Financials Cloud for EPM folks - Hierarchies

This is the second post of my Financials Cloud for EPM folks series, in these posts I'm trying to familiarize EPM professionals with ERP Financials Cloud because we all have to interact and work with ERP cloud at some point. 

In the first post, I covered value sets and in this post I will briefly writing about hierarchies. In the ERP world metadata is defined in two ways:

1- Value sets (flat lists) primarily used for transactions, journal entries and all kind of ERP related configuration/

2- Hierarchies - primarily used for reporting and budgetary control purposes (hierarchical reporting in ERP? Yes, there are multiple Essbase cubes in ERP for reporting ad budgetary control purposes)

Why is it important for us in EPM world? Well, unless your metadata is 100% synced between Planning/Consolidation applications and ERP then there is always a need to get metadata information from ERP. Whether it is for manual updates, description changes, member additions/movements in the hierarchy etc.

So let's get on with it and show how to access your hierarchies in ERP cloud.


From Settings and Actions go to Setup and Maintenance

Search for "Manage Account Hierarchies" and click on it, as you can see below this task is located in Financial Reporting Structures.

In Manage Account Hierarchies you will see all the available dimensions, and the associated tree versions. (Tree version is another copy of the hierarchy).

If you expand any of the nodes you will find the tree version(s) and the active/current one. From there, simply click on Actions -> View Tree Version.

And here you can navigate the hierarchy in a simple way. Let's say you are trying to load actual data in Planning and the rule is failing because of a missing member, the log will tell you what is the member name but it won't tell what is the parent member! So from here you can easily figure it out.

Hope you find it useful.

Quick tip - Period Mapping Type

I recently bumped into a weird and vague error message while trying to load an ERP custom query in Planning Cloud using the integration feature added in October 2019 release. I'm not going into details of how to setup the integration because it's well documented, so I'll just cover the error in case you run into it.

To summarize the steps, I have:

1. Created BI report using SQL data model with CSV output

2. Created an Enterprise Scheduled job to trigger the same report from ERP's Scheduled Processes












3. Created a Data Source integration application in Data Management

4. Finalized the mapping details in Data Management

All I have to do now is to run the integration! Unfortunately, the data load rule failed at "Import data" stage and I bumped into this error.

FATAL [AIF]: Error in Insert Process Details

The good thing is the ERP extract is getting exported and pushed to EPM without any issues, it's just failing to import in the staging area for some reason. How did I know the extract was working from ERP side? Well I checked the scheduled job output files in ERP and Data Management files in EPM (used EPM Automate) and the extract is there.

Here is the scheduled processes status in ERP indicating the job was successful from ERP side.

The log didn't have any meaningful information apart from FATAL [AIF]: Error in Insert Process Details, only this line so I had to create an SR with Oracle to sort it out and luckily they got back to me with the solution! it was the period mapping type! I'm trying to load the extract in BegBalance & No Year so I was using application level defined periods (not general mapping) and the integration had the "Explicit" Period Mapping Type by default.

After changing it to default it worked just fine.