Re-Certified in 2026: The Oracle Cloud EPM Planning Changes Worth Knowing Since 2024

In 2024, I made a mistake I don’t recommend to any Oracle Cloud EPM practitioner: I let my Planning certification lapse. Deadlines piled up. Client work took priority. And then I got stuck on the wrong side of the renewal window and had to climb back up the hill.   Long story, short, I took the full exam AGAIN and passed.

Guess what? It's 18-months later and it's time to take the Planning catch-up/delta exam to remain current. I can’t share anything specific about what’s on the exam, but I can share the approach that actually worked and the feature areas that Oracle materially advanced across late 2024 and 2025.

The best study guide is hiding in plain sight: Oracle’s EPM Readiness content

If you’re trying to stay current, don’t overcomplicate it. Oracle’s Cloud EPM Readiness pages are the most practical “what changed and why it matters” backbone you can use. Build a monthly cadence around them and you’ll avoid the scramble.   You can find it here: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/readiness/epm.html

This is also where Oracle makes important directional calls (for example, platform UI changes and de-support announcements) that can impact real projects, not just your test-taking.

What actually changed in 2024–2025 (Planning + EPM Platform)?

Here are the areas that stood out to me as “this would absolutely show up in real client conversations,” and they map directly to the kind of product awareness the Delta exam expects.

1) Forms 2.0 isn’t “new” anymore — it’s the direction

If you’re still treating Forms 2.0 as optional homework, the platform is politely telling you: “it's time to use Forms 2.0!”

Oracle has been explicit about the evolution toward Forms 2.0 / Dashboards 2.0, including de-support guidance for legacy experiences. The practical takeaway is simple: don’t build a brand-new solution on yesterday’s UX patterns. And, now that we can do in-line formatting with validation rules it just doubles down on building elegant user-experiences.

Why it matters: end-user adoption lives and dies in forms and navigation flows!

2) Data Pipelines: the “adult supervision” for integrations

If you’ve ever inherited a Planning environment where integration orchestration is basically:

• “Run this job”

• “Then run this other job”

• “Then wait”

• “Then run the midnight thing”

• “And if it fails, call Steve”

…you’ll appreciate why Data Pipelines are a big deal.

The Pipeline feature gives you a more intentional way to orchestrate and manage integration sequences in Data Integration.

Why it matters: fewer fragile runbooks, more predictable operations, easier supportability.

3) IPM Insights: the “tell me what changed” anomaly detection is getting real

This is one of those features that sounds like a demo gimmick until you actually implement it thoughtfully.

IPM Insights is Oracle’s push toward automated “what moved and why” discovery by automating identification of trends, anomalies, changes, patterns.

Why it matters: teams want faster variance explanations and better decision support without turning every planning cycle into a forensic audit.

4) Auto Predict: less “toy,” more practical (especially around edge cases)

Auto Predict is often an entry point for AI within FP&A: clients want “AI forecasting,” but they want it inside EPM, not a science project.

Oracle keeps smoothing out real-world friction. One example I love because it’s so painfully relatable: Auto Predict can now run even if the last historical period value is missing, and you can choose how it handles that situation.

Why it matters: predictive features fail in production over dumb data realities. Any reduction in “it didn’t run because of one blank cell” is meaningful.

5) Process approvals: built-in workflow within your planning cycle

Approvals don’t get keynote time. But they’re the difference between:

• “Planning is where we coordinate the business process” and

• “Planning is where finance keeps their spreadsheet replacement”

Oracle continued to evolve Process Management behavior and admin considerations especially around how Approval Units behave and what happens when entities are shared or org structures get more complex.

Why it matters: governance builds confidence, and confidence drives adoption.

6) Cell-level security: finally, “yes, we can protect that”

If you’ve done workforce, comp, or sensitive opex planning, you’ve probably hit the moment where the business asks:

“Can we hide just those values from those people?”

Historically, the answer was often “kind of, with workarounds.”

Oracle introduced cell-level security to let admins restrict read/write access at a much more granular level. This can be especially useful when you want to secure specific data-values like an Employee salary for certain departments (e.g., think the CFO's salary).

Why it matters: fewer modeling gymnastics. Better control. Less risk. More credibility for Planning as a system of record for sensitive processes.

The real moral of the story

The Delta exam had bits and pieces of these topics in it - and if you have been keeping up release notes over the past 18 months none of this should be a surprise! The real moral of the story is Oracle is is shipping meaningful improvements continuously, and the fastest way to stay current is to make release awareness a habit.

If you’re maintaining certs, you should be keeping up every month as the new patches comes out:

• skim readiness monthly,

• pick 1–2 items to actually test

Your future self will thank you the next time you’re staring down a renewal window wondering where the last year went!

Good luck on your keeping your Planning certification current!