Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) delivers incredible value to the many businesses that anchor their critical business operations in its software offerings. Unfortunately—particularly in today’s increasingly fast-paced environment—Oracle EBS does not offer a high-performance, quick-to-implement, low-maintenance analytics solution that easily combines data from multiple sources.
As a result, most Oracle EBS houses have evolved to using a mish-mash of multiple tools and high-cost experts to generate even the most basic reports— reports most commonly anchored in custom reporting solutions or Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) and Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA).
We would like to refer to this mish-mash as “the Achilles heel of EBS.” It’s a chronic pain experienced by many IT organizations that use EBS—here’s what it looks like.
A 4-6 week turnaround time on the first report request.
With Oracle OBIA/OBIEE, it’s not unusual for requirements gathering, schema development, and model development to take months, with each schema update further delaying delivery. But million-dollar operating decisions that rely upon dynamic enterprise application data can’t wait the weeks or months it takes to model and translate data, then load it into a data warehouse.
Cumbersome, brittle data modeling and ETL.
With Oracle OBIA/OBIEE, getting meaningful reports takes hours each day, if they can be delivered at all. Data modeling and ETL processes cause delays between the time a business request is made and the time production is available, with near real-time insight an impossibility given the 4-12 hours generally required for ETL. In addition, extensive work often is required to stitch together even inadequate, fragmented reports.
Demands from business users for self-service analytics.
Business users rely heavily upon IT for day-to-day reporting on Oracle EBS data, leading to delays, frustration, and friction. In addition, Oracle OBIA and OBIEE make it difficult to meet the growing need for blended insights, such as blending IT-curated datasets with personal or departmental data (i.e., analyzing departmental budgets versus actuals).
Slow business applications.
Traditional data warehouses and ETL solutions are burdens that slow down the performance of critical business applications. In addition, ongoing performance tuning requires on-demand expertise and too many meetings—and is expensive, frustrating, and time-consuming, to boot.
Lost data fidelity.
Lost data is as problematic to business users as delayed insights. It results from BI teams truncating source data, being selective about the tables to be joined, or providing only summary data for analysis in order to make reports responsive within reasonable time frames when using a traditional BI approach. Details—often the very information business users want to drill into for answers—are lost.
Incorta: The Instant Remedy to Oracle EBS Reporting Pain
This Achilles heel of Oracle EBS is a chronic pain to which we mustn’t become numb. It’s a pain IT organizations previously failed to overcome in order to successfully meet the incessant demands for improved, more timely operational reporting and analytics from the business side of the house.
But now IT organizations can overcome the pain. The next-generation data analytics platform from Incorta alleviates OBIA and OBIEE pain by solving all of the above issues and approaching analytics as a strategy, not an afterthought.
Incorta lets you:
- empower business users with easy, self-service analysis of secure data sets, so they can answer complex business questions on their own in only seconds;
- seamlessly expand your analytics footprint as your business grows via a more scalable, more robust analytics architecture that executes real-time aggregation of massive amounts of complex data—without using a data warehouse or reshaping data into analytical formats;
- free up IT resources to focus on innovative—rather than maintenance—projects thanks to a deployment that takes weeks instead of months; offers pre-built Oracle EBS dashboards, reports, and KPIs; and easily integrates with Oracle EBS Flexfields, Chart of Accounts, and Common Dimensions for seamless connections across Oracle EBS modules;
- inspire application developers to become super responsive to business needs by extracting more value out of data and analysis and
- unshackle IT, so they can innovate on strategic initiatives rather than produce repetitive reports for the business.
Learn how Incorta can help you maximize your EBS investment, with no data modeling or ETL required—read the just-released Accelerating Operational Reporting and Analytics for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) white paper.