Business Intelligence is a term much used recently. Wikipedia defines it, somewhat unhelpfully, as:

“the skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. Business intelligence may also refer to the collected information itself.”

Surprisingly the first use of the term was as long ago as 1958 and even the recent sense of "concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems" goes back to 1989, so why all the fuss now?

There are essentially two forces driving the growing use of business intelligence in its many forms:

• An awareness in business generally that raw data accumulated as a side-effect of processing transactions contains a myriad of correlations, trends and other useful information and that information may be used to provide the intelligence to inform and support business decisions.  Absolutely key here is the idea that better business decisions can be taken if data are accessible and analysed quickly and effectively to yield real business insight.
• A more IT technical appreciation that transaction processing systems are exactly that, they are good at processing transactions, and not so good at analysing and reporting on the transactions they assiduously collect.  Most modern transaction processing systems use the relational model.  Duplication is avoided and all sorts of relationship and integrity controls ensure a high degree of accuracy of the processed data.  However because of these very same relationships within such On Line Transaction Processing 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)

These two powerful forces have lead to the development and use of specific business intelligence tools.  From the BI tools have grown BI Applications and in the following sections we will look at Oracle’s BI Application offerings, in particular Project Analytics.  Project Analytics was released as part of Oracle BI Applications 7.9.6 in May 2009 and offers real opportunity for Project-centric businesses to get to the high value information within their Oracle Projects systems and so to be able to take better business decisions.
 

Oracle uses the term Oracle Business Intelligence to cover a wide range of heterogeneous business intelligence tools and applications, among which is Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus, understandably abbreviated to OBIEE+.

OBIEE+ is essentially a BI platform made up of common components upon which Oracle has built a wide range of analytics applications.  As well as Project Analytics, there are analytics for Financials, HR, Marketing, Order Management Fulfilment, Sales, Service, Contact Centre and Supply Chain. 

OBIEE+ has the following components (though not all are used in each analytic product):

• Oracle BI Server
  Common enterprise business model and abstraction layer
• Oracle BI Answers
  Ad-hoc query and reporting
• Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards
  Highly interactive dashboards for accessing business intelligence and applications content
• Oracle BI Delivers
  Proactive business activity monitoring and alerting
• Oracle BI Disconnected Analytics
  Full analytical functionality for the mobile professionals
• Oracle BI Publisher (formerly known as XML Publisher)
  Enterprise reporting and distribution of "pixel-perfect" reports
• Oracle BI Briefing Books
  Snapshots of dashboard pages to view and share in offline mode. 

Click here to see an Oracle presentation about BI Applications (Flash)

Projected Consulting Ltd, an Oracle Gold Partner, has successfully implemented and rolled out Oracle BI Applications at four different UK organisations.

Projected’s approach to the implementation and exploitation of the BI Applications is from a purely business requirements and reporting perspective. Our consultants are E-Business Suite functional experts with strong financial and business backgrounds. We will challenge organisations about their existing reporting processes and methods. Our consultants will also challenge the source of data and encourage the data to be extracted where possible from the source system, Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). In conjunction with our BI Developers, our OBI teams work together to ensure clients recognise the value from their purchase of BI Applications as soon as possible.

The Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) versions of the present releases of BI Applications will take you so far to meet your reporting requirements. In our experience, the standard dashboards with each of the BI Apps do not offer organisations all the reporting views they require. Projected know how to bridge the gaps and extend the Apps to give the real value.

Projected BI Applications Implementation Experience to date

Telecommunications Organisation

• Installed and configured Financial, Procurement & Spend and Project Analytics
• Ran all CRP and UAT sessions
• Built client specific dashboards
• Rolled out BI Apps to the business, including training and support
• Presently onsite for Phase 2 exploitation and optimisation

Transport Organisation

• EBS functional support to main SI for Out of the Box Financial, Supply Chain and Procurement & Spend Analytics

Ministry of Defence Supplier

• Roll out of Project Analytics to the business including recommendations from Projected Health Check on reconciliation and optimisation
• Capture, define and implement requirements for specific analytics
• Supported integration with Essbase for federated querying at higher levels of WBS
• Supported staff in the install and configuration of Project Analytics
• Enabled staff to make the most of the data available in the data warehouse that was not in the presentation layer

Government Department

• Installed and configured Project Analytics
• Ran all CRP sessions
• Built client specific dashboards
• Extended star schema to include Project Management (PJT) data in dashboards
• Extended security model
• Configured single sign-on to enable drill down into EBS Projects through action links

 Projected Fixed Price Implementations

Projected recognise the value to customers of using the BI Analytics applications successfully and also, therefore, the need to deliver real intelligence rapidly. To this end we have developed some fixed price offerings, see Quick Start and Proof of Concept.

Project Analytics is the latest of the OBIEE+ based BI applications to be released and is made up of four main components:

• Pre-built warehouse
• Pre-built Extract Transform and Load (ETL) process
• Pre-mapped metadata including over 350 pre-built calculations and metrics
• Best practice library of over 120 reports.

The Analytics tools can gather data from all manner of places through adapters, one of which is for Oracle EBS, so even if you need data from outside EBS altogether it can be accessed. 

The pre-built dashboards and metadata report against the following Subject Areas:

• Project Billing
• Project Budgets
• Project Costs
• Project Forecasts
• Project Funding
• Project Performance
• Project Revenue

Most of these are self explanatory as they map to areas within Oracle Projects. The Performance subject area has the main financial performance measures drawn from the other areas collected together for ease of use.

The result of Oracle’s investment in this pre-building is an immediately useful set of reports and the capacity to develop reports and dashboards in a very short space of time.  More good news is that the dashboards are role based and sit within Oracle’s “Single-Sign-On” regime so security is respected and enforced. 

Here is an example of one of the "out of the box" dashboards, the Project Executive Overview:

Click here to see an Oracle presentation about Project Analytics (Flash)

Projected Consulting recognise the value to customers of using the BI Analytics applications successfully and also therefore the need to deliver real intelligence rapidly. To this end we have developed some fixed price offerings:

• Project Analytics Proof of Concept
• Project Analytics Quick Start
• Financial Analytics Proof of Concept
• Financial Analytics Quick Start

These offerings each provide rapid deployment of a BI Applications module, predictable implementation cost and time frame, fast ROI across the organisation and reduced implementation complexity.

Project Analytics has the real prospect of becoming a "one stop shop" for all key project performance data, whether inside or outside EBS and will be a desirable addition to many Oracle Projects sites.  It is good to use  intuitive and has a comprehensive range of pre-built content to get started.

If you need report on data from outside Oracle Projects or even outside E-Business Suite there are tools and features to help.  Projected Consulting have the skills and services to help you use Project Analytics to gain real business insight from your Projects data.