Technology Blueprints & Strategy with Gary Crisci

Overview PBCS has made life so easy when it comes to moving data between plan types.  Setting up a Planning to Essbase ASO reporting cube, on-premise, is a very involved process with automations to either export/import data or to move data via partitions.  With PBCS it's pretty much as easy as clicking a button in the UI or calling a data map definition in EPMAutomate. A number of questions come up when determining how you want to architect your PBCS app.  You need to think about how data is going to be stored in the different plan types and how the data flow is going to work so that you get the results you need as quick as possible while ensuring the app is easy for users to navigate.  Features like Smart Push, which allow you to create data forms pointing to a BSO plan type and also write to an ASO plan type (or another BSO type if you wish) give you a lot of options to isolate your users from seeing what's going on behind the curtain.  I make it a sell...

Do you get tired of recreating the same PowerPoint decks each month when your numbers change?  Wouldn't it be great if you could just push a button and have the numbers in your ppt slide update to what is in the database?  Wouldn't it be even better if the data was used in visually rich MS Office objects such as tables and charts?  And, wouldn't it be awesome if you could interact with the data in real time during your presentation? Well, did you know Smart View for Power Point does all of that?  That's right I said Smart View for PowerPoint; Smart View is not just for Excel. Smart View has had the functionality to work with the MS Office suite for some time, but frankly the functionality outside of Excel has been limited and challenging to work with at times.  While the Power Point and Word functionality are not 100%, they have come a long way and with some patience you can make some really nice PowerPoint slides that are interactive with your underlying EP...

As a Director on the ODTUG Board, I have the privilege of serving as the organization's Treasurer.  Some of my duties include overseeing the organization's financial reporting as well as budgeting and forecasts.  When I took over the role two years ago I did an assessment of our reporting capabilities and I was unhappy about our dependency on Excel as our primary reporting and analysis tool.  Our controller did a fantastic job of pulling the data each month for our close and finance review, but we were limited to the reports that were created and any follow up questions or curiosities that required digging deeper posed a challenge and required someone to go off and manually work on it. As an EPM professional, I knew there were better tools out there and my colleagues on the board agreed.  Of course this wasn't news, previous boards had also thought about this, but they were impaired by infrastructure requirements.  As a not-for-profit organization ODTUG runs o...