Lawson Certification of Essbase

Yep, Lawsons compatibility matrix indicates that Essbase is only certified up to version 9. We're looking into upgrading Essbase from 6.5.4 and would like to be as current as possible so I'm interested in this post as well.

We are upgrading workstations to Win7 and Office 2010 so our Essbase add-in's for Excel will not install properly. Have to run an older version of Excel for now to use the Essbase add-in's for Excel.

How are you doing with this? We upgraded to Essbase V11 and it is 10x more complex to implement. To replace the API, we are ftp'ing the IA120 file to the Windows server and using .bat and .mxl files to load it into Essbase. Not pretty.

I was afraid of that. :cry:

We currently have consultants that are setting up our new Hyperion 11 environment. They haven't informed me of how they plan to pull the data from Lawson for schema and data loading. We're under the impression that we will not be utilizing Analytic Architect. I'm not so sure about that. :unsure:

Were you able to retain the same structure so your Excel/Essbase templates continued to work for you or did you have to modify them?

I don't think the structure changed except to enhance for our use. We were able to put all ratios/metrics in Essbase reducing the need for calculations. We took advantage of the "drillable" functionality. Took advantage of positive numbers vs. debits and credits for reporting. Were able to add history to the production cube rather than a separate history cube. We added new dimensions, so retrieval spreadsheets needed to be modified due to that. We did not go live with SmartView since we did not have time to train. Security was much more complex so be sure to get training. We package our desktop installs and addins were a bear to package. Might be able to give you helpful hints here.

Our users are primarily Add-in users and we use Hyperion Reports for period close reporting of P&L's and Revenue/Expense reports. All read-only so hopefully security won't be much of an issue. Think I'm really going to miss having the cube rebuild automatically with an IA120 job . When you say drillable functionality, are you drilling back into the Lawson DB?

Not having the automatic rebuild is horrible! That is the intention of our drilling, but we have not tried it yet.

We are on 9.0.1.10 and upgrading essbase to 11 - was anyone able to get the lawson api to work with 11 for the IA120 to still work?

We upgraded to Essbase 11. Still using Hyperion Reports for monthly P&Ls and the Essbase add-ins for Excel. We did not renew our Lawson Analytics so we no longer utilize the IA120 job. I wrote scripts to pull the organization and accounts dimensions as well as the account balance data from glamounts. We refresh dimensions and data hourly with load rules. Our Hyperion consultants who did the upgrade of Hyperion wrote the load rules. New accounts import into the outline but I sometimes have to manually sort at the lowest level to get them to appear in order of account number when drilling with the add-in.

We were able to get the IA120 to work with Essbase 11 and 9.0.1.10. Has anyone else? Is there there any reason we shouldn't go this route?

Vicki

Which consulting company did you use?

thanks!
brooke