Essbase Consulting
MTG Customized Consulting Solutions have helped the world’s leading corporations manage their data and use it in ways that truly fit their needs. We have spent more than a decade mastering the leading multidimensional technologies on the market. Over the years, MTG has delivered Hyperion Essbase consulting services to finance, marketing, and IT professionals, ranging from very large, performance-sensitive applications to calculation-intensive financial strategy models. We offer everything from complete applications development programs to customized project advisory consulting.
MTG’s Consulting & Development Methodology
Don’t leave it to chance. A scientific, methodical approach is required to ensure success. Find out more about standards and practices that have been developed and refined over decades of experience with BI systems.
Analytical Applications Design and Development
It’s all about the logic. The last twenty years have been about making databases easier. Now it’s time to make them smarter. Find out about how to build BI systems for strategic financial planning, financial control, marketing, and sales that drive competitive advantage and shareholder value.
OLAP and BI Technology Infrastructure Architecture, Implementation, Optimization
Get under the hood with Hyperion Essbase. Optimize your systems, automate processes, and secure the integrity of your data.
Project Planning, Design and Management
Will your next project meet all its objectives and be delivered on time and within budget? Find out how to build the right team, develop their skills, and then chart the course to high ROI and low project risk.
Case Studies
Project: Budgeting
Financial Services: Designed an annual budget system for a Fortune 500 business services provider.
Consumer Health Care: Designed an annual budget system for a Fortune 100 consumer health care company. Also Implemented a conversion from TM/1.
Pharmaceutical: Designed an annual budget system for an international pharmaceutical company. Designed an Excel/VBA front end using the Essbase API and sophisticated forecasting techniques. Developed a front-end program that would dynamically generate build files, temporarily map drives to the Essbase server to transfer all files to a common location, and then perform a dimension build so that end users would see nearly instantaneous results when adding cost centers.
Banking: Designed an annual budget system for Fortune 100 bank. Optimized existing Essbase database and existing Excel/VBA front ends to better meet the needs of end users and provided guidance on the rollout of the system.
Pharmaceuticals: Developed a consolidation, reporting, and analysis application for annual budget. Data load intensive.
Banking: Designed financial analysis and reporting models (P&L, balance sheet, field sales, department overheads) for budgets, forecasts and actuals. Calc and data load intensive. Prepared instructional/support documentation. Conducted end-user and developer training.
Lead corporation-wide multifunctional team to implement new Essbase client/server planning and analysis software, replacing mainframe System W. Developed systems requirements, performed all coding for two pilot division models (and eight additional divisions) and developed automated data loads from a variety of source systems. Provided initial training and on-going support to all divisions. Prepared instructional/support documentation. Received “Above and Beyond the Call of Duty” Awards in 1996/1998.
Project: Implementation and Optimization
Healthcare: Application redesign, maintenance planning, and optimization. Customer had previously had a competitor’s full-time consultant for eight months with little success and was ready to drop Essbase. Made redesign recommendations that were implemented by the customer very successfully, followed by an implementation review and further recommendations for go-live and automation. Customer credits MTG with a complete turnaround and is planning to use MTG as a high level resource for future Essbase projects.
Manufacturing: Built and maintained a sales application with the largest dimension in existence with over one million members on a single (SKU) dimension. Fully automated this application, debugged server issues, tested partitioning strategies, optimized, planned and implemented maintenance and backup, installed patches.
Retail Sales: Optimized a very large (48gb) database. Reduced calc time by half and disk requirements by three-quarters. Completed project in one third of budget. Tested cache optimization and S/D configuration also, but dynamic calcs and compression techniques turned out to be the most effective.
Food Services: Optimization and knowledge transfer to customer s (internal and external) consultants and developers. Delivered Application Workshops for about twenty developers and end users using MTG s proprietary Accelerated Development, Spreadsheet Add-in and Hyperion Analyzer courseware.
Financial Institution: Implementation review and problem solving (primarily advanced calculations) for large process re-engineering and key performance indicator system. Guide developers through solving extremely complex calc problems. Made design recommendations with respect to SQL Extract, interactions with RDBMS (Oracle). Design and implement multi-cube architecture using XREF. Identify, debug, and report bugs and anomalous behavior.
US Govt. Agency: Designed and tested approaches to RDBMS integration with Essbase 6.5 and Integration Services 6.5 (Betas). Focus on custom SQL, SQL drill-thru and Hybrid Analysis with respect to performance improvements and reduction of maintenance workload resulting from potential drastic reduction in DB size. Required redesign of (EIS)OLAP Model for compatibility with Hybrid Analysis (eliminate recursive hierarchies). Secondary focus on improved allocation and spreading (reverse allocation) calculations; including optimization primarily through reducing unnecessary disk I/O via proper calc order and use of most efficient commands and functions to reduce passes.
Project: Credit Analysis
Financial Services: Financial statement and peer analysis system for intellectual property lending group of middle market commercial bank. System provided a picture of the banks commitments and outstandings by industry group and risk class.
Project: Customer Profitability Analysis
Financial Services: Designed profitability and pricing analysis for a major NYC financial institution. Designed and implemented very large Essbase database with user customizable Excel front end.
Project: Equity Analysis
Financial Services: Small start-up vendor of bank financial statement data. Prototyped Essbase application, Excel interface, and HTML based WWW interface. Assisted in tool selection (Essbase vs. TM1) and strategy (Windows interface vs. Internet/browser interface).
Project: Medicare Compliance
Pharmaceuticals: VBA front end for Essbase system for Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company.
Project: Retail Analysis
Retail: Designed a very large Essbase system for sales and purchasing analysis. Determined proper business logic for complex metrics. Wrote data load rules to dynamically add and move members in the Essbase database and load weekly data. Wrote new calc scripts to calculate new metrics and optimized existing calc scripts as changes were made to the database. Wrote ESSCMD scripts to automate common tasks. Developed a Visual Basic scheduling program to launch a myriad of Essbase processes as data files became available, thereby fully automating the weekly load.
Project: Strategic Financial Planning
Business Equipment, Business Services: Annual strategy model for fast growth division of Fortune 100 business equipment and services provider. Included modeling of annuity revenue streams. Calculation intensive.
Project: Sales Reporting
Pharmaceutical: Developed Daily Sales Reporting & Analysis, Distribution Center and large (80 GB) chargeback models. Dynamic dimension build, calculation and data load intensive.
Project: Data Warehousing
Vehicle Manufacturer: Designed a purchasing data warehouse involving a complex product dimension with unusual hierarchical requirements. Reworked dimensional data model to accommodate true dimensional characteristics and implemented cubes primarily for ‘model cost’ analysis (costed product/part rollup). With RDBMS expert, conducted second pass needs analysis and data availability analysis with internal developers/users. Conducted BI Fastlane Workshops for developers and end users (in-house) with the goal of creating an internal Essbase center of competence. On Day Five, all four developers successfully designed and built their own cubes using their own data with minimal coaching.
Project: Customized Public and Private Training
Financial Institution: As follow up to earlier similar project, participated in meetings to help educate new project leader regarding strategies for implementing Essbase data model and size characteristics.