Dashboards, Reporting & Business Intelligence

Your business intelligence software will only ever be as good as your company’s attitude towards it. Here are a few ways that businesses end up sabotaging their own business intelligence initiatives:

• Unrealistic Expectations – Believing that just because the software has been paid for that you’ll have compliance to this new system across the board is, unfortunately, not enough. Before the software system is purchased, it is important that a core group be designated to lead the initiative and help achieve compliance. This group will be responsible for orchestrating the rollout of the business intelligence software and maintaining it moving forward, as well as eliminating any old systems of data collection that could cause duplication.
• Limiting Access to Results – In companies that allow limited access to reports, the sales team, marketing department, and other key teams and groups are left out of the loop and the business intelligence software is not used to its full potential. While business intelligence reports are very important during the decision making process at the corporate level, they can also help guide the teams that have the most face time with your customers, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and retention.
• Poor Data Quality – If the data your program is using is poor then the results it produces will be unreliable, no matter how excellent the business intelligence software is out of the box. No one will end up using the information during the decision making process or while interacting with customers after being burned by shoddy results. The initiative will crumble before it gets off the ground. By entrusting the core group with data quality, you can follow through with your program knowing that poor existing data will be cleaned up and that new data coming in will be quality from the get go.
• Resistance to Change – Business intelligence doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When you choose your business intelligence software, you need to find a vendor who can help you pick a product that can adapt to changing variables or that can support additional applications as time goes on. Both your customers and your employees will probably have some suggestions for how to improve your system within the first couple of months or even weeks of its launch, so you must be ready and willing to change your business intelligence program.
• Winging It – Without a clearly defined set of variables and objectives, any company will have a hard time finding value in their business intelligence software. The core group should be aware of what your company’s goals are and what will be the key milestones towards those goals. They should also know exactly what constitutes revenue and the specifics of other important variables when they process incoming data. With a clear view of what the business intelligence initiative was expected to accomplish, they will be able to help the system provide useful business intelligence for the entire company.

This is a quick announcement. I am scheduled for presentation on OBIEE and GL Reporting.

This is the same presentation that was accepted last year (2008) at OAUG with title “GL reporting on steroids using Discoverer and OBIEE” but unfortunately due to client commitment I couldn’t make it.

This presentation is about how to make use of GL chart of account hierarchies in OBIEE. Since OBIEE is the de-facto BI app from Oracle the presentation will focus on building GL hierarchies in the repository. The same can be accomplished using Discoverer.

I will make the presentation available when its ready

When deciding to implement BI Apps for OBIEE it is worth to understand what each packaged analytics contents are and how do they map to the Oracle e-Business Suite modules. I am going to start a series on OBIEE explaining each analytics module and then discuss on the drawbacks of each and how to go about adding customizations to the package analytics.

There are lot of do’s and don’ts when it comes to customizations to any seeded content. The usual still holds true “Oracle will not support any customizations”

But in my experience I have done customizations to the seeded Oracle Apps EUL and gone to the extent of customizing seeded Dashboards in Daily Business Intelligence. There are always rules to be followed and certain precautions to be taken so that your customization do not break any future patching. So there is always a risk.

Following is the mapping between the analytics and ebs modules

There’s no escaping it: these are tough economic times. Everywhere you go you hear about how bad the economy is doing, whether it’s news about the stock market, another major company in trouble, or the credit crisis. Making your business successful in times like these may sound like a daunting task, but with the help of business intelligence software, your company can still thrive.

The success of your business in any economy relies on a lot more than some data and statistics, but what you do with that data can greatly improve your company. The performance of your company is only as good as the performance of your projects, so having the data to analyze the performance and management of your projects is essential. Business intelligence software allows you to track the performance of your projects and make decisions for your company that will improve both the day-to-day tasks and the overall organization of the company. With the right information, you can make your projects and your company more efficient, focused, and successful, regardless of the economy.

For some companies, being able to see the relationship between differing sets of data is just as important as the data itself. As business intelligence software continues to improve, the ability to analyze those data relationships is also improving. Using business intelligence to understand the complete picture, rather than just the separate pieces, is another tool to stay competitive in a tough economy and keep your business on the path to success.

All of that data isn’t very useful if the software interface isn’t very functional. Many business intelligence software companies are now offering Rich Internet Applications to improve that functionality. Features of such software often include web dashboards, interactive web reports, and the ability to automatically generate spreadsheets that everyone is familiar with.

Don’t let a volatile economy affect the success of your company. Business intelligence software is a key element to guiding your business through the coming months and years, improving performance, and keeping your company focused.

Connection Pool is a very interesting concept in OBIEE. If you are from Discoverer background then you never had to deal with it at the Oracle Discoverer Administrator level. There are java connection pool settings which is different and application server connection pools but these are the settings which are configured by the DBAs.

Even in OBIEE, it is recommended that DBAs have their input in deciding the connection pool settings

The connection pool is an object in the Physical layer that describes access to the data source. It contains information about the connection between the Oracle BI Server and that data source.

The Physical layer in the Administration Tool contains at least one connection pool for each database. When you create the physical layer by importing a schema for a data source, the connection pool is created automatically. You can configure multiple connection pools for a database. Connection pools allow multiple concurrent data source requests (queries) to share a single database connection, reducing the overhead of connecting to a database.

For each connection pool, you must specify the maximum number of concurrent connections allowed. After this limit is reached, the Oracle BI Server routes all other connection requests to another connection pool or, if no other connection pools exist, the connection request waits until a connection becomes available.

Increasing the allowed number of concurrent connections can potentially increase the load on the underlying database accessed by the connection pool. Test and consult with your DBA to make sure the data source can handle the number of connections specified in the connection pool. Also, if the data sources have a charge back system based on the number of connections, you might want to limit the number of concurrent connections to keep the charge-back costs down.

In addition to the potential load and costs associated with the database resources, the Oracle BI Server allocates shared memory for each connection upon server startup. This raises the number of connections and increases Oracle BI Server memory usage