EPM Conversations — Episode 10, A Conversation with Jodi Hill, Pattern Recognizer and Outlier

We’re all wired to see patterns

We live in patterns: seasonal, political, historical, and even atomic. Many live a life blithely unaware of them, which is to their disadvantage, for understanding those patterns is key to what makes us human, drives culture and society, and informs economics. We happy few in the performance management world figuratively live and die by the patterns in data. If careful observation of clients, customers, and conferences is an accurate guide, we are largely cut from the same professional and educational cloth. This is not always true. Those of us who come from outside that pattern have different perspectives, values, and insights. Jodi Hill is one such outlier.

Her path to a job in business strategy is atypical and is driven by its unconventionality: from Army translator to accountant to consultant to strategist is surely out of our norm. So too is an educational journey from the Defense Language Institute to a BS in accounting to multiple Masters in predictive analytics, public policy, and health economics. No matter how diverse this may seem at first glance, it is held together by the thread of transforming data into information by seeing, interpreting, and understanding patterns. I’ve

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A Free Form Planning aka Essbase SaaS Journey — part 7, I didn’t know what (DTS) time it was

I didn’t know what (DTS) time it was, Then I met you

What is Dynamic Time Series (DTS)? I am ever so glad you asked ‘cos if you didn’t, there wouldn’t be much to this post, would there? To quote (and illustrate) from the Essbase Database Administrator’s Guide (oooooh, the very latest 19c one out in the cloud). Note that it is not entirely accurate.

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Just what is DTS? Again, per the DBAG:

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What this means is that you can calculate all sorts of period-to-date members in BSO without having to write code or do math in Excel or a standard report. Lovely.

Oh, what a (non)lovely time it was, How (un)sublime it was too

I’m here to tell you a (small) secret. This functionality wasn’t always there in Essbase SaaS. In the very early days of this supercalifragilisticexpialidocious product, It Wasn’t There. Ugh. But that is the past.

I didn’t know what day it was, You held my hand, Warm like the month of May it was, And I’ll say it was grand

The present is rather different – DTS is fully supported and it’s super easy to set up just as it is in the on-premises Essbase

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A Free Form Planning aka Essbase SaaS — part 1, creating an app

Essbase as διαχείριση επιδόσεων των επιχειρήσεων or Essbase as τη βάση δεδομένων?

Free Form Planning as a product name? Really? Yeah. No. Free Form Planning is really Essbase SaaS. I don’t think Oracle’s EPM product management team cast themselves as Greeks seeking to enter the city state of Troy through subterfuge, but make no mistake: Free Form Planning is Essbase, it is Software as a Service, and it is an application option within the Enterprise EPM product sku that you really, really, really ought to look at.

Most definitely not the Oracle EPM product management and development teams. Maybe.

Don’t believe me? This post is but the first of a multipart series on Free Form Planning as I make my case for FFP (I am so over writing the full name, cf. my well-known laziness and also remember this is really Essbase).

Before I document this first pass at creating an Essbase SaaS aka FFP application, I should note that the below is not the only way to create an application and it has twists and turns. As noted, this will be a series of posts on how this works.

With that, let’s create the app.

You’ve Got Possibilities

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OneStream Security Remover or how I learnt to love MarketPlace

Will no one rid me of this turbulent security?

No Archbishop of Canterbury will be put to sword in this blog post but what will be expunged is security that no one wants (heh, sort of like the TSA).

I recently imported an application into my local copy of OneStream and…

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What went FOOM!?

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And in a little more detail:

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Bugger, there’s a security group named “S_ACT_READ” assigned to a member on a dimension as a read data group and I don’t have said group on my install of OneStream. I could add it as a security group but that would almost certainly be repeated many times as the import process hit the rows in the dimension import file that have security – not my idea of fun or I imagine anyone else. I could also go into the dimension XML and find it, figure out the open and close of the XML node, and then delete the security assignment it but I’d have to do that across all dimensions, Cube Views, etc. that have any kind of security – also not my idea of fun. Bummer.

Marketplace

Or, I could remember that OneStream has a nifty utility that

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 8 — Why Two Is Not Better Than One

Apologies and yet without apology

Apologies up front as the subject of this blog post is both n00bie-ish as well as somewhat advanced and awfully, awfully, awfully important. It’s super-duper important that you understand what follows because a common design requirement and an equally common design solution won’t and doesn’t take into account OneStream’s core storage model. I’ll be making references to Data Management jobs, Finance business rules, as well as Data Buffer processing which is all rather a lot for a n00b post. But all of that is exposition – the key thing for we n00bs is to understand that a design approach we all take for granted in other tools is a Bad Idea in OneStream. Happily, the solution is straightforward.

The 42 people who regularly read this blog probably know a fair bit – although logic demands that I ask why you lucky 42 read it if you already know it. Perhaps you enjoy irrelevant links to popular culture from a year that predates your time on this planet by at least 50 years. Ask your parents or better yet your grandparents to help with that sort of confusion; hopefully the balance of the post will make

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No.6 — Instant Gratification

Instant

Everyone likes fast except when it comes to slow cooking or taking a nap or when pursuing a hobby or simply enjoying oneself. Of course, instant is even better than fast. No, not instant coffee (I can only drink it while camping – I think I somehow enjoy straining out bits of dirt from the tin mug), nor instant pot noodles (a staple of my university life, never to be repeated), but instead instant aggregations. I’m a busy geek; you are too. And I want it all. Now. Instantly.

Generally, in OneStream that’s not an issue as most dimensions are dynamically aggregated with the exception – till now – of Entity. By that I mean: input data at an Account, Time, Custom Dimension (and the other required dimensions – see my previous post for an overview of them in all of their glory) intersection and a single Entity and the numbers at an aggregate level are instantly available across all of those dimensions. That’s lovely in the non-ironic sense. However, that Entity dimension, the spine of every OneStream app, is a stored dimension, i.e. the upper level members must have materialized aggregate views. To get those aggregated –

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 5 — A Very Basic Sample

It’s Basic. It’s a Sample. It’s A Very Basic Sample.

Some people understand how to perform complex tasks or understand involved theory simply by reading some kind of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious documentation; I am not one of those people. Yes, I read the docs, yes, I think – insofar as I am able – quite a bit about what I’ve read, yes, I am capable of abstract thought (I hope, in an abstract way.), but at the end of the day, I learn best by doing. I’ve got to kick the tires, squeeze the apple (these are my favorite ones by a country mile), or employ whatever experiential learning metaphor you like best to truly understand.

Please try to put aside the irony of the above as the introduction to a blog post that attempts to explain how OneStream works as you, Gentle Reader, and Yr. Most Hmbl. & Obt. Svt. are about to go on a journey that illustrates our beloved CPM platform in as a practical manner as I can manage. In OneStream-land, I need to build a sample application.

But you say, (Do you? Do you? Really? Thought you did. Sad, but I’m glad you’re still here.),

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 2.4 – Deleting (and building) dimensions programmatically

Part four of three

In my innumerate fashion, we have now reached the fourth part of a three part series on building dimensions. Why can’t Cameron count? Putting aside the more obvious, “’Cos he’s an idiot” answer, the reason is I had planned part three to include code to generate dimension deletes via the Metadata Builder. That was the idea but it would have been an absolute monster of a post. The point of this blog is to inform you (and me), not bore you (and me) to death.

So that’s the excuse, but what’s to be covered in this post? Answer – create dimension load files programmatically through the Metadata Builder so that you never have to it again. Will it be as easy as selecting Flying Pizza (that’s a punch card in Jane’s left hand for those of you born after 1980 and also just what is Flying Pizza)? Just about, with a wee bit of customization.

Foodarackacycle

Something that XF’s competitors ought to read

Yes, way back in the introduction to TheTruthAboutCPM when I said that this blog wouldn’t be about other products I meant it. Alas and alack, I fear I do need to address an important

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 2.3 — Building deletions in dimensions

The final third

The last two posts on dimension building have focused on building dimensions either by hand or via the Metadata Builder. But what about deleting members?

You may not make mistakes but Yr. Obt. Svt. is, unfortunately, all too well familiar with, “Aw, bugger, I didn’t mean to add those 10,000 products/200 entities/14 departments/etc. I really didn’t mean to. Bugger. And now I need to get rid of some or all of them. Triple bugger.” Mayhaps you too have done so? Let’s hope so as how to do that is the point of this, the third and final (Hah! No, part four of three is now planned. Also, I can’t count.) part of this series on managing hierarchies.

Driving a manual

Stick shifts (or if you’re perverse and have an old car, a three on a tree, or if you’re really crazy, a Wilson preselector, or if you’re ultra cool, an epicyclic transmission which I finally learnt how to use) are a key component of driving enjoyment because of the control they provide. Wind out the engine way past a “reasonable” rpm just to hear the exhaust bark, hold it in gear round a corner …

A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 2.2 — Building dimensions in batch

Don’t do it, the manual bit

In our last exciting installment, Yr. Obt. Svt. took you on a trip through the most basic of dimension building processes, to wit, building a dimension by hand.

That’s all well and good but it doesn’t really reflect true application development and administration as doing just about anything by hand (sawing wood, cutting the lawn, filling out that 1040A, casting a budget, etc.) is painful for anything other than one-offs, a small scope, or something that hardly ever changes. Repetitive actions should be automated else we revert to paper ledgers and spreadsheets, fountain pens (actually, I use one), and green eyeshades. Instead, I daresay and hope you’ll do most of your loading from batch.

But how oh how oh how does your average geek load a dimension?

One way might be to take an existing dimension, extract it to a file (in OneStream XF aka XF that’s an XML file whose format I’ll cover in the next post – see how I’m stringing you along?) and then use that file to load said dimension in again to this application or to another. Hint: this sentence just described how to migrate dimensionality

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