Reporting in SaaS or On Premises Fusion Applications – OTBI, Smart View, OBIA,BI Publisher & Other

There are number of options for reporting in Fusion Applications. The most commonly used reporting technique in the implementation project is to leverage on BI Publisher. There are various tools and techniques supported by Fusion Application to generate reports for analytical and transactional reporting.

Fusion Application uses OBIEE foundation which offers tools to support ad hoc query/analysis, interactive dashboard and proactive intelligence/alters. The pre-packaged Essbase allows Financial Reporting Studio and Smart View to be used for reporting. The idea is that implementer should able to write reports with negligible programming efforts. This reporting is possible on data that resides either inside Fusion Applications Transactional Database or in an external source via Web service/methods.

These techniques for developing BI contents are applicable to SaaS (Software as a Service) and On Premise implementations of Fusion Applications.

This blog is an attempt to list down the tools which one can use for reporting in Fusion Applications.

Oracle Answers

It is a subcomponent of OBIEE and is also known as BI Answers. It lets you explore and interact with data by presenting data in tables, graphs, pivot tables, and so on.

Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) A predefined set of OBIEE repository (.rpd) and Web catalog are supplied with Fusion Applications. These reports are typically based on the ADF view objects. These reports are designed to report on operational data from the Fusion transaction database in real time.

Oracle Business Intelligence Application (OBIA) A predefined set of OBIEE repository (.rpd) and Web catalog are supplied with Fusion Applications. These reports are typically based on the BAW (Business Analytics Warehouse) tables which are populated by ODI by using ADF view objects to source data from Fusion transactional source tables. These reports are designed to report on analytical data extracted from the Fusion transaction database

BI Publisher – It is the reporting solution to author, manage and deliver all reports and documents easier and faster than Oracle Report or any other traditional reporting. BI Publisher report creation process is quite different in Fusion Applications as compared with Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) which has also BI Publisher as one of the component comes integrated with Oracle Fusion Applications.

BI Composer BI Composer is a wizard-based tool to generate analyses based on subject areas. It allows users to modify the embedded analytics in Fusion Applications, such as adding content from the BI Catalog, as well as extending existing content such as adding new analysis columns, creating alternative views of data, sorting and filtering the data, and applying conditional formatting.

Mobile BI Reports can be made available to the mobile platform using Application Composer in Fusion Applications. To develop reports for mobile platform a link Application Composer is provided, by selecting application from drop down list, link for manage report can be used to create a new report using predefined analytics.

Financial Reporting Studio This is an Oracle Hyperion tool installed on your desktop and it allows you to develop reports primarily on Essbase database.

Smart View tool – It is an Oracle Hyperion tool. Smart View is visible in Microsoft Excel once it is installed. This Excel plug in allows users to connect Excel to Essbase Server and Analytics Server to report data. Smart View also allows data to be entered into Essbase using the Excel front end.

In short numbers of option are provided by Oracle for reporting for Fusion Application. I would suggest choosing the right option to support your use case. There is an overlap between features and functions which is always a case when company’s BI portfolio is enhanced by acquisitions and mergers.