Plan/Forecast Scenario in HFM - best practice

Question

Hello all,
We're currently working on adding a Plan and Forecast scenarios to HFM
to incorporate some budgeting, which had previously been done in
Excel/Access. For those of you who do planning in HFM, would you care
to briefly summarize your processes?
1) How do you load the data into your HFM plan/forecast scenario?
Excel spreadsheet? FDM Multi-Load? Webform?
2) If you use Excel, do you just allow the users to submit via the
template using SmartView or formulas? What about audit/controls?
3) Do you let the users consolidate whenever they want?
Any other tips would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks

Answer 1

We've been doing budgeting forecasting for awhile in HFM.... However.... We leaving that and going to Hyperion Planning...
Some things you are going to want to consider:
1) You will probably have more people entering budgets \ forecasting then actuals, so there might be licensing cost.
2) Security will need to be considered, who get's what and where.
3) Budgeting \ Forecasting is usually done at a more granular level then rolled-up. This could make your HFM application much larger or more detailed then necessary.
4) If you re-org, which we do, we have to reconsolidate all the scenarios and all the years. Time consuming.
5) The is one rule file, making divisional or cross-company modeling difficult. For instance, one of our divisions has a very complex allocation model which we could not build in HFM.
6) Its not uncommon for users to ask for a rolling forecast, which can be done in HFM at the cost of more scenarios. Also, versioning is difficult in HFM.
7) Reporting will also need to be considered, who does it, how it looks and who gets what report.
With Planning, we don't have the above issues.
To answer your questions before moving to Planning:
1) How do you load the data into your HFM plan/forecast scenario, Excel spreadsheet, FDM Multi-Load, Webform? 90% use the data grids, 5% FDM (International or not on our GL) 5% SmartView (Powerusers)
2) If you use Excel, do you just allow the users to submit via the template using SmartView or formulas? What about audit/controls? How do you handle that in actuals? Our controls are handled via security
3) Do you let the users consolidate whenever they want? Yes - at the expense of users running consolidations over each-other