M-Power - Hyperion Admin Console

11th May 2010

At the centre of every Hyperion environment are the System Administrators.  Their role, which is not always properly appreciated, is to manage, control, maintain and enhance the Hyperion environment ensuring a smooth running solution is provided to end users.  Their role includes tasks like:

• Manage user account requests, system access, and security
• Develop and maintain a catalogue of all business rule calculation scripts, allocations, and custom calculations; perform validation that rules are functioning properly
• Manage month end / year end roll over
• Evaluate enhancement requests for purpose, fit, scope, effort and prioritisation
• Ensure compliance with appropriate change control procedures
• Co-ordinate with other user community, application and infrastructure teams

The varied nature of the role, which combines application, systems and business knowledge, can be challenging. The good news is that there are many discrete features and utilities in Hyperion for administrators to run. The bad news is that each of these is separate, run from a different place, using different components of the system with fragmented documentation. This makes the job of an administrator much more difficult and in most cases the potential benefits of the various administration capabilities of the software are not utilised.

At M-Power we understand these issues and have been building, deploying and managing a software solution that will unlock and control all of the powerful Hyperion administration tools available to you in an easy to use front end.  We call it the Admin Console.  The Admin Console is akin to placing your Hyperion System Administrator(s) as the pilot of commercial aircraft, all of the levers, buttons and utilities necessary to manage the system being within easy reach from a single screen.

The M-Power Admin Console has been developed in partnership with several of our clients of the last 3 years.  It brings together the execution of administration functions into a simple web based interface that requires nothing more than the click of a button to execute. Capabilities available from the console include:-

• Running one or more calculation scripts or business rules
• Managing security, toggling read/write access, start/end scenario periods
• Running data extracts and loads together with associated validation reports
• Running report batches that email pre defined reports to numerous users
• Reporting on who has logged in and which reports they have run, providing transparency into user activity
• Email alerts to confirm calculations have run

The Admin Console can also be used to empower selected end users.  By placing the power to run reports and trigger calculations with the end user, we can reduce the workload on the administrator and deliver the right information to right people at the right time.  This approach has had a very positive impact at many of our clients. 

The Admin Console is delivering great productivity gains for our clients, we are excited about the benefits we have already delivered and what the ongoing development of this solution will provide in the future.  In an area of weakness in the Hyperion product set the Admin Console is a great solution for all administrators.

“The Admin Console has changed the way we work, tasks which may have involved a number of manual steps are now available to us through a simple to navigate interface.  More importantly, these tasks which previously were restricted to Administrators, can be launched by the end user, both empowering the user in the process and reducing the reliance on administrator availability while freeing the administrator to concentrate on other duties.”

 Adrian Leigh, Hyperion Administrator, OZ Minerals