Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) has enabled over a thousand organizations of various sizes to quickly adopt world-class planning and budgeting applications with no CAPEX infrastructure investments, driving market-leading functionality across lines of businesses in the enterprise with flexible and customizable deployment options and virtually no learning curve.
Complete Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting Solution in the Cloud
Oracle PBCS is a tool that is used by many organisations of any size for planning, budgeting and forecasting. It helps solve enterprise-wide business planning use cases and a rich Web and Microsoft Office work environment that has solved a wide variety of financial, sales and operational planning use cases across multiple industries..
KEY BUSINESS BENEFITS:
- No hardware or IT investments
- Fully customizable and owned by Lines of Business
- Migrate from disconnected planning tools and spreadsheets
- Work with latest version of the software
- Multiple environments and global data centers for deployment
- Seamless monthly patching
- Low cost and time to implement
- Customize solution to your specific business need
KEY FEATURES
- Intuitive, role-based web and MS Office interfaces
- Flexible driver based what if modelling capabilities
- Built in financial intelligence and spreading logic
- Built-in commentary and annotation capabilities
- Flexible workflow and plan management capabilities
- Robust reporting and ad-hoc analysis with formatting and charting support
- Automated integration from Oracle and other ERP systems
- Oracle security and reliability of all Oracle Cloud deployments
OVERVIEW
The screenshots below will demonstrate key Planning features and functionality, generating ideas on creating your own application from scratch, or as a starting point for customizing content for your particular use case.
1. You need to login with the username and password provided by your Oracle.
2. For fresh install, you will see this landing page with three options:
- Planning and Budgeting
- Financial Consolidation and Close
- Tax Reporting
3. Click Start on Planning and Budgeting
In the Planning and Budgeting, there are also three options;
- Lite:Lite application is a basic application with one cube and the core components that you need to get up and running quickly. If you later decide that you need more complex business logic, you can convert a Lite application into a Standard or Enterprise application
- Standard: Standard application is an advanced application with two cubes and the option to add more cubes. You can add up to seven total cubes—three block storage cubes and four aggregate storage cubes. Complex business logic, such as business rules and allocations, is supported. You cannot convert a Standard application into a Lite application
- Enterprise:
Steps you through the process of manually creating an advanced custom
application that supports many plan types and complex business logic.
You cannot convert an advanced application into a simple application
STANDARD APPLICATION TYPE
Steps you through the process of manually creating a basic custom application that contains one plan type and provides a simple structure. If you start with a standard application, you can later convert it to an advanced application.
A Standard application:
- Allows you to add up to 20 dimensions total
- Supports custom calendars (up to weeks of the month)
- Supports business rules
- Allows member formulas
- Cannot be converted into a Lite application
- Can be converted into an Enterprise application
The Standard option will expand and provide you with two options;
- Sample: Oracle Hyperion Planning provides a Sample application, called Vision, that lets you quickly create an application with artifacts and data
- New: This is used to create your standard application from scratch.
I will be demonstrating using the sample data version
1. Click on the Sample icon as shown below to load the Vision data.
2. The load process is initiated and can take few minutes to complete.
3. Once complete a notification message will pop-up to confirm creation success.
4. Click OK on the Application Creation Status to go to the Application landing/Welcome page. It displays list of Icons and I will start with the Application icon.
An application is a related set of dimensions and dimension members used to meet a set of planning needs. Each application has its own accounts, entities, scenarios, and other data elements.
After an application is created, you can view and manage it using the application console.
The Application Overview shows the application properties (including the application type) and application statistics, such as the number of tasks, plans, rules, and approval hierarchies in your application. It also lists the cubes (for Standard applications) and dimensions (for Lite applications) used by the application.
CUBES
Cubes are informational objects that identify measures with the exact same dimensions and thus are candidates for being processed together at all stages: data loading, aggregation, storage, and querying.
DIMENSIONS
Dimensions categorize data values. Seven dimensions are included with the application: Account, Entity, Scenario, Version, Period, Years, and Currency. You can create up to 13 user-defined custom dimensions.
DASHBOARDS
Dashboards typically provide an overview to planners at the beginning of their planning and forecast process by showing summary data. The versatility of dashboards enables planners to chart, evaluate, highlight, comment on, and even change key business data. They can change a driver such as Volume in a form that's in a dashboard and immediately see its impact in other forms and charts
DATA ENTRY
The Data Entry page allows you to create and access ad hoc grids in similar ways in Planning and Smart View. You can manipulate and annotate data. You can analyze data in robust ad hoc grids by zooming in or out on members, and pivoting dimensions by simply dragging them. You can format forms to emphasize certain data (e.g., set the font size and color, bold, italicize, or underline data, set the background color).
RULES
You can filter business rules by plan type or type of business rule and them.
APPROVALS
You can filter to see Planning units by Scenario, Version, Approvals Status, or Planning Unit Name, and see Planning Units graphically
REPORTS
Simplified Financial Report creation and consumption can be done within the Planning application. No data export needed to reporting tools. You can view and distribute static or dynamic reports that summarize data, in either PDF or HTML format.
DATA MAPS/APPLICATION MAPPINGS
Administrator can map dimensions between a source Planning database and a reporting database to enable
Data maps are maps between a source application and a reporting application.
You can map dimensions between a source application database and a reporting database to enable:
- Reporting on source application data in a reporting application
- Aggregating and querying on Smart Lists, which are converted to regular dimensions in the reporting application
- Linking application data to multiple reporting applications for various consolidations
In my next post I will be showing you the installation steps for the Enterprise version of Oracle PBCS. if you have any questions about PBCS or you need me to talk about any functionality , please feel free to comment below and do not forget to help share my blog.
