Intelligent Enterprise

Better Insight for Business Decisions

RSS
Webcasts
Whitepapers
Subscribe
Home

May 31, 2003

Oracle Drill Down

Already a dominant player in data management, Oracle is on a quest to deliver the business intelligence "stack" as a tightly integrated whole. Is the sum greater than the parts for your business analysis needs?

by Jack Hakim and Tom Spitzer

Continued from Page 1

Predefined Intelligence

Oracle's E-Business Suite offers the Business Intelligence System (BIS), which is built on top of the company's BI technology stack. The BIS package, includes Discoverer workbooks and Oracle Reports, and is integrated with intelligence modules for financials, purchasing, operations, and others in the set of business functions supported by Oracle. Analytic tools within BIS make use of OLAP services, ODM, and Oracle's workflow and alert features. For example, you can define a workflow that triggers a sequence of alerts and actions that should occur when the operations function fails to meet a critical threshold.

BIS includes a predefined Oracle E-Business Suite EUL for Discoverer that eliminates having to create the EUL manually, as well as sets of predefined queries and reports. This EUL provides a simplified, business-oriented layer that sits above the complex data model employed by the E-Business Suite database, allowing users to create and modify analysis reports without having to understand the data model.

We can group BIS applications into three areas:

Strategic enterprise management, such as Balanced Scorecard and activity-based management
Analysis, planning, simulation, and mining, such as Sales Analyzer, and Financial Analyzer
Operational Intelligence, which provides operational reporting for most of the E-Business applications.

Users work with applications in all three areas through role-based portals that include prebuilt workbooks, portlets, and reports. For example, predefined analytic reports for a manufacturing manager could include Manufacturing Status, Planning Performance, Production Quality, and so on.

BI Beans

Oracle provides BI Beans components to enable creation of analysis models that extend beyond Discoverer's OLAP query capabilities. With BI Beans, developers create both Java client and HTML client applications. Most developers will build BI Beans applications within Oracle9i JDeveloper, which includes wizards that support creation of BI Beans applications, integration with the BI Beans Catalog, and integration with the BI Beans JSP tag library, which leverages wizards that define HTML client applications built with Java Server Pages.

Presentation Beans display data in the form of tables, crosstabs, or graphs. In the Java version, Presentation Beans provide an interactive experience, giving users the ability to rotate dimensions; select cells and charts, and format them; and use a clipboard to move data from other resources into analysis. With OLAP Beans, developers can retrieve lists of available dimensions, which they can then display in various ways to specify and initiate queries and calculations. For example, users can select measures and dimensions with the query builder through a dialog that's nearly identical to Discoverer's.

The BI Beans catalog maintains all objects that developers or users create with BI Beans. BI Beans' persistence services support the storage and retrieval of objects, including favorite queries and custom measures, which represent users' analysis sessions in the BI Beans Catalog. The persistence services also provide user interface components for performing these functions and browsing the catalog.