Oracle Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.4 What’s New and What’s coming
As I previously reported, there are currently two working EPM code sets in place from Oracle: The Oracle PBCS Cloud code set, and the on premise version. 11.1.2.4 is where they will finally be brought together.
Oracle currently has 150 customers of OPBCS with about 30 of them live. The biggest problem at this point is to keep up with the demand from a hardware perspective, so on-boarding has been a slower process than expected.
The OPBCS will go through one more cloud-only patch in Q4 that will bring in a new interface, mobile capabilities, etc. After that is released and tested in the cloud, Oracle will release the on-premise 11.1.2.4 version that will incorporate all the Cloud functionality plus some additional features. After that, the versions should be released in sync. Once in sync, the on-prem version will have all the performance analytics, self service tutorials, etc.
At Oracle Open World, product managers openly acknowledged performance issues in the 11.1.2.3 release around tabbing, forms scrolling, etc. This is due to the conversion to Application Developer Framework (ADF) that is standard for all Oracle Fusion products. ADF gave Oracle a way to standardize the UI for all Fusion and Cloud products and allowed for the creation of more rich and crisp graphing and charting. However, when scrolling, ADF’s architecture made it so only a small amount of data is fetched at a time… so while the form initially comes up quicker, scrolling large sets can be painfully slow. In earlier versions, the entire form was fetched all at once from the start which had the opposite problem. Oracle has been struggling with and other performance related issues since the ADF conversion in 11.1.2.2. However, they claim:
- 1.2.3.500 was a 100% improvement in performance than its predecessor.
- 1.2.2.500 was a 40% improvement in performance than its predecessor.
In 11.1.2.4, they went even further. The Oracle EPM development team created an internal technology and integrated it with ADF that solves this data-fetching issue once and for all. I saw this in person… and it’s true….there is no latency in large forms when scrolling and there was instantaneous cell-to-cell navigation.
Coming in the Cloud patch:
- Simplified mobile ready interface – focus on less clicks, tablet friendly (I will showcase this later)
- Better automation of routines
- Key administrative capabilities
Coming in 11.1.2.4 On-prem version (which will include the cloud patch capabilities):
- On the fly iterative planning using sandboxes
- Auto calculation, auto save-on-change (do not have to hit the save button – formulas instantly calculated.)
- Interactivity with large data sets – rapid loading of forms, quick cell-to-cell navigations, scrolling on all grids
- Valid Combinations – it will show only valid combination of data values – IE it will show only products relevant to a particular LOB.
- User defined calculations using excel formulas – Formulas edited/created in Excel can reference dimension members and will persist in Planning automatically when saved in Excel.
Sandboxing, explained…..
In 11.1.2.4 Oracle will include a way to do built-in versioning though a concept called a sandbox. This is a temporary version of the application that is unique to an individual user that no one else has access to, without having to create an entire separate application. The idea is that someone can change something, see the result of that change, then easily publish it to the production version if all goes well or easily destroy the version if things don’t go as planned.
Here is an example. Suppose you have a form open and you want to change a number. With the new auto-calculation you can instantly see the results of the change without needed to click a save button. However, you want to ensure the numbers look good before a save… So you create a Sandbox….before you make the change…
Stay tuned for more information on the upcoming interface and other capabilities coming in 11.1.2.4
The I.T. Side 