Web Analysis: Lost in Translation

Last week I was going through my CV and just saw one of my expertise as Web Analysis. Started wondering when is Web Analysis lost. Number of clients that I worked with in recent years had no Web Analysis.

3-4 years back, I remember creating and viewing Web Analysis system 9 dashboards to see happy finance guys faces. Its now been years since I have last build or seen users using these dashboards. Some organizations in 11.1.1.3 have been using this for drill down analysis. With 11.1.2.x, Web Analysis has started losing its sheen altogether.

I understand Web Analysis has some drawbacks in terms of functionality. But, unlike Planning, Essbase, I haven't seen any major functionality upgrades by Oracle. This has made the matter worse. All its betting is now done on OBIEE, but according to me, Web Analysis has its own significance and should never be ignored. I have seen finance users in so much comfort zone, while working on dashboards as well as drill down analysis. Seems, Oracle is planning to promote OBIEE and apparently make Web Analysis obsolete to remove redundancy in terms of dash boarding. This is visible in terms of later versions Web Analysis functionality as well as marketing strategies of Oracle.

Its my honest opinion that Web Analysis has its own USP, which no other reporting tool has, and with descent support from Oracle, Web Analysis can go places.

What's your take on this?

Unable to start application / Unable to load database %s

This is one of the most recurring issues in Essbase database. Let’s discuss the causes and resolution to this issue.

Causes:

•  In between an Essbase transaction (data load, calculation script execution, data backup, planning database refresh etc.) Essbase server shuts down abnormally.
• You try to force kill specific processes (data load, data backup, calculation script execution, planning database refresh etc.) and Essbase not being able to kill the process. Essbase starts showing never ending terminating process in sessions. Be sure, this is the start of the end of application which will eventually give above error.

These are few causes that I have faced during my Hyperion tenure. Share your thoughts if you could add up to these causes.

My take on this is I can understand this issue occurring during abnormal shut down, but what I am not very comfortable is with the second reason.

Planning based Essbase applications are more prone to this issue.

Here’s the fix to this issue that works for me,

• Login to Essbase server
• Go to task manager -> processes in case your server is windows based / Enter command ps –ef grep|’hyperionadmin’ in case your server is Linux based
• Force kill all the ESSSVR process which are tampering your application
• Restart the Essbase server

In most of the cases, these steps should resolve your issue.

Zooming to EPM Reporting

As discussed, in my first article, Reporting is one of the prime USP of Business Intelligence Tools. Think about EPM and to top the list you will find Financial Reporting, Web Analysis and Interactive Reporting.

Now, big question, what’s the difference between these three?

In the hay of 2003, Brio Reporting was bought by Hyperion Solutions Corporation. In no time, this product was integrated in Hyperion system. This product was fundamentally built to generate reports on different relational databases. This product was lost in transition from Brio to Hyperion to Oracle. Interactive Reporting is in its fading career now, its matter of time that it will be wiped away completely with the new products coming on and Oracle leaving this product behind. Not sure if this beautiful product has received justice, but that’s how things turned out to be.

With Financial Reporting, it’s a trade mark statutory reporting tool. What I mean by statutory reporting is the reports that need to be sent across to stakeholders and government authorities. Financial Reporting handles the standard reports viz. Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow etc. This effectively means analysis solely in terms of figures. You can always use graphs, charts and images, but this usually is not the case. This products provides you with number of features, one of which my favorite, Batch bursting of PDF outputs to number of users.

Coming to Web Analysis, as you would know, Images speaks more than figures, this is what Web Analysis gives you. Different types of graphs, charts and images, tailor made for top level management to do analysis on. Unlike Financial Reporting, this analysis is purely based on graphs and charts. This product stands ideal for decision making in real quick time. Few commonly used analysis basis include year on year, quarter on quarter growth, top five best performing stores, worst performing branches etc.

What’s the deal about Profitability and Cost Management?

Hyperion traditionally holds strength in Essbase reporting, planning & budgeting and Consolidation. But, in recent times, Oracle with its aggressive marketing strategy is launching number of decision making systems.

Let’s enlighten ourselves with one of Oracle’s high profile product ‘Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management’.

We all got used to implementing Hyperion planning for customers budgeting and forecasting needs. It got me over as to where does HPCM fit into this. It is not an alternative to Hyperion Planning; neither does it make much sense implementing HPCM without Planning. The only ideal way, according to me is co-existence of Planning and HPCM.

Now, the big question arises, what does HPCM do? In simplest of terms HPCM does allocations. If you compare it with the way we do allocations in Planning, then its altogether different ball game in HPCM.

Allocations in HPCM are completely driven by Business User’s. Business users create allocation models, select drivers, allocation type, and assignments in workspace interface and deploy HPCM application. The underlying Essbase application and calculation scripts are generated on the fly. Business User even calculates database in workspace interface, which then executes the generated calculation scripts in a precise sequence. The most appealing feature I found is tracing allocations graphically. This is one of the USP of Profitability and Cost Management. One BSO application and database is created where complex allocation scripts are executed and one ASO application is created where data is moved from BSO databases post calculation and is then used for reporting purpose. All this happens in real quick time. Believe me, all this on the fly requires real lot of scripting in the backyard.

Now, where does it score over allocations done in Hyperion Planning?

To start with, Allocations in HPCM are driven by end users. Tracing allocations graphically is the feature which will attract the End User most. Business Users love to have least dependency on the technical and support team, which this product promotes very well, as all is controlled by Business users. Complex allocations once written in Planning are hard to change by. Once, the Implementation team leaves and support team is in place and the allocation logics change, then it’s an uphill for the support team and will take decent amount of effort and time. And in today’s world, one vendor does the implementation and the other support. So, for the support team to incorporate the changes, they need to have crystal clear understanding of the entire application in terms of requirement and system technicalities. This rarely is the case.

For organizations where allocation logics are very complex involving number of stages and their drivers keep on changing, HPCM is the best fit.

From an architecture standpoint, where an end to end budgeting and forecasting solution is to be implemented with Essbase, Planning and HPCM licenses in hand, I would recommend following architecture. Again, this can have its own course based on specific requirements.

From Hyperion to Oracle Hyperion, What’s cooking in the backyard?

As we know, Oracle Corporations in its need to make a mark on Business Intelligence space and its vision for Fusion Middleware package acquired Hyperion Solutions Corporations in 2007. Hyperion system 9 was the last version released by Hyperion Solutions Corporations.

Since then, it’s all been Oracle. With much fanfare and with a new name, new look was launched Oracle EPM system 11.1.1.1.

Going into the Technicalities, a lot changed, few notable were the common installer package for all products, a new look Life Cycle Management, entire Directory structure change for all products, planning applications now getting created in the workspace itself, number of end user features etc. all this along with number of new EPM products released.

Further, with aggressive marketing strategies and much hype was launched much awaited Oracle EPM system 11.1.2.

This release was a completely different package altogether and had shades of Developer and End User Experience which showcased that this is no longer Hyperion product; it’s purely an Oracle product. Though number of bugs, it had Sublime documentation of every component, complete overhaul of look and feel and directory structure of the products, WebLogic Web Server being promoted with restricted license along with Sun Solaris operating system.

With these newer versions, the end user experience has been upgraded. But yes, all this come at a cost of very high system requirements from disk space, RAM and overall stability of the system.

This was a summary of technical transition. From a Business stand point, Oracle Hyperion almost completely eliminated the dependencies on third party software’s. Along with Hyperion Solutions Corporation, followed acquisition of WebLogic in 2008, further adding to the feature was the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010. There was a pattern and a thoughtful brain behind these acquisitions.

With WebLogic, it now had the in house web server. With Sun Microsystems, it got hold of java programming language and Sun Solaris operating system. Web server, java and an operating system was core to all Oracle products. Earlier, it had to adhere to the licensing terms of these third party software’s, which were now in house.

The next we can expect is the integration of OBIEE and EPM. Let's see, how does it unfold?

DEMYSTIFYING Business Intelligence

Today, I am going to share my know-how about the origin of Business Intelligence.

In the late 70’s, few people had a vision that companies will find it very difficult to maintain paperwork and would require some system where they could store all the data. These visionary people hit the nail on the head. With globalization, tons of data started moving across geographies, things became imminent that no company can exist without database engines.

These visionary people now lead the database giants in Oracle and SAP which now hold most of database market share underlying their vision.

The way in late 70’s these people had a vision that organizations won’t survive with the paperwork and had to go database systems, In late 90’s, few people had the vision that with globalization coming on, these databases will just be rendered as a data dumping zone which would be not very useful for analysis. These people had a philosophy which said, data is of no use unless organized in a decent way.

Just to add an example in a simpler way,

If I register 1000 transactions daily, I can handle it with paperwork. Now, if my daily transactions turn up to 100000, it becomes very tedious to handle all through paperwork. Again, more the paperwork, more the manual errors. So, now is the database. With 100000 daily, my monthly records will be 30*100000 and yearly will be 30*12*100000 and again multiplied by the number of years from the deployment of system in organization till date, this is for a specific country, then number of countries the company exists. Database can still be useful for analyzing this data. Looked great at starting year of the system, but decades later the data analysis becomes very difficult.

Say for example, I query a database with 100000 records to retrieve a single transaction, it will return me the result in micro seconds, but decades later my number of transactions in database are Number of Entities * Number of years * 30 * 12 * 100000. If I query database whose size is tons of terabytes to retrieve a single record, it would take lot of time. Now, here comes Business Intelligence Tools in picture.

What BI (Business Intelligence) tools do is from the entire set of transactions, they extract and store only specific transactions which are useful for analysis by the top level management and put an engine in place which is designed for faster retrieval. Further, just to add icing on the cake, they add good looking charts and graphs which attracts the management to buy it.

Please don’t misread my lines, even today everything can be done through paperwork, it’s just that Database Engines do it better. In a similar way, every reporting or analysis need can be satisfied with Database Engines, it’s just that BI tools do it better.

Hope, this was informative, more to follow soon.