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Oracle Cloud EPM Optimization: Importance, Tips, How-To

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Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is a powerful tool for helping organizations achieve their goals, gain access to deep insights, and make informed decisions.

Although organizations often successfully implement Oracle EPM, many face challenges when tailoring the platform to best fit their evolving needs and maximize the return on their cloud investment.

Continuous optimization of your Oracle EPM configuration is essential to increase efficiency and visibility, improve insights, and streamline processes.

Things to know about Oracle EPM Optimization:

  1. What is Oracle EPM Optimization?
  2. When is it time for your business to optimize Oracle Cloud EPM?
  3. Tips & Best Practices for Oracle Cloud EPM optimization
  4. Benefits of Oracle Cloud EPM Optimization
  5. How we help with Oracle Cloud EPM optimization

What is Oracle EPM Optimization?

Oracle Cloud EPM optimization is the process of assessing your current Oracle EPM configuration for gaps, performance, automation opportunities, and areas of improvement and developing a plan of corrective action. It often involves working across teams to customize systems, applications, and other solutions to fit your individual needs for growth and efficiency.

Oftentimes, it can be most beneficial to turn to an Oracle EPM optimization consultant or team for guidance to capitalize on opportunities, drive efficiency, and mitigate potential issues. 

When is it time for your business to optimize Oracle Cloud EPM?

  • Your business and reporting processes are inefficient or could be automated 
  • You need more real-time visibility across business units
  • You haven’t made any improvements to your Oracle Cloud EPM configuration post-implementation 
  • Your decision-makers lack the insights they need or aren’t getting access to the data fast enough
  • You’re not fully leveraging the modules in the Oracle Cloud EPM suite and/or their latest capabilities (e.g., EPM Reports)

Tips & Best Practices for Oracle EPM Optimization

  1. Create a CoE team
  2. Identify and address bottlenecks
  3. Keep up with EPM updates
  4. Ensure your data is accurate and well-managed

Create a COE Team

A key best practice for optimizing Oracle EPM is to establish a Center of Excellence (CoE) team.

An Oracle EPM CoE team oversees your cloud initiative, ensures cloud adoption, and drives the effort to help your organization get the maximum return on its EPM investment.

Your EPM CoE acts as a steering committee for best practices, leads EPM-related change management initiatives, and drives transformation in the business processes of managing financial master data; financial reconciliation, consolidation and close; and financial planning and analysis.

Identify and Address Bottlenecks

After implementing Oracle EPM, there are still plenty of opportunities to revisit and further optimize your configuration.

Your organization should conduct periodic reviews of your Oracle EPM Cloud usage to identify potential areas for improvement. This will help optimize performance and maximize the return on your Oracle investment.

One of the best ways to identify areas for improvement and performance bottlenecks is by reviewing your Activity Report. The Activity report is generated automatically every day during daily maintenance, each time you submit a Provide Feedback submission, and every time you restart an environment with the resetService EPM Automate command.

Some of the sections you’ll want to pay special attention to in the Activity Report are:

  • Number of Users
  • Top 30 Worst Performing User Interface Actions over 2 Seconds
  • Top 10 Worst Performing Business Rules over 30 Seconds
  • Top 7 User Interface Requests by Duration
  • Top 10 Worst Performing Calc Scripts Commands over 1 Min

By reviewing these sections, you can identify some of the worst-performing actions and objects, the business rules that take the longest to run, and the user actions that take the longest to complete. 

Your organization should use Oracle’s diagnostic findings as a start to a comprehensive approach that also considers process and application design factors.

  • To tackle process bottlenecks, a thorough analysis of your end-to-end EPM processes could reveal tasks that are no longer required, can be better sequenced, and/or otherwise streamlined or automated.
  • Application design analysis could identify opportunities to simplify the data model (e.g., hierarchies, dimensionality), implement scalable data security, and future optimize performance (e.g., partitioning, indexing, caching)

Through regular monitoring and iterative, ongoing optimization, your organization will optimize your Oracle EPM configuration with your current and future business needs.

Keep up with EPM updates

EPM Cloud is far from stagnant; Oracle frequently updates it with new features, upgrades, and enhancements. 

Set up a monthly reminder (perhaps with your CoE team) to assess and implement these changes to help you take full advantage of Oracle EPM’s technological advancements. 

Ensure your data is accurate and well-managed

Data is the foundation of Oracle Cloud EPM. If your data quality and integration is poor, it can impact the entire system’s effectiveness, resulting in inaccurate reporting, unreliable insights, and ill-informed decision-making.

To optimize your Oracle EPM environment, your organization should focus on optimizing its data management/governance, aggregation, cleansing, and integration processes. By investing time and resources in your data governance program, you can ensure data accuracy and consistency, maximizing the value of your Oracle EPM configuration.

Benefits of Oracle Cloud EPM Optimization

  1. Deeper insights into performance with adaptable data and powerful reporting
  2. Increase visibility across business units
  3. Streamline operations and increase efficiency
  4. Respond faster and more effectively to organizational change
  5. Save time by automated routine reporting
  6. Reduce costs with deep insights into dimensions of cost and profitability
  7. Empower your business leaders to make informed decisions with powerful analytics
  8. Proactively and effectively plan for the future with financial budgeting & forecasting, plus business analytics
  9. Streamline the financial close, account reconciliation, and tax reporting

How We Help With Oracle EPM Optimization

As a leading Oracle partner, we empower organizations to translate today’s insights into tomorrow’s solution through our full suite of Oracle Cloud services, from initial setup and design to optimization and beyond.

Our experts at ArcLight Consulting are dedicated to guiding you on your Oracle EPM journey and delivering value on your investment. We transform operations to maximize efficiency and help you reach your future goals faster.

We do not simply achieve business improvement results for our clients; we do it better, smarter, and in less time than the competition.