Adventures in Groovy – Part 19: Real Time Reporting Webinar with Breakthru Beverage Group

Introduction

Chris Hull has been kind enough to partner with us to present how the methods available in Groovy calculations have made a huge impact in their budgeting and reporting process using PBCS.

One of the biggest user complaints about their first budgeting process in PBCS was that they had to wait to get their consolidated reporting until an admin ran the process or a scheduled consolidation ran.  Thanks to what Groovy offers, this is no longer going an issue.

For those of you that participated, I have added some additional content.  I know we were limited on time.  I skipped a few examples and rushed through diving into the actual steps and Groovy processes.  I included additional examples and more information on the process below.  If you didn’t attend, I would encourage you to walk through the items in the order they are presented.

If any of this is of interest to you and you would like to speak further about the capabilities, please send an email.

Thanks for everybody that participated and supported this event.

Presentation Recording

Additional Questions

There were a few questions after we signed off.  I will do my best to answer them below.

Question: How can internal IT team support this solution? Does Huron train them on how to to write Groovy, change code in Groovy?  Demo shows only 3 cells were changed, how is performance if all products were changed? Doesn’t it hit MDX error limit anyways?  Does Oracle SR team support issues/bugs related to Groovy?

Answer: Most of our solutions are not maintained by IT, but by finance.  Huron certainly can train administrators on how to maintain the Groovy calculations.  As far as performance, I changed 75 products and it took 14 seconds to push the data from GP to the GP reporting application, and .4 seconds to synchronize it to the Fin cubes.  MDX isn’t used to do the synchronization so the MDX text limit is irrelevant.  Oracle does support the product and they support issues related to the API, which Groovy uses.  I have seen some issues resolved in weeks, and others that are still being addressed months later.

Question: What capabilities does the tool have to track changes to the budget?

Answer: PBCS, when turned on, has auditing at the cell level.  Every time data is changed, the user, date/time, old value, and new value are recorded.  At any point a user can look at that and see the change history.

Expanding On The Groovy Form Save Process

Additional Examples

Presentation PowerPoint

Conclusion

Thanks again.  I hope to do more of these in the future and will make sure  you are included in the invitation.