HFM, it’s been nice knowing you….introducing Oracle EPM Cloud

I’ve recently started a piece of work using Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), a tool and solution that has been very good to me over the years.

After a few minutes of re-familiarisation it started to feel like working with an old friend but it wasn’t long until I realised I had moved on, instead of feeling comforted by an old friend I started to experience some long buried frustrations and longed to return to a more modern solution.

I remember when my career was focused on HFM that I used to tell anyone who would listen that HFM’s greatest strength was its flexibility, yet it’s greatest weakness was also its flexibility. It was exactly this weakness that I was seeing as I reviewed an application for a client.

What I was seeing was an application that had been customised to meet multiple business processes leading to complex metadata constructs and an enormous rule file which of course had no proper commentary included.

I’m sure there are still loads of HFM applications out there that are similar to this so I wanted to share my thoughts on how you could move to a more modern solution that would be easier to own, manage and maintain.

Introducing Oracle Cloud EPM. A complete and connected suite of Enterprise Performance Management solutions giving you the agility to help you analyse, understand and report on your business performance.

The Oracle EPM suite is focussed on providing solutions to common business requirements. You can start anywhere to solve the most pressing issues, deploy at your own pace and scale up to add additional solutions over time.

Each of the solutions comes with pre-built best practices based upon Oracle’s experience of delivering best in class solutions which enables faster implementation times faster return on investment.

All the solutions share the same underlying architecture, all have a common user experience (UX) and AI/ML is built in across the whole suite.

One component of the Oracle EPM suite is Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close (FCC), a purpose built solution for your statutory consolidation needs. FCC comes with pre-built best practices based upon Oracle’s long experience of delivering class leading consolidation solutions.

FCC was originally viewed as the successor to HFM; I think that was a mistake. FCC has matured in to a class leading consolidation solution, don’t just take my word for it, Gartner have ranked Oracle as leaders in the ‘Magic Quadrant for Financial Close and Consolidation Solutions’. Not only does it include fabulous out-of-the-box functionality but with the ability to utilise Groovy, seamless REST API integrations and insertion rules the functionality is now very rich, but to say it replaces HFM is not giving the full picture.

HFM, like the one I have been reviewing recently, often supports multiple business processes. The vast majority support financial / statutory consolidation but I have seen all of the following, and more, inside HFM:

Budgeting, planning and forecasting including attempts at driver based budgeting
Tax reporting including provisioning and CbCR
Allocations
Detailed management reporting
Constant currency analysis
Sustainability reporting

The great thing was HFM handled this, it might have become a beast to own and maintain but it handled pretty much whatever you threw at it. I would never recommend that FCC be used in the same way, instead look at the wider capability of the Oracle EPM Cloud and create a roadmap to transition your business processes to the cloud; you can pick and choose what you move so that the transition can be handled in a controlled manner delivering early value.

Migrating to Oracle EPM Cloud

Whatever solution you are migrating from we would always recommend creating a roadmap that works for you. There is no need to adopt a big bang approach, there are many ways to construct a roadmap and business case for change; below are a few questions to ask and a process that could be followed to help define your roadmap.

Every roadmap will be different. Some will start with consolidation, others with planning, maybe ESG is the right place to start for you; the important thing is migrating HFM to the cloud doesn’t need to be a big bang you can pick and choose what you move and when you move it making sure that the users are part of the journey.

If you would like to hear more about migrating HFM to the cloud, Oracle Cloud EPM or the wider services that Praesto, Box Fusion and Carruthers and Jackson can offer please contact us, Tom or Thalia, we’d be happy to arrange a meeting.