Oracle Business Intelligence and Essbase Solutions Guide

Rosendo Abellera, Lakshman Bulusu

• Publisher: Auerbach Publications
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315355856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Information Management
• Index: Business

This book highlights the practical aspects of using Oracle Essbase and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) as a comprehensive BI solution. It explains the key steps involved in Oracle Essbase and OBIEE implementations. Using case studies, the book covers Oracle Essbase for analytical BI and data integration, using OBIEE for operational BI including presentation services and BI Publisher for real-time reporting services, Self-service BI– in terms of VLDB, scalability, high performance, stability, long-lasting and ease of use that saves time, effort, and costs, while maximizing ROI.

Chapter 1

Introduction

In This Chapter

1.1 Introduction

1.2 A Basic Business Need

1.3 What Is Business Intelligence

1.4 Why BI?

1.5 Enabling a Competitive Advantage

1.6 BI and Reporting Categories

1.7 Summary

1.1 Introduction

A multitude of companies have now chosen to use business intelligence (BI) and analytics. The general goal is that somehow, BI will allow them to gain insight and knowledge into the data contained within their corporate systems. With this, companies armed with the necessary technologies and tools can address the executive, management, and user reporting and analysis needs of the organi zation in dealing with visibility and analysis to their corporate data. With the proliferation of vendors specializing in BI and analytics, it is common to find several tools being used by an organization. Sometimes, you can even find several BI tools being thrown together in an attempt to provide a complete, holistic BI solution for users at all levels and facets of their business. Indeed, one of the major goals when implementing a BI solution is to provide reporting and analytics for the entire enterprise. Most recently, some vendors have successfully made available packaged BI applications that try to provide a complete set of analytics and also provide full-featured platforms for reporting. This book will examine the functional features of a BI and analytics application and will also even discuss the architecture and design of the technical structures that enable the objects (i.e., reports and dashboards).

1.2 A Basic Business Need

In the corporate world, there is a need to have enterprise-class reporting and analytics through a single integrated and trusted source to access vital data and information. Moreover, there is a need for visibility into and access to the data from the main systems to address the organization’s prevalent topics, such as (among others):

• Revenue and cost opportunities

• Improved leverage in negotiations

• Accountability and compliance to corporate policies

• Business unit activity

• Strategic and planning initiatives

So then what exactly is this “magic” tool for the corporate decision maker? To some, the solution lies in BI. Organizations look to BI solutions and resources for building the proper solution and providing enterprise-class BI reporting and analytics. The goal for many is to gain, for example:

• Improved business decision making with greater visibility and transparency into transactional data coming from a known, consistent single source for decision making based on facts

• Elimination or limitation of custom, on-the-fly manual development of repetitive reports:

○ Automatically prepare and deliver data from a single source of the truth

○ Eliminate redundant sources of reporting

○ Eliminate silos of reporting from personalized sources or outdated applications

• Implementation of best practices for all business units and activity across the organization, with standard processes of reporting supported by analytics to monitor and gauge report effectiveness

• Implementation of a flexible reporting and analytics management architecture that can grow with business requirements

• Centralized pool of knowledge surrounding an organization’s reporting and analytics tools, reducing maintenance and support costs related to the upkeep of various other standalone tools

But behind this “magic” tool for decision making is a complex and often confused system. So let’s start with a definition of business intelligence.

1.3 What Is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence in today’s BI and analytics landscape can mean many things to many people. Researching sources for any formal definition will yield any number of definitions or meanings. To some people, BI deals with reporting. To others, it is strictly analytics. Then again to others, it includes both types and categories of information. Perhaps they are all correct. But no matter the mechanism or tool used, BI funnels down to a common single notion: having these systems will enable a person or organization to make better, or more effective, business decisions. The two definitions shown below were taken from the corresponding links referred to alongside each. Indeed, both refer to BI being used to “help make business decisions” and “enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-making.” That is the ultimate goal. So what facilitates that capability?

Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and presenting actionable information to help corporate executives, business managers and other end users make more informed business decisions. BI encompasses a variety of tools, applications and methodologies that enable organizations to collect data from internal systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, develop and run queries against the data, and create reports, dashboards and data visuali zations to make the analytical results available to corporate decision makers as well as operational workers. (Source: http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/definition/business-intelligence)

Business intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term that includes the applications, infrastructure and tools, and best practices that enable access to and analysis of information to improve and optimize decisions and performance. (Source: http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/business-intelligence-bi/)

The definitions mention a set of applications, technologies, methodologies, processes, architectures, and the like to explain what BI is. Each definition can allude to a technical capability or even an actual special infrastructure and architecture. Indeed, as implementers and developers of BI solutions, we know that there are specialized skills and knowledge for delivering this special type of system.

This book will explore those applications, technologies, and architectures. Moreover, we will use as an example the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) suite and discuss how, properly used, it can provide the right platform for reporting and analytics.

1.4 Why BI?

From a business context, it is tougher than ever to achieve a competitive advantage with the prevalence of tools and technologies accessible to everyone. The key is to find the right tools and technology. There are few innovations available that can truly offer a breakthrough. Competing on analytical capabilities is one very important and powerful way to break through, sustain advantage over time/economic cycles, and effectively outsmart and out-execute the competition.

Achieving competitive advantage in today’s world is vital to a business’s growth and well-being. Every decision can greatly affect an organization. For this reason, decision making based on facts at all levels of the enterprise has become increasingly important. With the proliferation of different types of data and information available in today’s world, no longer should decisions be made on “gut-feel” or a hunch. Breakthroughs in technology are enabling a more effective and efficient environment for business intelligence and analytics. Overall, there is a new generation of tools and capabilities to provide the right data to the right person at the right time!

1.5 Enabling a Competitive Advantage

As part of a large consulting firm, one of the authors helped to create a new Oracle BI practice. Centered around that practice was the concept of how corporations and organization could use analytics to gain a competitive advantage over their competitors. Numerous books now have been written of how some organizations—even from seemingly surprising industries such as baseball, namely, the Boston Red Sox—were using new BI tools for analysis that could help to beat their rivals. Utilizing analytics, these companies could measure and focus in on certain key indicators that would allow them to do such things as optimizing supply chains to identify their most profitable customers. Later that year, he wrote and published an article that recognized the trend toward operational BI and how it was rewriting the rules of competition, augmenting decisions and insights with facts, and slowly replacing the usual business practice of decision making with just instincts. With the maturity of BI systems and new technologies such as those involving Big Data to enable advanced analytics, a whole new level of business intelligence is possible.

BI and analytics are more than just a simple supply of data and information. BI solutions now encompass a holistic suite of capabilities that enables business strategy at all levels of decision making from tactical and operational to strategic to gain the competitive advantage. Organizations are now more capable of achieving high performance. High performing organizations have chosen to employ the distinctive capabilities of analytics to win over time and over their competitor. More and more companies have gained these capabilities, and the trend is toward an accelerated acceptance of analytics.

In their offerings, leading BI software vendor companies such as Oracle have pushed their message for organizations to gain a competitive advantage and become an “insight-driven enterprise.” The plan entails the following:

1. Every person is provided with relevant, complete, and consistent information tailored to their function and role.

2. Intelligence provides insight that predicts the best next step, and delivers it in time to influence the business outcome.

3. Lead people take action based on facts to optimize decisions, actions, and interactions.

Sound simple enough, right? It’s the same objective that has always been targeted. It seems that this may be easier said than done. From a practitioner’s and implementer’s point of view, we ask, “Why isn’t everyone doing it successfully? What are the challenges?” Perhaps we don’t have the right tools and technology to make it truly happen just yet. After all, even after a few decades into it, the field is still in its infancy. New capabilities are being discovered with every change and advancement in technology. Take, for instance, the concept for mobile BI. The idea is not at all new; however, in today’s world of smartphones, mobile BI can now readily come to fruition. But not only that, other features and functions are just now being conceived and considered. With each new technological advance, BI will come closer to being able to offer organizations the means to transform into insight-driven enterprises.

But assuming that technology does get better and helps the BI industry overall, deep-rooted challenges still remain—especially when dealing with data. These issues are chronic, and we often hear stories of failed attempts at providing quality intelligence and analytics because of poor, inaccurate, or incomplete data. In fact even now, at the time of writing this book, there are other approaches and technologies (e.g., Big Data) being explored to effectively handle data. But our general perception is that it is not just about the technology. We don’t dismiss the fact that fundamental shortcomings must first be fixed; however, other factors outside of technology come into play. These factors are related to understanding the various kinds of reporting and analytics being targeted and also knowing the data architecture and structures that support each kind of BI.

1.6 BI and Reporting Categories

Often, people will group tasks dealing with data or information as output under one heading as Reporting. In the simplest notion, reporting aims to provide access to data and information. Companies will often lump everything coming from the decision support system (DSS) and the output of transactional systems into one category, which they frequently call reporting or even sometimes analytics. But in this case, can “one size fit all” truly apply?

As a practitioner who must create and support such a system, you will discover that several considerations will come up that may easily form divisions in thought regarding the best methods to develop and handle that report. You begin to understand that different structures are involved with different types of reports. Furthermore, you begin to discover that what you are trying to achieve is not Reporting at all; rather, it is more of an Analysis. The end result is that you now know that there are different types of reporting. For our discussion concerning BI, reporting can be classified into three distinct categories:

• Operational Reporting

• Analytical BI

• Operational BI

Together, these three provide a holistic BI solution that covers all aspects of reporting and analysis. In the realm of BI, Analytical BI was the traditional form of BI, and it is often referred to as Traditional BI. With the industry now matured, what was once the traditional standard form of BI now has a place on its own and has made space for other forms of reporting and an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Why Oracle Essbase Now
• Chapter 3 Oracle Essbase and Oracle BI: Successful Players and Products
• Chapter 4 Analysis, Evaluation, and Selection
• Chapter 5 Data Integration, Implementation, and Customization Using Essbase
• Chapter 6 Using Essbase for Analytical BI
• Chapter 7 Using OBIEE for Operational BI
• Chapter 8 Using OBIEE for Self-Service BI
• Chapter 9 Best Practices for Solution Implementation and Customization
• Chapter 10 Use Case Scenarios
• Chapter 11 The Prize for the Price: A Win–Win or Not
• Appendix A: Oracle Big Data and the Cloud for Analytics
• Appendix B: Slides from Data Warehouse Architectures
• Appendix C: Oracle® Data Sheets
• Index