Dashboards, Reporting & Business Intelligence

In Nature, everything tends to achieve the “equilibrium” state. For e.g. In physics we learn that “Water” tries to find its own level, and if you remember the experiments, there are two containers that are connected with each other using a small pipe near the bottom of the containers. The shape and size of the containers are different. There is a small gate somewhere in the center of the connecting pipe that controls the flow of water between the two containers. Now to begin with the experiment, both containers are empty and the valve in the pipe is closed, then you fill up one container with water. Once it is full, you open the valve in the connecting pipe and let the water flow out and into the container that is empty. You will notice that water fills up the other container only to the point when the level of water in both the containers reach the same height, so in effect the container with water initially loses its level and the empty gains its water level. So no matter what the size and shape of the container is on the other side the levels of water in both sides are the same. In effect, that’s the equilibrium level!Similar phenomenon is exhibited with electricity, There is a difference of voltages at the two points before they are connected using a copper wire, once connected both the points try to reach the same voltage levels. Even in chemistry it is taught that chemicals react with each other only to reach the equilibrium state. Once the equilibrium state is reached, then there is peace! In other words objects of same nature always try to achieve harmony.So if we as humans are of the same nature then will we ever see harmony among ourselves? Is there an equilibrium state for humanity? Some of the things that are tightly associated with humans are love, wealth, health, knowledge and spirituality. We find lot of disparity of levels between humans in the above five areas and since there is difference in the levels of each of these human aspects there is no perceived harmony between humans especially between countries, regions and race.So can we expect humans to reach the equilibrium state in the above five aspects? I guess we are missing a crucial element here, “the conduit” that is necessary to achieve the equilibrium state. Even natural objects don’t try to reach harmony unless they are connected. If they were kept separated then they would never reach harmony. Similarly we need a suitable conduit to gain harmony in the human aspects of love, wealth, health, knowledge and spirituality. I guess “Internet” has emerged out as the perfect conduit for knowledge that in turn will lead to level out wealth and hence trigger conduiting health, spirituality and love. The other conduit that is happening is identified by the name of “Globalization” and this is leading to the creation of sub-conduits such as “Travel” and wealth creation. With the help of these conduits, it is possible to see an equilibrium state between the above-mentioned human aspects.

But are we missing something here? Is it that simple to just create more conduits in order to achieve harmony? The main difference between the objects in nature and humans is “Intelligence”. Natural objects have low consciousness compared to humans and the only intelligence they are guided with is the laws of nature. Humans, on the other hand are gifted with high level of consciousness and intelligence. Humans are gifted with “Free Will”, they have the ability to create and destroy things. So even the natural tendency for humanity in general is to achieve peace with everything there will definitely be some interesting human elements that would try to accelerate or decelerate this process. Your thoughts?

Another important development in the SOA environment is an enterprise service bus (ESB). An ESB is a message-based capability that facilitates interaction between distributed resources. An ESB is not required for SOA, but it does increase the power and flexibility of SOA usage.The objective of an ESB is to route messages between resources in a reliable manner; that is, it guarantees message delivery. Message routing may be done synchronously or asynchronously between source and target systems. Messages may be also be transformed from a source format into a target format as they pass through the bus. Other facilities offered by an ESB include load balancing and failover. More..

Wayne Eckerson at SearchCIO.com offers his insight into Embedded Analytics. Here is what he says

“

Embedded analytics are the next wave in business intelligence because they bring BI closer to the operations and processes that drive businesses on a daily basis. Embedded analytics won’t replace standalone BI tools. Rather, they will make the functionality offered by such tool sets more readily available. By embedding BI functionality within operational applications and processes that drive the business, embedded analytics will make BI more operational, easier to use and pervasive — key challenges facing the current generation of BI adopters.“
Oracle has an excellent embedded analytics offering that comes packaged and ready to use with Oracle Applications. Its called Daily Business Intelligence (DBI), that comes with pre-defined dashboards for Financial Intelligence, Payables Intelligence, HR and many other modules. There are few setups involved and need to run few concurrent requests on a periodic basis in order to refresh the data in the seeded dashboards. It also comes with DBI designer, so you can create custom reports and KPIs. DBI is an offering under the CPM umbrella.

Intelligent business is a fundamental shift in thinking for the world of
data warehousing and business intelligence. More Details…

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BI and PM components 

 

 

BI and PM are not monoliths. In our definition, any PM initiative is made up of at least two of the following components: 

• BI products—Tools that provide information gathering, analytics, and presentation of data to end users 
• Analytic infrastructure—Infrastructure to store, organize, and prepare data for reporting and analysis  
• Dashboard and scorecards—Tools and/or applications that help businesses track key performance indicators (KPIs) by providing a unified view of organizational performance data and options on a timed or near real-time and integrated basis. 
• Planning, budgeting, and forecasting (PBF) products—Applications that provide a business with a high degree of flexibility to align financial and/or operational plans to its specific enterprise or departmental planning processes 
• Analytic applications—Delivered applications that accurately gather, unify, coordinate, and analyze company-wide or content-specific data. Financial consolidation and reporting is an example of this type of application

More at..

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Panorama Software Ltd says it is the first business intelligence vendor to integrate with Google’s new web-based spreadsheet application. The company has also laid out plans that will enabled its BI software to front-end SAP AG’s Business Information Warehouse, a move it hinted towards earlier this year.

Enterprise Performance Foundation Refresh Engine, is a nice feature that ships with EPB and CPM offering. Its always been an issue un-installing Oracle tools installed on your PC. With the CPM offering, Oracle has provided this useful tool that allows you to reset all the setups and data back to the original state when the product was installed. So I shouldn’t call it an un-install but a simple way to re-install. It resets the data but keeps the seeded data.

You may refer to metalink doc Note:315272.1 for more information on this engine.

The Enterprise Performance Foundation Refresh engine provides users with the ability to remove all user created data from an FEM database environment, thereby returning that environment to the original install state.  This functionality is particularly useful for demo environments, so that consultants can remove any customizations that they may have implemented, without requiring the assistance of system and/or database administrators to re-create the database. 

One important feature of the Refresh engine is that while it removes all user created data, it does preserve all of the seeded data, so that the environment can be used again for a subsequent demo.

What are Business Views that Oracle refers to within all the intelligence products like BIS, Discoverer for APPs and Daily Business Intelligence?

• A Business View is a database view on top of Oracle Apps Tables
• Logical view encapsulating key columns and extra information from Flex Fields (Key and Descriptive)
• Easy and Efficient mechanism to reflect any Flex Field changes
• Pre-built Security encoded within each Business views.
• Security is defined based on Operating Unit, Inventory Organization and Business Groups
• Pre-seeded EUL Folders use Business Views as their data source
  Business Views is comparable to Noetix views

Why do we need to Regenerate Business Views?

• Oracle just provides the base skeleton of the view.
• This skeleton view usually has a suffix of _FV (FV = Full View)
• This skeleton view has all the required columns plus instructions on how to extract the Flex Field Columns
• Sample instruction ‘_DF:PER:PER_GRADES:grd‘
• Business View Generator Program reads the skeleton view definition and creates a complete _FG view (Full Generated)
• EUL Folders point to the _FG views

 After reading the post above regarding a hijacked blog, I have immediately taken a backup of this entire site. Not that it has lot of postings and since the blog is only half the age that of my son (6 months!), it is not as critical but I want to cultivate the habit of doing this regularly. I have already devoted so much of my personal time on this one and intend to continue this for a long time, so it perfectly makes sense to cultivate some good habits

I use Wordpress and a true Open-Source gem and with all the plugins, its a no-brainer.

New License Revenues Grew 32%

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., June 15, 2006 – Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL), today announced that preliminary Q4 fiscal 2006 financial results exceeded management’s previous guidance.

New software license revenues increased 32% to $2.12 billion, exceeding previous guidance of 8% to 18% growth.  Database technology license revenues grew 18%, while applications license revenues increased 83%.   Organic applications license revenues, which exclude the Siebel and Retek acquisitions, increased 56%.

Fourth quarter total GAAP revenues increased 25% to $4.85 billion, exceeding previous guidance of 13% to 17% growth.  Q4 GAAP earnings per share are estimated to be $0.24, as compared to previous guidance of $0.21 to $0.23.

Total non-GAAP revenues increased to $4.94 billion or 22% in the fourth quarter, exceeding previous guidance of 10% to 14% growth.  Non-GAAP earnings per share are estimated to be $0.29, as compared to previous guidance of $0.26 to $0.28.

These preliminary financial results are subject to revision.  Oracle will release its final results on June 22nd, as previously announced, and will hold a conference call and web broadcast to discuss the results at 2:00 p.m. (PDT) / 5:00 p.m. (EDT). To access the live web broadcast of the event, please visit the Oracle Investor Relations website at http://www.oracle.com/investor.

About Oracle
Oracle Corporation is the world’s largest enterprise software company.  For more information about Oracle, please call Investor Relations at (650) 506-4073.

EPB Basics: EPB which stands for Enterprise Planning and Budgeting is an offering from Oracle that allows organizations to do their planning and budgeting. In effect it replaces Oracle Financial Analyser but it can be used practically for lot of different planning and analysis purpose.

Components: There are two key components to the whole EPB offering. The first component is the Enterprise Performance Foundation known as EPF. All the objects and structures belonging to EPF reside in the FEM schema. EPF is a datawarehouse in itself and it comes with predefined FACT and Dimension tables. It is also packaged with its own Discoverer End User Layer. EPF is the common datawarehouse and lot of other tools (OLAP based) get sourced from EPF. Financial Consolidation Hub and Profit Analyzer also feed off EPF and in future EPF would become the common hub for lot of other applications.

On the other hand EPB is based on OLAP and all the dimensions and data is sourced from EPF. Together with EPF and EPB it makes a solid combination that allows you to do planning and analysis.

Usage: There are two ways you can use EPB, one with General Ledger integration and other is Non GL. General Ledger Integration is a powerful asset that no other tool in the market offers. With the GL link you can directly pull your Oracle General Ledger data into EPF and hence into EPB for multi-dimensional analysis. EPB being OLAP based you get the option to slice and dice your GL Balances and in combination with XML publisher you can create Profit and Loss reports, Income Statements and lot of other ways to report your data. You can configure EPF and EPB such that when your period and set of books in GL closes, the actuals data is automatically pushed into EPF and then into EPB (using Open APIs).

The Non-GL mode is used when you are using some other General Ledger application like PeopleSoft or other vendor. In Non-GL mode it requires to load the data and dimension members through the interface tables that comes with EPF schema. You need some kind of ETL to get the data and dimensions from the third party system into EPF. So using the Non-GL mode you can effectively bring in any kind of dimensions and data for your analysis. Also Non-GL mode becomes an ideal choice in the following situations

• If you want to keep your planning and budgeting seperate from your production enviornment
• If your Oracle Apps version is on lower version than the required base version for EPB
• If you have multiple set of books and multiple chart of accounts with not all the sites and users on Oracle Applications.

The only drawback with Non-GL mode is that you need to design the ETL part in order to bring in the data into EPB.

Key to Success: So it is very important to understand what you need to consider and how you want to implement EPB beforehand.

• Prepare the EPB instance : Ask your DBAs to go through every step in the EPF and EPB “About document” and religiously follow each and every step mentioned in it. If any pre-requisite patch is missed that would further add delay to your proof-of-concept or demo with the CFO!
• Hire EPB Consultant : Since this is fairly new product there are not many resources who have EPB implementation experience. Lot of clients try to hire consultants with previous OFA experience but who do not have EPB experience and this can put your implementation at serious risk. Its a natural recipe for project overruns and running out of EPB implementation budget. Finally the consultant who was trying to learn EPB on clients dime blames it on the product and the client not knowing the reality agrees with the consultant.
• Good Hardware resources : During the demo or POC it makes perfect sense to isolate the instance and have only few people using or only the EPB implementation team. This helps in quicker isolation of the issues and hence resolution. Also make sure that the hardware resources like memory, CPU bandwidth are adequate. At one of my clients the instance they provided did not have enough memory so every now and then we would get the memory leakage and thrown out of the application. This becomes really irritating and feels like nobody is interested in implementing except yourself.
• User Involvement: Work with the users and get a commitment for their time during the entire implementation process. Users are the end customers of this product and they are going to use it on day-to-day basis so it is mandatory that they become part of the implementation team.
• Smaller Scope: Start with a smaller scope and slowly expand to cover other aspects of your implementation. For e.g if you have multiple set of books with different chart of accounts then start with the consolidated set of books or just one set of books. Finish off with one small scope, get familiar with it and then go forward with the wider scope.

EPF provides a nice feature to reset the EPF and EPB setups which is an indirect way of uninstalling EPB. With this feature you may as well start the real implementation in the same instance after you are done with the POC.

EPB with the latest rollup patches has become very robust and stable. The key to success is fully patched up instance and resources with the right skill set.

Hope this was useful, please drop me a line (infocaptor@gmail.com ) if you have further questions or need more information.