Our daughter, who (proud dad moment!) is working on her biochemistry master’s degree, recently called to check in. During this conversation, she told us about a recent experience in her lab: “And then I went in on Friday morning and – BOOM! – everything came together. We finished up our cultures in an hour and took the rest of the day off!” She and her lab partners had been working for several weeks on a project without seeing much in terms of tangible results and they were getting frustrated and discouraged. Suddenly, as she put it, everything came together, and they had something to share with their supervising professor. This seemed like a real-world example of the Pareto principal, or the 80/20 rule – the idea that twenty percent of your efforts yield eighty percent of your results. In this case, all the work over several weeks led to the results, but it seemed to the team in the lab like their success happened in one hour on a Friday morning.
Our Oracle Hyperion EPM clients often experience something similar. I like to call it the divergence principle. It is similar and goes something like this: When you have a newly implemented Oracle Hyperion solution (it could be HFM or Cloud Planning – anything, really), the system kind of hums along on its own. You check on the scheduled jobs, run reports, do your analysis. Response times are fast and the data accurate, timely, and help you answer the information needs of your business units and the higher-ups. You have evenings and weekends free. Twenty percent effort for eighty percent gain.
Over time, however, this tends to invert. Data integration becomes more challenging. The business changes and the systems no longer provide the answers. Maybe you needed to add manual processes like spreadsheets to keep up. You update the dimensions and cobble together solutions to keep your system relevant. The performance slows down. Evenings and weekends become more about the care and feeding of Oracle Hyperion EPM. If this persists, frustration grows and maybe your finance, accounting, or technology teams start to think about other solutions, as costly and time consuming as that may be. Eighty percent of your time (or more!) is being spent getting twenty percent results. Your system has fallen victim to the divergence principle and you’re the one paying the price.
If this sounds like your situation, I have good news and better news: The good news is you’re not alone. Financial system owners inevitably experience issues of their solutions not keeping pace with their changing business and most of our clients have been in your shoes. The better news is, US-Analytics can help, as we have with dozens of organizations just like yours. Our Strategic Managed Services team specializes in getting Oracle Hyperion EPM solutions back on track and keeping them on track. We will assess your business processes, align your system to those requirements, and, most importantly, keep your solution humming along while you get your life back.