Breakfast

I can’t blog about Kscope without talking about the food. As promised, bacon is back! It might seem like a silly saying, but people don’t understand how important it is to serve fantastic food. Last year’s Kscope was rife with budget cuts. This year, those budget cuts happened in other areas so the hot breakfast could return.

Look at this madness! People were talking about the return of the bacon all day yesterday. I think attendees will be pleased this week.

General Session

Bright and early (luckily, I caught up on some sleep last night) at 8:30am the General Session began. I was pretty impressed with the attendance and the general session was both informative and heartfelt.

Abi and Carrie did a wonderful job talking about Oracle Analytics and its integration with international sports. Very informative and cutting edge stuff! They discussed how Oracle can use gobs of data to make real-world predictions and gave a true life example with futbol (soccer, as we Americans know it)!

Did you know Oracle is partnered with the Premier League?

Technical Sessions

Now let’s get onto some technical sessions. Note that my focus is very different now in the EPM space so you’ll see more around EPM reporting than anything else. If I see other EPM blog posts that cover the other Oracle EPM products, I’ll link them in my final post for the week.

One of the obvious changes at this year’s Kscope was the number of reporting sessions. I was pleased to see what seemed like twice the number of reporting sessions compared to last year. This is fantastic and I’m going to try to attend as many as I can to both support these presenters and learn all the stuff I still don’t know!

Quick and Dirty Rockstar Reporting (Angie Caruthers, Olympus Consulting)

I think Angie mentioned this was only her second presentation ever. Yay! Angie is very sweet and she’s been doing a lot of reporting work with Olympus.

Angie’s 30-min session was focused on Management Reports, one of the tools under the EPM reporting suite called Narrative Reporting. She gave some wonderfully simple tricks and tips to elevate your report design and aesthetics, like how to create butterfly reports, custom tab names, and integrating supporting detail.

Coming Off the Top Rope—Top-down Forecasting in Oracle EPM (Pete Nitschke, Pivot2 Solutions)

Pete is a long-time ODTUG friend of mine and he travels half the world every year to be at Kscope to share and spread knowledge. I’m excited to attend one of his sessions this Kscope.

Pete’s session was focused on the hows, whys, and whats of top-down modeling. He included one of the most poignant FAQ’s (with answers) that most people ask when attempting to do this. He also gave use cases on why someone might need to do this.

Honestly, it was refreshing to have a real conversation about the implications of moving to this type of modeling and the considerations one must make. He also did a hilarious bit about “lazy forecasters” and several ways (with listed pros and cons) on how to force data down to the detailed levels if you’re this type of forecaster. 😂

Pete showed real-life examples of the code you can use for pushing data down (using business rule functions and/or groovy). He also touched on implementing top-down modeling with hybrid. He then talked about the inputs required for different audiences (i.e. managers vs. executives) and various ways for dealing with those political scenarios. In addition, he covered how to handle adjustments. Finally, he considered using Strategic Modeling for this type of modeling (instead of Planning).

There was so much information in his presentation—I would highly recommend any attendee interested in this planning method to download his slides from the Kscope23 app.

My Session: Narrative Reporting Report Packages From the Ground Up

I skipped lunch to go grab my laptop from my hotel room and take one more look at my presentation. For the past handful of Kscopes I’ve been presenting on the report packages topic, as it’s still not a widely known solution. It’s my sweet spot and this year I was happy to show how to build report packages from start to finish, explaining every major step of the way and their considerations.

Thank you to everyone who made the long trek to my room and participated in my session!

Battle Royale MMXXIII: Which EPM Reporting Tool Will Rise to the Top? (Edward Rosie, Argano & Glenn Schwartzberg, GSchwartzberg Consulting, LLC)

This was a highly entertaining session, as expected. Glenn defended Narrative Reporting (and did a great job!) and Edward defended Smart View to see which Oracle EPM reporting tool reigned supreme in the end. Danielle was the emcee. They debated various reporting points and, of course, Narrative Reporting beat out Smart View in the end. Narrative Reporting for the win! 😂

P.S. – the features were stacked in favor of Narrative Reporting. The truth is these reporting tools are like apples and oranges, but with much overlap.

It was also a heartfelt farewell to Glenn Schwartzberg. This is his very last Kscope conference and he will be fully retiring soon (he’s working as a part-time independent right now).

We sang him the song “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and I was so happy to be part of one of his send offs.

What’s New and Coming in EPM Cloud Platform (Shankar Viswanathan, Oracle)

Bad Opal! I was 15 minutes late for this session because I was catching up with friends in the hallways. Therefore, I came in when Shankar started talking about Smart View.

Shankar rapidly fired through his slides so it took a moment to get settled. While on the topic of Smart View, he discussed some new features that are upcoming later this summer like IPM events and new granular application roles (dashboard, reporting, announcements, and document upload). He also covered some features people may have missed, like the ability to copy artifact URLs from navigation flows.

On the data integration front, he discussed the updates related to cross-application data maps, a feature that has been a long-time coming. Later this summer there will be performance optimizations and better diagnostics for data maps. In early fall, they will release cross-application data maps which will go across Planning and EPCM. Close and Tax can be a target but not a source. Eventually in Q1 they hope to have attribute support in data maps.

I was fortunate to be part of the team that assisted with the beta testing of Dashboards 2.0 with Forms 2.0 last year. I was pretty excited about the performance gains and new features. Oracle’s EPM team discovered that 80% of users are web users and spend a lot of time in the web in objects like forms. So this was an important project.

Forms 2.0 have been built with Oracle JET. Oracle has clocked 4-5x quicker refresh times on large grids. There are quite a few improvements as well for expand and collapse, POV bar dropdown, the member selector tree hierarchy, web Ad hoc, and more. They’ve also made some usability enhancements.

One of the most important things to note, which we knew when we beta tested, is that Forms 2.0 will be arriving to the Redwood Theme only at release. To switch from Forms 1.0 to Forms 2.0, it was just a simple setting change in the beta, and it looks like they‘ve kept it that way for GA.

In addition, there will be use cases where you will have no choice but to use Forms 2.0 if you need one of the new features (like write back). This means customers will have to first move to Redwood in order to take advantage of the new functionality. Shankar also mentioned that non-Redwood themes may be going away as soon as next year. Based on their research, ~51% of customers are using Redwood. They’re planning to make new dark and light themes so customers can keep different colors for different environments (the largest use case for not using Redwood). They will most likely have a migration plan for deprecation.

The above is consistent with Oracle’s messaging awhile ago that they are moving all new features to the Redwood theme first, and in some cases, only.

One of the cool things about Forms 2.0 is being able to directly edit the from from the main interface. No more having to go to another icon to edit forms.

Shankar ended the session by quick covering Groovy/API, formatting on forms, the ability to set user variables from a form interface, the ability to attach documents uploaded into the library, what’s coming to Smart View in 2024, and Essbase 21c.

His final slide can also be found in Cloud Customer Connect and is usually captured in webcasts hosted by Oracle.

Nightly Activities

I attended the Monday happy hour for a little bit and caught up with some buddies I hadn’t seen around the conference yet.

Then I went offsite for a dinner with Natalie and we played catch up. We were told by our Lyft driver that there was a fire nearby. It caused the striking and beautiful sunset.

The entertainment for the night started with the ODTUG Community Monday Night events and I’m glad I attended the lip sync competition. This year, 5 teams battled it out and we saw some excellent creativity on stage. There was a nicely sized crowd in attendance, which expanded as the lip sync teams continued. The top 3 teams had to redo their performance for the growing crowd to ensure the final vote was all inclusive.

Jim won the award for a cleverly planned out prop-filled rendition of “Ridin’” by Chamillionaire. It was stiff competition, however. All the teams were great. We saw the fruitful efforts from months of practice from Pivot2 Solutions with GE, Argano, Dodeca, and some solo acts from Kim Berg Hansen and Jim Czuprynski.

After Jim was awarded his trophy, an impromptu Bollywood song and dance were played. This song was just created this past Sunday! Even Tracy joined in and learned the steps on the fly.

Finally, the event turned into a karaoke bar, with several performances from ODTUG members, including a line dance.

Then a small group of us called it a night! Until tomorrow!