Planning 11.1.2.3 features without ADF UI (Rolling Forecast)

I did an upgrade some time ago where Hyperion Planning was upgraded from 11.1.2.2 to 11.1.2.3, this gave the application access to a whole new slew of functions, I can expand on some of these in a future blog, but some were time savers , others items that users had asked for, and others were just ‘neat’.  But with this particular upgrade we ran into a major issue, Latency- as it was a global roll-out. The ADF UI that is the default in 11.1.2.3 in our high latency (200-400ms) environment was causing crashes in IE, and un-usable forms.  So we were left with a couple of options -  option one, tell the users to suck it up, get used to it (I dare you to tell that your users) and option two to revert to the classic UI giving up ADF. After carefully contemplating how to build a user feedback shield, change the locks on my office, and several e-mail filters (500+ users) I decided option one was not the way to go, so now I had to find a way to get the functionality I had promised users without the pretty new ADF user interface. 

There were 3 key features that I wanted  to come out of the upgrade even if I had to go with classic UI:

1. New Calc Script functions
2. Cell Audit History for users to view
3. Rolling forecast integration 

Since number 1 has nothing to do with the UI, it was easy to check this one off the list with a simple verbal ‘Check’.  For number 2 we had to get a little bit more creative, since the classic UI did not support the feature, we trained the users on accessing planning forms through Smart View; again this was not too much of a hassle for the set of users who were looking forward to this feature. But number 3 is where things got a bit tricky.

Rolling out an 18 Month Rolling Forecast into the planning application (that was initially designed for 12 month annual budget) was going to be a key measure of success for us, and we had to find a way. What I found is that we can very quickly enable and disable the ADF UI, and I found a way to take advantage of that.  Using 4 steps we were able to quickly, easily and consistently configure forms, variables, and reach our goal.

Step 1 – Build a template of your form

You can do this using either the classic UI or the ADF UI, which ever you are more comfortable with will work, here I’ve created a form to display some metrics that I want to view in my new Rolling Forecast form.  One key note is that you must have both the year and period dimensions in your columns

Step 2 – Enable ADF UI

If you haven’t already done so, enable the ADF UI by changing the application property “ORACLE_ADF_UI” to true. You can do this from workspace, with your application open; go to Administration -> Application -> Properties.  Note that you will get a notice that you must restart application server for the change to take effect, this is not true, logging out and back into workspace will get you the desired results.

Step 3 – Enable Rolling Forecast

Now that you are logged in looking at the beautiful new ADF UI go ahead and open the form you previously created, right click on your columns and select Rolling Forecast Setup

You will be presented with a dialog to create the variables, if you have already created these just enter the same prefix and check ‘resue existing substitution variables’ if it is your first time setting this up, fill in the remaining details, in my case the variables already exist. After you generate the variables will populate into your form and you’re all set. 

Step 4 – Disable ADF

This is a lot like step 2, only setting False instead of True, if you have been in ADF UI up to this point, you will need to ‘add’ the property first, do this by going to Administration -> Application -> Properties, click on the green ‘+’ and give the property a name of “ORACLE_ADF_UI” and value of “false”  you will again get the warning that you need to restart, and again, you don’t, just log out and back into workspace.

Step 5 – Enjoy your new rolling forecast form

As you can see the variables are now referenced in my form, and I have a rolling form created, that’s all there is to it.

The last thing you might be asking is, how do I advance those variables without ADF UI’s nice buttons? Well there are 2 ways, you can always re-enable ADF to advance and disable again, or use MaxL to advance the variables as needed, I wrote up a simple excel file to generate the values for me, and run those in EAS Console to quickly modify the variables.  Sample of that show below, if you would like a bit more details on this, please leave a comment and I can expand.

Now that all this is said and done, I want to make a couple of extra points

1. Disabling ADF UI is not for everyone, there are other changes besides just those I mentioned in this post that you should take into consideration
2.  Implementing a Rolling Forecast is a lot more than just building some forms, you also need to look at Calc scripts, and scenario start/end period.
3.  Rolling Forecast is a fundamental organizational process change, not just a technology change, be prepared for that. I'm going to be writing a future post to expand on the challenges of implementing Rolling Forecast and the success I have seen.