Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting controls the business processes of planning, budgeting, forecasting, monitoring, and analysis, integrating performance management with personal accountability.

Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting converts business strategies into actionable plans, increases the efficiency and effectiveness of the budgeting process, and automates real-time monitoring of the company's execution against the plan. This new functionality empowers everyone — from entry-level employees to management — to drive the company's success and holds internal stakeholders accountable for critical planning and budgeting decisions.
With EPB you gain:

Oracle EPB is part of Oracle's Corporate Performance Management (CPM) encompassing business activities across planning and budgeting, strategy formulation and goal setting for executives, and business activity monitoring and operational reporting. This solution leverages Oracle's low-cost, standards-based infrastructure with leadership in the areas of reliability, availability, scalability, and security. Oracle is the only vendor with a comprehensive offering across the entire technology environment to applications continuum.

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Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting is a new application that delivers scalable planning and analysis, offering sophisticated data modeling and multi-dimensional analysis in a web environment, tailored for each customer’s own business processes.

Enterprise Planning and Budgeting enables you to understand the business better by providing analysis tools to increase visibility into your organization. A framework to manage the critical business processes of budgeting and forecasting allows you to define the rules, tasks, and schedules, ensuring that you control these planning processes and achieve consensus when looking forward. The application enforces consistency while supporting decentralized flexibility. With ongoing monitoring of the business included, you tune plans to improve results and hold individuals accountable. Enterprise Planning and Budgeting is part of the Oracle E-Business Suite, an integrated set of applications that are engineered to work together.

No. EPB can be implemented by Oracle e-Business Suite customers but it can also be implemented by organizations who are running other vendors’ ERP applications. The latter can deploy EPB by extracting and loading required data into the open FEM interface tables. Non Oracle ERP customers will derive all the business value from EPB as a specialized standalone product.

EPB requires Oracle Applications version 11.5.9 or higher. You can choose to upgrade your entire application suite or deploy an independent instance of Oracle Applications release 11.5.9 or higher to implement EPB. In the first scenario, you will derive the full benefits of the pre-built integration between EPB and Oracle General Ledger.

Oracle will provide migration utilities that will help you convert existing dimensional metadata, fact data, documents, selection rules, calculations and user responsibilities to equivalent constructs in EPB. Oracle Financial and Sales Analyzers will continue to have error correction support until end of 2006 with extended support until mid 2008. For more details, please refer to the published white paper at http://www.oracle.com/applications/cpm/

EPB builds on the proven functionality of OFA and OSA, but extends it to include automation and integration of the business processes, data-driven exception alerts targeted to accountable individuals, significant reporting enhancements (annotations, more flexible formatting, more graph types), a new multi-dimensional allocation engine, calculation templates in business terms, and integration with Oracle Workflow. There is an upcoming OFA-OSA and EPB functional mapping document that discusses this in more detail.

EPB relies on the single sign on authentication provided by Oracle Applications. Users are provided one or more EPB responsibilities appropriate to their organizational role. Integration is provided to Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) services via Oracle Internet Directory.

EPB provides highly flexible mechanisms for setting read and write access by user. Access to input plan or budget data must be explicitly granted to responsible users. EPB provides a built-in mechanism for business accountability by supporting ownership for the data behind all business metrics tracked in EPB. This ownership construct allows automatic notification of actions and alerts initiated within EPB to appropriate users. Both straightforward organizational hierarchical responsibilities as well as real life dotted-line management can be modeled.

No. EPB allows you to configure the dimensionality, business rules and business processes to best fit your specific requirements. EPB provides a comprehensive framework to define and maintain the appropriate data model and business processes. EPB is designed to provide you with the deployment and cost-of-ownership benefits of a packaged solution along with the business benefits and flexibility of a configurable solution. EPB easily encompasses lifecycle changes in your business.

Users with the Business Process Administrator responsibility can create and maintain business processes for planning, budgeting, forecasting, and monitoring the business. Examples of a business process are Strategic plan, Annual budget, Quarterly rolling forecast, and Month end variance analysis. You define each business process by specifying its data model, solve, tasks, and schedule. Typical tasks are data loads, worksheet distribution, worksheet submissions, data processing and exception alerts. Business Process executions can be calendar or event driven.

Yes. EPB Business Processes and notifications are enabled by Oracle Workflow technology. Once the business processes have been defined, Enterprise Planning and Budgeting monitors their schedules and initiates a new process run of each business process appropriately. Task execution is controlled by Oracle Workflow and this automation reduces the administrative effort and cycle time.

Yes. Many EPB business processes can be in active execution concurrently. This mirrors the business reality of today’s continuous and dynamic planning and budgeting activities. You can choose to retain several past runs of business processes in EPB and report against them, such as historical versions of the budget. Older business process runs are then automatically deleted.

Yes. EPB provides an extensive set of features to input values within a personal workspace and recalculate their incremental impact across the organization iteratively. This functionality is provided within the data collection worksheets. Users can also create personal dimension members and extend hierarchies to perform their analyses. Final inputted numbers can be submitted to the shared EPB workspace subject to validation against targets and approvals.

The initial release of EPB focuses on a comprehensive set of standard functionality rather than extension hooks. The configuration options and rich functionality included is expected to eliminate or minimize the need for customizations in your implementations. There are published hooks available in Oracle Workflow, one of the underlying components.

EPB provides extensive document authoring, formatting and sharing functionality directly to the end user. Documents include crosstab and large collection of graph types. EPB also provides ability to export a document in the Oracle Reports 9i XML data source format. This export file can be used to develop or update high quality production reports in Oracle Reports 9i Developer to be published as briefing books.

EPB documents can be exported to an Excel readable HTML file format. Document layout and formatting is preserved in the exported file. The ability to upload budgets from Excel workbooks into EPB worksheets is planned for a future release. An OLAP Excel Add-that will allow secure access to the EPB data stored within Analytic Workspaces is also under development. This is planned for a future release of EPB.

Licensing is on a named user basis, with the full license being $2,995 per user and the read-only (or limited) license being $595 per user. These prices both include a run-time version of the database and the OLAP option. OFA/OSA customers can migrate their licenses to EPB on a 1-for-1 basis, which includes a run-time version of the database and the OLAP option.

No. ODP continues as a separate product within the Oracle APS suite. With Oracle Applications 11.5.10, the underlying architecture has shifted from the Oracle Express Server platform to the Oracle 9i Database plus OLAP option. A direct integration link is planned between ODP and the FEM schema thus integrating demand planning data with EPB.

The strategic direction of EPB is to provide industry templates and extensions on top of the generic functionality. For the Public Sector market the extensions will leverage Public Sector market specific features (i.e. Position Budgeting, Integration with HR Position Control, Posting Budget Journals and Budget Revision) available in PSB today. This will be achieved by tightly integrating EPB and PSB to provide a comprehensive Planning, Budgeting, Analysis and Reporting solution for the Public Sector market.

PSB currently incorporates line item-based budgeting and position-based budgeting. If you are planning to incorporate PSB for position-based budgeting as part of your HR and GL implementation, and are going to leverage the two way integration between both (HR for position budgeting, and GL for budget journals and budget revisions), then you should continue with PSB. If your requirements are more around line item based budgeting, long range planning, and complex analysis then you may want to evaluate EPB to see if there is a fit.