You’ve heard it since the advent of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS). Migrating your Hyperion Planning environment to the cloud means no initial upfront cost for hardware or software, less IT involvement, and no annual maintenance costs. It’s an attractive offer — but, for many, migrating to the cloud is an unknown process.
The migration may not be as tasking as you think, and it gives you a great opportunity to clean your environment and streamline your processes. In this blog post, we’ll go over what needs to be consolidated and streamlined versus what stays the same during your migration. (For a deeper dive into cloud migration best practices, you can jump straight to the video.)
What version of Planning do you need for a straightforward migration?
Fortunately, using Oracle Life Cycle Management (LCM) to migrate your applications should make the process fairly simple — if your on-prem environment is 11.1.2.1 or newer. For previous versions, the migration won’t be supported by Oracle, but you still have options:
Migrating plan types
When you start looking at migrating your plan types, you have the opportunity to cleanse your environment and processes. There’s a series of questions you’ll need to ask yourself before migrating your plan types:
You also need to look at the dimensionality of your plan types. If they have an overlap in members, you can consolidate those plan types. If not, you need to consider how you can fit your plan types into PBCS.
Calculations
If you use calculation manager, LCM can take all your calculations and migrate them. The calculation manager is available in the cloud and you can make modifications to your calculations once they are in the cloud.
If you use the Business Rules Server, things become a little more complex. In this situation, you’ll need to take all your existing rules and convert them, which may require a lot of manual efforts.
Calculation scripts don’t exist in PBCS, so you must do a manual conversion to business rules since the scripts will not import via LCM. This can be as simple as copying and pasting your calculation scripts to business rules. This presents another opportunity to cleanse your environment. Since administrators have the ability to make calculation scripts quickly, they typically have a lot of calculation scripts that were only used for a specific instant and never revisited.
Load rules
Load rules also don’t exist in PBCS. This leaves you with three options to choose from:
Report scripts
Report scripts aren’t all necessary and allow you to once again streamline your processes since they do not exist in the cloud. Usually, report scripts are used for things like getting data off an ASO cube with no export command. So how can you do that now that report scripts no longer exist? You have several options:
About 70-80 percent of your migration to the cloud will be spent on automation. Unless you have a lot of consolidating to do, very little of your time will be spent on plan types or forms since LCM expedites the process.
Automating your metadata requires the use of a new tool — EPM Automate. This tool mimics the ability of the outload load utility that on-prem users are familiar with, but adds some additional functionality like the ability to upload files. There are several other features separate from typical planning functions, since the EPM Automate tool was created to span the entire EPM cloud stack.
To automate your data processes, there’s a little more work involved than the typical load rule. In the cloud, you must go into data management, define what your flat file looks like in an input format, and then apply your rules. Though it’s a longer process, you end up with more flexibility, automation, and visibility. Load rules typically get buried, which can create an issue with admin turnover. In the cloud, you gain visibility and have a single avenue to importing data.