hyperion financial management

hyperion financial management

The Role and Impact of Hyperion Financial Management in Modern Business Operations

1. Introduction to Hyperion Financial Management

Hyperion Financial Management was introduced into the market several years ago. The current version provides a web-based platform that supports new functionality while leveraging the analytical capabilities of their existing EIS product, Hyperion Reports, and the Essbase multidimensional database. The product includes several pre-packaged modules for balance sheet, profit & loss, and other elements of a typical reporting package. A conductor manufacturer, which analyzed exceptions in its monthly consolidation of 100 individual entities, used Hyperion Technology. The company was able to analyze and correct these exceptions prior to sending its overseas operations to bed, thus minimizing cash flow problems. Hyperion is a data aggregation tool, meaning that it can be applied to multiple functions across an organization, not just financial consolidation.

1. Introduction Hyperion Financial Management is a part of Hyperion Performance Management Suite that provides global financial consolidation, reporting, and analysis in an online, real-time application. It is a comprehensive, web-based Hyperion enterprise application, including a series of tools that extend its functionality. Hyperion Financial Management can operate independently or as part of a larger suite of modules. In terms of the technical aspects of the tool, the Hyperion Financial Management infrastructure is built using industry standard N-Tier technology comprising of web servers, application servers, client providers, and databases. This document is not intended to provide an exhaustive overview of Hyperion Financial Management. It should be considered in the context of the business issues facing your organization. It provides examples of how Hyperion Financial Management functionality has been designed to address business issues raised by clients in numerous SME implementations. It addresses some of the strategic issues facing organizations looking to implement such applications and provides some examples of best practices derived from those implementations.

2. Key Features and Capabilities of Hyperion Financial Management

In a world where many different management projects are vying for business resources to solve a wide variety of important business management problems, Hyperion Financial Management has considerable specialization for managing the corporate financials that enable earnings to be reported to shareholders. A financial consolidation application, this Hyperion software is used to enable statutory-based external financial reporting within the rules and regulations presented by GAAP, for group and for trading accounts. It is also used to enable internal management reporting by business units, by geography or by function, so that the corporation’s strategic direction can be followed and managed.

Hyperion Financial Management is also supported by its integration capabilities with numerous key Oracle and non-Oracle platforms. It is a seamless system integration interface, so it can provide real-time data extraction or be utilized as a front end or middle-tier project application, which provides an attractive and flexible offering to business users. Further, it has resource scalabilities that are supportive of its financial application componentry. Business is not constrained in terms of its financial reporting and analysis utilizations, because Hyperion Financial Management has successfully been utilized for the purpose of both internal operational and external financial disclosures; it has been designed to flexibly deliver this dual application componentry.

3. Implementation and Integration Strategies for Hyperion Financial Management

There are sufficient reasons why a business would want to provide supplemental data for inclusion in consolidation packages that would warrant some discussion of Hyperion Essbase before more fully exploring the Hyperion Financial Management system. All of these issues relate to the movement of BI application functionality into the finance domain to satisfy specific financial planning and analysis requirements. Finance department requirements that have historically been handled within Excel, or simple departmental databases, are moving into the enterprise-focused BI tools. As these finance department, or more specifically, corporate performance management requirements change, there are issues with the IT systems deployed by the finance team members. In the end, those problems in a CPM environment are either addressed by moving to integrated BI tools such as Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Strategy Management, or problems dealing with moving on to a significant infrastructure problem which was quite likely the root cause of financial modeling remaining under departmental control in the first place.

In developing a new Hyperion Financial Management application environment, there are several different implementation strategies that may be pursued. There are several infrastructure deployment questions that need to be answered before a Hyperion Financial Management environment can be developed, and those questions can radically impact whether Hyperion Financial Management is an acceptable solution as a stand-alone financial consolidation tool, or whether Hyperion Financial Management must be extended into a general BI solution. In general, Oracle suggests a staged strategy for deploying the Hyperion Financial Management solution. Hyperion Essbase is added as a temporary storage system, and for the initial phases of system deployment, there is truly a clear wall between the Hyperion Financial Management system and the rest of the business. However, it is instructive to discuss Hyperion Financial Management in the context of multiple business concerns that can see directly related benefits from involvement with consolidation and planning tools, even if that involvement appears to be an initial one-way submission of financial results.

4. Best Practices and Case Studies in Utilizing Hyperion Financial Management

The use of Oracle’s Hyperion Financial Management business consolidation and close solution continues to grow, and properly addressing business problems will ensure successful implementations. Evergreen Energy Inc. faced numerous business challenges that were frustrating its management team. The organization was growing quickly at both an organic and inorganic level. In the spirit of being an entrepreneurial organization, they had tried to solve many business consolidation problems with applications on spreadsheets, using pure sweat and exceeding the capabilities of their current financial system. Evergreen operated in a highly regulated industry, and management was challenged to report timely and accurate financial results. The auditors reported difficult times auditing these results. The board of directors relied heavily on these financial results, using them in making crucial decisions for the organization. Thus, it is critical that Evergreen had accurate real-time data to make informed business decisions. The management team understood the problem and realized that as they grew, it would grow proportionally, not supporting this type of growth and complexity for their financial consolidation, external reporting, and management reporting needs.

This section will explore three different case studies where organizations realized substantial efficiencies and a successful implementation of HFM while learning the process. This chapter is based on factual implementations and best practices. All details have been altered to protect the confidentiality of the clients. Each case study will outline the business process problem presented, how HFM was configured to solve the problem, and the final results. Lastly, at the conclusion of the section, the best practice findings have been compiled.

5. Future Trends and Innovations in Hyperion Financial Management

These advancements will address one of the fundamental issues that almost blight the Hyperion Financial Management market that it can be perceived as too clunky, too challenging to use, and thus not solving the problems that today’s consumers now demand. The challenge, however, will be to find the right balance between the expectations of the workforce that comprise of a new generation of professionals where technology is ubiquitous versus the uses and benefits that potential users of future financial management capabilities are likely to expect. And of course, the second challenge is to educate the Board, the Regulator, and of course the leaders that lead the enterprise and their finance functions that these new innovations from will not only need existing enterprise accepted systems, but will also be trustable, transparent and of course provide a common-sense approach to managing the future business in the same way that Hyperion Financial Management does today.

It is widely recognized that the Hyperion Business Financial Management product will continue to be one of the core products that underpin the Oracle/Hyperion portfolio, and its importance to the modern enterprise, where regulatory, risk data collection, and enterprise performance management is rapidly emerging as a key theme. The increase in the number of acquisitions seen over the past several years will be aimed at better integration of specific applications such as Hyperion Financial Management to ensure their ongoing widespread acceptance and that we will see, in a number of years down the road, the more pronounced impact of natural language voice recognition or indeed wearable computing devices where capabilities are more embedded to allow the future agile, mobile workforce to view, work with, and interact with their financial systems.