Happy June – how is it June? Oracle year end has came and went, and with it came an entirely new licensing strategy for EPM Cloud. The specifics are yet to be released, but there are now 2 new go-forward “EPM Cloud products” from a licensing perspective:

  • Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Standard Cloud Service
  • Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Enterprise Cloud Service

EDMCS is included in the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Enterprise Cloud Service Package with 5,000 records, and the package runs $500/Employee per month, minimum 25 Employees.

However, EDMCS remains the only EPM Cloud product that will have stand-alone pricing! As it has application outside of just EPM or ERP; and may be used stand-alone without any other applications, if needed.

New EDMCS Licensing Options

If you want to reference the Oracle pricing guide here or ask for assistance on pricing, click here.

  1. Record-metric pricing will continue to be available for customers $1500 per 1000 records per month (current customer pricing model and will be continued, stand alone)
  2. Employee metric pricing is now available for EDMCS standalone (NEW stand-alone licensing model!) at $12 per Employee per month; with a 5000 Employee minimum with no record limit
  3. EDM included with the EPM Employee Metric Pricing ($40 per Employee per month) with no record limit
  4. EDM is also included with EPM Cloud Enterprise with a 5000 record limit, and you can expand using the metric pricing in #1

*Remember a record is a unique piece of master data – so if you use the same Account in ERP, FCCS, and EPBCS, it counts as one record.

*Employee metric is the number of Employees in the organization, not the number of provisioned Users

If you are a current EDMCS customer, I don’t expect your licensing to change in the near term. However, if you are new to the Oracle EPM game, it may make it easier to start using EDMCS in your implementation (because its already licensed) and gain the efficiencies if you have multiple cloud applications that need to receive master data updates (such as new Accounts, Cost Centers, or Products).

I know I’ve recently posted about my favorite update from the 19.05 EDMCS release (see here), but since it’s now the first week of June the 19.06 update is coming fast (Friday 6/7 for Test Pods and 6/21 for Prod)!

First off, for EDMCS, the Oracle dev team is more on a bi-monthly schedule for new features and releases, and on the off months focuses more on bug fixes. That said, because of the 19.04 release push to 19.05, there are not a ton of new features released in 19.06 – there were just a couple defects fixed for this push.

June 19.06 Update Defects Fixed:

29712666 – The list of allowed values overrides for a property represents the latest overrides for the property in the application. This makes the list of property values more dynamic for what is valid for the property – most notably for E/PBCS UDA properties that may be more fluid for applications and have different settings.

29649363 – A child and its parent can be deleted in the same request. This bug fix is a big one – allowing you to delete children and parent nodes at once instead of in sequence.

May 19.05 Update New Features:

Because the 19.05 update had so many feature enhancements, I thought it would be helpful to comment on them in this post.

  • First off there are a ton of new EDMCS videos posted on the Oracle site
  • EDMCS now allows hyperlinks in Request comments – so can add links to Sharepoint or other helpful sites right in the request.
  • If you load requests from a file format (.xslx) you can use formulas in the columns. Prior to this update, if you had formulas to generate values you had to copy/paste as values.
  • You can perform the workflow actions of Approve, Push Back, and Reject while inspecting a request. This allows you to act on a request directly from Request Activity instead of opening the request to visualize the changes in the view. This is useful when a request is being approved from a summary point of view, when an approver’s permissions do not allow access to the view where it was submitted, or when an approver is responsible for approving the node type but not the hierarchy.
  • When reviewing Requests in the Request card, you can now filter by Request Activity, Request ID and timeframe. Just gives you more options for filtering requests and understanding what was requested.
  • Validations that are tied to an application adapter (such as valid length of segment values for Oracle Cloud Financials) are now tied to Viewpoints vs. just the default application View. So if you have a maintenance View for multiple apps, the validations that are relevant to that subject matter are translated to that Viewpoint as well.
  • *My favorite* is allowing properties for the Node Type to be displayed in the Hierarchy or List view panel on the left side of the Viewpoint. This is the blog post I posted on the topic!
  • The Binding Indicator on Viewpoints / Data Chain objects has been expanded to have more information.
    • Bound – directly used by the external application
    • Node Set Bound – related node set is used by the external application
    • Hierarchy Set Bound – related hierarchy set is used by the external application
    • Node Type Bound – related node type(s) are used by the external application
    • Unbound – not used by the external application
  • You can now re-order hierarchy nodes using a request file.
  • For Subscriptions, you can select the top node for the subscription to look under for the target nodes. One or more top node filters can be defined for a source viewpoint in a subscription. Changes which occur in the source viewpoint for the top nodes or their descendants will get added to the subscription request for the target viewpoint.
    • This is helpful when you have dimensions in E/PBCS or FCCS that may need to mirror the GL and may also have another (or several) alternate hierarchies. The subscriptions can be filtered to the GL-view of the hierarchy.
  • When an administrator is importing/exporting a Snapshot using the Migration card, other users that perform other types of activities, like adding nodes or reviewing data, are restricted until Migration activities are completed.
  • A new EPM Automate has been released – and it is compatible for Mac! I am a Mac-girl and I am very excited about this 🙂 Other features:
    • Ability to run multiple instances of the utility from the same directory
      • The EPM Automate utility now supports the execution of multiple instances of the utility against an environment from the same directory.
        • New ApplicationAdminMode command

        This command places the application in administration mode so that access to the application is limited to Service Administrators only. This command is useful to prevent users from working on the application when Service Administrators are performing administrative operations.

        • New sortMember command

        This command sorts members of Entity, Account, Scenario, and Versions dimensions and of custom dimensions. This command is useful for sorting dimension members after loading members into Planning.

        • New lagTime parameter for replay command

        lagTime, an optional parameter, allows you to set the number of seconds that the replay command should wait between the execution of each HAR file included in the replay file. Because user activities are not usually initiated simultaneously, setting this parameter helps to create a more realistic simulation of load on an environment.

        • The provisionReport command now produces a simplified version of the report by default

        The provisionreport command now, by default, generates the simplified version of the Provisioning Report identical to the report that is displayed on the Provisioning Report tab of the Access Control screen.

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns about EDMCS and its features, functionality, implementation considerations, or licensing! Happy to help!

Continue your educational journey by “hopping” over to the following posts to find out more about specific product updates, as well as gain different partner perspectives on the licensing, naming, and consolidation changes:

1. Opal Alapat gives an overview of the June 2019 Oracle EPM Cloud blog hop, as well as details on the product name changes, product consolidations, and new licensing: https://womaninepm.com/2019/06/04/orclepm-cloud-update-big-june-2019-changes/

2. Jun Zhang does a comprehensive summary of the June updates by product:

3. Pete Nitschke discuses the Planning Cloud June updates in more detail:

4. Eric Erikson provides his perspective on FCCS:

5. Jay Chapman covers the notable EPRCS (now called Narrative Reporting) June updates:

6. Tony Scalese covers changes to the REST API and EPM Automate: