How Oracle HFM is a critical tool for an enterprise financial manager

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Oracle HFM (Hyperion Financial Management) is part of Oracles BI implementation. HFM is an elaborate, internet-based software that allows you to manage financial information rapidly and cost-effectively especially at an enterprise level.

Through HFM, you can scale or adjust your requirements to suit your organization. The software allows you to collect data, consolidate financial information and then create reports and analyze them.

HFM seeks to solve the problems or challenges as below:  

Challenges or problem

As a finance executive, you could very easily feel burdened by over-whelming amounts of data that are difficult to collate and synthesize. Often times, you will use too many spreadsheets to consolidate financial information and this can be a difficult task to audit and maintain.

To give a very basic example, you can imagine that if a multinational company collects data from the grassroots level to the top of the executive food chain using a spreadsheet, several issues could happen.

·         Columns could interchange

·         Wrong formatting used

·         Custom reporting solutions could make it difficult to use the same spreadsheets on a global level

·          It also becomes quite a complex task to keep updating data from different spreadsheets even if you have mastered macros

A system like Oracle FHM makes all these processes and more much simpler in several different ways. The main benefit, however, is that you only have to get used to a single software to have access to all the data you require through the different levels of your organization. You will also be able to get all this data without almost instantly.

Benefits of HFM over traditional methods

You may be wondering, why should you use HFM? Will it really be useful to you?

With HFM, the software has a tight configuration to cater for:

  1. Planning specific to your needs
  2. Very powerfully programmed features
  3. Simple design considerations to allow you to do what you need to quickly and efficiently and
  4. Lastly, there are reporting tools already in the system that you could use as they are or modify to suit your needs.

All these key considerations mean that FHM will allow you:

·         To save time and be more productive due to less confusion,

·         You can transform raw data into useful information quite easily effectively.

·         You can easily confirm the authenticity and correctness of data through data validation.

·         It allows for better process management with tighter controls and approvals.

·         You can easily manage different currencies without having to change each data input manually.

There are several other benefits but this should give you an idea of HFMs power.

Oracle HFM architecture

HFM uses a multi-tier approach depending on the type of user. This includes:

·         A database tier: this tier contains relational databases as the source of data used for financial management.

·         An application tier: this tier contains the application, web servers and the reports and

·         A client tier: has a UI and communicates with the application tier. Its main purpose is to enter, display and maintain data and metadata.

With HFM, you can easily take away the mundane tasks of collecting and processing data and be able to focus on activities more critical to the productivity of your organization.