Hiring a new employee for any open position is a major task, but it can be extremely difficult to find a Hyperion administrator who’s both qualified and a good fit for your organization.
If you’re currently searching for a Hyperion admin, you probably realize that you can’t make exceptions to the qualifications you’re looking for — this is not a job organizations have the time and resources to provide additional training for. Your ideal candidate profile also depends on several factors, like which tools you need managed, the number of applications, and much more.
In this blog post, we’ll outline the most essential technical and functional skills your recruiter should be looking for because, let’s face it, their job is hard enough.
Technical Skills
When it comes to a complex suite of tools like Oracle Hyperion, it’s obvious that the administrator you’re looking for will need an assortment of technical skills. If you have on premises software, there are several general infrastructure tasks you should look for on their resume:
- Establishing disaster recovery procedures
- Server maintenance
- Evaluating and installing relevant patches
- Diagnosing and resolving issues with Hyperion infrastructure, hardware, and software
If you are on premises or cloud based, some deeper technical skills may need to be considered. They include:
- Performance tuning and application optimization
- Backup and recovery of Hyperion applications
- Assisting in creation and maintenance of interfaces to or from other financial system applications
- Automation and scripting of tasks
- System documentation
You also need to make the distinction between maintaining a Hyperion system and developing a Hyperion system. Do you need someone to make customizations to your tools, like writing a calc script in Hyperion? Is your organization thinking of upgrading or installing another application in the future? If so, you need to look for resumes listing experience in these areas.
To evaluate if a candidate is a good fit for your organization’s needs, consider their level of experience with…
- The current version of your tool or system
- Your data loading and integration tools
- Updating calc scripts, business rules, web forms, and reports
- Creating and maintaining Essbase cubes (if you have Essbase)
- Creating and maintaining workflows (for Planning, HFM, or DRM)
- Managing user security roles and access
- Implementing monthly metadata maintenance
- Supporting the integration of acquisitions (both the company’s and the inherited systems)
Functional Skills
While a Hyperion administrator requires an array of technical skills, an admin needs to speak the language of finance and accounting as well as IT.
Just being familiar with your business processes is not enough — they should be able to help optimize them. After all, the ultimate goal of a Hyperion system is to support strategic, seamless EPM processes.
Examples of functional tasks you should look for on your prospective Hyperion admin’s resume include:
- Setting up, opening, and closing business processes with your Hyperion tool(s)
- Data validation experience
- Helping the corporate FP&A team manage processes and helping business units complete their key activities
- Performing ad hoc and routine financial close tasks (e.g. running month-end close processes, maintaining a reports calendar)
- Creating and maintaining financial reports
- Ensuring data accuracy and integrity
- Providing training to end users
- Resolving end user support requests
- Advising on best practices for business processes and technology
Finding a Good Hyperion Admin
The technical and functional expertise required to support Hyperion is a scarce skillset in high demand. Often, organizations looking for an in-house administrator search for months and still come up short, leaving a mission-critical system without sufficient support.
Fortunately, there is a less risky and more cost-effective alternative. Outsourcing support to an experienced Hyperion managed services provider will give you all the skills listed above, typically at a more affordable price.
If you need help supporting Hyperion — whether you recently lost an admin, completed an implementation, or need supplemental support for critical times like month-end close — managed services is an option worth evaluating.
Wondering how much you could save with managed services? This ROI calculator can provide an estimate in minutes.