I recently was engaged to assist on a small project to get data out of Oracle Financials Cloud (OFC) and into Oracle’s Financials Consolidation Cloud Service (FCCS). Now mind you, I’ve performed various actions for testing and supporting clients in their already configured state. To be able to perform these steps myself for the first time from the ground up was quite exciting… not to mention a learning experience.
This blog post comes from my recent adventure connecting Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle FCCS together using the out-of-the-box connectivity.
Something You Must Know
Both FCCS and Oracle Financials Cloud run on Essbase in the Cloud. Having that fundamental knowledge brings a level of foundation to how the products will communicate with each other. It also allows for some generic troubleshooting and product fundamentals to assist in building the integrations.
Setting up Oracle Financials Cloud (OFC)
To get data out of the system, as with most systems, a user-account of some accord must be created and granted access. For my client, it was set up way in advance for me by its ERP administrator. They were able to quickly turn around and provide me with the required information:
- UserName / Password
- Oracle Financials Cloud URL
- Application Filters (if applicable)
Setting up FCCS / Data Management (DM)
After receiving the required information from the ERP Administrator, my attention has turned to starting the work in Data Management to be able to extract data. Of course, before we can extract data, we must go through the steps of setting up and configuring Data Management for connectivity to OFC.
To set up DM, we take the information provided from the ERP Administrator and create a new OFC source system registration.
We will also make sure that the system can be properly initialized:
At this point, if you also open the Process Details log, you will see the connection information and download of information from the ERP.
You will also get a recap of what dimensions were captured and the total number of base members.
Now at this point, if all is successful, you should also see a Target Registered for each ERP application found. In this case, we only had 1 ERP application found, and it was also successfully added.
To quickly recap: So far in DM, we entered the UserName, Password, and URL for our OFC instance, then the software undertook many configuration steps for us. Other steps were also taken for us as well, including Periods, but I did not call those out with screenshots. How amazingly nice and awesome! Now for some fun stuff!
Data Management Updates
When the system automatically created the Target Application Registration, it might not have aligned the dimensions appropriately. You might be thinking, “Wait…what are you talking about?” You know: when a dimension is added, let’s say AccountingPeriod (or Account), it is assigned a class of Generic and a Data Table UD1 column (or Generic and a Data Table UD2 column).
I know this isn’t correct because we want that aligned to the POV Period, so we need to change the class to PERIOD so we can use it automatically in the POV. Or we want the Account dimension of our ERP to align with the Account dimension of FCCS/DM. It could be this way for many dimensions, and as such, I needed to go in and correct any that did not meet my expectations.
What to do Now?
Now that we have a system registered, the DM rollout is pretty much the same as any other. I needed to review data volumes and decide how to create my location structure. To do this, I used Smart View to do a generic assessment of dimensional structure. The same UserName, Password, and URL can be used to gain access to the ERP since it is Essbase driven.
I created a private connection with the following information: https://<baseURL>/aps/SmartView .
In my examples from the screenshots above, it would be: https://XXXX.fs.us6.oraclecloud.com/aps/SmartView
HINT: I also used this connection to find data for initial importing, testing, and validating.
After getting Smart View set up and figuring out how I wanted to slice and dice the data, I could build out import formats, locations, and data load rules. These steps are identical to Data Sync style rules as the application is registered as “Essbase.”
The only thing that I noticed is when the data load rule source options were automatically created, it did not include all the dimensions of the cube. I had to go in and manually add the missing dimensions and the required extract filter conditions. It wasn’t a big deal to add these, but it is something to look out for. After the data load rules were built, it was just a matter of kicking the import process off and creating mapping. This client had very simple mapping, and the process executed fairly quickly and easily.
Next Steps
After my first location was built, I had to build about 30 more, but I was off to the races for this client and its direct integration into the ERP – Oracle Financials Cloud. The client’s next steps are going to be data validation; glad my work here is done…or is it?
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