[Anonymous]

How do I teach myself Oracle Hyperion? How long will it take to gain working knowledge of Oracle Hyperion. I am interviewing with a company which is asking for working knowledge on oracle hyperion. Please advise. Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Hyperion is a vast modules of applications, there is one for chart of accounts, reporting/consolidation, reconciliations, analytics/BI,workflow etc…What exactly will you be working with and at what capacity as ‘working knowledge' is vogue?

You might be able to learn somethings by doing online research but if you are going in as system administrator for some of the above mentioned you would need quite a bit of experience on how they are applied in the ‘real world' and potentially taking expensive oracle university classes.

[Anonymous]

My company purchased Hyperion to use for our projections/planning process. We had to walk away from the setup, we were never able to get it setup to work for us. I am really curious of other companies who use it and its a benefit to them.

[TNCPA16]

We use Hyperion for consolidation and reporting at my company. I would second what CPAASAP said – “working knowledge” is pretty vague. I use Hyperion for reports, which is pretty straightforward and easy to pick up (pick the report you want to run, enter in parameters, and that's that). Our accounting department uses it for consolidation, which I'm sure is a little more complex. Hyperion has a user manual that I'm pretty sure you can find online. I would start there and read up more about the system.

[Mrs.Smith]

I agree with the above posters. Oracle Hyperion encompasses a vast array of products and no one would realistically have a working knowledge of all of them. In my role, I use mostly Hyperion Planning and Essbase for revenue forecasting and budgeting purposes. I took a few self paced courses from Harbinger group. Their classes are slightly more affordable than most Oracle classes, but all Oracle classes seem to be expensive! Also, the “Look smarter than you are” series is good for Essbase and Planning. Oracle has great end user (and admin) guides too, but without the software to work in it may be difficult to gain more than a superficial understanding.

If you were called in for an interview without Hyperion on your resume, it is probably just an employer wish and not a requirement. Maybe just ask thoughtful questions to see what hyperion applications they are using, how they are using them, what their biggest challenges are, if the chosen candidate will be expected to develop reports, webforms or other apps or if you would just be an end user running reports created by others and ad hoc queries? Maybe read up on OLAP and MDBMS in general (although it really depends on what Hyperion offerings they are referring to. I am really only familiar With EPM side). If they are truly needing someone with in depth Hyperion knowledge, then it's probably not the right fit. I think these things are hard to learn “outside” of the job. You don't want to oversell yourself and end up being let go either. Just be enthusiast about learning and relate it to your previous companies software and overall skill set. Good luck!! Let us know how it goes.

[Anonymous]

I'm doing financial reporting for a mid-size public company and I LOVE hyperion. In fact, most people come to me for advice in setting-up templates/running ad-hoc reports or just to verify balances (because they don't trust their own pulls). If you can master the tool, you'll definitely raise your value as an employee.

That being said, your use of hyperion will vary depending on what position you're applying for. If you're doing global FP&A, you will use it to pull balances for all regions (foreign regions if they do business overseas), pulling balances in local currency, historical currency (for constant currency uses) etc. The same would apply for Financial reporting and Consolidations.

Now if you're part of a regional accounting team, then your use of hyperion will generally be more limited. You're usually just pulling a few accounts for your section and your region. And the use will be even more limited if you're just doing one function of accounting, such as AR/Revenue or Fixed assets.

I think it would be difficult to teach yourself hyperion from just a manual or tutorial. It's more important to learn about the structure of the organization and chart of accounts before delving in and just creating reports and pulling balances from the various cubes that hyperion offers. It's a tool that you need someone there to guide you through, but that's just my take on it.

[Author]

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