Sometimes rethinking the approach to the design of an Oracle Cloud EPM application can have dramatic effects on performance and usability. Our Oracle Cloud EPM certified consultants applied their expertise to deliver a massive improvement for one of our clients using Oracle Cloud EPM Financial Consolidation and Close (FCCS).

The client had a scenario in their FCCS application used for management reporting that only contained Profit and Loss (income statement) data as well as some KPI’s based on Management data. This is an additional reporting scenario to their Statutory one, which has detailed information on their products and performance etc.

The scenario was translating at about 23 – 25 minutes per month so 1 year of data took between 5 and 6 hours to translate. This meant that any changes to data could only be reviewed after the translations had been run, which generally was scheduled to happen overnight on a daily basis.

The client was using the FCCS_Movements dimension, which contain the Opening balance plus movements, to roll up to a closing balance for these accounts. This is a pre-built member in the FCCS application. It enables users to benefit from the movements calculations and uses default movements on specific accounts to populate various reporting requirements, mainly on the balance sheet data sets. Since Profit and Loss accounts don’t roll over from one year to the next, as they roll up into the Retained Earnings figure, there was no need for this hierarchy to be used for the management reporting requirements.

As part of a detailed review of the client’s application, we recommended moving the data out of the FCCS_Movements hierarchy into a sibling of this hierarchy, a single member under the Movement hierarchy with no additional hierarchy.

The user impact was minimal as users were able to retrieve the same data set, by simply using a different movement member and a new scenario. The new scenario was due to the client deciding to move data from a point in time and not all of the history.

The impact to the FCCS translation time, however, was significant as 1 year now translates in around 90 minutes compared to the previous 5-6 hours.

To put the client application in perspective here are some sizing numbers.

• Entity members = 9610 – all entities, including all alternate hierarchies, reside under the FCCS_Total Geography seeded member, so when a consolidation or translation is run, it has many entities to process
• Data Source members = almost 3000 members

If you would like to know more or would maybe like us to look at the performance of your Oracle Cloud EPM application then please do contact us via the contact page on our website HERE.

Until next time

Kim