2024 Reflections

As the year draws to a close, it’s time to reflect not only lessons learned but remembering our achievements! It’s often too easy to focus on the negatives but as my Mentor (a.k.a Debra Lilley) encourages the importance of fostering growth by reflecting on the positive aspects as we step into 2025! So here are some of my highlights of 2024…

January – I had the pleasure of being on the abstract review committee for Kscope24 Financial Close track! Lead by the insightful Terrance Walker!

February – I was lucky enough to be taken to see “Cirque de Soleil” at the Royal Albert Hall courtesy of the Brovanture theatre appreciation society! One of the many ways Brovanture recognises the teams contributions!

March – Brovantures’ very own ACE conference in Cyprus, a wonderful trip to celebrate our successes!

April – I received my acceptance into the Oracle ACE program, a worldwide advocacy recognition program which rewards and promotes individuals for their personal contributions to the Oracle community. Check out the website for more info or reach out to me, I’m always happy to chat on this subject: https://ace.oracle.com/pls/apex/ace_program/r/oracle-aces/home

May –  I Joined the UKOUG Shine Mentoring program as a mentor and helped turn LinkedIn Purple! A fantastic initiative spearheaded by Leona Chauhan and a heap of wonderful volunteers who helped structure this successful program. 

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June – Attended the Brovanture annual retreat at Centre parcs, a great time to catch up with all my colleagues from around the globe and the optimal balance of work and recreational activities!

June was a busy month we also attended the UKOUG Community Awards night at Redbull racing MK7, Brovanture came away with 2 awards, EPM Partner of the year Gold award for the 2nd consecutive year!  and my ACE partner in crime Lydia Maksoud won the UKOUG Woman in tech of the year!

July – was another busy month kicked off by the UKOUG Shine Summer Sizzler event at Oracle Reading, a great celebration event for the first mentoring cohort 

First up was a panel session “What I would tell my younger self” hosted by Philippa Clifford-Davies featuring Sundus Butt, Jerry Seager, Joanne Wallbanks and Sudipta Ray

We had some great breakout sessions and also heard from Leona and Jacqueline Ryan – Co-Chair of Oracles Women’s Leadership (OWL) program on collaboration with the Shine program in future events.

We also heard from 2 thought provoking motivational speakers! Ciara Banerji on Energy IQ and Lucile Kamar playing Boundaries Bingo and finally the “Mentors and mentees panel - key learnings from the programme”, hosted by Grace Honeysett, featuring Julie Harris, Cristina Arzuza, Andreea Vasiliu, Thalia Nguyen Phamova and Judit Chantler.

Next up, I had the honour of being selected to speak at Kscope24 in Nashville, ODTUG Kscope is the premier educational conference for Oracle technology users, attracting Oracle experts from all over the globe. with over 250 technical sessions, hands-on training, all-day symposiums, and networking with Oracle experts. This year’s agenda was jam packed with great content from Oracle, Partners, Oracle ACE’s and Customers!

   https://www.odtug.com/kscope24

The conference was held at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Centre, another spectacular hotel 

I had the pleasure of travelling with my ACE partner in crime Lydia Maksoud and we just had to check out the music in the Honky Tonk bar!

I attended my first Oracle ACE dinner and was lucky enough to share a table with my fellow UK ACE’s and met Oracle’s famous Connor McDonald and had the biggest piece of chocolate cake I have ever seen! 

I presented “discoverIEs journey or discovery” sadly Katherine Mills couldn’t attend so we recorded her inputs so she was with me virtually!, I also spoke at the WIT luncheon on my experiences with the WIT mentoring program.

It was great to catch up with Brovantures Associate Director Roger Cressey and Rich Wilkie, VP Oracle EPM Product Management along with Many others!

And the finally event on “General Jacksons showboat” was a party not to be missed, Great food, exceptional music and lots and lots of dancing!

August – I presented a repeat of  “discoverIE’s journey of discovery” at the SAOUG webinar

September –  I Re-Certified as an “Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close 2024 implementation Professional”

October – I attended the Oracle EMEA EPM Roadshow 2024 at the Oracle offices in Reading, great to catch up with Oracle Product management and hear the latest updates!

And Tim German approached me with the opportunity to  lead the Kscope25 Abstract review committee for the Financial Close track! some amazing abstracts have been submitted and I'm excited for what is undoubtedly destined to be another remarkable conference!

November –  I Re-Certified as an “Oracle Account Reconciliation 2024 Certified Implementation Professional”

December –  Brovanture had a big presence at UKOUG conference in Birmingham, Andreea Vasiliu & Michel Schoolenaar Oracle product mgmt. presented on the AI Powered Finance with Oracle EPM which was standing room only!.

I had 4 sessions, Kicking off with my ACE partner in crime Lydia Maksoud with “3 EPM processes walk into a bar – and they all integrate with Cloud ERP!, next up was an “Interactive Multi  EPM Product Panel” Hosted by Brovantures Guillaume Slee, with Myself & Lydia plus Michel Schoolenaar  Oracle Director EPM Product Management and our Customer Nick Murray from AVON, I then presented “Elevate your HFM to new heights with EPM Financial Consolidation & Close (FCC)” and my last session was on one of the Shine panel Building Mentorships that last a lifetime hosted by Grace Honeysett.

Lydia and I also attended the UKOUG Oracle ACE Dinner held at the famous Ashas Indian restaurant! clearly a popular choice as there were 50 Oracle ACE's!

The UKOUG did something different at this years conference they had a closing Key note, Bonita Norris the youngest women to climb mount Everest, a remarkable and inspiring story!

Wow that was a busy year! it’s not until you sit down and put pen to paper that you can truly reflect and celebrate your successes!

Wishing you all good health, success & Happiness for 2025!

Until next year………. 

Enabling Forms 2.0 for Oracle Financial consolidation and close (FCC)

 

If you haven’t made the move to Forms 2.0, this blog might be useful before you dive in!

Forms 2.0 was first released in 23.11 and there are lots of great additional features that enhance the user experience as summarised below, however, there are a few considerations to be aware of before making the switch!

Considerations

All fixes and enhancements will only take place in Forms 2.0

If you have formatting applied on your current forms, note forms 2.0 doesn’t have formatting in the browser, however you can apply formatting in SmartView which is saved to the form for future retrieves and is pretty smart! (ha-ha see what I did there 😉) (Form formatting in the browser is in the pipeline, dates to be announced, but unlikely in the next few months) Groovy is an option but can be code heavy…. as my Colleague Mike informed me!, but personally & I hope you will agree the SmartView formatting is pretty cool!!  See a quick example below,

Forms 2.0 - Web View

Forms 2.0 - SmartView Standard View

Forms 2.0 - SmartView Formatted  View

To apply formatting in SmartView, select the FCCS menu then Apply > Custom Styles from the formatting section, then use normal excel formatting, once complete, select Save from the formatting menu

I  Always recommend mitigating any risk by checking out the features in your test environment first, I am sure you will love the improvements!

It’s an application specific setting so if you don’t like it simply reset back to Forms 1.0. or clone production back to test.

And Finally, If you are using Dashboards they will need to be migrated to 2.0

Highlights of enhancements

Faster rendering, cell navigation, scrolling across and down the page,

Improved member selections via dropdowns with ability to start typing the member name speeding up selection, it refreshes instantly as the member is selected, no more clicking the Apply arrow to update the form (Yay).

Line-item detail, (Like HFM) ability to add additional lines to give context to a balance with logic to determine how the value rolls up into the balance of a single account see example below.

New updated Icon Menu: Adjust, Grid spread, Comments, line-item detail, Cell History and Undo   

Plus the ability to add Comments to multiple cells in one go. 

Enabling Forms 2.0

There are no migrations steps, as the Administrator simply update the settings as below;

Navigate to Application > Settings

And from the dropdown menu against Forms Version select Forms 2.0 and Click Save and you are good to go!

Oracle related webcasts and YouTube content on Forms 2.0

https://youtu.be/naDI1TlHyy0?si=FLt-bT-Yvf3z7cBp

https://community.oracle.com/customerconnect/events/604915-epm-why-you-should-adopt-the-new-forms-2-0-and-dashboards-2-0

 

Highlights of the EPM Cloud Aug 2024 update - Financial Close

 

Not a huge amount happening on August EPM update, but a few items to note are:

Account reconciliation

There are 2 new roles available for Access Control  
View & Manage, enhancing the segregation of duties, which was a focus across the EPM Close products announced at the ODTUG Kscope24 conference this month (safe harbor apply)  so we can look forward to welcoming further enhancements for role segregation.

View role – Provides Read Only visibility to the tabs within Access Control, along with viewing user security reports

• Manage Groups
• Manage Native Users
• Manage Application Roles
• Role Assignment Report
• User Login Report
• Manage Teams
• Manager Users
• Power User Security
• User Group Report

Manage role – Can View and Export user security reports

For more details see the Oracle documentation here: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/account-reconcile-cloud/adarc/admin_setup_tools_access_control.html

Financial Consolidation and Close

Oracle have added the capability to Export & Import Configurable Consolidation Rules in XML format, with the ability to modify in a text editor, thus making it quicker to move across applications after testing, modifying and amending rules.  Do be aware that when the rules are imported they will have the status of Undeployed  and unfortunately the seeded rulesets cannot be exported!.

Important Actions and Considerations - Highlights

• Oracle advise installing the Latest version of EPM Automate, and also recommend updating this every month to ensure you have the latest features, bug fixes etc. for smooth operation.
• Advanced warning for 24.10 update – Changes in the permissions, power users who work with Forms and Dashboards will require security access to the folder in which they create Forms and Dashboards, so it’s a good idea to update the access in advance to avoid disruption.
• Good news for Forms 2.0 and Dashboard 2.0 – This update indicates that many of the gaps and issues customers were facing have been addressed and recommend customers move to 2.0 see my blog on enabling Forms 2.0 for more details.

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Oracle Transaction Matching Tip for period mapping when pulling data from Oracle Fusion ERP

 

We have recently seen an increase in  customers taking advantage of the Powerful Account Reconciliation and Transaction mapping tool in the Oracle EPM Suite of products and our very first implementation of Transaction Matching took us a while to figure out why our Period mapping wasn’t working and so the fix stuck with me ever since!

After recently completing another Transaction matching implementation I wanted to share this information for those of you just starting out on your Transaction Matching journey in the hope this Tip will hopefully save you a heap of time!!

When you are creating the Application to pull data from Fusion, the “Dimension Name” for “Fusion Month” should be mapped to the “Generic” Dimension Classification”  and “Data Table Column Name” as “UD11” as shown in the below screenshot, this is not the same when creating Applications for loading Account Balances or for FCC where you would normally select the Dimension Classification as Period.

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog,  I hope this was useful!

… Until next time

Feb24 EPM Update – Important Actions & Considerations

 

This section of the Oracle Cloud readiness update is often overlooked and many of us just want to see this month’s enhancements, myself included! however this section shouldn't be overlooked, below are some key items that may impact your applications!

• Oracle are Upgrading All Non-Hybrid Essbase versions to Hybrid Essbase in the next 3 months, to check if your application is Hybrid enabled, go to Applications > Overview > Activity Reports, as shown in the below screenshot and follow the link at the bottom of the page to see the full information & instructions published by Oracle.
  
  
  
  
  
• Discontinuation of Infolets from the 24.04 update, creation of new infolets will be disabled and no longer supported, this is a real shame as Infolets were a great way to display high level detail and embed them on the home screen, however with the enhancements in Dashboards in recent releases the discontinuation of this feature should not be a significant loss, so if you do have Infolets that are in constant use! it’s time to switch them over to Dashboards.

• Discontinuation of Non-Redwood Themes, this has been talked about for some time now, but Oracle are saying this will be removed towards the end of Q1 so not long to switch, check out this oracle video to see the enhancements you are missing out on by not utilizing the Redwood theme: https://community.oracle.com/customerconnect/events/604505-epm-why-you-should-be-using-the-redwood-theme-in-epm-cloud

• 24.03 Updates to Substitution Variables and Consolidation Settings, the March update Financial Consolidation and Close will be introducing a new module called “Consolidation Settings” this will phase out the user-created substitution variables, with a migration option for some substitution variables with more plan in future updates

So take a break, grab a beverage and read the 24.02 Important action and considerations!

https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/epm/wn/epm/releases/Feb24/24feb-epm-wn.htm#T55212