Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) September Updates 2024: What’s New?

Oracle releases monthly EPM updates to improve capabilities in financial consolidation and planning, analytics, reporting, and more. The most recent updates in this series are Oracle EPM Monthly Update, September 2024. If you're curious what new features and capabilities are included in the Oracle EPM monthly update 2024, this blog is for you.  

Here, we'll look at the changes that are taking place across multiple EPM modules and provide you with the actionable information you need to make the most of this release.  

‍Why You’ll Love These Changes:

• Better Decision-Making: Up-to-date information allows for accurate financial analysis and reporting, leading to more informed decision-making.

• Increased Compliance: Detailed information on data tables helps ensure that financial processes comply with regulatory requirements, reducing the risk of non-compliance and associated penalties.

• Enhanced Data Management: New detailed information on tables within Financial Consolidation and Close enables you to manage and organize data more effectively.  

• Streamlined Financial Processes: Comprehensive information across the data tables will help businesses to streamline their financial consolidation and close processes, making them more efficient and accurate.

Highlights: What's New?

Enterprise Performance Management:

• Account Reconciliation: Learn how to create a group attribute, assign it to a data source, and import transactions with group attributes in Transaction Matching. Another tutorial covers importing balances with data integration, mapping them to target applications, and creating reconciliations in Account Reconciliation.

• Enterprise Data Management: New videos provide guidance on custom validation and best practices for ensuring trustworthy enterprise data.

• Planning: A tutorial on creating and activating Predictive Cash Forecasting applications as part of a broader configuration series.

• Profitability and Cost Management: Users with the "Migrations - Administer" role can now view and modify daily maintenance start times via the user interface, REST APIs, or EPM Automate commands.

If you want to learn in detail about Oracle EPM updates for August 2024, we recommend you read the full advisory here.  

What Is the EPM Monthly Update Schedule?

Oracle follows a particular schedule to apply monthly updates.  

• Test environments: Oracle will apply monthly updates to test environments during the first daily maintenance window, which begins at or after 22:00 UTC on the first Friday of each month.  

• Production environments: Oracle will apply monthly updates to production environments during the first daily maintenance window, which begins at or after 22:00 UTC on the third Friday of each month.  

What Is the Need for Oracle EPM Cloud Monthly Update Testing?

Oracle EPM monthly upgrades have the potential to impact a wide range of functionalities. If you decide to enable a new feature, you should consider how it may influence existing business processes and procedures.  

A bug repair may have a detrimental impact on your business processes or develop a new issue. Because downstream concerns can significantly affect operating efficiency, even simple changes must be tested.  

What Should You Test?

• Before releasing updates into production, test all important business functions.  

• Test important business process flows for various positions inside the organization.  

• Important custom reporting and integration with other programs.  

• Workflows that are tailored to your needs. (Journal, invoice, purchase order approval, etc.)  

• Automatically available UI and process new features that will be relevant to you.  

• Manual testing is just not feasible given the frequency of changes, the complexity of programs, and the variety of interconnections between them. AI-powered test automation is a reasonable approach to Oracle EPM testing.

Opkey for Oracle EPM Test Automation

Opkey is an official Oracle partner and the industry's leading No-Code test automation platform. Opkey is also the top-rated testing tool on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. This AI-enabled No-Code test automation includes pre-built tests that reduce the time required to complete regression testing each month.