Having worked with Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) products for several years, some colleagues and I recently spent some time evaluating a third party offering called “QlikView”. Whilst our main interest at Projected has always been Oracle’s BI Applications for E-Business Suite, the buzz being generated around QlikView intrigued us. The Oracle BI Applications provide pre-packaged analytics reporting built on OBIEE, so we were keen to see if QlikView was a suitable competitor to BI Applications for our E-Business Suite customers.
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Posts Tagged ‘Business Intelligence’
QlikView versus BI Applications and OBIEE
Friday, March 9th, 2012 by Andy CoatesProject Analytics – Help At Last
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 by Projected ConsultingWhy do I need Project Analytics?
How many of you have been through an Oracle Projects implementation either as a client or functional consultant and can recognise this situation? You have worked through fact finding interviews, discussions and CRPs, you now have a configured Oracle Projects system to meet the detailed transactional needs and then somewhere along in all this process you come to look at reporting. The conversation is then a little tense as Oracle Projects is really good at getting data in and not always so nice at helping you get it out again, especially not in aggregate.
In other words, it is exactly at the sort of level that directors, financial controllers and senior project managers may wish to see useful information that Oracle Projects is probably at its least amenable. For functional consultants, such as me, this has always been an uncomfortable area, despite significant improvements delivered in the application over the years and the power of tools such as Discoverer. Now at last some welcome help is coming our way through the recently released (May 2009) Project Analytics, part of Oracle BI Applications 7.9.6.
The difficulty of deriving real insight and intelligence from detailed transactions is of course not restricted to Oracle Projects, it affects all systems built using the relational data model. As a chartered accountant and non-technical functional consultant I have to tread carefully here as I am not a technical consultant but in essence relational systems such as Oracle EBS are terrific at getting data in as they avoid duplication and provide all sorts of relationship and integrity controls between related pieces of data.
However, because of these very same relationships within such Transactional (OLTP) systems, pulling data out again requires considerable skill (understanding the complex relationships) and computing power (potentially large data volumes and much joining together of data separated in the relational design.) Over years there has therefore grown up a range of Business Intelligence (BI) tools designed to help aggregate, collate and provide real insight into the detail so assiduously collected by OLTP systems such as Oracle EBS.
Project Analytics is a new Business Intelligence solution from Oracle, the technical details of which have appeared in Antony Heljula’s guest article Review of Oracle BI Applications 7.9.6 and Project Analytics and Andy Coates’ Oracle BI Applications 7.9.6 – Project Analytics Screenshots. I hop that this short article will give something of a user eye view of the benefits of Project Analytics and how much help it can be.
What Does Project Analytics Give You?
Project Analytics has four main components:
- Pre-built warehouse
- Prebuilt Extract Transform and Load (ETL) process. The Analytics tools can gather data from all manner of places through “adapters”, one of which is for Oracle EBS
- Pre-mapped Meta data including over 350 pre-built calculations and metrics
- Best practice library of over 120 reports.
Oracle BI Applications 7.9.6 – Project Analytics Screenshots
Monday, August 24th, 2009 by Andy CoatesFollowing on from Antony Heljula’s excellent blog post on Project Analytics (Review of Oracle BI Applications 7.9.6 and Project Analytics), here are some screenshots of the application:-
The Project Analytics dashboard index page, with full descriptions for all of the out-of-the-box dashboards.
Review of Oracle BI Applications 7.9.6 and Project Analytics
Thursday, August 20th, 2009 by Projected ConsultingWe would like to welcome Tony Heljula as our first guest Blogger. Tony is a Technical Architect for Peak Indicators, specialists in the Oracle Business Intelligence product stack.
Project Analytics
There has been quite a bit of interest surrounding the new BI Applications 7.9.6 release, one reason in particular is because of new Project Analytics application.
First things first, whenever you get your hands on a new release of BI Applications you want to know if there are any general improvements to the technical components and install process. I’m glad to say that there are some improvements:
- With Informatica Power Center 8.6, there is no longer an additional Service Pack to install
- The Oracle Data-Warehouse Administration Console (DAC) has a progress bar when importing metadata
- The Oracle DAC software is now a separate installable component (on both Linux/Unix and Windows)
We tested out the BI Apps Project Analytics install process using both the Oracle EBS Vision 11 and Vision 12 environments; the good news is that it was a pretty straight forward exercise – the ETL full load went through seamlessly except one hiccup where there was a duplicate record in the Employee SCD staging table…. a quick fix required, before restarting the ETL.
The Project Analytics full load took approx 1.5 hours (when we ran an ETL that also included all the Financials modules however, it did take quite a bit longer).
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