I recently had the opportunity to work a bit with pipelines in EPM. They are one of the best developments in Cloud EPM over the last couple of years. But I do have some gripes with them. While they offer a lot of awesome features to tie together various integrations and business rules, the visual provided becomes almost useless as the number of stages in the pipeline grows.
For example, let’s compare these two pipelines. The first is a basic pipeline with two stages. It is easy to read and interact with (other than the blurring I added).
The second pipeline has 17 stages. There’s no need for me to blur much here because it is too small in the interface to be able to read.
Of course, you can hover over the icons and the names and descriptions enlarge a bit, and you can select a stage and interact with the panel that opens on the right. But it would be nice if the display could be enlarged, zoomed into, so the entire chain of stages could be readable. I did not see any other requests on Customer Connect asking for this type of enhancement, so I created one myself. Check it out here https://community.oracle.com/customerconnect/discussion/828989/pipeline-graphical-icon-sizing#latest
Another complaint I have about pipelines is the lack of a Save button. When you edit a pipeline, it is automatically saved. This may not seem like a problem, one might view it as a good feature to ensure changes are saved. However, it does pose a problem if a change is made unintentionally. We had an incident the other day where a scheduled pipeline was accidentally modified between two runs. The first run was executed correctly and data loads and calculations were correct. But before the second run, the sequence of stages was altered. The data loads and calculations did not execute in the correct order, so the data was not valid. Adding a Save button to the pipeline interface instead of automatically saving would be a good enhancement. I did not find anything similar on Customer Connect, so I created one. Check it out here https://community.oracle.com/customerconnect/discussion/828965/epm-data-integration-pipeline-save-button#latest
Another annoyance with pipelines is the lack of audit visibility. While investigating how the pipeline from above was modified, we could not determine when or by whom the changes were made. Others have found the lack of auditing an issue as well and someone did create an idea about it, check it out here https://community.oracle.com/customerconnect/discussion/813261/pipeline-add-audit-type-for-pipeline-changes#latest
If you agree with these ideas, I would appreciate your upvotes. Oracle is responsive to the community making suggestions, it helps them decide what enhancements to make.
As always, happy EPM’ng!
Random EPM Notes 
Also add,
1 – String jobs (Pipelines) together whether predecessor job is successful or failure.
2 – Add Start Time and Total Time for each step in the Pipeline, not just the End Time where you have to do math to figure out each step.
3 – I’m going to say REMOVE the auto save. It’s stupid and causes too many headaches.
4 – More advanced scheduling scenarios. This may be a Job Scheduler thing, but if you need to run the job multiple times in a day, then more advanced options should be available.
5 – In the scheduling allow for it to pause/wait for other jobs to be in a ‘completed’ or ‘successful’ or ‘failure’ status before running a job. You might have a job that cannot run concurrently with other jobs, so have it wait…. Again, might be a Job Scheduler request thing.
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Great suggestions, thanks for sharing.
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Paul – Completely agree with your Ideas!
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Here’s another for the Wish List:
Ability to update a Pipeline definition without having to CANCEL a scheduled job and re-schedule with the changes applied.
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