inlumi blog

Joachim Brandt is a Principal Consultant at inlumi Norway. In 2020, Joachim led the implementation of a consolidation solution in Oracle EPM Cloud at Fiven, a chemicals company headquartered in Oslo. Having previously done all their consolidation in Excel, Fiven now has a scalable solution which has significantly improved their close processes, reporting, and analysis.

As a Commercial Manager in our Managed Services division, I have been very busy recently trying to fit as many upgrades for organisations as I can into our schedule to meet the December deadline for Hyperion 11.1.2.4, expiring on Oracle Premier Support. Rightly or wrongly, there had been quite a lot of indecision about whether to make the move or stay with a release that is moving to Oracle Sustaining Support and the implications this has. Owing mostly to security concerns with the lack of vulnerability patches post Dec 2021, many organisations have now decided that upgrading sooner is better, but that timeline is now likely to push into early 2022.

It is a reality that employee-related costs comprise a significant percentage of an organisation’s operational costs. Typically, a Workforce planning solution caters to the traditional finance cycle of the annual budget and the year-to-go periods of the quarterly forecasting. If an organisation wanted to perform long-term planning of Workforce costs, this was done at a cost centre level with a subset of accounts. The COVID pandemic triggered an emphasis on the costs, with organisations quickly looking for ways to gain further insight into them. A critical aspect in the decision-making is truly understanding where these costs are.

When I ask organisations how frequently they perform a forecast, the response is almost universally the same: every quarter with an annual budget. Mid- to long-term planning was often done manually in Excel even if an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solution was in place. The focus was on the short term with special attention to the budget.