Troubleshooting Hyperion Capital Expenditure (CapEx) Issues [ID 1089963.1]

In this Document

Purpose

Troubleshooting Steps

References

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Applies to:

Hyperion Planning - Version 9.3.0.1.00 to 11.1.2.0.00 [Release 9.3 to 11.1]
Information in this document applies to any platform.
Checked for relevance on 04-Oct-2011

Purpose

The purpose of this document is to introduce key CAPEX module concepts and features and present troubleshooting tips and a starting point for investigating issues that may arise while using the CapEx Module in Planning.

Troubleshooting Steps

Overview

Capital Asset expense planning is a specialized planning module that automates the planning of capital assets and capital asset related expenses, such as depreciation, maintenance and insurance. 

The purpose of the predefined Capital Expenditure Module was to simplify implementation and reduce customization efforts and maintenance burdens by providing some functionality and best practices already built in to the data forms, accounts, calculations, menus, and smart lists. 

Common Usage
• Plan for new asset purchases, and Depreciation/Amortization 
• Not only can you plan for actions on existing and new tangible assets, but also intangible assets including impairments (i.e. Brand Valuation, Copyrights, etc)
• Plan for driver based/user defined asset related expenses
• Report on Assets 

Convenient functions and features

• Depreciation: Calculations for the most commonly used depreciation methods (i.e. Straight Line, Diminishing Balance, Sum of Years Digit) are pre-defined.
• Depreciation Conventions: The ability to set the period in which depreciation starts if it varies from the in-service date.
• Cash Flow Incidence: Set how cash outflow for capital purchases should occur; in the same month, next month or in a staggered method.
• Funding Percentage & Funding Incidence: Set the percentage of funding for capital purchases from an external source. Also set the frequency of cash inflow for funding of capital purchases.
• Capital Asset Related Expenses: Plan for expenses, such as insurance, repairs and maintenance associated with a capital asset by allocating a percentage.
• Amortization: Indicate whether intangible capital assets should be finitely or indefinitely amortized across their useful lives.
• Manage existing capital assets: Plan for transfers, retirements, improvements and impairments of capital assets from pre-built menu selections.
• Real-time impact analysis: Users can visualize and assess the impact of capital asset expenses on general operating expenses, income statement, balance sheet and cash flow in real-time and on the same screen instead of toggling between multiple screens.

 

• Here is an example of what comes out of the box with Planning for, in this case, depreciation: 
  
  Predefined Smart List: DeprMethod 
  Associated Account Member: "Depreciation Method" 
  Predefined Smart List Entries: NoDepr, SLN, SYD, DBYear, DBPeriod 
  Predefined menus: Depreciation Summary Menu 
  Menu options: Depreciation Details (Data form), Roll up Asset (Business rule), Calculate Depreciation (Business rule), Calculate Existing Depreciation (Business rule)

General Troubleshooting
I. Confirm relevance to CapEx exclusively!

• Many of the calls logged against CAPEX as a product are actually just general Planning issues (i.e. form takes a long time to open, customized calc takes a long time to run, it takes a long time to log in, installation, refresh, or deployment error) and should be researched as not unique to Capex.

II. Debug / Logging considerations (Variations to locations will occur in versions prior to 11x)

• Most issues with Planning and CapEx will be captured in one of the following logs by default:

o hyperion\logs\services\HyS9Planning-sysout.log 
o hyperion\logs\services\HyS9Planning-syserr.log

• Most issues with Business rules will be captured in one of the following logs by default:

o hyperion\logs\eas\Hbrlaunch.log
o hyperion\logs\eas\Hbrserver.log 
o <essbaseserver>/Hyperion/AnalyticServer/Essbase.log
o <essbaseserver>/Hyperion/AnalyticServer /app/<appname>/<appname>.log

• Most issues with calculation manager will be captured in one of the following logs by default:

o hyperion\logs\services\HyS9CALC-sysout.log 
o hyperion\logs\services\HyS9CALC-syserr.log
o hyperion\logs\Planning\calcmgrserver.log

III. Initialization / Deployment considerations

• If Capex is disabled:

o Change the registry.properties file usually located in C:\Hyperion\common\config from False to True for Capex: PLANNING_CAPEXPLNG_OPT=false,false and restart
o It is possible someone has hidden the initialize CAPEX menu HSP_SYSTEMCFG table in the application database, change REF_APP from 0 (or 1) to 2

• When creating an application, if you rename the capex cube, the system will still create the cube as Capex and not with the new name that was specified during the application creation.

• If reserved members are manually created in the accounts dimension with same name of members as those of capex dimensions (i.e. Land, Goodwill, Construction in progress) you will see error messages in the Planning system logs when you try to initialize indicating which members are duplicates, allowing you to delete them first.

• In order to deploy a Capex application in EPMA 9.3.1 you must load Capex .ads files that bring in specific dimension members, smart lists, etc. into the application view. If an application view is valid for Capex plan types and these required members are missing from the application view, the deployment to Planning will report an error "...member can't be found" because the deployment is trying to create certain forms during the Workforce/Capex initialization process and can't find the required members for the forms. A possible workaround is to initialize Workforce and/ or Capex in a classic Planning application and then upgrade it to EPMA.

IV. Application considerations

• The "No Year" member is not enabled in the Scenario's start and end year property in a CAPEX application, so you cannot grant write access to it.

• Capex does not provide a method to partially retire an asset or retire a portion of a single specified or line item asset. As a workaround, you would create two existing specified assets from the original single specified asset.

V. Troubleshooting considerations

When someone is reporting that some of the out of box or customized functionality did not work as expected the first step is to determine which component did not work properly. 

Here is a list of some possibilities:

• A business rule
• A data form
• Predefined Menu (exapmle Depreciation Summary Menu has on data form and three business rules you can choose by default)
• Smart Lists (example: DeprMethod is associated with the "Depreciation Method" account member and includes entries like NoDepr, SLN, SYD, DBYear, DBPeriod)

Once you determine which component you are troubleshooting you move to the next step of determining the details, what should have happened, and how to track what actually happened.

Here is an example:
When you add an asset you are prompted to fill out values of a run time prompts that will be used to run the Add Asset rule. These are typically coded into FIX or IF statements within the rule or set as a variable within the rule. 


If the prompts that are filled in manually in this screen

Or those being used as "members from the form" were not correct, you will get different results than you expected.

• In most cases you can review the hyperion\logs\eas\Hbrlaunch.log to determine what values were filled in and used for the calculation. 
• You may also want to review the <essbaseserver>/Hyperion/AnalyticServer /app/<appname>/<appname>.log for more calculation details. 
• In some case you may need to enable DEBUG_ENABLED=TRUE and review the calculation details in the hyperion\logs\services\HyS9Planning-sysout.log and HyS9Planning-syserr.log

References

@ BUG:8263368 - ABILITY TO ENABLE WRITE ACCESS TO "NO YEAR" MEMBER IN NONE CAPEX APPLICATIONS
NOTE:1078487.1 - Can Assets in Capex Planning be Partially Retired?
NOTE:734459.1 - How To Disable The Ability To Initialize Workforce or Capex in Planning
NOTE:808306.1 - Initialization of Capex and Workforce through EPMA - Deployment is Hanging Error: "...member can't be found"