PBCS (Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service) is the name most of us still use out of habit, but Oracle has since unified PBCS and EPBCS into a single Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM Planning business process. The export process below works the same way regardless of which name you know it by.
There are a few different ways to get data out of Planning (Data Integration, Smart View, and EPM Automate's exportData command among them), but the quickest for a one-off extract is the built-in Export Data action on the Overview dashboard. This tutorial walks through that method. If you'd rather script and schedule this instead of clicking through it by hand, see our EPM Automate best practices post.
Following along with screenshots? Rather than reproduce Oracle's copyrighted UI images, this walkthrough links to Oracle's official documentation for the current Export Data screens. Oracle's Exporting Data reference walks through every option described below.
Step 1: Start the Export
Log in to your Planning environment, then navigate to:
Application > Overview > Actions > Export Data
(If you learned this on an older PBCS environment, you may remember this as Navigator > Overview > Action > Export Data: the menu labels were renamed to Application and Actions as part of Oracle's move to the current Redwood interface, but the underlying feature hasn't changed.)
Step 2: Configure the Export
In the pop-up window, click Create to begin configuring a new export. You'll be asked to specify:
- Location: export to Local (downloads directly to your computer) or Outbox (saves to the server, which is required if you want to schedule the export as a job).
- Cube: the plan type you're exporting from. Note that the driver/column dimension for the export needs to be a dense dimension in that cube.
- File type: comma-delimited (.csv), tab-delimited (.txt), or a custom delimiter of your choosing.
- Smart Lists: export Smart List values as labels or as names, depending on what your downstream process expects.
- Dynamic Members: choose whether to include or exclude dynamically calculated members (dense dynamic calc members for BSO cubes, dynamic calc members for ASO cubes). Excluding them generally makes the export run faster, since Planning doesn't have to calculate those values on the fly.
- Decimals: set a fixed number of decimal positions (0 to 16), or leave it at the default precision.
- Disable Implied Share (BSO cubes only): forces child-level rows to export even when their values match the parent, which matters if a downstream system expects every row rather than an implied rollup.
- Missing Data Label: the placeholder text used for missing data in the export file (defaults to
#MISSING, up to 16 characters). - Slice Definition: define exactly which data you want by setting the Row, Column, and Point of View dimension members for the export.
Once everything is configured, click Export to run it.
A Few Things Worth Knowing
- If you chose Outbox as the location, you can click Save as Job to schedule the export to run immediately or at a later time, useful if you want the same extract to run automatically every period instead of being triggered by hand.
- Planning allows up to 5 export jobs to run concurrently. If you're scheduling several extracts around the same time, keep that limit in mind.
- For large exports, excluding dynamic calculation members and being precise about your slice definition (rather than exporting an entire cube) will noticeably improve export performance.
For the complete, current reference (including edge cases for ASO vs. BSO cubes), see Oracle's official documentation: Exporting Data.
If your team is regularly extracting data by hand and would benefit from automating this process (via EPM Automate, a scheduled job, or a broader Data Integration pipeline), CloudADDIE can help you design that workflow.