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5 Benefits of CXO for Oracle Essbase

insightsoftware -
November 18, 2022

insightsoftware is a global provider of reporting, analytics, and performance management solutions, empowering organizations to unlock business data and transform the way finance and data teams operate.

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For enterprise reporting globally, Oracle Essbase does a great job maintaining the underlying financial data. But when it comes to making sense of this data – organizing, visualizing, and finding the narrative – Essbase has limited capabilities.

CXO Software for Essbase puts your Finance team in control – eliminating the need for inefficient spreadsheet-based reporting processes. This innovative yet simple solution turns your Excel-based reporting process into a dynamic, web-based and highly mobile reporting platform for all your Essbase data.

With CXO and Essbase together, your Finance team can maintain dashboards and financial reports – including mobile output – via the same web-based interface. And without the need for expensive business intelligence tools or IT projects.

Here are five ways CXO can improve your Essbase reporting.

Regional Reporting

Reporting for global companies is a complex process that often sees different reports for regional business units. With Essbase, detailed and consolidated views of the business can be cumbersome.

One region may require a finer level of detail with different organizational roll-ups than their counterparts. If business units are structured differently across each region, then individual profit centres and cost centres will need to be presented in ways that suit the needs of regional management.

Using Essbase alone, this can be a manual, time-consuming process to generate the basic reports you need. Getting reports to mirror your organizational structure across multiple regions is tedious and requires highly specialized expertise. You will need to extract data from Essbase, copy it into Excel, and build the reports there. This manual approach is error-prone and results in multiple versions of the truth.

CXO is built specifically for financial reporting, and it performs its role in an intuitive and highly intelligent way. Direct connectivity allows you to present and visualize your data in a clear, logical format. Your data is then ordered exactly how you would look at it, whether you’re the CEO or CFO, rather than how it is stored in Essbase hierarchies.

Consolidations

Essbase does not provide an easy method of producing clean, crisp reports for complex organizations. If you have a complicated organizational structure, you will find it exceedingly difficult to configure coherent reports in Essbase that work across your entire organization.

This gets even more difficult if your company reorganizes or acquires new entities. This kind of shuffling and reordering of reporting units may have already happened in your company. Then you’d know, when responsibility for a few cost centres shifts from division A to division B, making the change in Essbase is difficult to say the least.

Adding CXO to Essbase means you’ll be able to gather all your needed data into a single overview. You’ll be able to enjoy the quickest analysis and easiest comparison – for a broad, in-depth perspective. And with CXO’s highly adaptable, free format templates, you’ll have the freedom to build any type of output or report you desire.

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Workflow Tools

Essbase lacks workflow and approval capabilities meaning Essbase provides no way to add comments alongside your numbers. The practical implication of this is that on a month-to-month basis, you’ll have to chase down key stakeholders to get them to provide numbers in a timely manner. Doing this ad hoc is a waste of time, and easily adds days to your reporting cycle.

With CXO, you’ll be able to stimulate collaboration and engagement with built-in commenting functionality. This commentary and live chat captures insights from all your stakeholders to tell the story behind your numbers.

You’ll be able to consolidate report commentaries quickly and easily and track them with an audit trail to support your governance and compliance needs. You can then share vivid analysis and in-depth insights securely with other users.

Performance

Depending on the number of end-users working on Essbase, your process of generating a report can grind to a near standstill. Performance problems in Essbase become even more of a challenge when users are trying to extract large amounts of detailed information from the system. It is not uncommon for Essbase to time out in those kinds of situations.

This places limits on the scope of information on which you can report. With Essbase alone, you may resort to running the reports in stages. Or run scenarios and comparisons at a very high level and then very slowly drill down to lower levels and subsequent passes.

Adding CXO to Essbase means you can connect directly to your data for deep real-time insight.

Real-Time Reporting

Essbase does a great job managing your underlying data required for sophisticated reports and maintaining structured financial data to provide a single source of truth. It is in organizing, manipulating, and presenting your information where Essbase falls short. End-users of Essbase typically spend hours building board packs, updating and refreshing them, and manually manipulating data in Excel spreadsheets.

Integrating your Essbase solution with a real-time reporting solution like CXO that understands the underlying Essbase infrastructure and table structure will save significant staff time and greatly enhance the performance of reports from the Essbase database.

With CXO, Essbase users no longer have to perform processor-intensive data dumps to Excel. This eliminates the primary bottleneck that typically causes performance problems in Essbase.

If you would like to learn more about streamlining reporting, increasing accuracy, and saving time, contact insightsoftware for a free demo.

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