Contribution made by Josh Forrest
Overview
The increased number of BI (Business Intelligence) and EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) systems being implemented by financial management groups worldwide will inevitably lead to increased reporting requests. It’s now become vital for organizations to select a proven reporting tool able to handle the load of large and small organizations - Hyperion Financial Reporting is that tool. With Hyperion Financial Reporting, users are able to easily create highly-formatted, book-quality, management and operational reports. Organizations have stakeholders who demand information in varying layouts, end-users comprised of different security levels, managers who insist on static, pre-defined reports, and analysts who desire the ability to manipulate metadata that ultimately builds each report. These can be easily met with Financial Reporting.
Product History
Presenting financial data sourced by Essbase to the user community was often accomplished by using Microsoft Excel VBA (Virtual Basic for Applications). This approach to reporting was slow, prone to mistakes, and required developers to become proficient in the Excel VBA language, while concurrently understanding how to integrate the Essbase API into this code base.
To give users a GUI (Graphical User Interface), Hyperion designed and developed Hyperion Reports. This reporting application was used to display data to users from a variety of source systems, including Hyperion Essbase, Hyperion Planning, and Hyperion Financial Management. Hyperion Reports began to grow a large user-base, and in 2007 was part of the Hyperion acquisition by Oracle. At the time of the acquisition, Hyperion applications were being used by approximately 12,000 companies, including 91 of the Fortune 100. The acquisition made Oracle a leader in the EPM market and strengthened the Oracle offerings.
Soon after the acquisition, Oracle introduced a new product family coined OBIEE-Plus (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus). This suite of products included all Oracle and Hyperion reporting and analysis tools. OBIEE-Plus consists of the former Siebel Analytic applications (Dashboards, Answers, Delivers, Disconnected Analytics, Publisher, and Briefing Books) in addition to the legacy Hyperion reporting tools (Interactive Reporting, SQR Production Reporting, Financial Reporting, and Web Analysis).
Strengths / Benefits
- Easily-formatted/ high-quality - Financial Reporting
allows for a variety of formats, each format meeting accounting
principles set forth by regulations and external requirements. Having
the flexibility to format reports in numerous layouts makes appeasing
different sets of end-users easy.
- Report automation -
Users can run and print multiple reports from a pre-defined schedule
with batching. The batching process allows reports to run overnight
with other batch processes. Once all reports have finished processing,
they can be sent to folders on shared network drives or printed.
- User control
- Users have complete control over layouts, formatting, fonts, and
colors, as well as a flexible range of output options enabling wide
distribution via print, HTML Web pages, PDF, and online viewing.
- Rapid report creation
- A graphical, object-oriented interface enables the rapid creation of
reports that combine grids of data and text, charts, graphs, and images.
- Reusable content - A library of reusable report components simplifies and streamlines the process of building and maintaining complex reports.
- Multiple source applications
- Financial Reporting accepts connections into multiple source
systems/applications, including Hyperion Essbase, Hyperion Planning,
Hyperion Financial Management and SAP NetWeaver BI.
Resources