Is your essbase reporting system working for you or against you?

When you first got essbase, everyone was excited right? Speed of thought analysis, slice and dice, you could now get to those numbers.

Well what is your environment like a few years later?

Has your admin gotten burned out and quit?
Are you on your 2nd or 3rd admin?
Is your reporting process back to waiting on the manual creation of reports even though they are sourced out of Essbase?

A common theme has emerged from my clients as more of them have been running Essbase for more than a few years now.

-the essbase administration is found to be very manually intensive and unwieldly
-published reports are too often created out of excel manually
-the original DBA is long gone (no processes are understood but run by looking at documentation consisting solely of printscreens)

While I am often brought in to a new customer for new application development, I find myself addressing all of these issues time and time again.

I'll expand on each of the challeges and how they can be overcome in the postings that follow.

hj