing the built-in reporting tools, but how does the rest of your organization get their reports? Not everyone in your organization has Hyperion access. Learn from a Hyperion certified consultant how to harness the built-in power of Smart View VBA Functions to generate reports. This session will focus on how to develop and deliver reporting to the non-Hyperion user community in your organization utilizing your existing tools. Live examples and code will be used to explore solutions to many of the common reporting scenarios. Specific examples will display the benefit of the Smart View 11.1.2.3 multiple grid reporting and butterfly reporting functionality. This session will help you shave hours off of your daily, monthly, and quarterly reporting tasks.
More cool stuff with 11.1.2.3 with cool code. Doesn’t that sound cool? It does to me.
Are you crying Uncle yet?
That is nine, count ‘em nine, different EPM Reporting sessions. Is that the sum total of these sessions at Kscope? Absolutely not. In fact there are 14 on offer. And that is just a subset of all the EPM sessions. Kscope has content, content, content.
The next blog post will be The Truth About Other Interesting Topics at Kscope13.
Be seeing you at Kscope13.
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