Recently, we notice a new impact of deleting entity at HFM 11.1.2.3.
Once you deleted one entity at HFM, the parent of that entity’s pass/fail will change to Fail at all the historic periods, no matter the hierarchy is locked or not.
This is what happened at my application:
For our users, they always want to have two green ticks at all the entities as that is a symbol means all the tasks were finished at that period. And before admin publishes all entities and locks the whole hierarchy, the pass/fail should be pass. So the pass status should be kept there when the hierarchy is locked.
This is a new feature at 11.1.2.3 version. When we were at 11.1.1.3 version, deleting entity will not have any impact to the pass/fail status of the parent. Now open historic periods and re-run consolidation can get the pass/fail status back to pass.
To me, I can somewhat understand why Oracle brings this feature to us. When I was consultant, I saw at many clients’ admin, who is not quite familiar with Hyperion, deleted some entities with data. This will cause the problem when we do enhancement or upgrade, the parent level figures will not match with the children entities. Now with this new feature, the parent entity’s red cross will let you know once you deleted entity, the parent level results may not be correct, you need to run consolidation to update parent level’s data.
I would not say this is a bad thing. However, I think something can make this feature better:
- Check the active/inactive setting before changing the status. In case the entity is inactive entity, delete this entity will not impact the parent level. So the pass/fail status should not change.
- Provide user a way to solve the red cross other than consolidation. Because all historic periods’ status changed, then it means we need to run all historic periods’ consolidation to get the green tick back. This is not a easy task for an application with many years’ data. And also needs to consider the system files’ (metadata, member list, rule) changes. At most times, current period’s metadata and rule cannot even get the correct figures for last year.
Hi James,
I had not noticed this new functionality but I believe it is a good safety feature for clients who design and deploy changes without considering the history.
Based on my experience, I believe it is a good practice to consolidate the whole application after each load of new metadata/rules. So now Oracle forces us to do that.
In any case, it better to be safe than sorry.
Thank you for the great post.
Cheers,
Thanos
Hi Thanos,
Thanks for sharing. I agree with you that the historic periods need to be considered when delete an entity. I still remember one client deleted entity with data and this makes the consolidated figures cannot tie with details. So the initiation is good. However, another case we encountered recently is user requested to add one entity and found it is wrong at next day, so we need to remove this entity without any data. This action also made the all historic periods fail. Thus we just want this feature to be a little bit more intelligent to check whether there is real impact (i.e. [Contribution Total] figures) to parent before changing the pass/fail status.
Regards,
James Zhang