MIPRO Unfiltered » OBIEE

Oracle Mobile BI

Larry Zagata — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:20:27 +0000

We have discussed OBIEE and its analytics capabilities in detail in previous blog posts here on Unfiltered. So it follows that we’d call out that Oracle announced the availability of a new Oracle BI Mobile option, which allows any OBI 11g customer to deploy all their existing dashboards to mobile devices (iPad, iPhone) without any re-programming or manual porting efforts. In today’s remote-but-connected work environments, the ability to have analytics always available is key. As we have emphasized in the past, BI is much more than reporting, and having mobile capabilities allows you to make business decisions while traveling and away from the office. We’re not talking second-rate representations of your dashboards and analytics, either — we’re talking about the real thing. In mission critical environments, no longer do you have to wait days to take action if you’re away from the office. In many instances hours (let alone days) can be critical, so extending BI analytics to mobile devices can have a very broad positive impact.

Below are links to two short but very good demos on Mobile BI applications. You should check them out.

Here’s an intro to Oracle Mobile BI.
Here’s a brief rundown on Oracle Financial Analytics Application for mobile.

After reviewing the demos, if you have any questions, please let me know. As always, I’m happy to chat.

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More links:

MIPRO Consulting main website.

MIPRO on Twitter and Facebook.

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Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management

Larry Zagata — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:27:00 +0000

In previous blog posts (see here and here) and our Business Intelligence Manifesto whitepaper we have discussed the importance of aligning metrics and goals from top to bottom in the organization. Aligning metrics and goals allow the organization to measure its performance consistently against the key objectives of the entire organization. This means that every business unit, department and manager on down is in alignment to help drive the business to success. We discussed this alignment in the context of dashboards and metrics and ensuring they are in sync. We can now take this a step farther by introducing Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management.

From Oracle’s product page:

Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management extends the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) with capabilities that enable strategic goals to be communicated across the organization and monitoring progress over time. Armed with this insight, employees can understand their impact on achieving success and align their actions accordingly. As they use scorecards to measure the outcome of their actions, they can quickly make adjustments as needed to successfully achieve the goals.

BENEFITS:

Organizational alignment — Provide a framework that organizes strategic thinking and performance measurement
Clarify and build consensus on strategic direction — Communicate strategy and measures of success
Align behavior and increase focus on priority initiatives — Ability to act on insights by invoking a business process from scorecards
Support strategic planning — Provide metric relationship analysis and organizational learning

This is a tremendously powerful (and welcome!) tool to help organizations extend Oracle BI and keep progress aligned with strategic goals over time. Remember, BI’s job is to help the organization run more strategically and effectively. Once you make the investment in BI, you need to monitor performance, just as you would a key user-facing application you launch in production. Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management is massively helpful in this regard.

Here’s an excellent Flash video showing a sample scenario in which Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management is used. Very helpful in visualizing its role in your OBIEE practice.

Questions? I’d love to help. Ask away in the comments or send me an email.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

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NEW: The Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms

Jeff Ventura — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:55:19 +0000

Gartner has posted the 2010 Magic Quadrant for BI platforms, and in terms of hitting a sweetspot between ability to execute and vision, Oracle has been squarely positioned in the ‘Leaders’ quadrant.

The full report is full of good information, but there are a few things worth noting:

Oracle has established the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) platform as the “BI standard” in 82% of the references that responded to our Magic Quadrant survey. It also has the widest range of BI platform capabilities employed (for example, reporting, dashboards, ad hoc query).
Oracle was one of the top three vendors for product quality.
Perception is positive and strong. Oracle has created within its references a very positive perception of its vision and success. Magic Quadrant survey respondents had a better opinion of its future and success than they did for its competitors.

Download the full report here.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

PeopleTools 8.5 and OBIEE: There’s Value in Those Hills

Larry Zagata — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:39:39 +0000

We have posted multiple posts on the new PeopleTools 8.5 release (here’s our most popular; here’s our shameless plug), in addition to several posts on the value of Oracle OBIEE and BI apps. However, today’s post will talk about PeopleTools 8.5: for customers who have both PeopleSoft and Oracle OBIEE, there is some additional value to upgrading to PeopleTools 8.5.

With PeopleTools 8.5 there are some new integration capabilities which may offer significant value and bring your organization closer to the ideal state of embedding business intelligence into the business process.

From the PeopleTools 8.5 release notes:

OBIEE to PeopleSoft URL Integration

Developers and OBIEE administrators can enable navigation from OBIEE Answers or Dashboards to the PeopleSoft transaction page without hard coding the PeopleSoft URL during OBIEE setup and configuration. PeopleTools exposes a component API as a standard Web Service that can be consumed by OBIEE at design time. In addition, the web service can expose the key structure information when appended to the URL as a query string. Including the key information enables the system to identify a specific transaction row within a PeopleSoft table.

After successfully defining and embedding the action links to specific PeopleSoft table columns (DeptID and SETID), when the user clicks on the action links for a given row of data (DeptID = 10000 and SetID = SHARE) the bind parameters of the PeopleSoft Component URL are mapped to their actual runtime values. The user is then directly navigated to the PeopleSoft Department component, which displays transaction details specific to the row of data in the OBIEE Answers of Dashboards.

This is a wonderful feature allowing direct navigation from OBIEE to the original transaction details.

Another worthwhile bit:

OBIEE Report Integration

PeopleTools enables you to integrate OBIEE reports with PeopleSoft applications. To enable OBIEE report integration, PeopleTools includes the Analytics servlet, an Oracle BI Presentation service plug-in and part of Oracle BI Web Component. This servlet communicates to the Oracle BI Presentation server and acts as a client which forwards the request made from PeopleSoft to the listening Oracle BI Presentation service. The OBIEE server provides the HTML markup to be displayed in its entirety in the PeopleSoft user interface.

After configuring and deploying the Analytics servlet, you must define the analytics server in the PeopleSoft application. Once the PeopleSoft application recognizes the analytics server, you can retrieve, access, and view OBIEE report details as your security permits. In this implementation, you must configure and store the OBIEE administrator credentials in the PeopleSoft application. The PeopleSoft application uses these credentials to login to the OBIEE server, impersonate a real user, and establish a session.

You can configure OBIEE reports as pagelets, embedded pagelets, and as transaction pages. As part of OBIEE integration, Pagelet Wizard supports the use of OBIEE reports as the data source for any of the supported output types. Embeddable pagelets can be used to create Related Content services for the OBIEE reports. Using the related content framework, these OBIEE report type of related content services can be used with application transaction pages in a context sensitive manner. The context is provided by the page fields on the transactional page, and is used to render OBIEE reports, based on these page field values.

Another terrific feature that allows users to execute OBIEE reports based upon the context of the transaction page they are on. This allows BI to become part of the business transaction process and not an afterthought. These new features should really open up BI capabilities for those customers owning both PeopleSoft and Oracle OBIEE.

Questions about this? Simply email me.

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Previously by Larry Zagata:

Related whitepapers (PDF):

MiPro’s Business Intelligence Manifesto: Six Requirements for an Effective BI Deployment

Related Services:

It’s All About the ROI: The Value of Oracle BI Apps for PeopleSoft (Part III)

Larry Zagata — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:19:22 +0000

Previously, we have discussed the value of Oracle BI apps for PeopleSoft, and we have examined some key implementation considerations. Today, in this final post on the topic, I would like to chat about the biggest buzzword of them all: ROI.

The key question for many customers is this: does it really make sense to buy the BI apps versus build something from scratch? In order to discuss ROI, we first must clear the air about build vs. buy and ROI calculations. In this scenario, remember we are talking not only about the reports, dashboards, metrics and source PeopleSoft system analysis, but also about the data warehouse structure and all of the associated ETL scripts.

When we talk about ROI, we are really talking about two types: “hard” ROI which translates to real, measureable cost savings and soft ROI which is less measurable but still benefits the organization. Hard ROI is a challenging one to pinpoint in a blog post, as it really is very much dependent upon each organization’s specific circumstances. To accommodate this for the purposes of this post, we will generalize some hard ROI statements and focus more on the soft ROI of the BI apps.

HARD ROI

No one deploys technology for the fun of it; in the enterprise, it is deployed to solve problems and drive to a business objective. The task at hand is to understand these problems and validate them. For evaluating hard ROI, I suggest you start with these two important questions:

What will your organization be able to do with the BI apps that you could not do prior to implementing them?
What problems will be resolved through the use of the BI apps that were unsolvable before the project was started?

By asking these two key questions, it should unlock some real information for hard ROI calculations. Let’s look at a couple of quick examples:

Based upon better business intelligence as a result of deploying the BI apps, it is estimated inventory can be better controlled and inventory values can be reduced by 10% or $1,000,000, resulting in a better control of cash.
Based upon better business intelligence as a result of deploying the BI apps, it is estimated to reduce purchasing costs by 5% or $200,000.

Again, these will be very specific for each organization and will take some time to calculate. Regardless of what any vendor will try to sell you, there is no magic hard ROI calculator that’s accurate for every business. I haven’t seen one yet.

Next, let’s look at a small part of the BI apps — the reports. If we look at how many reports and dashboards there are in the Procurement and Spend Analytics app and make some assumptions based upon experience, we can start building out some ROI. Here’s a basic example case.

The Procurement and Spend Analytics app contains: 2 dashboards, 14 dashboard pages, 103 reports, 161 metrics. Let’s run some basic numbers.

Assume that each report is of simple complexity. Simple is defined as simple formatting and groupings, standard calculations such as totals, sums, averages etc. Standard graphs and charts. 8 hours to design, develop and unit test. (Note: Most likely there will be a mix of low, medium and high complex reports. 8 hours is low if you consider requirements gathering and the source system analysis is included in this time. 8 hours is conservative to get buy in; choose a realistic effort for your organization.)
If each report is 8 hours then 103 * 8 = 824 hours of work, or 20.6 weeks of effort. This does not include dashboards and dashboard pages. This also does not include any data structure or ETL work or metrics analysis

Make sure you agree upon any “estimates” you utilize with others in the organization so the ROI calculation is accepted internally.

SOFT ROI

Soft ROI is much more fun to talk about. It can cover so many intangibles that are valuable to the organization. Identify enough of those intangibles, even if you can’t quantify them with dollars, and the ROI discussion becomes pretty evident.

Let’s start out with some general ROI statements about building a BI solution vs. buying one.

According to TDWI Research, the average data warehousing project costs $1.1 million and takes 10 months to deliver, while a data mart project costs $544,000 and takes six months to deliver. (1)
One leading BI implementer has estimated that the cost of deploying a custom solution is typically 2.5 to 3.5 times greater than the cost estimate of deploying prebuilt applications. (2)
When you add everything up, we estimate about 7X the cost/effort to deliver a similar piece of custom-developed functionality as prebuilt BI apps. (3)

These statements in themselves are pretty powerful when discussing the cost and value of building a solution that equates the same functionality that the BI apps provide.

Let’s further explore some of the soft value statements of pre-built BI applications:

More timely access to information
Improved decision making
Improved performance (no reports against the transaction system)
BI embedded into the business process. With BI apps, users appear to stay within the PeopleSoft application.
Total Cost of Ownership (BI apps are supported and maintained)
Baseline data warehouse in place, providing a foundation to add additional data sources and additional content. It’s a great “foundation.”
Industry-standard defined measurements

Additionally, here are some soft value statements regarding the Oracle BI apps specifically:

Oracle development takes care of the following activities:

Requirements gathering
Data structure and dimensions
Naming standards & industry KPIs
Change data capture design
Metadata
Source system review
Alerts and triggers
ETL design and development
Reports and dashboards design and development
Support, maintenance and upgrades
Enabling BI within PeopleSoft or embedding BI into the business process (seamless integration)

Hopefully this makes clear of the potential of building a “soft ROI” business case for the BI apps. There is a lot of value that cannot always be added up monetarily, but many of these soft ROI factors certainly add up in manpower, time and effort to benefit to solving business problems.

This post concludes this three-part series on this topic. If you’re interested in learning more, please email me and I will be happy to discuss your plans with you. We do a lot of BI work here at MIPRO, a great deal of which is focused around planning and intelligently building out BI cases for clients.

CITATIONS

(1) From In Search of a Single Version of Truth: Strategies for Consolidating Analytic Silos by Wayne Eckerson, TDWI Best Practices Report, 2004 (www.tdwi.org/research/reportseries). Technically, the numbers are for consolidating data warehouses, but the common approach for consolidation was starting from scratch.

(2) The Business Intelligence Consulting Group, “The Great Debate: Buy Versus Build,” 2007

(3) Jeff McQuigg – Independent consultant. IT Toolbox Blog 3/17/2008

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Previously by Larry Zagata:

Related whitepapers (PDF):

MiPro’s Business Intelligence Manifesto: Six Requirements for an Effective BI Deployment

Related Services:

The Value of Oracle BI Apps for PeopleSoft (Part II)

Larry Zagata — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:49:18 +0000

Now that I have provided my opinion and thumbs up approval of the Oracle BI apps, let’s discuss the nuances of implementing them.

With all of Oracle BI’s pre-built ETL, data structures and reports, one would probably think it should be very straightforward. Well, if your shop is totally vanilla and you accept the metrics as Oracle defines them, then yes, the implementation would be pretty uncomplicated. Oracle’s BI apps are built on the excellent OBIEE platform, which is proven, scalable and stable. The metrics are based upon industry standards.

But that doesn’t mean its out-of-box metrics are your metrics. I’ll get to that in a second.

Regardless of whether or not you’re a vanilla install, you still have the technical aspects of installation and configuration of the OBIEE foundation, as well as the installation and configuration of the BI apps. Depending on your security needs, your platform and overall size of your infrastructure will determine the relative ease or complexity of this installation and configuration. And remember, with any installation we aren’t simply installing to get the product available for use – we want to install in the appropriate manner for stability, scalability, failover and maintenance. These are big deals.

Aside from the technical install and configuration, the core time and effort it takes to implement will depend on two primary considerations:

First: As hinted at before, how vanilla or customized is your PeopleSoft solution? As you may have discovered, when you customize any ERP application it makes patches, maintenance and upgrades more challenging because you have changed source code, tables, fields etc. Likewise, if you have customizations it also affects the Oracle BI apps. You have to understand the changes, because they will impact the ETL scripts, data structures, reports and dashboards. For any change you make, you have to understand if the Oracle BI apps are impacted by that change and make the appropriate changes to the BI app.

Second: How does your business process map to the metrics? If you agree with the out-of-box metrics and how they are measured, then there is little to change here other than testing to ensure results. However, if your preferred metric is different than how the BI app’s metric is defined, then you either have to change your measurement preference or make the changes to the BI app.

Here is an example. Let’s say the BI app measures invoice payment terms as starting at the point the invoice is generated. This means that the due date and all of the reports use the invoice print date as the date the clock starts ticking. If your organization uses the anticipated receipt date the customer receives the invoice as the date the clock starts ticking, you have to change your measurement or change the metric in the BI app. A simple example, but hopefully you get the point. Bottom line is that there has to be some deliberate thought given to these seemingly pedestrian details.

One of the key activities of implementing BI apps is indulging this requirements gathering fit/gap process to define and evaluate the two factors mentioned above. This activity as absolutely crucial and often ignored by many organizations, who later complain that their BI systems aren’t effective. So, the best approach is not to try for the golden plug-and-play, but instead to perform the necessary planning and design first. I can’t stress this enough.

Next post, we will explore some ROI on Oracle’s BI apps. Stick around!

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Previously by Larry Zagata:

Related whitepapers (PDF):

MiPro’s Business Intelligence Manifesto: Six Requirements for an Effective BI Deployment

Related Services:

The Value of Oracle BI Apps For PeopleSoft

Larry Zagata — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:12:54 +0000

Having practical experience in supply chain, PeopleSoft ERP (SCM) and Business Intelligence (BI), I am naturally drawn to anything that combines the attributes of all three. Oracle BI applications for procurement and spend can do just that. We have spoken previously about how PeopleSoft query tools are BI tools and not a full-on BI enterprise product. That said, there is a completely integrated solution offered by Oracle that is just as user friendly.

As we all know, there are literally thousands of tables in PeopleSoft and tens of thousands of fields. To boot, since PeopleSoft is a transaction-based system, there are many different statuses of these transactions. Imagine the work required to sort through all of those tables and fields AND choose the right status/disposition in order to develop effective business intelligence. Remember, we are not talking about simple reports, but true business intelligence that provides insight into your business operations and is aligned with executive-facing strategic objectives.

With Oracle BI apps, Oracle has pre-packaged all of that work of mapping tables, fields and statuses. It’s already done. Additionally, they’ve built the required Oracle data warehouse structure to support BI and all of the required ETL scripts to extract, transform and load the data. This means that a tremendous amount of the work has been accomplished even before a single report or dashboard has been created. On top of all of that, there are hundreds of reports, metrics and dashboards. In fact, in the Procurement and Spend Analytics alone there are 161 metrics, 103 reports, 14 dashboard pages and two dashboards.

That’s impressive.

If you were to perform the investigation of thousands of tables and fields, choose the correct status, design and develop an appropriate the data warehouse structure, design and develop ETL scripts, establish the 161 metrics, and design/develop the 103 reports, I think you’d quickly realize how much time and effort it really takes to accomplish this. It’s a massive chunk of work, and to have that pre-packaged with Oracle BI apps is a godsend. Further, the maintenance and task of keeping the products in sync is taken care of through maintenance releases. This can be a huge advantage in and of itself, as every time a patch is applied it has the potential to impact the downstream BI.

Finally, another huge advantage I see is that the Oracle BI apps help achieve one of the most strategic goals of business intelligence: embedding BI into the business process. With Oracle BI apps, the integration is very tight, almost seamless, as users move from PeopleSoft apps to BI. They may not even realize they are using different applications, and as a result BI becomes part of their daily routine and adds value to the core organization.

There are many other benefits to these solutions and I have only highlighted a few. In my next post, we’ll discuss different considerations when implementing Oracle BI apps. In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments about this — or are considering Oracle BI yourself — please email me and I’ll help you sort out your options. I’d love to hear from you.

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Previously by Larry Zagata:

Related whitepapers (PDF):

MiPro’s Business Intelligence Manifesto: Six Requirements for an Effective BI Deployment

Related Services:

Living together: Oracle BI and PeopleSoft

Larry Zagata — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:01:08 +0000

We previously discussed the basics of business intelligence and why companies – even in a down economy – should choose a BI tool.

Today, we will explore a scenario that’s commonly talked about: having PeopleSoft ERP and Oracle BI applications happily coexist and thrive.

First, the ERP side.

PeopleSoft is a world-class ERP system and is run by thousands of companies globally. It is feature- and functionality-rich and provides a quality end user experience. Additionally, the PeopleSoft data and table structure is organized logically with a fairly intuitive design that an experienced user can understand.

This balance of feature richness and logical organization provides an excellent source for some of PeopleSoft’s in-box reporting tools, such as Nvision and PeopleSoft Query. If one understands how to access the data, then these tools can provide a mechanism for self-service. If an organization’s information is all contained within one ERP system, then these reporting tools may provide a sufficient and efficient means of reporting. I stress reporting only because they do not provide the greater capabilities of dashboards and advanced analytics.

But hold on: what if data is stored in other systems, whether they’re proprietary systems, data marts, Access databases, or Excel spreadsheets? Getting information from these sources now poses a greater problem if data needs to be consolidated. And believe me, this is very much a reality for many companies out there.

What if you could have the best of both worlds? The feature-rich intuitive data structure combined with the power of an enterprise business intelligence solution that provides for all of the key benefits noted in my previous discussion? Oracle BI applications provide such a combination. These apps are packaged, natively-integrated solutions into PeopleSoft that are built upon the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) BI platform.

First though, because the word “integrated” gets so many vendors in trouble, let’s make sure we understand what it means. In this scenario it does not simply mean all of the potential touchpoints between the two solutions have been identified. In this case, it means that the Oracle BI-PeopleSoft solution identifies all of the key tables and fields, provides pre-built ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) processes to move data from PeopleSoft to a pre-built data warehouse structure. It contains an impressive array of pre-built metrics, reports and dashboards.

All of this pre-built integration removes much of the complexity associated with designing a solution of this magnitude from scratch. A homegrown solution could take many months to years to effectively design and build (in fact, the going rate for homegrown BI solutions is 7x that of a packaged BI app in terms of cost and effort). In addition, once the solution is implemented, the core OBIEE foundation is present and allows for information access from multiple data sources other than PeopleSoft. By definition, this is what we refer to as true enterprise business intelligence solution. Not only will access to PeopleSoft information and performance be improved, but a more thorough and comprehensive solution will be deployed that allows for dashboards tailored by audience, metrics, KPIs and advanced analytics.

If it sounds impressive, it’s because it is. Even in during this economic downturn, BI is bucking the trend. Anything that truly helps a company make smarter decisions and aligns business operations to overarching corporate objectives will be looked at quite heavily. We field questions about BI every day from clients who are actively being told to look into BI, despite spending slowdowns in other areas.

If you would like further information on an Enterprise BI strategy or BI applications for PeopleSoft, please email me. If social media is more your thing, you can follow us on Twitter or become our fan on Facebook. Or, if old school RSS is your gig, you can subscribe here.

Using BI to Survive the Recession, Part I

Using BI to Survive the Recession, Part II

Business Intelligence in the real world: Aligning metrics (Part I)

Business Intelligence in the real world: Aligning metrics (Part II)