Consolidation Dimension, DSO, and Solve Order

With FCC the change to DSO (where the movement and period dimensions are dense) really speeds everything up. One area that has still seemed slow involves QTD and YTD reporting. The fix for this is to adjust the solve order for the consolidation dimension. All of the dynamic parents should have a solve order of 51 (not 50 or 52 but 51).

This change is scheduled to be pushed to the pods with the June 2022 update.

In case you think I have a crystal ball or a hotline direct to the development team, you're right, I do. But actually I found out about this on a cloud customer connect post to the FCC forum. So even if you don't have a question to post, there are still benefits to following the forum and finding out what others are saying.

By the way, here's the original cloud customer connect post. See the bottom of the responses for the details.

https://community.oracle.com/customerconnect/discussion/610242/making-period-and-movement-dense-report-performance-issues-with-qtd-ytd-views#latest

FCCS - Housekeeping Tasks

As more and more customers migrate to or license and implement Oracle FCCS, people are asking what they need to do with regard to housekeeping or care and feeding of the application. There are several tasks that should be done to keep FCCS in good shape. Nothing is hard, some can be automated, and those not currently "automatable" will be. These are listed below in no particular order.

1. Validate Metadata - within the metadata manager run the process to validate metadata. Issues occur when metadata settings are not correct and the validation process will tell you what is wrong.
2. Download application snapshots - the application snapshot should be downloaded for backup purposes. This is easy to automate with EPM Automate.
3. Download and truncate the audit logs. As the audit logs grow, they utilize space. Every now and then (the frequency will vary from customer to customer) these logs should be downloaded and then truncated.
4. Clear Empty Blocks - run this business rule to remove empty blocks, as they are using space when they're not needed. Running monthly or weekly is about right.
5. Dense Restructure - this is like defragmenting the application. The statistics will show you whether needed or not. If the value is close to 1, then running is not needed. If something like 0.001024, then definitely needed. Again, checking weekly is about right.

Doing these things should keep FCCS running quickly and smoothly.

Consolidate All vs Consolidate All with Data

One of the long running debates about HFM is the advantages of Consolidate All (CA) vs. Consolidate All With Data (CAWD). Some people say it doesn't matter. Some people say you should never, ever do CA. What's the difference, and when would you use one vs. the other? Let's take a look.

Assume we have a little entity hierarchy, with NC and VA rolling into TotCo. Only NC has data. If you do a CAWD on TotCo, NC and TotCo will get calculated; VA will not. If you do a CA on TotCo, then all three get calculated. The difference is whether VA gets calculated, and therein lies the debate: is that okay?

There are multiple things to consider. Once you calculate VA for the given scenario, year, and period, it will never go back to "NO DATA" and will always get included in subsequent consolidations (as HFM now thinks it has data). And you'll also see it getting calculated for the rest of the year. But, if you have rules that pull data from other places into the entity, then you need a CA to get the rules to run. Maybe VA just hasn't gotten it's data loaded yet, but then again maybe it's been an unused entity for years and is there just for the history.

My take on it: if you can avoid using CA, then do so. But, if you need it, then don't shy away from it.