First quarter 2024 in the books!  Here are the EPM updates for April 2024. Updates will hit test environments April 5th and prod environments April 19th. Here’s what caught my eye. Daily Maintenance – Randomization of Start Time As noted in last month’s updates, the April update includes a randomization of the start time by minute. This change ensures that the daily maintenance load on EPM Cloud infrastructure is distributed throughout the hour. If you do not like the random start time assigned by Oracle, it can be changed to a more desirable minute. Improved Redwood Experience in EPM Clo ..read more

There are a lot of useful features in Oracle Cloud EPM modules. Some take more configuration than others, and documentation is often less than clear. Weekly planning is one of those features. And possibly lessor known with this feature is that you can have both weekly and monthly based on the accounts. Our use case is to have revenue planning by week, but expense planning will be by month. Using the Financials module, we can do this relatively easily. When enabling the Financials module, we need to select Weekly Planning and set some options. It’s ok if you already have Financials enabled, thi ..read more

One of the advantages of having a Narrative Reporting instance instead of just utilizing Reports within the EPM Planning instance is the ability to build Report Packages. Report Packages allow you to combine non-EPM data sources with the EPM reports and create a repeatable workflow to manage virtually any level of internal and external reporting needed. It can be a bit overwhelming to set up at first (at least that’s how I felt), so I thought it would be good to keep it simple to get started and focus on creating a basic package. The first step is to think about the overall layout of the repor ..read more

About 3 years ago, I wrote about installing and using Smart View on a Mac. While I still think it’s pretty cool to be able to use Smart View on a Mac, the reality is most of us are using Windows computers. With that in mind, I wanted to expand on that original post and show how to install and use Smart View for those users that do not have a desktop version of Office installed on their pc and are instead using the browser-based Office 365. Oracle documentation details all the steps. I’ll keep it somewhat simple, I encourage you to read the documentation, especially if you intend to deploy to a ..read more

Back in August 2023 I mentioned functionality called Calendars and Events. I did not get into specifics at that time, I was instead writing about configuration changes as a result of the new functionality. Now it’s time to get into Calendars and Events, which is really cool. Calendars and Events is functionality used to enhance IPM Insights, Auto Predict, and Predictive Planning. Oracle has good documentation on it. In simple terms, it smooths out inconsistent historical data so Insights and predictions are more accurate. Use cases include businesses with recurring events that cause a spike (o ..read more

Happy New Year! Unsurprisingly, there are no new feature updates for January 2024. However, there are two upcoming changes in future updates that are worth noting. Plan to Display One Day of Data Instead of Three on the Jobs Status Page Currently, the Jobs Status page displays 3 days of data. Upcoming in the March update, the Jobs page will display 1 day as the default. Plan to Discontinue Support for Infolets Others have pointed out this upcoming change scheduled for April. Infolets are being deprecated. I have not implemented Infolets for clients, I am not sure how widely they are being used ..read more

I posted the other day about the recently released EPM Automate command called simulateConcurrentUsage. We were not able to get the command to work and we opened a SR with Oracle about it. Fortunately, it was an easy fix and not a bug as they originally thought. The upload location has to be specified instead of uploading to the default. This was not detailed in the Oracle documentation. This command can be used to simulate multiple users performing certain activities, including opening forms, running data rules, and running business rules. Ideally, this command can provide administrators with ..read more

Forms 2.0 was recently released and overall is a huge improvement. But a colleague of mine discovered an issue with percentages. The issue has been raised with Oracle and they are investigating. Until a resolution is provided, be aware of the following behavior. When entering a value with the percentage character, the digits are moved such that .05% becomes 50%. While unlikely one would enter a percent in this manner, it is possible and would result in the incorrect value being saved. As of this writing, Oracle has replicated and acknowledged the issue. I will update this post with new info ..read more

Time for another monthly EPM update from Oracle. Listed below are the December updates that caught my attention. Self-Service Concurrent Usage Testing Under Simulated Load I can’t wait to try this out. A new EPM Automate command called simulateConcurrentUsage is being released. With this command a simulation can be executed for specified operations for a given number of users and iterations. The operations supported are: Open forms Save forms Run business rules Run data rules Open ad hoc grids Using this command will help to validate the response time of the application under concurrent usag ..read more

Another month has gone by and another update is coming from Oracle for EPM. At first glance in the Planning section, it states there were no new features. But this is misleading, because there is one in the Common section that I think is a pretty big deal. Forms 2.0 and Dashboard 2.0 functionality is now available! Listed below are all the November updates that caught my attention. Forms 2.0 and Dashboard 2.0 There’s a lot going on with forms and dashboards. Runtime improvements, standardized menus, consistency between web forms and Smart View forms, revitalized dashboard designer, grid chart ..read more