Ascend Makes a Splash at Wave Conference

The conference opened with a keynote speech from founders, Tom Shea and Bob Powers. They spoke about the OneStream product road map, the latest developments and the numerous new channels beyond the former MarketPlace available to the OneStream community. The new MarketPlace will consist of the existing MarketPlace, Open Place (OneCommunity Forums and Open Solutions that support customization) and PartnerPlace (a platform for partners to market their innovations). Additionally, IdeaStream will offload the enhancement requests from ServiceNow Support.

Some of the overarching themes of the conference were:

• OneStream has grown beyond just being a consolidation tool.
• As planning and operational reporting projects continue to grow their presence in OneStream, there is a need to emphasize scalable design (extensibility) to keep up with the size and performance needs of these larger applications.
• Large datasets too granular for the cube should not be ignored and can be effectively stored, analyzed, and reported from within OneStream’s relational tables utilizing Relational Blending.
• OneStream continues to invest in its development side with the goal of making it faster, more efficient and easier for all skill levels.

When not attending the various seminars, members of the Ascend Team were putting faces to names and making introductions at the various social events hosted by OneStream. At the final ‘Light Up the Wave’ event, the Ascend Team engaged in competitive games of basketball, Jenga and pool. Other highlights include two team dinners (Mexican and Asian Fusion), a few rounds of blackjack and group breakfasts where we caught up on the previous day’s activities and upcoming events. The future looks bright for OneStream and Ascend’s partnership, which is deploying state-of-the-art OneStream solutions within an ever-growing and changing business landscape.

Some highlights from each learning stream are outlined below. Note that these highlights are intended for information purposes only and are not guaranteed in future releases of OneStream.

Developer

• Workspaces - The introduction of the Workspace layer atop the Dashboard Maintenance Unit giving developers a more efficient way to design dashboard content. It offers a container to allow adjacent development of the same solution, reducing naming conflicts and, it groups all related artifacts in one package making migrations more straightforward. The vision is to perform more of the artifact creation in the Application Dashboards screen without dependent objects being in other areas of the application. Business rules, cube views and books related to dashboard will be located within those dashboards.
• New dashboard development features, including:
• Custom controls that can be packaged and shared without waiting for OneStream to add them in future releases.
• Creating dashboards dynamically from code in addition to working within the Application Dashboards page. For example, using dynamic code to loop through the items that become the members of the dashboard tabs instead of manually adding each one.
• Making development easier for various skillsets by flattening the learning curve and empowering the entry-level ‘citizen developer’ with blocks development while giving advanced developers better external tools to manage their code and accelerate development.
• Highlighting the arrival of C# as a second scripting language for use with OneStream. The similarities between C# and VB.net were noted along with some of the tools available to convert code automatically. It was emphasized that development would not be forced into C# anytime soon as this is still a new concept and the strategy of where and when to apply it needs to be evaluated.
• Sensible Machine Learning – There was a deep dive into the current approach and technology OneStream is utilizing for Machine Learning. Currently, OneStream’s Data Science team collaborates with the partner and performs data science exercises to make sure that all the relevant internal and external inputs are considered (as project success is determined by model accuracy). Once the completed model is available, the partners are engaged to perform the setup in OneStream. While the data science portion of this project may be available to partners in the future, in the interim OneStream will tightly control it for best success.
• Smart Integration Connector – This is intended to remove some of the infrastructure needs of setting up OneStream to access client source systems. OneStream will no longer require VPN access to connect with client source systems and external database connections will now be managed within the application without involving OneStream in their setup.
• OneStream Marketplace solution offerings that:
• Automate Data Import Schedule Management along with success / failure email notifications that ‘every client wants and currently custom develops.’ This packages the batch harvest process for loading and, as such, will not work with files beyond txt/csv. A 2.0 version is also currently under development that will include these omitted file types (i.e., Excel XFD imports).
• Simplify the management of custom database tables by allowing users to create, delete, update and migrate tables (across environments) from one central location without having to write SQL.
• A walkthrough of:
• OneStream’s best practice sample design application called ‘Blueprint’ BR and SQL scripting “dos and don’ts” by the author of the OneStream Business Rule book and a SQL subject matter expert.

Architect

• Data Unit Sizing – OneStream continues to educate architects on the data unit and how efficient designs can keep its growth under control. Data Units over 500k records are considered large and anything exceeding 2m records may need to be evaluated for re-design. Extensible Dimensionality was presented as the main tool to prevent run-away growth and reduce the number of unnecessary sparse intersections available to a data unit. They also explored the pros and cons of other options for storing data outside of the cube using tools such as Specialty Planning and BI Blend.
• Beyond typical consolidation functionality:
• Aggregation – As the number and complexity of OneStream planning projects continue to grow, there is a strong push to have formerly predominant consolidation tools embrace Aggregations. While more limited in their financial consolidation capabilities, they may offer enough functionality suitable for a Planning application while offering performance gains up to 90% faster than Consolidations.
• Hybrid Scenarios – OneStream continues to offer more ways to copy and share data across scenarios such as sharing smaller subsets of data dynamically to enable improved reporting and analysis performance or using more efficient out of the box ways to copy stored data.
• Attributes – While these offer a way to dynamically tag and group data without requiring stored data intersections, there are performance issues involved with setting attribute members to ‘Allow Consolidation’ to see their results at the parent entity level. OneStream outlined some mitigation strategies to overcome the consolidation lag issue as well as some important things to consider before implementing Attributes.
• System Diagnostics – OneStream showcased their new System Diagnostic dashboards which should be released by year end. They also reviewed some of the performance validation rules currently available and soon-to-be released. The rules will inform and change the way applications are designed, ensure more efficient designs and help avoid common traps.
• BI Blend / Relational Blending – OneStream continues to promote the application’s ability to host data beyond the cube. They also spoke to how large datasets can still be part of the OneStream experience without weighing down the performance of a cube. Data stored solely in Stage or in custom relational tables can be blended or reviewed separately providing the ability to see transactional level data alongside summarized cube-level data.
• Table Views – These are primarily designed for viewing, writing or editing relational data in Excel in a tabular format. While they can report on any data source including cube, stage and metadata, they tend to work best with smaller data sets and reports due to high processing overhead. Nonetheless, they have potential and will be explored internally by Ascend.
• Application Control Manager – OneStream showcased its metadata management tool sharing metadata across OneStream and other source / target systems.
  

Tax

• Demo of Release 4 and 5 – OneStream held a live demo of the current release 4 and future release 5 in the 1st quarter of 2023. The major new feature for release 5 is the one-year forecast.
• Future Enhancements – OneStream discussed the most frequent requests by tax clients for future enhancements which included the multi-year return provision, the simplified tax calculation for non-carried forward loss benefits and adjustments, workflow modifications for non-tax-provision-calculation entities, tax integration with other tax software packages, what-if scenario on tax rates changes, and tax balance sheets. Design of the multi-year forecast is on the enhancement path.
• A few takeaways to emphasize are that tax should be implemented after OneStream consolidation. Market-place solution implementation should follow the same methodology as it heavily depends on the metadata, BR and dashboard build. OneStream recommends using an experienced consultant in this area for tax implementation projects and its enablement team will provide guidance for 1-2 initial projects.