What are the uses of Hyperion Planning and How efficient it is in Planning?

Hyperion Planning is an application that sits on top of the Essbase OLAP server and is used by organizations to perform planning and budgeting. Using the tool, you work with standard dimensions such as period, year, scenario, entity and accounts to which you can add other custom dimensions such as product and geography, with an Essbase cube being built using these into which you add budgeting and planning data. Budgets are typically either set top-down or bottom-up, with users entering their budget data either through web-based forms or through Microsoft Excel, with Essbase then being used to spread and allocate numbers down the hierarchies or add them all up after the budgeting process has finished. As such it differs from Essbase in that it’s an application rather than just a tool, and over the past few years Oracle and Hyperion have added specialized versions to handle workforce planning, capital asset planning and so on.

Hyperion Essbase is an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) multi-dimensional database server that extracts data from a wide range of data sources, files, and spread-sheets; calculates and aggregates this data; providing fast access to the results, using a dimensional model. Essbase brings analytics to the business user and enables the business to quickly access business scenarios, forecast outcomes and perform what-if analyses to identify trends.

Essbase stores data in a ‘cube’ or OLAP database. Additionally, Essbase incorporates one of the leading calculation engines for doing financial calculations such as allocations and eliminations.  

Hyperion Planning is an excel and web-driven planning, budgeting and forecasting application to help connect operational assumptions to financial outcomes. Hyperion Planning sits in an application server (relational layer that sits on top of Essbase); between the Essbase database and the client tools that work with it; integrating financial and operational planning processes; leading to improved business predictability. Planning does so by leveraging Essbase's multidimensional data model as well as standard relational database management platforms.

The Essbase portion of the application gives Hyperion Planning the calculation power to handle predictive planning, allocations and complicated revenue recognition planning.

The relational source allows Planning to collect textual information critical to a coordinated understanding of the budget.

Essbase is a database. Planning is an application that uses Essbase (i.e.: suite of products all bundled together - HAL, Essbase, Hyp Reports, HAB). Customers think they are getting Essbase when they buy Hyperion Planning. This is in somewhat true, as Essbase is the back end of Hyperion Planning; where planning cannot work without Essbase.

Hyperion Planning is an optimum tool to serve planners at all entity levels to easily analyse and submit data plan.It is the best way to implement a streamline planning process in an organisation.This framework will help to co-ordinate different departments and align them towards shared objectives. 

It is used for planning, budgeting and forecasting. 

Hyperion Planning is a web-based planning, budgeting and forecasting solution offered by Oracle as part of the Hyperion family of products for Enterprise Performance Management. Typically businesses use MS Excel to build budgeting / planning templates that require extensive man hours for preparation of templates for input, distribution / follow-up, and consolidation. This process is so cumbersome that most budgeting processes spend the bulk of the time in these activities and are unable to run iterative processes.

With tools like Hyperion Planning, the effort required for preparation, distribution, tracking, follow-up and consolidation is dramatically reduced by leveraging the capability of the multi-dimensional OLAP engines to perform consolidations / aggregations as the data is entered, unifying the data in one location to avoid versioning problems, and having strong workflow capabilities to track the budget preparation and submission process.

1.Streamline Enterprise-wide Planning and Budgeting Process

2. Ensure Reliability with Predictive Planning and Rolling Forecasts

3. Collaborative Planning within an Intuitive Scalable Web Interface

4. Enhance Productivity with Full Microsoft Office Suite Integration

5. Enable Agility with Mobile Access

6. Integrate Planning and Management Reporting Seamlessly

7. Ease Collaboration with Powerful Plan Management and Workflow

8. Large Deployments with Scalable Architecture at Low Cost of Ownership

9. Robust Data Integration and Deployments

It’s very effective in planning; you can lay the Foundation for Enterprise Business Planning:

Oracle Hyperion Planning is the center piece of Oracle’s broader solution for Enterprise Business Planning. The Enterprise Business Planning process spans strategic planning, budgeting and forecasting, workforce planning, capital asset planning, project financial planning and other elements of operational planning that have a significant impact on financial performance. It also involves an ongoing evaluation of business costs and profitability analysis and uses those insights to drive change in business plans. In addition, Enterprise Business Planning can leverage predictive analysis and simulation techniques to constantly evaluate and quantify risk and uncertainty, inherent to all of these plans, and takes actions to mitigate those risks as appropriate.