2.9.8 Release Notes
OFA Replacement
Oracle retired it's excellent Oracle Financial Analyzer and Oracle Sales Analyzer applications when the Oracle Express database merged into the Oracle RDBMS.
The spiritual successor to Oracle Financial Analyzer was EPB (Enterprise Planning and Budgeting). This never achieved a significant install base, and was cancelled after the acquisition of the Hyperion EPM Product stack.
The Sales Analyzer migration route was to Oracle OLAP, in conjunction with tools such as BI Spreadsheet Addin, and OBIEE.
For some workload scenarios the Hyperion EPM stack is an excellent choice. However, for many Oracle Financial Analyzer clients who relied on the flexibility of Express and the Oracle Financial Analyzer toolkit, it does not offer a suitable upgrade route.
Many of our clients have previously attempted a migration to either the new EPM stack, or a competing product such as Cognos &TM1.
myObjectiveOLAP was designed with Oracle Financial Analyzer upgrades in mind. Typically we can take your application, and with only minor changes to your application upgrade it to Oracle OLAP with myObjectiveOLAP.
Your existing support teams will be able to support the new application with a few days training on notable differences.
Your application will perform much better as we'll be able to take advantage of significant improvements in the OLAP (Express) engine.
You will be fully supported on modern platforms. You will be able to upgrade your client OS (Windows 7 & 8) and MS Office (Office 2013). You will also be able to upgrade your Server OS.
When moving to myObjectiveOLAP from OFA you should think of it as an upgrade, not a migration. In our experience over 95% of your ofalc (ofa custom code database) can be transitioned without modification.
Oracle Express and OLAP Custom Applications
Oracle Express Server was extensible via a number of provided applications and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
Structure N-Dimensional Application Programming Interface (SNAPI)
Many client applications were built with SNAPI to fulfil specific business requirements for reporting, data-entry or analysis. SNAPI was only available in Oracle Express and was not transferred to the Oracle Database when the OLAP engine was merged. This left many customers with the choice to move to Oracle's new Java API where possible, or to continue using Oracle Express Server. The SNAPI C library continues to function flawlessly even on Microsofts latest OS. Many of the tools such as Oracle Express Objects which were designed to develop against this library are now showing their age and cannot be installed.
myObjectiveOLAP provides a drop-in replacement library and API that can be used to develop custom client applications against the Oracle+OLAP database. Protecting your investment, reducing your implementation and retraining costs.
myObjectiveOLAP For Express provides tools to develop SNAPI library integration for those clients who wish to remain on Oracle Express Server but wish to upgrade their PC clients.
Oracle Express Spreadsheet Addin
Oracle Express Spreadsheet Addin provided slice & dice functionality for querying data stored within the Express Server database directly from Microsoft Excel.
This was an extremely popular tool which also offered cell based formula reporting (xpCellQDR) which was used to meet many business needs from ad-hoc analysis to complete Board level reporting solutions. The final part of the Oracle Express Spreadsheet Addin was complete access to the SNAPI API from within Microsoft Excel enabling "anything you can think of" custom applications to be built.
myObjectiveOLAP brings the same level of integration between Excel and Oracle+OLAP covering slice & dice reporting, cell based reporting (mooCellQDR) and an extremely rich and extended API which can be accessed from Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). In addition as Oracle OLAP is now part of the relational database the API supports integration for relational data types and reporting.
Accounting Hub
myObjectiveOLAP has been used with great success as an Accounting Hub.
An Accounting Hub traditionally sits at the intersection between your billing systems and your ERP and financial ledger's such as Oracle E-business or SAP.
By offering complete integration between the Oracle relational data store and the OLAP Analytic Workspaces myObjectiveOLAP has shown to be able to handle large volumes of data from upstream billing systems, apply business rules, enrich data and handle deferrals through its deferral engine.
Customers often use an Accounting Hub to reduce the costly and risky changes to customer impacting systems when a change of financial reporting is required.
Through myObjectiveOLAP coupled with the Oracle+OLAP data-store customers are able to handle the challenges of greater regulation, SOX compliance and changes to Accounting Standards such as IFRS15.
myObjectiveOLAP's Accounting Control Framework enables a clear and transparent dashboard of your data as it arrives as raw billing files, is enriched, deferred mapped to your financial Chart of Accounts . Integration with your ledger means that any issues encountered when the journals are finally posted are immediatley visible from the Accounting Control Framework and the Accountant responsible is emailed with any issues.
Our Accounting Hub is also enabled for manual journals to be posted within the Accounting Hub from Microsoft Excel; together with attached backup, and hierarchical authorisation support built in.
One of our clients is using myObjectiveOLAP Accounting Hub to provide the link between 18 billing systems and a SAP ERP. 350 million transactions a month are processed into 7,500 journals with full multi-currency support and end-to-end transparency.
Drill is enabled to allow the end users to easily drill from a single ledger balance to the source transactions. Speeding up reconciliation activities and assuring both their senior stakeholders and auditors that they have a solid and robust reported result.
Forecasting and Budgeting
myObjectiveOLAP has its roots in providing functionality similar to Oracle Financial Analyzer which was a world class forecasting and budgeting solution.
As a company we have had many years of delivering comprehensive forecasting and budgeting solutions based on the OFA application to a diverse range of customers in Retail, Telecoms, Public Sector and Utilities. In fact two of the people from the team literally wrote the book on implementing Oracle Financial Analyzer based solutions.
When we first started designing myObjectiveOLAP we looked at the challenges we had faced in real-world delivery of this type of application and wanted to bake all those hacks, customisations and extension into the core product, so you wouldn't have to.
myObjectiveOLAP used for forecasting and budgeting supports all the components you would expect from a modern day enterprise forecasting solution:
Even though we think we've captured everything you might need; we know you may want to extend the application. To this end we have a fully documented and complete API which is supported from the ground-up so you don't need to worry about your support position if you decide to add functionality.
Use-cases for using myObjectiveOLAP for forecasting and budgeting include customers using it to manage and forecast a large retail and property portfolio, and for revenue and cost driver based what-if forecasting.
Some customers will have migrated to Oracle Hyperion Planning, we also integrate with OHP and customers are using myObjectiveOLAP to report on data originally planned within OHP as well.
Reporting
Whatever you use myObjectiveOLAP for:
...it's likely you're going to want to see the results of your efforts. Our client software offers a number of reporting options for you.
Slice and Dice through Data Explorer
Data Explorer enables you to build, save and share reports. Quickly moving through your data to answer your questions. You can even schedule reports to run at a later time and myObjectiveOLAP will send you the report when you've asked for it. We've also added Relational Drill; if your data is based on a relational data table it will quickly drill from the analytic model to the source transactions.
Excel Cell Reporting
myObjectiveOLAP supports single-cell reporting from within Microsoft Excel. Enabling you to create highly customised reporting solutions including charts, pivots. We've taken it one step further with the ability to double click on a cell and myObjectiveOLAP will automatically drill down on either your X or Y dimensional hierarchy as requested.
Relational Explorer
myObjectiveOLAP enables you to quickly query any data you've stored in the Oracle relational data store and export the data directly to Excel. A drag and drop query wizard enables non technical users to quickly construct and share queries without any SQL knowledge. For pro-users we have also included a SQL query pad with full syntax color coding and hints.
File writing
If you used to write files directly for interfaces, letters or reports you can still do that. Once you have written out your custom file, if you tell myObjectiveOLAP the name of the file and email address it will deliver it for you.