General Ledger reporting system:

This appears to be the most popular Essbase implementation among Essbase customers. 

Probability of Success:  high

Security Access: read only, security filters sometimes used but not too often.

Purpose of system: High performance reporting system

-Issues to overcome:  scalability of the reporting system.  Often times when these are first attempted, especially without consulting help, too many dimensions are created.  This results in a model that either does not run or runs very very slowly. 

-Currently, ledger systems reporting capabilities are not flexible enough for management reporting.  Wanting to look at the business in different ways is a requirement that can not be met by out of the box ledger reporting systems.

-Ability to report on nonfinancial metrics with financial data.  Many times, companies created hundreds of journal entries and bogus accounts to create a place to store data like headcount and other miscellaneous data.  This clogs up your financial ledger and also consumes much time.  Non financial metrics can easily be incorporated into Essbase reporting systems.

-Single source of data for reporting purposes.  As companies make acquisitions it becomes more difficult to report consolidated financials.  By loading all numbers into a common model, consolidated financials can easily be created. It used to be that financial analsts were spending too much time rekeying data into a common report.  Now a days, analysts instead of rekeying data are spending much of their time exporting then importing this data into Excel, then hours reformatting this data each month.  This process can be streamlined to eliminate this wasted effort via a properly designed Essbase model.

-Ledger systems are designed to record transactions and keep audit trails.  They are not designed for reporting.  I have seen instances where it would take 8 hours plus to create all the reports while once loaded in Essbase, the financials can all be created in < 20 minutes.

-Many decisions that must be made to ensure the success of this type of project are:

-how many dimensions will be contained in the database,

-how many years of data,

-and the granularity of data (ie. monthly or weekly or daily).

An entire project usually entails creating the income statement and balance sheet reporting system in this Essbase model.  It is possible to create both in the same Essbase application.

Budgeting system (includes General Ledger reporting system plus budgeting ability)

Spreadsheet links:  All business analysts are guilty of using spreadsheet links.  Let me count the ways that spreadsheet links are bad. 

-a cell in Excel can only have a certain number of characters in it.  When people try to use links to consolidate multple workbooks it doesn't take long before they run out of characters to enter in the formula.  In one case, the mapping to the network drive changed (5 more positions were added to the name) which resulted in breaking every report that was being used for corporate consolidations. 

-people have been known to link to a file on someone's desktop.  When they happen to not be in the office, you can't get the data.

-people have made sheets that link to sheets that link to sheets.  In the beginning this seems to make sense.  6 months later, you find that people are spending their time trying to decipher the links.  When a value doesn't consolidate properly, the number of places to look gets exponentially large.

-by implementing spreadsheet links, you are designing an inflexible system.  What if the number of rows changes for some of your entities.  Are you going to be diciplined to implement the change to every spreadsheet or only the affected sheets?  If the latter, now you no longer have a standard layout and cannot copy formulas with dynamic references on your consolidation sheets.

Essbase as a reporting system:  Let's talk about the gains realized from successful Essbase projects