Offline Budgeting and Planning

Have you ever been on a plane and said to yourself, “there aren’t enough Jack Daniel's miniatures aboard for me to have to sit through Santa Clause 3 again, but if I could just enter my Q4 forecast numbers, I’d be all set for the remainder of this ten hour flight.” Or, maybe you were driving down the Pacific Coast Highway thinking, “if I could only finish annotating my annual budget right now, my trip to the beach would be so much more enjoyable.” [Disclaimer here that I would never condone driving and budgeting or driving and doing anything else besides just driving, for that matter…] Or, maybe you’ve stayed at that Motel 17 out in nowhere with a download speed of 1 kb (+/- .5 kb) per hour and lost your budget updates no less than 20 times.

Ok, maybe not… But certainly, there is value in being able to access a budgeting system while disconnected from the system. Whether you’re on a plane or staying in a remote location, there’s inevitably a time when a deadline is looming and you just have to finish your work. Hyperion Planning provides a solution for this dilemma through the offline capabilities of the Smart View Excel add-in tool.

Smart View is a tool that allows you to pull Hyperion Planning data web forms into Excel. Once a form is in Excel, you can essentially perform all the same functions that you can in Planning web. With Smart View, you can input data and save it to Essbase, use the adjust data feature, enter supporting detail and cell text, and run business rules and calc scripts. You even have the same look and feel as a web form with expandable parent members, page drop-down boxes, green read-only cells, and yellow updated cells.

The process for taking a Planning data form offline in version 11 is fairly simple:

1. The application has to first be enabled for offline usage. Set this by going to Administration -> Manage Properties -> Application Properties and setting ENABLE_FOR_OFFLINE to true. This is the default setting.
2. Next, you need to enable individual data forms for offline usage. Edit a form, go to the Other Options tab, and click the Enable Offline Usage box.
3. Open the data form(s) in Smart View and click Take Offline. You can choose to take a single form, multiple forms, or an entire form folder and its contents offline.
4. Select the page dimension members to store offline. You can either choose to take all page members or just a subset.
5. Provide a connection name and click Finish.

At this point, the necessary application components are copied from the server to your local machine. Basically, a smaller version of the application is created on your system, including necessary outlines, calc scripts, dimension members, data, substitution variables, and web forms. The download can be quite large depending on the number of items you choose to include. To minimize the download time and system footprint, you will want to limit the web forms and page dimensions to only those that you will truly need.

Once all the components complete their download, you can work in your subset of the application to your heart’s content, all while being disconnected from the network. You can essentially perform the same operations as if you were still connected, with the following exceptions:

• When you save information, you are saving it to your local machine.
• When you log into the application in Smart View, you no longer log in through the Common Provider. You now go to Independent Provider Connections and open your offline connection there (named in step 5 above).
• Currency conversion is not supported for offline usage.

This offline connection can be accessed as many times as you’d like, continually opening, saving, and closing it until it’s synchronized back to the server.

Take the following steps to push any updates in your offline connection back up to the network server:

1. Open the offline connection.
2. Click Sync Back To Server.
3. Log into the application on the server.
4. Select which forms, folders, and page members to sync back.

After the upload is complete, I generally delete the offline Independent Provider Connection to remove the application files from my machine.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell. So, the next time you're in the middle of the Gobi Desert or standing on the edge of a crater rim on Mount Kilimanjaro, you'll have the comfort of knowing you can still get your work done. If, on the other hand, your motto is "when I'm away from work, I'm away from work", then just forget everything you just read.

Using Smart View with OBIEE - Part 2

This blog post is the final post in a two part series. The first part of the series on how to use Smart View with OBIEE can be found here. To continue with the example in this post you will need to have properly connected to your Oracle BI Server as outline in Part 1.

After completing Part 1, You should have:

- Accessed Smart View
- Connected Successfully to your OBI Server
- Have your data source manager set-up similar to this screenshot






Create a Smart Slice

Expand the "Sample Sales" schema.


Create a Smart Slice
Select "Add"
(This will start the Smart Slice creation process)










Once your “Add” selection has been made the open worksheet is modified with a rows/columns intersection and a Smart Slice POV prompt. This is the Smart Slice creation mode where you define your analysis criteria and will eventually save it for later use. Notice that the row and column members are at a high-level. At this point we need to select a more granular set of data for analysis.

In the POV prompt (see image below) we are able to select the members that actually build out the grid rows and columns as well as the POV for which no members are actually shown on the grid but are integral to the data slice that we want to conduct our analysis with. When we are ready to select this criteria simply double click on a member. Also to move a member from POV or from rows to columns, simply select the member then drag and drop it into the desired location.

Move DESCENDANTS([D0 Time].[T03 Per Name Qtr]) from under the POV header in the POV prompt so that it rests under the Rows header. Now move [D0 Time].[T00 Calendar Date] from underneath the Rows header so that it rests under the POV header.

Under the Fields header of the POV prompt, find [D1 Customer].[C1 Cust Name] and select it. Now drag the [D1 Customer].[C1 Cust Name] from underneath the Fields header so that it rests underneath the Rows header.

At this point the very structure of our sample Smart Slice example has been created. However, as you can see from the worksheet rows and columns, the current selections are seeking to retrieve the DESCENDANTS of our tabular grid, this would be a huge retrieval of data and we do not want that. We want to build out a more granular slice of data and we do that by conducting the following operations all by using the POV prompt.

Double-click [Measures].[All] under Columns in the POV prompt.

Select the following measure [F1 Revenue].[1-01 Revenue (Sum All)] by using a combination of the checkboxes and the arrows in the middle of the two large pick-list columns.

Double-click [D1 Customer].[C1 Cust Name] under the Rows POV prompt.

Select the following measur [D1 Customer].[C1 Cust Name].[Abhishek Arya] by using a combination of the checkboxes and the arrows in the middle of the two large pick-list columns.

Double-click [D0 Time].[T03 Per Name Qtr] under the Rows header in the POV prompt.

Select the following measures [D0 Time].[T03 Per Name Qtr].[2006 Q4], [2007 Q1], [2007 Q2], [2007 Q3], [2007 Q4] by using a combination of the checkboxes and the arrows in the middle of the two large pick-list columns.

Your final grid should appear as follows.

Right now, the Smart Slice you have been modeled but not confirmed. To begin saving the Smart Slice, click the green arrow toward the bottom-left of the POV prompt.

You may be prompted to review the Member Selections made. If so, just click the “OK” button.

Next, the Smart View Data Source Manager will open a field which allows you to enter a name for the Smart Slice you have just created. Enter a “TestSmartSlice” (1) in the field then click the green (yin-yang-like) arrows (2) to save it.

After the Smart Slice has been saved, it is immediately visible in the tree.

Right-click on the smart slice you’ve just created and select “Insert Query Into Report”

The Report Designer appears. Click the Insert button and select Function Grid.

A tabular representation of the model you built out for the smart slice now appears. The #NEED_REFERESH value underneath the measures column tells us that we need to hit the REFRESH button in order to run the query to get data. We do this by using the Hyperion file menu dropdown and selecting Refresh.

The results of the retrieval are shown in the worksheet and we have successfully retrieved data from the Oracle BI Server using SmartView and a Smart Slice.

Conslusion

This example is very basic but it introduces you to the concept of conducting analysis of your Oracle BI data outside of Answers. Using smart slices allows reusable analysis to be conducted in the most popular analysis tool on the market, MS Excel. Using smart slices also introduces a new level of security that can be achieved for your subordinate users. Using SmartView as an extension of current analysis tools will allow you and your organization to grow your toolset along with the direction that Oracle is going with in Business Intelligence following the Fusion release.