EBS Extensions for Oracle Endeca – Is it End of OBIA for E-Business ?

Recently Oracle announced the enhancement of EBS UIs with optional, Endeca Information Discovery – powered modules. These UIs provide a more modern look and feel and leverages the search, navigation and analytics capabilities of the Endeca product to increase user productivity and provide customers with new insights on top of EBS data.

This blog is an attempt to list down EBS –Endeca extension offering and compare it with the OBIA reporting solution. Is it a replacement to OBIA? 

EBS –Endeca Extension Offering

The Endeca offering consists of prebuilt EID Integrator ( ETL) jobs that access the EBS schema and populate Endeca Server instance which powers a single UI module, along with prebuilt configurations of EID Studio that provide an OOTB UI for that module. Second, EBS has extended the core EID studio framework to provide fully integrated security and workflow interactions.

EBS Extension Modules

The following EBS Extension Modules are released

EBS Applications Extensions for Oracle Endeca

• Order Management

Meet revenue goals, reduce fulfillment delays, and avoid product returns.

• Discrete Manufacturing

Improve operational efficiency, meet customer commitments.

• Inventory Management.

Reduce direct procurement spend, control new product design costs.

• Enterprise Asset Management

Increase asset utilization, reduce maintenance costs.

• Project Management

Manage potential delays, reduce administration costs and overhead.

• Field Service

Improve SLA compliance, increase field resource utilization.

• Channel Revenue Management

Eliminate revenue leakage, increase profit margins.

EBS Self-Service Applications Extensions for Oracle Endeca

• iProcurement

Improve productivity of requestors/buyers, reduce maverick spending.

• iRecruitment

Candidate Search and Improve recruitment efficiency, improve candidate experience

EBS Extension Vs Oracle BI Apps

The EBS Extensions are embedded and tightly integrated within the EBS UI. It provides analytical insight to EBS data. While Oracle BI Applications are prebuilt analytic applications using a data warehouse model, and these work with EBS, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, and other data sources.

The EBS Extensions are intended to improve transactional visibility within EBS but are limited to transactional data for a specific functional area and one data source (EBS).OBIA works on large volumes of historical data, supports time series trending, ongoing management reporting as well as cross-functional analysis, and supports multiple Applications Unlimited product lines and Fusion Applications.

So it is a alternative  to OBIA, I don’t think so,  customer will go with EBS Extensions for improved EBS users experience and OBI Apps for rich analytics on EBS and, potentially, other sources.