Upgrade Oracle EPM - Hyperion Financial Management Upgrade - Upgrade HFM from old release (i.e. 11.1.2.3) to new release 11.1.2.4

Upgrade Oracle EPM - Hyperion Financial Management Upgrade - Upgrade HFM from old release (i.e. 11.1.2.3) to new release 11.1.2.4

Requirement:

1. Need a simple HFM upgrade where minimum 7 years of historical data will be migrated along with their numbers verification.
2. Minimum cost and duration

Always there is fight which one to chose between In place (existing servers) vs. out of place (new servers). There is many writing including Oracle Document, have almost forced everyone that there is no other was than applying maintenance release on top of old version of environment. But this is certainly not the only option rather the costliest risky option.

I will never encourage my customer to follow this technique. I have got an opportunity to upgrade two HFM application from 11.1.2.3 to 11.1.2.4.101. Applying HFM 102 patch is in progress.

While discussing the available options I could not resist to say to my customer why not "Put the old liquor in a new bottle." My Scottish customer immediately had show a positive response on my recommendation.

Here I am discussing what I had proposed during  that time. Yes, I have successfully executed what I am saying here. We have got support from Oracle on few of ICT related issues (read BUG) after our upgrade in Oracle EPM / Hyperion Financial Management 11.1.2.4. I hope you have understood what I meant to say here.

"Hyperion Financial Management 11.1.2.4 can be upgrade from earlier release using old CopyApp utility."

Following are the high level steps:

1. Log into Old version HFM server and create new UDL to point new 11.1.2.4 version HFM schema.
2. Execute CopyApp and copy existing application along with data and audit data. Audit data is optional.
3. Update HFM DSN for the newly copied HFM Application
4. Launch EPM 11.1.2.4 Configuration Utility and upgrade 11.1.2.4 version HFM schema using Configuration Utility

          5. Register the HFM Application and do the provisioning. 

          6. Old version application is upgrade to 11.1.2.4 and all signed off data are in same status. A quick high-level reconciliation can be performed to sign off the migration.

Benefit we have received:

1. Post upgrade the application data reconciliation was 100% correct and there was not a single data issue
2. All the former sign-off was already in place
3. Consolidation for past data was never required to be executed, though for checking purpose last 2 year data was consolidation to build confidence in the new upgraded application in UAT environment. That test was also successful.
4.  As-Is rule have seen a performance gain around 20%
5. A separate CR was kicked of to convert few  Member List loops to Data Unit in rule file. Post Data Unit implementation the consolidation time was reduced to 30 minutes compared to 1 Hour 20 Min in old version.  (16 thousand lines of Rule was there in the rule file)