Dentsply Sirona is a long-time Oracle Hyperion client, leveraging HFM, Essbase, and Planning to meet their critical financial reporting and analysis deadlines. With performance and availability for their end user community a top priority, having the best tools available to ensure their internal clients are receiving the most efficient, effective support possible isn’t a nice to have, it’s a requirement. Dentsply Sirona standardized on the Accelatis Application Performance Management Platform to get the results they needed.

2. Dentsply Sirona Sinks
their Teeth into Oracle
Hyperion Performance
Management

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Speaker and Company Overview
The challenges that brought us to consider and
embrace Accelatis as a solution
Examples of how we use Accelatis to address our
challenges with IT and the user-base
What we plan to expand on and do next with
Accelatis
Agenda

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Scott Sweezey, Hyperion Systems Manager
Over 11 years Hyperion administration experience
MBA in E-Business
Certified Public Accountant
Pontus Bergstrom, Hyperion Planning and Essbase Supervisor
Over 6 years Hyperion administration experience
Degree of Master of Science, Business Administration
Presenters

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Chuck Czajkowski, Solutions Architect
Over 20 years IT and Networking experience
On the support team at Hyperion Solutions in the early 2000’s working
as an Environmental Support Lead handling complex issues
Product Issues Manager for the Common Technology Group at Oracle
after acquisition
Worked closely with many dev teams (HFM, Planning, Essbase, FDM,
Workspace, Shared Services, Weblogic) to facilitate worldwide support
training for new releases, patches (PSEs/PSUs), and ensure overall
stability and functionality.
Joined the Accelatis team at the beginning of 2014 supporting all
customers currently running the platform.
At Datavail, works with the Sales and Marketing team to identify and
create solutions for new and existing customers
Presenters

6. About
Dentsply Sirona

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Leading dental equipment maker and dental
consumable producer
Design and manufacture laboratory and specialty
products relating to dental supplies
Founded 1899, headquartered in York, PA
$4 billion sales (2017) in over 120 countries
Locations in more than 40 countries
16,100 employees worldwide (2017)
About Denstply Sirona

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Dentsply Sirona

9. About Datavail

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What Does Datavail Do?
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Hyperion
Footprint
v11.1.2.3
Full-time support staff of 7
User-Base
• HFM: ~500
• FDM:~300
• Planning/Essbase:~500
11 year old Hyperion Implementation
Third Party Software: Accelatis Suite and EPM
Maestro

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Organizational
Limited server access for Hyperion Administration team
Little information for discussion about “Application vs Hardware/Network” cause
System and User-Base
High number of complex application integrations and automations needing scheduled
Reacting to system and user performance issues with limited ability to perform root cause
analysis
Growing users base and artifact inventory across all applications
Effectively testing significant changes to an application where user load is a factor
Challenges

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Originally purchased HFM Rule Profiler to help address significant consolidation issues
Purchased full Accelatis Suite later as part of HFM/FDM rebuild and Planning and Essbase
rollout
Our Accelatis Journey

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Hyperion Administration team reports outside IT under the
Corporate Controller
IT team supports server hardware. Limited application
support
Gap exists for tasks that requires Hyperion application
expertise but server or other elevated access
No visibility to server health or performance
No ability to run Hyperion utilities from the servers
Limited access to server files via shared folder access
Server Access

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Closing the
Gap with
Accelatis
Suite
Using Accelatis server agents combined
with security flexibility
Batch files, utilities and executables can be called in
Accelatis, via a script and/ or automation, and executed
on server with full permissions
Scripts and automations can be run by Hyperion Admin
team but only modified by IT
Accelatis logs provide and audit trail for the use of the
scripts and automations

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Solution
Automation that calls a batch file on the Planning server
that runs the command line and moves the outputted
zip file to a shared folder to which the Hyperion
Administration team has access
Problem
Diagnostic files requested by
Oracle for Planning SRs
require command line
executed to output a zip file.
Only IT has access to run
command lines on the
server and access to the
location the zip file is
outputted to.

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Using Accelatis Health Checks to “peak under the hood” without the need for
server access
Accelatis Performance Lab (memory, CPU, etc)
Health Checks (services running, etc)
KPIs (Performance Lab items monitored with alerts)
Closing the IT Gap with Accelatis Suite

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Users: Who is doing what?
What users are loading the Forecast for specific legal entities?
What users are running MDX queries?
Are any users running HSGetValue queries with a Planning vs Essbase connection?
**Can I have the option to be notified when some of these happen?

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Challenges
Activities and execution cross multiple servers
• Multiple batch files using windows schedules to link across servers
• Very low transparency into the process
Multiple log files generated across different servers
• .err files
• Cumulative error files with different key words
Data Movements and Automations
Example: “Simple” data sync to move selected data from
HFM to Planning

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Anatomy of an Automation (example)
Part 1 (send selected data from Planning to HFM)
Run Planning business rule
Data Sync from HFM to Planning
Part 2
Run Planning business rule
Data Sync from Planning to HFM #1
Data Sync from Planning to HFM #2
Data Sync from Planning to HFM #3
Run Planning business rule #1
Run Planning business rule #2
Data Syncs and Automations
Planning
Foundation
Planning
Foundation
Foundation
Foundation
Planning
Server Separate Logs
Planning

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How do we do this without server access?
We don’t have access but the agents do!
Data Syncs and Automations
Batch File on Planning ServerAccelatis Custom Script
EXAMPLE

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Just bother me if there’s a problem!
Data Syncs and Automations

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Script to search log for errors (Cumulative Log)
Data Syncs and Automations
Script to search for errors set up as health
check
Automation triggered by health check
detecting an error that then sends an email
to Hyperion Administration team with log
file attached
Hours saved each day manually opening
each log file (via a shared folder) to search
for different types of errors in various log
file (~0.5 FTE plus response time)
+
=

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Automations + Generic Log Reader

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Automations + Generic Log Reader

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Remote Agents
Installed two agents in different US locations
Run set of 3 simulations hourly for FR, HFM and Planning on agents and on servers themselves in Europe
(baseline).
Users: Who is (or may soon be) having
issues?
Note: Data pulled from Accelatis database and presented in Quantrix Modeler

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FR Reports
Used to reduce inventory of 173 report to 129 (25% reduction) after collecting usage statistics
and reviewing with report owners
Instituted quarterly FR usage inventory and usage reporting and annual rationalization
HFM and Planning Forms
Instituted quarterly FR usage inventory and usage reporting and annual rationalization
Research what users are using what forms
Example: What US legal entities are using the HFM form used for US GAAP adjustments to
statutory ledger reporting?
Artifact Tracking and Rationalization

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Issue
Main budgeting and forecasting BSO Planning application
began experiencing performance issues
Slow aggregation and business rule executions
Database became frequently fragmented resulting in often
multiple defragmentations a week
Changing BSO Planning App to Hybrid
Challenge
Confirm anticipated performance gains
Verify no other performance issues would result
Solution
Turn one of the main
dimensions into a
Hybrid dimension
(act like ASO)
Accelatis Express Load
to the Rescue!

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Approach: Use Express Load in Dev to simulate loads of 10 -75 users across various activities
Express Load Testing

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Express Load: Testing Results

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All of the features and benefits we’ve just reviewed can be summed up in 3 main
areas of major improvement :
Efficiency –
• Both or Development and Support teams have realized significant efficiency when it comes to proactive management and
effective Root Cause Analysis
Reliability
• Our system is up more consistently, making the applications available to the end user community to do their jobs
Our “Internal Brand”
• Our team’s reputation with our internal clients (the Oracle Hyperion end user community) is stronger than ever, as they appreciate
our giving them more uptime and our ability to resolve issues that we don’t catch proactively more rapidly than before
To Sum it Up

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Leverage Audit module more
Attach Change Control documents to changes and run reports out of Accelatis for Internal Audit
Notify by email respective application administrator of changes to their application(s)
Remote agent expansion
Expand from two locations
Will do analysis of Active Directory data for users to determine the locations most represented by the
Hyperion users in order to select target agents for those locations
Expand use of Generic Log Reader
Capture additional Essbase statistics like application size (folder size)
Incorporate native Accelatis Dashboards more into daily monitoring practices
What’s Next

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35. Q&A

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