Oracle E-Business reporting solution using OBIEE without breaking the bank

Agenda
Introduction Company Background Alternate and cost effective approach to implement reporting with EBS Todays Market Expensive Solutions Architecture SSO integration with EBS Roles and Responsibilities Reporting Project Monies Cost and Time Best Practices Questions

Introduction

About us
Pramod Ramprasad, Associate, has over 12 years of consulting experience in providing simple solutions to complex business challenges on software development projects. Strong background in Oracle technologies - Data warehouse, OBIEE, E-business suite (ERP) and Portal

Anunaya Shrivastava, Associate, has fifteen years of experience delivering high technology products and services across several sectors including federal government and major corporations in implementing and sustaining Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system

Company Background
Key Facts Founded 1914 Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, USA NYSE: BAH Employees: 25,000 Revenue: More than $5 billion Chairman and Chief Executive Officer: Ralph W. Shrader, Ph.D. Web site: www.boozallen.com Overview Booz Allen Hamilton has been at the forefront of strategy and technology consulting for nearly a century. Today, Booz Allen is a leading provider of management and technology consulting services to the US government in the defense, intelligence, and civil markets, and also serves corporations, institutions, and not-for-profit organizations. The firm is a well-known, trusted, and long-term partner to our clients, who seek our expertise and objective advice to address their most important and complex problems.

Todays Market
Market conditions are erratic and leaders are cost conscious Unemployment is hovering over 9% and businesses are reluctant to spend monies on software projects although sitting on capital reserves IT is a cost center and management is cutting back on expensive software that maybe useful to make better decisions Employees are working harder with less and need smarter and intelligent solutions

Alternate Approach To Reporting With EBS

Why are these expensive for a medium size companies? BI Apps and DBI costs approximately about $0.5 million to a $0.75 million plus additional work to maintain and configure ETL - Informatica, Business Objects cost approximately half a million for one prod license Expensive Servers Netezza, Exadata cost around a $1 million to $2 million for each server Maintenance of Data warehouse schemas can be translate to multiple server and higher cost Synchronization between apps db and data warehouse leads to additional cost
BI APPS/DBI Netezza,Ex adata, BW, Marts etc

$$$$$
ETL (Informatica , Business object)

Alternate Approach - Development Lifecycle

Source: An Organizational Community Building Process at Booz Allen

Alternate Architecture
Extract seeded Discoverer metadata and business areas into OBIEE FTP the .dbc file from $FND_TOP/secure directory on the R12 instance Open Discoverer Administrator, with Oracle Applications User checked Choose the System Administrator Responsibility

Extract seeded Discoverer metadata and business areas into OBIEE

Extract Rice object views from discoverer business areas Migrate the discoverer metadata file to OBIEE .rpd file

Discoverer Content - RPD & Answers

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Alternate Architecture
Extend and customize Discoverer seeded views and objects into separate OBIEE schema Use of materialized views to enhance reporting performance Configure Nightly Refresh of OBIEE Materialized View via EBS

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Alternate Architecture - Use EBS to manage materialized view refresh program

Add OBIEE Materialized View Refresh Concurrent Program to Custom Application Request Group Submit refresh request to run periodically per business requirement

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Alternate Architecture Traditional Star Schema

Develop custom views on top of Discoverer views Use of Dimensional modeling to mimic header and line level detail of EBS content Maintain transactions data in a fact for example, warehouse inventory transactions, invoice receipts, purchase order and etc Maintain descriptive data within dimensions for example, vendors, employees, supplier, customers, descriptive flex fields, and chart of account description Map the objects based on the codes exposed in the fact and derive the report

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EBS Authentication within OBIEE

Create an EBS Integration Layer connection pool and the connection pool should be kept solely for the EBS integration authentication, that way it can be secured off. Create an initialization block to authenticate against E-Business Suite Create Session variables and check required for authentication

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EBS Authentication within OBIEE

Propagate the EBS usernames and responsibilities to BI Analytical repository such that EBS row level security is maintained across reports. Compile PLSQL package provided by Oracle (EBS_BIEE_INTEGRATION) script file in EBS apps schema Initialize and populate the ACF session variable in the admin tool when ExternalLogon is enabled in InstanceConfig.xml Setup Profile Option value in EBS to enable security through E-Business Suite

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EBS Authorization with Roles and Responsibilities

Setup an EBS applications users responsibility in Oracle OBIEE Setup Reporting Request Groups in EBS for use in the OBIEE security Setup OBIEE custom Request Groups within EBS Create OBIEE custom responsibilities with Oracle BI Administrator Menu Attach OBIEE custom responsibilities with OBIEE Request groups Configure Base URL for the custom responsibility with FND: Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE base URL Assign Responsibilities to EBS user

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BI Dashboard and Reports

Expose Reporting, Dashboard, BI Publisher and Microsoft Integration to user community based on EBS roles and responsibility Provide Dashboard menu to navigate to multiple lifecycles Organize Dashboard by Lifecycle for example, Asset Management, Core Accounting, Procure to Pay, Revenue Management and etc

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BI Dashboard and Reports

Sample Report - Aging bucket report, Delinquent Accounts Receivable by customer Sample Report Asset Management report output Users are able to view reports based on OBIEE responsibility assigned to in EBS All users and responsibilities are maintained within EBS and does not require any change to web catalog or the RPD in the event new user accounts are created or deleted

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Financial Statement Generator (FSG) and OBIEE

Leverage the sophistication of Financial Statement Generator in Oracle E-Business suite to build Report (Rowset, Columnset, Contentset, Display Options, Row Order) Use BI Publisher and attach templates to the output Create concurrent programs to transpose FSG into OBIEE compatible output Trigger and display FSG reports from OBIEE Dashboard with BI Publisher templates

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Best Practices
Data Model: Organized data model by Rice objects and provide content by lifecycle Grant access to business users based on roles and responsibilities Document and provide glossary of contents within the model Answers: Follow consistent naming conventions across the data model, use of prefix and suffixes Simplify and distinguish between fact and dimension making it easier for reports writes Dashboard: Organize and provide standard menus to navigate to the reports within 3 clicks Provide summary and drill down details of content

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Project Monies Cost and Time?

Project Cost depends upon the architecture, scalability requirements for future, number of reports to be developed The time line depends upon the complexity of the requirements and solution, the number of resources involved and the maturity of the processes available Unless there is a need for very big datawarehousing solution ETL tools turn out to be expensive to procure and implement Although one would like to get the pre-fab RPDs for each module in Oracle application the silver bullet does not exist and it requires effort to make an RPD that fits your needs A sincere effort in firming up the requirements upfront and finding common elements in them and developing a design based on them can save money and time for the later phases

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Questions & Answers

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Contact Information
Pramod Ramprasad ramprasad_pramod@bah.com Anunaya Shrivastava shrivastava_anunaya@bah.com

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