Overview of Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence in Oracle Fusion Applications

This article discusses an Overview of Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence, or OTBI. OTBI can be used to create an Analysis, Dashboards, Infolets, Interactive Reports using a number of tools.

What is an Analysis?

Analyses are queries against an organization's transactional data that provides answers to Business Questions. Analyses can be enhanced through features such as graphs, charts, tables, calculated items and drilling down

Analyses Can be created using BI Composer and BI Answers and are saved in the Oracle BI Catalog.

1. BI Composer is a tool that is recommended for end-users because it is a simple, easy-to-use, and has a drag and drop graphical interface. Users can just drag and drop columns you want to have in a particular analysis. What this does is pulling data from the transactional tables without having to use SQL.
2. BI Answers is a more sophisticated tool to retrieve data from the transactional tables. It allows you to create an analyses as well. BI Answers has quite a few additional features. It also contains a graphical interface but is meant more for developers and business analysts. Using BI Answers, you can also create dashboards, a collection of reporting objects. 

The data these tools use comes from Subject Areas. Subject area is nothing more than a group of attributes (columns) from the underlying application transactional tables that are available to the report writer. For Financials, the transactional tables that we are referring to here have to do with GL, AR, AP, cash management, etc.

An Infolet is an interactive container that's displayed in those page dots that we find in the Welcome Springboard. For more information on infolets, check out a separate article Overview of Infolets and Infotiles in Oracle Fusion Applications

Business Intelligence Mobile App Designer enables users to create multi-touch information-driven applications with rich interaction, rich visualization, and rich media meant to be displayed on tablets and mobile devices.

These reports, analyses and dashboards are organized by Application in the Business Intelligence (BI) Catalog.

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)

The EPM Workspace helps you to create reports, books, snapshot reports, and financial report matches. It also comes with a batch scheduler and helps you to schedule batches to automatically run and burst the outputs through the email accounts for different users.

It also allows you to get a snapshot of books. The Term "book" in OTBI is a grouping mechanism so that you can run related reports together. 

You will also be able to have access to the Allocation Manager, a Hyperion tool that allows you to do general ledger allocations (i.e. allocating expenses across multiple cost centers).

EPM Components

The Business Intelligence Catalog or BI Catalog is a repository of reporting objects that OTBI uses to generate reports and analyses, grouped by application. You cannot run BI Publisher reports from the BI Catalog but you can open and view how they have been designed.

The BI Catalog splits into two: My Folders and Shared Folders. 

1. My Folders contain user-defined reports that are only visible to the user logged in
2. Shared Folders is visible to all users that have access to the specific application and have the sufficient roles.

How do I navigate to the BI Catalog?

If I'm working with Studio and I want to use some Hyperion features (like scheduling a batch of Studio reports) I should navigate to the catalog from the Financial Reporting Center. If I want to use OTBI, I should use Reports and Analytics.

To get to the BI Catalog via the Workspace, go to the Financial Reporting Center and from there, there's a link that takes you to Workspace. And then, select Application > Catalog.

Reports and Analytics. If I want to use OTBI, Reports and Analytics is what you want to navigate to. Reports and Analytics allows you to create an analysis using the BI Composer, the more simple tool for end users. If you want to use BI answers, to create a dashboard, click on "Browse Catalog" from inside Reports and Analytics. There's a new menu here that allows me to create an analysis, dashboard, and other objects. 

To get to Reports and Analytics, Go to the Navigator > More > Reports and Analytics. 

OTBI Objects and Related Icons

When you navigate around in this catalog, you're going to see Icons and each correspond to a different reporting object:

1. Folders. Folders as well as sub-folders simply organize the reporting objects.
2. Analysis is also an OTBI object. A query against the database without the use of SQL using a graphical drag and drop interface from Subject Areas
3. Report is the BI Publisher Report, t
4. hat will be that tool
5. Dashboard is also an OTBI object. A dashboard is a collection of reporting objects. They have one or multiple pages, can show a report, a link to an external page, images, etc. A dashboard can include one or multiple analyses, it can include another OTBI report, scorecards, Key performance indicators, links to financial reports, etc.
6. Prompt is a component of a dashboard.
7. Data model is a component of a BI publisher report.

Column Data Structure for Analytics

Now, there are two of them, so how do we build an analysis, an object, an OTBI object to retrieve data from the Revenue Management tables? That's the next topic here after this slide. So before we get there, one more word about these columns that we can use in an analysis.

Some of them are going to include numbers. That's what we call fact columns. They're going to store values that you can aggregate such as Billing amounts, transaction price, etc.

But sometimes, you get to see a column that is storing something other than an amount. That's what we call an attribute column. That's a contract number, a ledger name, etc.

Then you have other attributes, we call them hierarchical. These are information that's organized in a hierarchy, like year, quarters, and months. So those are the types of columns that you're going to find when you look at a subject area.

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