Automating Oracle Hyperion FDM Tasks

Oracle's Financial Data Quality Management (FDM) is heavily relied upon as a preprocessor of data in advance of loading into Oracle's Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), Hyperion Planning and occasionally into Oracle Essbase. The product does an excellent job validating, parsing, merging data based upon rules that ensures the output data is correct for loading into the target system. This summary does not nearly give the product justice and more information can be found at: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/hyperion-data-quality-management-066557.html.

Despite all the benefits that FDM brings to enhancing data quality, it lacks significant ability to automate the various tasks that are necessary to keep the application running across an ecosystem of applications, servers and processes that typical finance administrators need to interact with. FDM does have a built-in “localized” scheduler but it is difficult to job chain FDM processes with other running processes outside of the control of FDM. As a result, clients who depend upon FDM often rely upon manual processes to do such tasks such as running custom file splitters, loading data to various applications via the “4 Fish Process” and generating and emailing reconciliation reports in PDF or XLS formats. In the typical environment, where there is a heterogenous mix of applications and computing environments, each step along a job chain typically requires human intervention which is time consuming, error prone and ultimately undermines SOX compliance.

In the previous post, Star Finance Command Center (SFCC) was introduced as an alternative to manual processes and how a current Command Center customer helped educate their team about the product's capabilities through a comparison of current processes and those under the control of SFCC. In this post, the following three main FDM tasks will be highlighed and how SFCC automates them:

• Running a FDM Custom Script
• Running the “4–Fish” Process (Import, Validate, Export & Load)
• Running the FDM report engine

Details of how Star Finance Command Center interacts with FDM will be explored in this PDF file: http://staranalytics.com/blog/blogfiles/Automating_FDM_Tasks_with_Star_Finance_Command_Center.pdf