Dodeca
 Spreadsheet Management System

Some of our clients ask, “my company already has Hyperion Financial Reporting, so do I need Dodeca?”

Many of our clients also have Hyperion Financial Reporting. Hyperion Financial Reporting, or HFR, is used by Oracle Essbase customers who need to publish standardized reports in HTML or PDF format. HFR also features batch/burst capability that can be scheduled to create and distribute reports automatically.

Like Dodeca, HFR has a managed repository of reports and easy-to-use, point-of-view selectors, but the HFR report format lacks the layout and formatting flexibility and robust calculation capabilities of spreadsheets. Clients in the accounting and finance disciplines use Excel day-in and day-out and prefer data in Excel format. Dodeca presents the data in the format these users expect. Creating reports is easy for report developers, because they can leverage their existing spreadsheet experience without extensive training. In addition to reporting, Dodeca supports analysis and planning applications.

Dodeca is extremely flexible, highly customizable, and uniquely well-suited for many different types of applications. Our clients use Dodeca for a wide variety of applications, both large and small. Dodeca scales to handle applications with thousands of users, yet it is simple enough to be quickly, easily, and inexpensively deployed for small applications.

Common applications that Oracle Essbase and Hyperion Financial Reporting users find Dodeca useful for include:

• Reporting, either instead of or along with Hyperion Financial Reporting for corporate, divisional, and retail store reporting.
• Planning, where Hyperion Planning does not meet their business requirements or where they wish to use Essbase as their budgeting, planning, or forecasting engine.
• Analysis, where clients need the ability to easily investigate the details supporting the numbers and where they need to annotate and summarize their findings.
• Management, for operational tasks as varied as merchandise planning, store location planning, and weekly forecasting.

Dodeca has many capabilities that are not provided by Smart View. One of the biggest differences is that Dodeca makes it easy for developers to design, publish, and distribute dynamic spreadsheet reports using the popular Excel format, filled with Essbase and/or relational data, in a matter of minutes.

With Dodeca, you can leverage the powerful calculation capabilities, charts, and easy-to-use formatting of spreadsheets and deliver customized applications to your entire user base from the entry level to the top level executive. As the report developer, you control the spreadsheet report templates and the settings used to build reports, and you can make sure your users have spreadsheets that are accurate and error-free.

Dodeca is optimized for Essbase performance and allows users to retrieve very large datasets very quickly. We recognize the continuing popularity of the classic Excel add-in for Essbase, so we modeled Dodeca’s ad-hoc capabilities on that popular product and have expanded them based on feedback from our clients.

Many of our clients ask, do I need Smart View, Excel, or the Essbase Excel add-in to run Dodeca?

No. Dodeca is a dedicated spreadsheet application that is independent from Oracle Smart View and was built to use the Excel file format without the need for Excel. Dodeca supports the Excel 97 through Excel 2013 formats. The Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System supports 398 Excel functions.

My company already has Smart View, so do I need Dodeca?

Smart View is a solution that provides Microsoft Office integration to a number of Oracle products, including Essbase. In many companies, Smart View is first put into the hands of the spreadsheet gurus, who figure out how to use it and then train the less spreadsheet-savvy users. The value an individual realizes from Smart View is directly proportional to the skills they have as a spreadsheet user.

Smart View has no central spreadsheet repository, which means you have no managed control over the spreadsheets. You are unable to easily leverage the skills of the more experienced spreadsheet users to ensure spreadsheets are properly constructed and, more importantly, contain accurate information.

But, Dodeca goes further. Dodeca’s central spreadsheet repository ensures that your users get the most up-to-date spreadsheet template, populated with the current Essbase data, and retrieved from the correct Essbase database. Dodeca users get the answers they need fast and dependably.

Unlike Smart View, Dodeca requires little to no training to use. In other words, Dodeca makes Essbase easy. Dodeca connects to relational databases from the Dodeca server using JDBC technology and supports nearly every database that is JDBC compliant. The most common relational databases used with Dodeca include Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, and MySQL.