Oracle E-Business Suite users realize that extracting relevant information and using it intelligently to further the business has quickly become a key requirement of their jobs. Business intelligence (BI) within E-Business Suite took a big step when Oracle acquired Siebel Systems in 2006. Siebel’s analytics technology became the foundation of Oracle’s BI software, and it continues to build on top of that foundation today with its Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, also commonly known as OBIEE. Development of OBIEE as well as competing third-party tools have helped Oracle E-Business Suite users attain further insight into their enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications –what they’ve done, what they’re doing, and how their functions connect to the success of the business. But challenges remain. Integration of data between E-Business Suite and other applications is still a struggle for some. Similarly, unifying the display of all the application data through as few dashboards as possible is crucial and still something with which organizations struggle. And finally, finding the right predictive analysis tools moving forward is important.
Prior to acquiring Siebel, Oracle was largely known as a niche player in BI, trailing leaders such as IBM Cognos, SAS, Business Objects (now owned by SAP) and Siebel. The almost $6 billion purchase of Siebel allowed Oracle to open up its BI capabilities to heterogeneous environments. No longer could Oracle BI draw only from Oracle applications sitting on top of Oracle databases. That made it and OBIEE more viable as an enterprise-wide BI platform. Oracle made another big purchase in 2007 that furthered its BI capabilities when it bought Hyperion for about $3 billion. Before being acquired by Oracle, Hyperion had been considered one of the leaders in BI by analyst firms such as Forrester and Gartner. Hyperion
Essbase, an online analytical processing (OLAP) server, had drawn much attention in the industry and is now an Oracle product. Oracle has since developed and advanced the capabilities of OBIEE. Some its major components today include:
• Oracle BI Server: The repository and foundation for all BI data within OBIEE.
• Oracle BI Publisher: Previously called XML Publisher, it merges multiple data sources to produce informational reports (not dashboards).
• Oracle BI Answers: A query and analysis tool to create charts, tables and other display items from multiple data sources.
• Hyperion tools: Various reporting and analytical tools from Hyperion to analyze Essbase.
Integrations
Integrating data and applications is a major priority for system and application managers.In a 2010 reader survey, application managers said that integrating applications and data was their third greatest challenge, behind only software upgrades and maintaining system availability and performance. One of the knocks on Oracle BI in the past has been its lack of integration. Companies often have disparate software solutions to deal with the various aspects of their business. So they might have used Oracle E-Business Suite for financials, but then they might use Siebel for CRM, PeopleSoft for human resources, and some legacy, homegrown application for supply chain management. Pulling all that data into one platform and display it using one dashboard is a major challenge.
Well, now Oracle owns Siebel and PeopleSoft. So in some cases, rather than working to integrate BI data themselves, businesses can just wait for Oracle to do it for them. Oracle has also done some work itself to build integration into its BI around Oracle Business Suite and other applications. Most notable here is Oracle’s common enterprise information model. That allows end users to latch onto data from various sources sitting in different locations, including relational databases, flat files, Oracle sources, and non-Oracle sources. All that data can then be translated into a dashboard for the end user that is removed from the underlying data. The result? Different end users can have different custom dashboards without having to get their fingers dirty in the data themselves.
Though Oracle has done a lot to advance BI around E-Business Suite – through acquisitions and its own development – some companies still choose to go with a third-party BI tool. Many companies don’t want to use every one of the hundreds of Oracle E-Business Suite modules. They might like Oracle E-Business Suite for financials, but they like SAP for their manufacturing application, and something else for their sales application. In other words, they’re going for a best-of-breed approach rather than locking in with one vendor. In such a case, Oracle E-Business Suite users may want to find third-party tools that they feel better integrate and report that data independently of any single application vendor. They might feel that pulling data from different systems is a little harder to do with Oracle tools, ecause they think Oracle tools pull data best from its own applications. A related reason may be that a company is planning on eventually moving to Oracle BI tools, but won’t do it until it migrates its applications to E-Business Suite. Right now it has something that works for it, and doesn’t want to change what isn’t yet broken. Finally, it may just come down to cost. According to the popular BI Survey, two of the main deterrents to a wider rollout of OBIEE were the cost of software and the cost of implementation. The survey revealed that users also reported query performance as being too slow. On the flipside, according to the survey organizations choose OBIEE for two main reasons: because of the Oracle name, and because of OBIEE’s integration with other Oracle applications.
Future
BI tools for Oracle E- Business Suite users have come a long way. At one time it consisted largely of siloed reports only for Oracle E-Business Suite applications sitting on top of Oracle databases. Now application managers can get reports that stretch across Oracle and non Oracle applications, analysis that goes beyond looking at past trends, and views into the impacts of changes on the entire organization, and not just specific departments. The idea of pervasive BI is one often touted as being a trend in BI as a whole, and within Oracle E-Business Suite as well. BI’s penetration in most organizations is around 22% -- that means that about 22% of employees access BI tools for their jobs. According to the 2010 Business Intelligence Challenges and Priorities Survey 58% said that one of the most noticeable differences in how their organization will use BI compared to last year will be that more business users will access BI systems. “Every single person in an organization should have access to fact-based insight.Every business process should have insight.Whether that will actually happen is another question. The vision of pervasive BI has been a vision for many years. Another trend in BI for Oracle E-Business Suite is real-time and predictive analytics. Being able to gather data and report it out to end users as they’re making a transaction presumably allows them to make more intelligent transactions. For example, an organization has a supply chain problem, and realizes that it is not getting products from a given vendor in time. It can then dive deeper and realize that it’s not getting the products in time because accounts payable isn’t paying the vendor in a timely manner. That information can then be used to predict how the supply chain process would go if accounts payable paid on time and vendors sent products out in a timely manner.
The goal of growing BI penetration and improving real-time analytics is simple: Get specific information to the right people so that they can make good decisions. Oracle E-Business suite users aren’t much different. They need accurate BI tools if they’re expected to further the goals of the companies for which they work.
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