Hyperion Financial Management is a product by Oracle that is used to report on actuals. The system is accessed by users mostly via Excel, where an add-on called SmartView allows for retrieval of data from the system.
As a Finance user, you retrieve actual and forecast data from the system via an Excel add-on, called SmartView retrieves, or directly in HFM online. Retrieving data can take a long time to load, depending on how heavy your retrieve is. Once the data is retrieved, several calculations must be applied.
A dashboard that standardizes reporting, and a dashboard that makes the data extraction process much easier. Self service analytics.
Dashboard cannot tap into an Excel SmartView retrieve. Hierarchy structure for morethan 2,000 legal entities is quite complex. To retrieve data, the user must provide values for eleven parameters. Data is then retrieved via a formula that points to the parameters. [example of formula and how it maps to the parameters, drawn; parameters are: entity, account, period, year, view, custom1, custom2, custom3, custom4, value, scenario, icp)
Hierarchy for entities and accounts was flattened via two dataflows, then connected to a bulk extract of the system that pulls in [Eliminations]. A complex but robust logic was applied to take into account Eliminations at the parent level and aggregate up in the hierarchy ensuring that numbers are not double counted.