BI in Fusion Application – OTBI, BIAPPS & Advanced Analytics

This blog is an attempt to introduce Oracle BI offerings in Fusion Application and discuss with minimal details on associated technologies and architecture supporting the various BI components.

   

What is BI in Fusion Application?

The Business Intelligence for Fusion Applications has following three bi components

Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI)

This is a new BI component built on the OBIEE platform. It reports directly from the Fusion Application transactional tables and so it reflects changes in the transactional tables just as they occur. This is fusions real time BI component.

[OTBI offers a real time, self-service reporting and analysis facilities within Fusion Application

Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA)

This BI component known as BI Apps is build around a pre packaged data-warehouse, ETL, metrics and dashboards and it also uses the OBIEE platform. The BI Applications support the existing Oracle Applications ERP and CRM application, this component has been extended to support the Fusion applications suite.

[OBIA offers more historical and complex type of analyses. The underline data warehouse solution offers reporting areas like historical trending, year-over-year comparisons etc]

Advanced Analytics

The specialized analytics which includes tools like Real Time Decision, Data Mining and Hyperion Essbase are built into the Fusion Applications to support particular use cases, e.g. Essbase is used in Financials to deliver financial statements for the GL Ledger module and RTD is used for sales predictive capabilities.

[The advanced analytics provide domain specific analyses by using business intelligence foundation]

BI in Fusion Application- Advantages

In my view though all bi components are different products, the fusion application uses same business language, the same user experience, same report templates and graph types which drives the entire user experience.

This fusion application allows managing all business metadata from a single place. 

There is tight integration between business intelligence and Fusion Applications which is very important in terms of functional perspective. For example BI and Fusion applications use same flex fields and security definitions.

The adoption of tools and technologies in Fusion can reduce the installation and managing overheads of number of BI components

OTBI Vs OBIA

OTBI which is transactional business intelligence focused more on the ability to better manage your operations – What’s Happening now!

While OBIA is more focused more making strategic decisions or providing strategic insight to the business. This is questions like what happened? What will happen? Or better, what should happen.

The target users are also different for OTBI and OBIA. Users with more operational responsibilities are envisioned as the target for OTBI while more managerial and executive users are targeted for OBIA.

In short OTBI and OBIA are complementary to each other rather than competing with each other. Still I believe there is still overlap in some areas.

BI Fusion Pre-Built Contents  

The BI Fusion offers pre-built analytical contents for following oracle application modules

• Oracle Financials

• Oracle Supply Chain Management

• Oracle Procurement and Spend

• Oracle Project Portfolio Management

• Oracle Human Capital Management

• Oracle Customer Relationship Management

I believe the combination of OTBI, OBIA and Advanced Analytics can answers to all business questions from operational to analytical arena.