EPM August 2024 Updates

Here are the updates for August 2024. There are no updates to Planning, but there are a few for EPM Cloud Platform. There are also a couple to Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management worth a look. Updates will go to test environments August 2^nd and prod environments August 16^th. Here are the few that caught my eye.

Air-Gapped (Replicated) Backups in Secondary Region

This should bring some peace of mind to everyone. Oracle will ensure that the daily backups are replicated in a secondary region. This safeguards data in case of a region outage.

New Application Roles

More new application roles are coming. Announcements – Manage, Dashboards – Manage, and Documents – Manage. I am especially interested in the Dashboards – Manage role, this should help to delegate some administrative duties to business users more suited to managing dashboards.

REST APIs to Work with User Variables

The following tasks will be available thru REST APIs:

• Get user variable values defined for the application
• Get user variable values defined in the application by the user variable name
• Get user variable values defined for a member
• Get user variable values defined for a user
• Get user variable values defined for a user and a member combination
• Set user variable values for the application

What intrigues me about this is being able to provide default values for user variables when creating new users. We currently use a Groovy script and a form to set up initial user variables, but this will be a more efficient and customizable approach.

Groovy Script for Post-Daily Maintenance Cloning from Primary to Standby Environment

This is a nice way to automate cloning to a standby environment.

Enhancements in Smart View (Mac and Browser)

Some more improvements to Smart View (Mac and Browser) to bring it closer to standard Smart View. Two new operations: Apply to All Sheets added to Options and a Disconnect command from Actions menu.

Job Scheduling in Data Management and Data Integration

This was in last month’s update for Planning, now it applies to EPCM, FCC, and Tax Reporting. The Job Scheduler console will include Data Management and Data Integration jobs, providing consistency in scheduling functionality.

Edit Embedded Template Tasks

We will be able to edit embedded template tasks allowing overrides on the task properties within the containing template. Additionally, multiple levels of embedded templates can be added.

Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management

I normally do not highlight changes in EPCM, but there are two coming worth a mention: IPM Insights and Task Manager. I am a big fan of both. IPM Insights is an amazing tool and I have only scratched the surface of it so far. Adding this to other business processes is great news. The same can be said about Task Manager, it is an amazing tool and adding it is great news.

As usual, there are lots of other updates in the August release that may be of more interest to you. I encourage you to read the full document and be prepared when environments are updated.

As always, happy EPM’ng!