510A

What You Really Should Know About Hyperion Financial Management

Presented by: Michael Fuori, LINDIN Consulting Inc.

Agenda

Reality Check: Your Reporting and Analysis

Process Today Look Beyond Your Day-to-Day PLAN, PLAN, PLAN Hyperion Financial Management Success Formula

Your Next Step Q&A

Features Design Considerations Realizing the True ROI

Reality Check: Your Reporting and Analysis Process Today

Still a disjointed, often manual process Hyperion Enterprise - Consolidations, with

help from Excel

Forecasts and much of the budget process still done manually in spreadsheet templates Some companies still doing the intercompany, cash flow and equity outside of their Hyperion Enterprise Applications

Many running GL reports cut/pasted into

Excel, others using Business Objects, Brio, VB or MicroSoft Access for their analysis Many still doing corporate reporting, hard copy reports out of Excel !!!

Reality Check: Your Reporting and Analysis Process Today

(Continued)

Centralized Administration, but many suffer

from maintaining distributed copies around the world. Others rely on a Citrix Solution to handle the access volume Maintenance becoming an increasing concern for the administrators Performance on large dynamic drill downs becoming an issue Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 putting increased strain on need to expand existing applications. Where do we expand?

Reality Check: Your Reporting and Analysis Process Today

(Continued)

Still not enough time for analysis Increased pressures to cut days from the closing

cycle The theory of the Virtual Close putting more strain on the closing process Manual processes cant get much faster Business hours communication (phone calls/emails/faxes) across the organization wasting valuable time Cumbersome reporting solutions to get simple commentary leaves less available time for analysis

Look Beyond Your Day-to-Day

Hyperion Financial Management is NOT

Hyperion Enterprise. Remember your Micro Control conversion. THIS IS NOT AN UPGRADE so dont treat it like one. This is your chance to CHANGE THE PROCESS FOR THE BETTER, eliminating a substantial portion of the effort while offering a viable, efficient reporting and analysis mechanism.

PLAN, PLAN, PLAN

POV POV POV The power of having 12 dimensions will

cause initial confusion to straight finance people if not trained well This brings some added complexity to things like the journal entry module and Excel retrieve reporting The Value dimension allows for very detailed currency translation detail and is now part of the POV Plan your design with these 12 dimensions in mind, especially while laying out your reports. (For ease-of-Use)

The Hyperion Financial Management Formula for Success PLAN + Powerful FEATURES + Design Considerations + Reporting Tools =
Less confusion Less time Shorter closes Transforms data into usable information Viable WEB delivery mechanisms

TRUE ROI

Be Aware of the Many Features

New architecture (Cube Theory) No longer have to live with only
Entities and Accounts as the primary dimensions

The 3-level subacct barrier has

been finally been broken First Pass through Submitted, Approved and finally Published

Unlimited number of levels

throughout the organization. NO NEED for special Final categories dozens of phone calls per user! E-mail addresses can be hardcoded or controlled via a lookup table

Leverage Process Management, Creates accountability

Automatic criteria-based e-mail

capability

Huge time savings, eliminating

Be Aware of the Many Features

(Continued) Intercompany a separate dimension!!

Major advantage in reporting

capabilities, but existing canned intercompany report(s) may not suite your companys needs against COA, now any dimension is valid. 100s of spreadsheets could be eliminated over associated numbers

Ability to have more complex

logic, business rules

Previously only able to build

Adding textual notes to ANY data cell intersection Aid FP&A in commentary sensitive reporting capabilities

Eliminates possible confusion New Hyperion Reports allows not

only for column annotations, but also for data sensitive full textual descriptions and graphical reporting. 256 per obj!

Be Aware of the Many Features

(Continued)

Ability to capture entity unique

account information is needed at lower level of the organization but not required from a consolidated point of view

Line-Item detail feature allows

each subsidiary to use a custom table. (i.e., debt instruments can now be tracked aiding the individual units while not affecting the corporate chart of accounts!) quality dynamic style flows can be created and delivered over the WEB, eliminating hours of PowerPoint type modifications due to last minute changes in the numbers

Leverage a well planned outline with Hyperion Analyzer

Executive ready, presentation

Be Aware of the Many Features

(Continued)

Advanced currency translation

Data anywhere in the system can

be viewed in any currency defined within the system, while still applying all the correct rules for translation, including rules for the EURO and CTA calculation

No conditional suppression in
Reports module

Can highlight these exceptions.

Can prevent numbers from appearing but not suppress the entire line; however, white numbers with white background would not display on report!

Reports are distributed over the Users cannot build reports over
WEB, 150 concurrent users per Reports server the Web. All other features are supported.

Design Considerations

Think Out-of-the-Box! Do not design the outline yourself if no prior

Essbase type experience is present in the development team. GET ALL USERS INPUT UP-FRONT!!!

All requirements gathering is vital before the

design takes place. An efficient design should properly leverage the custom dimensions, and user-defined fields without overloading one particular dimension over another. Remember its not Hyperion Enterprise. Not everything needs to be squeezed into the Entities dimension.

Design Considerations (Continued)

Dimensions should be designed for

dynamic drill through. Hence the accounts dimension P&L starts with NET INCOME, and then drills into more detail. This is the opposite of how a Hyperion Enterprise chart of accounts is built The & character is not a valid character, even in the description! The Label is shorter than Hyperion Essbase allows

Design Considerations (Continued)

Dimensions should flow properly. It should

make sense as you drill in. The hierarchies are leveraged throughout Hyperion Financial Management as well as Hyperion Reports, Hyperion Analyzer and the Excel Retrieve Pivot feature. hierarchies should account for as much of the reporting and analysis functionality as possible. This will minimize the number of hard-coded and logic driven functions needed.

Try and stick to the 80/20 rule. The outline

Design Considerations (Continued)

The generations/levels can be highly

leveraged within the delivery tools to create dynamic reporting and analysis. List all level-4 items, or all items between level-2 and level-5. This helps minimize the report maintenance. When designing your reporting objects, try to reuse reporting objects in a similar manner as Row and Column sets were imported by Hyperion Reporting.

Not to be confusing, but, Hyperion Reports

(NEW) Hyperion Report Writer (OLD).

Design Considerations (Continued)

Leveraging the custom dimensions

One is usually designed to replace the sub-

account table feature of Hyperion Enterprise. Members of the Account dimension can have an attached starting member from one of the custom dimensions. Every account could have a different starting member from CD1 (Custom Dimension1). Entity or Data Type equivalent to the basic Hyperion Enterprise substructure is commonly a second custom dimension. (Input, Adj, GL, PriorPerAdj, GAAP, etc.) Equity Partner/Minority Interest Entity Names can be defined in a custom dimension to handle what was once very complex calculations.

Design Considerations (Continued)

User Defined Fields (UDFs)

Example:

Extra grouping functionality Similar to CODES identifier in Hyperion Enterprise Three CODES instead of one Entities grouped by geographical area or
population

Define a UDF instead of Custom dimension One to three UDF per account
20 characters of information per UDF Equivalent to Essbases Attribute dimension

Informational Not functional or summary

Design Considerations (Continued)

The right tool for the job! you can

Build budgeting and forecasting functionality into Hyperion Financial Management Calculate product line profitability Create a pre-load file validation process with
Hyperion Application Link

Butmake sure the fit is right!

Planning a 3000 line item bottom up, involving

spreading and push downs budgeting processes may be easier in Hyperion Planning Storing heavy product-line detail for 200,000 book titles may be better in Hyperion Essbase Pre-processing may be simpler for the GL to handle during its extract process

Realizing the True ROI

Savings with Hyperion Financial Management

Coty: millions per year GE: elimination of nearly 1,200 spreadsheets

through the drill down capability of Hyperion Analyzer

Elimination of the effort involved in

MANUALLY creating slices of views for analysis Analysts can quickly identify potential cost over-runs possible expansion opportunities time to spare Elimination of time off the close? Money well spent

Realizing the True ROI

(Continued)

Hyperion Financial Management, Hyperion Analyzer, and Hyperion Reports together can save your organization tens if not hundreds of hours:

Clear plan Outline required functionality Take advantage of the features Together they can:

Centralize many processes Simplify analysis Help communicate the process

Your Next Step

Create a full Business Performance

Management road map even if the first phase of your Hyperion Financial Management implementation is ONLY to duplicate your Hyperion Enterprise functionality Detail additional Phases to include advanced features and functionality so maximum benefit can be realized Allocate adequate resources for testing and training due to the extreme differences between Hyperion Financial Management and Hyperion Enterprise

Questions & Answers?

Thank You for attending this mornings very early session.

For more information concerning this presentation, contact me at: 212-808-3026 MFUORI@LINDIN.COM

Please Complete Your Session Evaluation.

510A
What You Really Should Know About Hyperion Financial Management
Presented by: Michael Fuori, LINDIN Consulting Inc.