Oracle BI Applications - Giving the Users the Reports They Really Want

Oracle BI Applications:
Giving Users The Reports They Really Want
Mike Vickers, Consulting Manager, Rittman Mead
UKOUG Apps’13 Conference, London, Oct 2013
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About the Speaker
• Mike Vickers, Consulting Manager at Rittman Mead
• 4 years with Rittman Mead
• 6 years of Oracle BI, EPM & DW technologies
• 15+ years experience of implementing BI
• Presenter at previous UKOUG events
• Contributor to Rittman Mead Blog :
http://www.rittmanmead.com/blog
• Email : mike.vickers@rittmanmead.com
• Twitter : @aneyeonbi
• ...but not Mark Rittman

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About Rittman Mead
• Oracle BI and DW Gold partner
• Winner of five UKOUG Partner of the Year awards in 2013 - including BI
• World leading specialist partner for technical excellence,
solutions delivery and innovation in Oracle BI
• Approximately 80 consultants worldwide
• All expert in Oracle BI and DW
• Offices in US (Atlanta), Europe, Australia and India
• Skills in broad range of supporting Oracle tools:
‣ OBIEE, OBIA
‣ ODIEE
‣ Essbase, Oracle OLAP
‣ GoldenGate
‣ Endeca
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What are the Oracle BI Applications?
• Pre-built and pre-integrated horizontal and industry-specific applications built around OBIEE
• Provides pre-built ETL, conformed dimensional data warehouse, RPD and Catalog
• Covers Oracle EBS, Peoplesoft, Siebel, SAP and Fusion Applications
Integrated
Analytic Apps

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Oracle BI Applications Packaging
• BI Apps is sold as a series of analytic applications - Financial Analytics, HR Analytics etc
• Vertical apps for pharma, banking etc also available
• OBIEE, Oracle Database and ETL tool have to be licensed separately
• Customers typically license 3-4 applications, then build out from there

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Pre-Defined ETL Routines from EBS, PSFT, Siebel, JDE, SAP
• Integrated, conformed dimensional data warehouse
• Deployable on Oracle, MS SQL, IBM DB/2 and Teradata
• Uses embedded ETL tool (historically Informatica) to load data from sources to DW
• Staging tables and presentation tables
• Allows modular deployment
• Lowest grain of information
• Prebuilt aggregates
• History tracking
• Indexing

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Role-Based, “Best Practice” Dashboards and Reports
• BI Apps delivers an integrated RPD that maps DW structures into 3-layer OBIEE model
• Can be customized or extended by the customer - design patterns and quick-start elements
• Suite of “best practice” reports and dashboards, based around BI Apps analytic apps
• Built on OBIEE 11g (since BI Apps 7.9.6.3), can also make use of BI Mobile, Scorecard,
Essbase etc

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Integrated, Enterprise Business Model
• Provides a business-friendly enterprise data model over your BI data warehouse
• Includes hierarchies, calculations, subject areas and other data items
• Allows you to join data from different areas together
• Provides reporting governance, security etc

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But ... It’s Usually Not Exactly What You Want!
• The core data items are useful, but it might not include all your hierarchies, flex-fields etc
• Certain reports could be useful but with a few changes
• It would be useful to be able to link GL and AP numbers, for example...
• Or even create new dashboards more aligned with how you do things
• Some changes require lots of IT work - whole new data sources, for example
• But some can be done at the catalog or data model layer, for example:
‣ Linking one report to another - for supplier information contained in separate reports
‣ Creating links between GL and sub-ledgers
‣ Altering the standard hierarchies to make reporting more meaningful
• Let’s go through three examples...

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Example 1: Report Linking / Workflow

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General Dashboard Design - Requirement
• Users don’t ask for much - “only” exactly the right information,
immediately
‣ Not an unreasonable request with OBIEE
• Need to act on their findings, often for business critical reasons
• Different users have different aims:
‣ Managers - broad business decisions
‣ Operational users - fulfill transactions, make calls etc.

Question

Log in to OBIEE

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Answer

Action


Example - Suppliers At Risk
• Goal is to determine which suppliers are at most risk of deferring.
• Do this by analysing who has been paid late most frequently.
• Relevance of these suppliers at the current time.
• Create a scenario where, in a short time, users can:
‣ Identify the suppliers
‣ Explain the reasons why
‣ Act on it if necessary
Identify

Explain

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Act


Supplier Risk - OOTB
• Supplier information exists but spread across:
‣ Payments Due
‣ Payment Performance
‣ Supplier Report

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Supplier Risk - OOTB
• No single workflow to tackle the problem
• Requires a user to go back and forth between several pages

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Supplier Risk - Example Solution
• Data exists OOTB
‣ Web Cat changes
Web
Web
Cata
• Create
Cata
log
log
‣ New analyses
‣ New dashboard page
RPD
RPD
• Features
‣ Filter based on results of another analysis
ETL & Data Warehouse
‣ Action Links

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• Basic analysis to find all suppliers which have been paid late
• Second analysis from a different subject area
• Filter based on the results from the original analysis

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• Final analysis to expose greater detail
• Action link from dashboard analysis to this report
‣ Behaves as drilldown
• Action link from the final report to external system
‣ HTTP request
‣ Java Method
‣ Web Service
• Action link can accept parameters
‣ Allows for integration with external systems

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Supplier Risk - Finished Example

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Example 2: Linking GL to Sub-Ledgers

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Sub-ledger Linkage - Requirement
• Finance users require linkage between General
Ledger and sub-ledgers
‣ Accounts Payable
‣ Accounts Receivable
‣ Revenue
‣ Purchase Orders
• Validate source system processes have posted
transactions to GL correctly
• Navigate from GL to the respective sub-ledger for
more specific transaction information

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General Ledger

Accounts Payable

Accounts Receivable

Revenue

Purchase Orders

Examples - Validation & GL to AP
• Validation
‣ Compare posted AP payments with the equivalent
transactions in GL
‣ If the results match, the data is valid
• GL to AP
‣ Begin with a GL transactions query on a specific day
and account
‣ Drill down to see the relevant GL Journals and AP
invoices
‣ Should see the totals matching
General Ledger

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Accounts Payable


Sub-ledger Linkage - OOTB
• No reports demonstrating sub-ledger linkage
• Intersection table in the warehouse
‣ W_GL_LINKAGE_INFORMATION_G
• Key field GL Journal ID available in most subject areas
• Not a proper dimension table
‣ Possibility of dropping rows

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Sub-ledger Linkage - Example Solution
• Data exists OOTB
‣ Web Cat changes
• Create
‣ New analyses
‣ New dashboard page
• Features
‣ Filter based on results of another
analysis
‣ Action Links

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Web
Web
Cata
Cata
log
log

RPD
RPD



Sub-ledger Linkage - Validation Example
• Begin with AP payments query
• GL analysis with subquery to get equivalent GL transactions
• Validation row
‣ Union two result sets to sum to 0

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Sub-ledger Linkage - GL to AP Example
• Core GL Transactions report filtered to
Payables, split by:
‣ Account Number
‣ Date
• Simple GL query, prompted on Date
and Account Number
• AP Invoice analysis with subquery on
GL Journal ID

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Sub-ledger Linkage - GL to AP Example

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Sub-ledger Linkage - Finished Example

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Example 3: Altering the Standard (“OOTB”) Hierarchies

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Account Hierarchy - Requirement
• Need to view the parents of an account
‣ Category parents
‣ Account may have multiple parents and be in multiple hierarchies
• Bottom-up view of hierarchy structures
‣ Parent
‣ Grandparent
‣ Great grandparent etc.
• This requirement extends to other segments
‣ Business Unit
‣ Department
‣ Location etc.

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Account Hierarchy - OOTB
• Supports up to 20 levels in the hierarchy for each
segment
‣ Allows drilldown through the levels
• But only has a top-down view of the hierarchy
• Confusion with which column has the parent
‣ B and C have a parent in level 1
‣ Level 1 is the grandparent of D, E, F, G
‣ Level 2 is the parent which is required

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Level 4

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• Account “Supervision” has two parents as displayed below
‣ Total Operating Expenses - Level 2
‣ Total Office Expenses - Level 7
• Each row has same value - the total value attributed to the account
‣ 214,575
• Not appropriate for analysis

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• Account groups
‣ Mandatory in financials deployments
‣ Managed using CSV files
‣ Can alleviate the need for category parents
• But requires a full load when groups need changing
‣ Not ideal

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Account Parents - Example Solution
• Not supported by Data Model
• Physical
‣ New column(s) in database for Account Parent
Web
• RPD
Web
Cata
Cata
log
‣ New select view and physical alias
log
‣ New logical table
RPD
RPD
‣ New presentation columns
• Web Catalog
‣ New analyses
‣ New dashboard

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Account Parents - Example - Physical
• Add 2 columns to W_HIERARCHY_DS and W_HIERARCHY_D
‣ Parent Name: X_PARENT_NAME
‣ Parent Code: X_PARENT_CODE
• Edit Informatica mappings to populate column:
‣ SDE_ORA_Stage_ValueSetHier_DeriveRange
- Level2 at the start of this mapping is the immediate parent
‣ SIL_HierarchyDimension
• This change will apply to all segments

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Account Parents - Example - RPD
• Create a physical view in the RPD based on the W_HIERARCHY_D table
‣ This prevents duplicate rows when querying
• Alternatives
‣ Physical table using PLP
‣ Materialised view if on Oracle
SELECT * FROM(
SELECT ROW_NUMBER ( ) OVER (
PARTITION BY Hier.HIER20_CODE, PARENT_CODE, HIER_CODE
ORDER BY HIER_CODE, Hier.HIER20_CODE, PARENT_CODE
) AS ROW_NUM,
Hier.PARENT_CODE,
Hier.PARENT_NAME,
Hier.HIER_CODE,
Hier.HIER20_CODE,
Hier.ROW_WID,
Hier.HIER20_NAME
FROM
W_HIERARCHY_D Hier)
WHERE ROW_NUM = 1
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• Join to the correct segment alias, in this case Segment 3 for
account
‣ HIER_CODE = SEGMENT_LOV_ID
‣ HIER20_CODE = SEGMENT_VAL_CODE
• Create a logical table and associated Hierarchy
‣ Map to the Segment table alias as well as your view in the
table source
‣ Join to facts in the business layer
• Map columns into presentation layer

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• The resulting logical diagram

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• The resulting physical diagram
• Can use this for other segments
‣ Require an alias of the view for each segment - as with
W_HIERARCHY_D

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Account Parents - Example - Web Catalog
• Simple analyses yields compelling results at the dashboard level
• First analysis
‣ Account Parent
‣ Transaction Amount
• Second analysis
‣ Account Parent (prompted)
‣ Account
‣ Transaction Amount
• Action Link from first to the second

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Account Parents - Finished Example

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Summary
• Oracle BI Applications is a great, quick-start way to deliver analytics to your organization
• Main value is in the ETL, and the data warehouse data model
• The reports, dashboards, and typically hierarchies etc are usually customized
• In this presentation we looked at three examples, all done at the BI layer
‣ More fundamental customizations take place at the ETL and DW layer - IT tasks
• Rittman Mead have extensive experience implementing and customizing the BI Apps
‣ Either full-implementation, from start-to-finish
‣ Or helping organizations get the best from their existing investment

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Thank You for Attending!
• Thank you for attending this presentation, and more information can be found at
http://www.rittmanmead.com
• Contact us at info@rittmanmead.com or mark.rittman@rittmanmead.com
• Look out for our book, “Oracle Business Intelligence Developers Guide” out now!
• Follow-us on Twitter (@rittmanmead) or Facebook (facebook.com/rittmanmead)

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Oracle BI Applications - Giving the Users the Reports They Really Want

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