Overcoming Oracle Essbase challenges with Jedox Webinar

It's video week at Jedox! This recorded webinar addresses Hyperion Essbase users and reviews key issues faced by business users and developers of legacy calculation engines and planning systems. Learn how the modern Jedox platform can address these challenges to provide greater user satisfaction, less IT burden, and a rapid Return on Investment.

Organizations that simplify and optimize planning, forecasting and reporting free up valuable resources, so they can focus on growth. However, many organizations feel stuck with slow platforms that are not user-friendly, expensive to maintain, and difficult to upgrade.

Often users were forced to select a tool like SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC), or Oracle because it came with their ERP, rather than by selecting the most suitable tool from the market. Other tools like Hyperion Essbase and Hyperion Planning had some unique features 20 years ago, but have been overtaken by newer and more modern platforms that combine planning with visualizations and analytics.

Jedox is built on Excel, the world’s most used reporting and planning tool. Jedox is designed to enable you to leverage your Excel skills to transform your reporting, budgeting and analysis. Easy to use so you can focus on business outcomes.
Jedox software creates extremely effective budgeting and planning and Corporate Performance Management solutions for systematic data analysis.
Its core is a cell-oriented, multi-dimensional in-memory OLAP server that has been especially designed for planning, analysis, reporting, and data consolidation.

Financial Data Analysis by Jedox event in Singapore

Jedox is an Excel based financial planning software. Financial data is often difficult to audit and unreliable because of ineffective controls in Excel. The issues surface in overworked teams, manually reconciling data scattered across multiple systems and countries. Traditional BI/PM software needed specialised technical teams to develop and maintain them. Waterfall implementations meant Finance filled out requirement documents, explained basic finance concepts to the technical team - and then waited for the result. The business process (that Finance was still ultimately responsible for) was no longer under Finance’s control. To manage this, agile companies adopt the Jedox Suite. Jedox gives you unified planning, consolidation and reporting in one intuitive solution.

Knowledge Management Solutions, an authorized Jedox partner in Singapore, is having a free event to introduce this great platform to finance specialists in Singapore at 3pm - 5pm, on 28th August 2015. The address of this free Jedox event is Singapore Management University 60 Stamford road
Singapore, 178900.

For more details and registration, please visit Register for Jedox Finance Data Analysis event. Watch a short video of Jedox below to see the capabilities.

Excel Plus : From Excel to JEDOX

Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application is by far the most widely used business application on the planet. It is free (well actually not but since comes with every business PC it is perceived to be free), simple, fast, flexible and gives independence to its users. But, a big but, is that MS Excel based processes have several drawbacks : it is inconsistent and error prone, maintenance - intensive, complex and not audit proof, slow and manual to consolidate, difficult to access and collaborate, provides low data-security and there is no process control and workflow.

Although these drawbacks are universal, MS Excel became the basis of complex business processes with many stakeholders and although it sits outside IT-managed systems, it holds business-critical reporting and planning and analysis. Enter the Excel hell!

Jedox is a business intelligence and coorporate performance management platform positioning itself as EXCELPLUS. Excel plus means that JEDOX removes Excel’s drawbacks while retaining its advantages.

Jedox basically transforms the world’s most used reporting and planning tool into the most useful tool. Jedox manages your data, your business rules, and secures your data, yet allows you to still use your Excel expertise. If you know Excel, you know JEDOX and you’ll love Jedox. You can take your Excel-based processes and quickly and easily become a Jedox BI expert, on the web, smartphone or tablet, and the cloud.

Jedox offers Excel Plus and transform the most used business application on the planet, Excel, to the most useful one. 

Data-Driven modeling – Self-Service redefined
With Data-Driven modeling you can quickly and easily analyze data and simulate complex scenarios and then share this interactively to collaborate and drive insight across your organization.

Imagine you can take any data and instantly turn this into a powerful online multi-dimensional dataset that you can share for reporting, dashboards, commentary and for modelling forecasts and scenario planning. That’s what Jedox Data Driven modeling gives you. In one click you go from Excel-hell to Jedox apps that you can instantly and securely access through any device. It’s powerful and easy and empowers business users everywhere.

Enable collaboration and business ownership through instant feedback loops with online data collection and correction, and instant consolidation.

What is JEDOX?

Jedox is a Self Service Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management platform developed by Jedox AG based in Freiburg im Breisgau/Germany. With a modular structure, JEDOX platform uses Microsoft Excel as its user interface on the one hand and a Jedox-specific spreadsheet on the other, both of which can be used in all common browsers.

Jedox is unique in a sense that while most business intelligence solutions try to replace MS Excel based analysis and planning process entirely with their platform (and usually fails to do so because at one point things are exported to Excel), Jedox puts the powerful MS Excel sheet in the heart of their solution. By doing this they provide a familiar interface to users while enhancing business intelligence capabilities far beyond MS Excel.

This is actually what JEDOX offers in a nutshell : Excel Plus. The modular architecture of JEDOX has a cell-oriented, multi-dimensional in-memory OLAP server that has been especially designed for planning, analysis, reporting, and data consolidation. But for users, it is as simple as using Excel. If you know how to use Excel, you know how to use JEDOX.

Most business intelligence tools like QlikView and Tableau are one way : they get data and distribute them in nice, interactive dashboards but they cannot write back to original data model. You cannot do planning and budgeting in these tools. So most corporations, even if they have a powerful BI tool, they goes back to Excel for planning and forecasting.

Jedox components (Jedox Excel Add-in, Jedox Web, Jedox Mobile, Jedox OLAP and Jedox ETL expands Excel beyond its functionality and adds powerful features like mobile access, BI dashboards and security to the BI solution.

In 2013, Jedox AG has been included in the list of "Cool Vendors" in the Cool Vendors in In-Memory Computing, 2013, report by Gartner, Inc. A key factor for the “Cool Vendor” designation is its unique in-memory technology: Jedox OLAP Accelerator is capable of increasing the processing speed of traditional in-memory technologies (classic CPU multicore architecture) several times over. Jedox leverages state-of-the-art NVIDIA Tesla graphic cards (GPU technology) with internal memory that can be addressed much more quickly. This technology advantage enables blazing fast reaction times when analyzing extremely large data volumes or planning / simulating large scenarios such as multidimensional aggregations and complex rule calculations. Companies can now do planning, analysis, and reporting in real time.

Another interesting feature of Jedox is its powerful data-driven modeling feature where an Excel plain data file can be imported into JEDOX olap with a few clicks, which makes creating an olap model for jedox very easy.

Jedox Product Overview

Jedox 5.1 Data-driven Modelling

Since version 5.1, European business intelligence (BI) software provider Jedox offers a powerful data-driven modeling feature, Jedox users can create an entire OLAP model with existing data at the click of a button, with the model immediately available for analysis, reporting and planning tasks. This new Jedox 5.1 data-driven modeling feature uniquely combines the content depth of classic OLAP tools and the simplicity of state-of-the-art data discovery software.

How data driven modelling works? First, you start with your existing data in Excel. With one click, you create a Jedox in-memory cube. You can now immediately report, plan and collaborate across your organization. This works by automatically generating a sophisticated load (ETL) script to read your data from Excel. The ETL you can edit, extend, and schedule in order to refresh your data as often as you need. The result is you can instantly take any Excel data and immediately use this live through Jedox anywhere.

Since this feature will quickly create a JEDOX model, the data and the interface will be immediately exported to Jedox Web which will open the data to mobile access in a few minutes.

This powerful concept is best demonstrated then writing about. Watch below video for a very nice demonstration from Jedox AG.