Support Business Expansion By Incrementally Enabling Custom Dimensions in Financials

You can now incrementally enable custom dimensions in Financials. The new dimensions are available only in the OEP_FS cube even if you have other modules enabled.

Previously, you had to enable all dimensions the first time you enabled features and could not incrementally enable additional custom dimensions later.

Financials provides 5 custom dimensions, including Product and Services. In an existing application, if you have not previously enabled some of the custom dimensions, you now have the option to expand your business by incrementally enabling the custom dimensions, up to the total of 5 custom dimensions.

Business Benefit: 

Customers often seek adding custom dimensions to support business growth post going live or after using Financials for some time. This feature enables this without having to rebuild the application.

For new applications, you don’t have to unnecessarily enable all of the custom dimensions in case you might need them in the future, because you can now add them later only if needed, for example to expand your business.

Tips And Considerations

  • You can enable a total of 5 custom dimensions at any time—when you first enable the application, or later.
  • All out-of-box artifacts are updated for the newly enabled dimensions. For example, if you incrementally enable the Product dimension, all out-of-box forms are updated to include the Product dimension.
  • Any additional custom artifacts you’ve added or modified are not updated for the newly enabled dimensions. You must modify your customized artifacts to incorporate the newly enabled dimensions.

Oracle recommends these steps to avoid potential data loss when you incrementally enable dimensions:

  1. Export all level 0 data.
  2. Clear the data in the application.
  3. Use Enable Features to incrementally enable the dimension.
  4. Refresh the database. From the Configure page, select Refresh Database from the Actions menu. Click Create, and then click Refresh Database.
  5. Modify the exported data file to add a default member (for example, Any Member) from the newly added dimension in the POV, or include the Any Member member in the header section of the rule file.
  6. Reimport the modified CSV file.
  7. Run the business rules to aggregate the data. 

Oracle recommends that you perform these steps in your test instance and after it clears validation, take it to your production instance.

Key Resources