Planning Overview

Before You Begin

This 15-minute tutorial introduces you to Planning in the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud Service.

Background

Oracle Planning is a budgeting and planning solution that provides functionality including:

Streamlined data entry through web, mobile, and Excel interfaces
A calculation engine that promotes business modeling with complex rules and allocations
An efficient budget review process
Infolets and Dashboards, to focus on your most important information
Enhanced decision making through dynamic reporting, analysis and planning
Free Form and customizable business processes
Integration options with other systems to load data

Planning supports driver-based plans that are based on global assumptions, such as interest rates and headcount, and promotes modeling with complex business rules and allocations. You can create infolets, for high-level aggregated essential information and dashboards, for an overview of summary data. This enables decision makers and managers to collaborate with budget holders during potentially complex budget review processes, and provides the ability to use pre-defined reports, or to create and publish dynamic financial reports within Planning.

EPM Cloud Service supports Planning business processes that deliver instant value and greater productivity for business planners, analysts, modelers, and decision-makers across all lines of business of an enterprise.

About EPM Cloud Services

Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud Services provide end-to-end business processes, such as Planning, to meet the requirements of most organizations and ensure a connected and agile experience across multiple business processes.

New customers can purchase one of the following EPM Cloud services:

EPM Standard Cloud Service
EPM Enterprise Cloud Service

An EPM Cloud Service instance allows you to deploy and use one of the supported business processes. To deploy another business process, you must request another EPM Cloud Service instance or remove the current business process. The business processes that you deploy share the same identity domain to facilitate user management and assigning of roles. Access to resources belonging to a business process is individually controlled for each business process.

About Business Processes

The business processes and features available to you depend on the specific EPM Cloud service that you purchased. Both EPM Standard Cloud Service and EPM Enterprise Cloud Service are comprised of a suite of business processes. The following table lists what is included in each service:

The following Planning business processes and features are available in the EPM Enterprise Cloud Service:

Custom Planning, which allows a high degree of customization to support business requirements
Free Form Planning, which enables you to deploy Planning with no dimension requirements and also create using Essbase outline files
Use of the Groovy scripting language to create or customize business rules

Module-Based Planning

Modules extend Planning with complete planning and budgeting solutions for:

Financials—Enhance your ability to manage and analyze finances at any business level using driver or trend-based income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow planning, or simply plan revenue and expenses. With the best practice, out of box key performance indicators, drivers, and accounts, Financials accelerates your planning process.
Capital—Plan for the long-term impact of capital assets on financial plans. Manage, prioritize, and plan for capital expenses.
Projects—Bridge the gap between project planning systems and the financial planning process. Assess the impact organizational projects and initiatives have on overall corporate resources and ensure they align with short and long term financial targets.
Workforce—Plan for compensation and headcount in relation to financial plans. Budget for future headcount and related personnel expenses such as salary, benefits, and taxes.
Strategic Modeling—Build on-the-fly scenario analysis and business modeling. For long-term strategic planning, this solution combines a set of rich financial forecasting and business modeling features. Evaluate financial scenarios, and take advantage of out-of-the-box treasury capabilities for sophisticated debt and capital structure management.

With the exception of Strategic Modeling, these business processes include built-in best practice pre-defined content including forms, calculations, dashboards, drivers, and key performance indicators (KPIs). Forms are designed to integrate with the dashboards and reports that dynamically reflect your data, plans, and forecasts. Strategic Modeling is available with standard and industry templates that can be leveraged to create a customized scenario models with flexible blended scenario business cases.

Module-based Planning sets up the cubes required for business processes. Choose this option to create a business process that supports best practices and industry standard functionality.

Custom Planning

Custom Planning supports most planning and budgeting requirements through Enterprise complex business logic, such as business rules and allocations. Select this option to create a business process if your requirements would necessitate a high degree of customization.

Free Form Planning

Free Form Planning helps you create an open dimensional solution. You can create cubes with any dimension combination required by your organization. It does not require Currency, Entity, Scenario, and Version dimensions and their member hierarchies.

Free Form enables you to model and build your own Hybrid BSO or ASO cubes while preserving the ability to leverage Planning functionalities.

Service Administrators can create Free Form Planning business processes using one of these sources:

An Essbase outline file (OTL) from an on-premises deployment (release 11.1.2.400) with a single cube Essbase application.
Because the OTL file name is assigned to the cube created for the Free Form Planning busines process, the file name must have eight characters or less. Longer file names will cause the business process creation to fail.
A snapshot of an on-premises deployment of a single cube Essbase application, release 11.1.2.400.
Migrating a supported snapshot simplifies and automates the process of loading dimensions, creating substitution variables, loading calculation scripts, and loading data.

Clients and Tools

An Oracle EPM Cloud subscription comes with its own set of utilities and tools. Availability of these tools depends on the business process. The following clients and tools are available with Planning:

EPM Automate Utility allows Service Administrators to access environments using a command window to automate business activities such as exporting a business process and downloading the exported a business process locally.
Smart View provides a common Microsoft Office interface designed specifically for EPM Cloud.
Smart View Extensions and Add-ons:
- Planning Extensions - Includes Smart View Admin Extensions and Planning templates, which facilitate administration activities, such as dimension management.
- Predictive Planning - Works with valid forms to predict performance based on historical data.
- Strategic Modeling - Enables users to interact with Strategic Modeling in MS Office.

Overview: Creating a Planning Business Process

You develop your operational financial plan with Planning. You set up the Planning business process to include the appropriate structure for your organization's needs. Each Planning business process has a specific framework with the following structure:

Application name—Specify the name of the business process.
Calendar structure—Specify your organization’s calendar, such as the first month and first year for your fiscal year.
Currency—Identify whether multiple currencies are needed and define the default currency.
Number and names of cubes—Select and name plan types to hold combinations of metadata, forms, and business rules.

After the framework is created, dimensions and members (metadata) are added and assigned to cubes. Security is assigned so that users and groups can access Planning. Access can be further defined to secure metadata, forms, task lists, and business rules.

Learn more about Planning business process creation in the Creating the Planning Business Process tutorial.