EPMware Is the Silver Lining in EPMA End of Life

System upgrades are disruptive for teams that rely on that technology for their day-to-day business functions. And when an upgrade also includes finding a replacement for software that is reaching the end of life, the process gets even more complicated.

For example, when Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) users upgrade to version 11.2, they lose access to Enterprise Performance Management Architect (EPMA), EPM’s corresponding metadata management solution.

However, for EPMA users that are struggling with inefficient and outmoded change request processes, being forced to replace their metadata management solution has a silver lining. 

Why Metadata Management Matters

Whether due to inertia or a “we’ve always done it this way” mentality, too many finance teams rely on manual change request processes. In today’s complex and data-fueled business environments, this approach is borderline negligent.

Your business depends on having data that is accurate, accessible, and trustworthy. When metadata change requests are delivered and managed manually via SharePoint, email, and similar methods that lack governance and validation, it’s easy to introduce errors and inconsistencies.

This low-quality metadata is then shared across all of your business systems and applications, potentially corrupting the customer, product, location, and financial data your business relies on for analytics and intelligence.

We recently had the opportunity to work through this scenario with a client. Here’s how EPMware helped them transform their metadata change management processes and workflows.

Atradius: A Metadata Management Success Story

When global trade insurance provider Atradius began the EPM 11.2 upgrade process, the finance team saw an opportunity to not only replace EPMA in favor of a more robust metadata management solution, but also automate and streamline their inefficient manual request processes.

At the time, the team was manually supporting the flow of data between Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), its Hyperion tools, and other source systems, such as credit insurance, collections, and reinsurance. 

Per Oracle’s recommendation, Atradius test-drove the free version of DRM as a replacement for EPMA, but DRM Lite’s lack of direct integration with target systems and inability to read and feed from source systems didn’t align with Atradius’s requirements to improve their inefficient processes.

The finance team wanted an out-of-the-box software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that was:

• Cost-effective

• Easy to implement

• Minimally disruptive to day-to-day operations

• Able to streamline metadata management workflows 

EPMware’s unified metadata management and data governance platform checked all the boxes.

How EPMware Helped Atradius Succeed

Atradius needed to implement a new metadata management solution with minimal downtime, and EPMware delivered. 

EPMware’s out-of-the-box integration and one-click import capabilities allowed the Atradius team to migrate its metadata from EPMA to EPMware with little technical effort. And thanks to EPMware’s built-in technical validation, Atradius’s metadata was automatically translated during the installation, saving hours of manual work. 

Working with our technical partner and EPM integration specialists inlumi, EPMware quickly responded to Atradius’s request for functional validations to replace some of their manual processes. inlumi’s deep technical knowledge and understanding of the client’s needs enabled the team to complete the EPMA-to-EPMware project in 20 days from start to finish—a rare feat for a financial system transformation.   

Atradius began seeing improvements almost immediately due to EPMware’s ability to automatically harmonize hierarchies across all systems and applications. 

Before implementing EPMware, accounting transactions generated by credit insurance, collections, reinsurance, and other source systems had to be manually transferred into EBS for consolidation or budgeting because mapping tables and consolidation rules were not consistent across systems.

Using EPMware’s built-in mapping capability, Atradius’s finance team now has a central metadata repository and links that allow information to be easily transferred between systems with little manual intervention. 

EPMware Future-Proofs Metadata Management

EPMware’s code-free integration capabilities, plug-and-play adapters, and built-in validations helped Atradius transform and future-proof its metadata management strategy. 

Atradius has its metadata centralized, validated, and accessible across all systems, meaning when another critical tool reaches its end-of-life, EPMware adapters will deploy the metadata to the replacement solution, seamlessly keeping all systems synchronized.

Want to see exactly how EPMware outperforms Oracle EDM and DRM? Download the vendor comparison.