Wiley Oracle Data Warehousing And Business Intelligence Solutions Jan 2007 ISBN 0471919217 pdf
Oracle ® Data Warehousing and
Business Intelligence
SolutionsRobert Stackowiak Joseph Rayman Rick Greenwald
Oracle ®
Data Warehousing and
Business Intelligence
Solutions® Oracle Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Solutions Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc.
10475 Crosspoint Boulevard Indianapolis, IN 46256 Copyright © 2007 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana Published simultaneously in Canada
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About the Authors Robert Stackowiak is Vice President of Business Intelligence in Oracle’s
Technology Business Unit. He has worked for over 20 years in business intelligence, data warehousing, and IT-related roles at Oracle, IBM, Harris Corporation, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His papers regarding business intelligence and computer and software technology have appeared in publications such as President & CEO Magazine, Database Trends and
Applications, and The Data Warehousing Institute’s publications. He also
co-authored the books Oracle Essentials: Oracle Database 10g (currently in 3rd Edition, February 2004, O’Reilly), Oracle Application Server 10g Essentials (1st Edition, August 2004, O’Reilly), and Professional Oracle Programming (1st Edition, June 2005, WROX).
Joseph Rayman leads the Oracle Consulting Business Intelligence Practice
in North America with over 20 years of business experience in a vast array of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, retail, telecom- munications, healthcare, and federal government. His technical and busi- ness leadership spans enterprise architecture design, enterprise data modeling, VLDB system tuning, data warehouse design, data mining, and quality assurance activities for data warehouse practices. Joe is a key con- tributor in defining and authoring Oracle Consulting’s Data Warehousing Methodology. Prior to joining Oracle, Joe designed and deployed business intelligence and statistical analysis solutions for a large food manufacturer and provided real-time trading and analysis solutions for a major interna- tional financial organization.
vi About the Authors Rick Greenwald has worked in the IT field for over 20 years for major ven-
dors, including Oracle, Gupta Technologies, Cognos, and Data General. He has coauthored more than a dozen books, including Oracle Essentials: Oracle
Database 10g (currently in 3rd Edition, February 2004, O’Reilly), Oracle Application Server 10g Essentials (1st Edition, August 2004, O’Reilly), and Professional Oracle Programming (1st Edition, June 2005, WROX). Mr. Green- wald currently works for Ingres Corporation.
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Credits
Acknowledgments xv Introduction xvii
11 Custom Data Warehouse Solutions
23 Emerging Trends
21 Building Custom Business Intelligence Applications
20 Spreadsheet Add-ins
20 Oracle Portal
18 BI (XML) Publisher
16 Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
15 Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition
14 Oracle Warehouse Builder
12 The Role of the Oracle Database
11 Enterprise Messaging Service
Part I Oracle Business Intelligence Defined
10 BPEL Process Manager
10 Business Activity Monitoring
9 Data Hubs
9 Oracle Integration Components Enabling Business Intelligence
8 Activity-Based Management
6 Enterprise Planning and Budgeting
5 Balanced Scorecard
4 Daily Business Intelligence
3 Business Intelligence and Transactional Applications
1 Chapter 1 Oracle Business Intelligence
24 Contents
x Contents
Chapter 2 Oracle’s Transactional Business Intelligence
27 Transactional Business Intelligence
28 Business Terminology
28 Oracle’s Daily Business Intelligence
30 How DBI Works
33 Varieties of DBI
34 Balanced Scorecards
45 Oracle Balanced Scorecard Structure
46 OBSC Architecture
48 Creating an Oracle Balanced Scorecard
48 Data Hubs
49 The Oracle Customer Data Hub
49 How Data Hubs Work
51 Other Oracle Data Hubs
51 Is Transactional Business Intelligence Enough?
52 Chapter 3 Introduction to Oracle Data Warehousing
53 Oracle Data Warehousing Basics
54 Oracle Database Analysis and Schema Considerations
55 Managing an Oracle-based Data Warehouse
64 Where to Start?
70 Oracle/PeopleSoft EPM
71 Oracle/Siebel Business Analytics Applications
73 Choosing Completely Custom
74 Chapter 4 Choosing a Platform
75 Scaling Up Platforms Versus Scaling Out
76 Hardware Platforms
77 Cost Considerations
80 Availability Considerations
80 Manageability Considerations
83 Sizing the Platform
84 Information Needed for Warehouse Hardware Sizing
85 Benchmarking 86 Sizing Hardware for Business Intelligence Tools
89 Your Strategy
90 Part II Custom-Built Data Warehousing Solutions
91 Chapter 5 Designing for Usability
93 Approaches for Design
94 Key Design Considerations
94 Features for Design — Enhancing Performance
98 Business Scenario 106 Normalized Design 108 Dimensional Design 110 Hybrid Design
113 Online Analytical Processing Design 116 Other Considerations 120 Selecting the Best Approach 126
Chapter 6 Business Intelligence Tools 127 Oracle Portal and Portal Products 128 Using Oracle Portal 129 Building and Deploying Oracle Portal and Portlets 132 Reporting 136
BI/XML Publisher 137 Oracle Reports 140 Oracle BI Reporting Workbench (Actuate) 141
Ad hoc Query and Analysis 142 Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 143 Discoverer and Business Intelligence Standard Edition 153 Oracle Spreadsheet Add-ins 162
Building Business Intelligence Applications 165 JDeveloper and BI Beans 166 Data Miner
166 Other Tools
169
Chapter 7 Data Loading 175 Oracle Database Data Loading Features 176
Embedded ETL in the Oracle Database 177 SQL*Loader 178 Change Data Capture 179
Transportable Tablespaces 180 Data Pump 180
Oracle Warehouse Builder 181 OWB Packaging
181 Typical Steps when using OWB 182 ETL Design in OWB 184 OWB and Dimensional Models 189 The OWB Process Editor 191
Balancing Data Loading Choices 192
Chapter 8 Managing the Oracle Data Warehouse 195 Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 196 Database Performance Monitoring 200 Database Administration 202 Database Maintenance 218 Database Topology 223 Management and Management Options 224 Chapter 9 Data Warehouse Performance Tuning and Monitoring 227 Understanding Performance Challenges 228 Who Is Responsible? 228 Contents xi
Successful Approaches to Performance Tuning 238 Critical Tasks for Performance Tuning Lifecycle 239 Hardware Configuration 244 Software Configuration 247 Database Application Design 256
Business Scenario: Tuning Our Sample Solution 257 Where To Start
257 Enterprise Manager Advisory Framework 258 Approaches for Success 273
Part III Best Practices 275
Chapter 10 Scoping the Effort and an Approach for Success 277 Uncovering Key Business Initiatives 278 Where to Start 278 Information Sources 280
What is Important 282 Accountability and Securing Business Sponsorship 282
Establish a Steering Committee 283 Project Review Board 283 Endorsing a Methodology 284
Choices of Methodologies 284 A Business-focused Approach 285 Staffing the Project
293 Organization Structure 293 End-User Experience 299 Engaging the Business: Education and Training 301
Managing Risk 301
Communication — Managing Expectations 301 Contingency Allocation 302 Financial Risk
303 Technology Risk 304
No Place to Shortcut 305
Chapter 11 Understanding Business Needs 307 How Bad Deployment Choices Impact the Business 308 Independent Data Marts 308 Limited and Inflexible Reporting 310 Sources of Information Limited to Internal Data 311 Limited Data History 311 Lack of Current High-Quality Data 312 Limited Growth Flexibility 313 Project Drivers and Business Types 314 Financial Companies 314 Healthcare 316 Manufacturing 318
Media and Entertainment 319 xii Contents
Retail 319 Telecommunications 320 Other Business Types: Transportation and Utilities 321 Educational Institutions 321 Government Agencies 323
Developing Scope and Gaining Business Support 326
330 Business Constraints 330 Where to Start Justification 330
Measuring Value 331
Common Metrics to Measure 332 Common Budgeting Techniques 349 Total Cost of Ownership 356
Modeling Total Cost of Ownership 357 Return on Investment 360
Modeling Return on Investment 360 Claiming Success
363 Index 365
Contents xiii
Chapter 12 Justifying Projects and Claiming Success 329 Concept to Project
Acknowledgments
We begin by acknowledging the support of our families, especially our wives who realize that authors sometimes get a bit cranky and difficult as deadlines approach. Although they probably hope there is not another book coming from any one of us soon, we realize such an undertaking would not be possible without the support of Jodie Stackowiak, Donna Rayman, and LuAnn Greenwald.
Special thanks to the folks at Wiley Publishing who worked their magic to turn the documents and screen-captured images from our laptops into the book you have in front of you. We would especially like to thank Tom Dinse, our Senior Development Editor, and Bob Elliott, Wiley’s Executive Editor who understood the need for such a book.
Within Oracle, we have had the great fortune to work with many people skilled in this area. From Oracle Development, we would like to acknowl- edge the following who have provided us with guidance over the years that was especially relevant for this book: George Lumpkin, Robert Ash, Hermann Baer, Andrew Holdsworth, Paul Narth, Jean-Pierre Dijcks, Paul Rodwick, Chris Leone, and Ray Roccaforte. We would also like to acknowl- edge the contributions of business intelligence specialists in the Technology Business Unit, especially Louis Nagode, Gayl Czaplicki, Derrick Cameron, Jim Bienski, Alan Manewitz, Joan Maiorana, and the Enterprise Technol- ogy Center under Jim Olsen where we were able to illustrate some of the large-scale management capabilities.
xvi Acknowledgments
Oracle also has a great many business intelligence specialists within sales, consulting, and other organizations around the world who remind us of the day-to-day challenges that their customers face when building these solutions. Some of the key individuals who influenced the content in this book include David Pryor, Susan Cook, Steve Illingworth, Nick Whitehead, Jon Ainsworth, Kevin Lancaster, Craig Terry, Joe Thomas, Rob Reynolds, Rich Solari, Nuge Ajouz, Ken McMullen, Brian MacDonald, and Patrick Viau. There are many more, of course.
Lastly, much of the content in this book is based on the experience of the authors. Some of the descriptions of what to avoid are based on observa- tions we made of less successful techniques used by Oracle’s customers. But many of Oracle’s customers and partners provide innovation and tech- niques that take product features and turn them into useful solutions. We have had the fortune of dealing with both types of customers, and this book is much stronger and realistic because of what these customers and the Oracle partners have shared with us. So, thank you to all of you whom we have worked with over the years. We especially hope you find this book to be of value as you build and develop your own solutions.
Introduction
We are now decades into deploying decision support systems, data ware- houses, and business intelligence solutions. Today, there are many books that describe data warehousing and design approaches. There are many books that describe business intelligence. There are many books that describe the Oracle database. So you may be asking, why did the authors decide to write this book?
The fact is, the authors of this book still hear comments from many of you that business intelligence and data warehousing projects are problem- atic. This seems to be true regardless of database technologies or business intelligence tools selected and deployed. While the wealth of Oracle skills and resources that exist might make this less true where Oracle technology is part of the solution, the number of implementations that face significant issues and the repetition of mistakes convinced the authors that too few projects are approached holistically. Not many of the books that are avail- able as resources look at Oracle business intelligence and data warehous- ing in such a manner.
This book attempts to give you a single reference that covers a diverse range of relevant topics in providing a holistic approach. It covers the data- base and platform technology, of course. But it also covers business intelli- gence tools, emerging business intelligence applications, architecture choices, schema selection, management and performance tuning, requirements gathering, and justifying the project. Tips are included throughout the book based on real experience and implementations.
xviii Introduction
Your tendency might be to jump to sections you know something about or suspect as being a possible solution to a problem in order to further develop your knowledge of a specific topic. Although you should find value in using this book that way, keep in mind that the reason many imple- mentations struggle is due to ignoring areas that should be understood and are outside the core competencies of those engaged in the project.
To sum it up, the goal of this book is more than about gaining academic knowledge. If this book attains its objective, you will gain knowledge that you can apply to your own project such that your deployed solution will be viewed as successful technically within Information Technology (IT), but also successful because it delivers the business value that your business community recognizes.
Who This Book Is For
This book should appeal to a wide audience. Although those in IT will find it particularly useful, more technically inclined business analysts and man- agers should also find value in topics such as justifying projects and evalu- ating deployment choices.
Within IT, the day-to-day management and modification of such an infrastructure often falls on database administrators, programmers, and systems managers. Certainly, we cover topics of interest to this group. Unfortunately, the value of architects and project managers in deploying and updating such solutions is often overlooked. There is plenty in this book that should also appeal to that audience.
How This Book Is Organized
This book is divided into three parts: Oracle Business Intelligence Defined Custom Built Data Warehousing Solutions Best Practices
Part I: Oracle Business Intelligence Defined Part I provides a broad background as to possible Oracle-based solutions
and how you might deploy them. The database and business intelligence
Introduction xix
Chapter 1: Oracle Business Intelligence A broad introduction of Oracle business intelligence is provided. Topics
introduced include Oracle’s transactional business intelligence, integration components, and components in custom-built data warehouses and busi- ness intelligence solutions.
Chapter 2: Oracle’s Transactional Business Intelligence Sometimes called operational business intelligence, this chapter describes Oracle’s Daily Business Intelligence modules, Balanced Scorecard solution,
and Data Hubs (used in master data management). You are provided with guidance as to where such solutions might be particularly useful and why a data warehouse might also be deployed to augment such a solution.
Chapter 3: Introduction to Oracle Data Warehousing The introduction of this topic covers the wide array of features in the Ora-
cle database that are relevant in data warehousing. More detailed explana- tions are provided in Part II of this book. In addition, the chapter covers the data models that Oracle provides for its applications as pre-built data warehousing solutions.
Chapter 4: Choosing a Platform The basics of choosing a hardware platform are covered including scaling
up versus scaling out and how to size your choice. Specifics addressed under these broad topics include high availability considerations, manage- ability considerations, and approaches to benchmarking.
Part II: Custom-Built Data Warehousing Solutions Most business intelligence solutions today are custom built. Part II
describes design approaches and deploying and managing business intel- ligence tools and an Oracle data warehousing database. These are explained in the following five chapters.
Chapter 5: Designing for Usability Covering approaches to design, topics in this chapter include how to leverage Oracle features and an illustration of how these features can be used to pro-
xx Introduction
Chapter 6: Business Intelligence Tools This chapter introduces using and deploying Oracle’s wide array of busi-
ness intelligence tools, including portals, reporting, and ad hoc query and analysis tools. The Oracle Business Intelligence Suites (Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition) are covered. In addition, the Oracle database sup- port provided by business intelligence tools available from other vendors is described.
Chapter 7: Data Loading Embedded extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) features provided
by the Oracle database are described in this chapter. Oracle Warehouse Builder’s role in ETL, target data warehouse design, data quality analyses, and metadata management is also described.
Chapter 8: Managing the Oracle Data Warehouse Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a useful interface often used in man-
aging Oracle data warehouses as described in this chapter. The Grid Control interface for managing clusters is illustrated, as are interfaces for basic per- formance monitoring, administration, and maintenance.
Chapter 9: Data Warehouse Performance Tuning and Monitoring Typical performance challenges are described and proven approaches to
solving such challenges are presented. We then illustrate using such approaches to tune the data warehouse first described in the business sce- nario presented in Chapter 5.
Part III: Best Practices Understanding the technology is great, but is no guarantee of success. Part III will help you identify potential risk and best approaches for mitigating
risk as you develop and deploy your solution. These best practices are described in the following three chapters:
Chapter 10: Scoping the Effort and an Approach for Success
This chapter describes how to uncover initiatives by your business com-munity, securing business sponsorship, endorsing a methodology, project
Introduction xxi
Chapter 11: Understanding Business Needs Business needs for better business intelligence might be driven by a poorly
designed solution or by a new business requirement. Examples of less opti- mal solutions and how they can impact the business are first described in this chapter. Typical project drivers driven by business requirements are then presented followed by suggestions on how to build support for a project.
Chapter 12: Justifying Projects and Claiming Success Getting the go-ahead to build a solution often requires financial justifica-
tion. This chapter identifies the potential costs you should consider and where business benefits might come from. Financial benefits are computed for a variety of scenarios and computing return on investment (ROI) is described.
Illustrations in the Text
Oracle product illustrations in the text are captured from recent Oracle software versions. You should be able to leverage similar capabilities regardless of your Oracle software version provided you have Oracle Data- base 10g, Oracle Business Intelligence 10g, or newer releases of these prod- ucts. We frequently indicate when key features were introduced in these products so that if you have older releases deployed, you can understand limitations you might face.
From Here
To become an expert on this topic usually requires years of practice and learning, implementations for a variety of companies and organizations, and the uncommon ability to feel equally at home discussing needs and details among both IT and business co-workers. For those that grow in such expertise, there is great opportunity and potential reward.
This book is intended to help lay that foundation. Of course, your suc- cess will depend not only on what you read in the following chapters, but also on how you put what you learn here into practice in the solutions you work on. As you now start reading this book, it is our hope that it will help you avoid many common pitfalls and that you will gain a better perspec- tive on how to attain professional success in building and deploying such
P A R T
I Oracle Business Intelligence Defined
In This Part
Chapter 1: Oracle Business Intelligence Chapter 2: Oracle’s Transactional Business Intelligence Chapter 3: Introduction to Oracle Data Warehousing Chapter 4: Choosing a Platform
C H A P T E R
1 Oracle Business Intelligence
Business intelligence can be defined as having the right access to the right data or information needed to make the right business decisions at the right time. The data might be raw or might have been analyzed in some way. Having access to such information enables management of the busi- ness by fact instead of by primarily relying on intuition.
This is a broad definition of business intelligence and is not limited to data warehousing alone. Although a data warehouse is often used to pro- vide such a solution and is the primary focus of most of this book, we’ll broaden the discussion to also include business intelligence gained from on-line transaction processing solutions. Business analysts and users of business intelligence don’t really care about — or want to understand where their information comes from. They simply want access to such sources. So the solution you choose to deploy will depend on the kind of information that is needed.
This chapter provides a broad discussion of Oracle’s business intelli- gence offerings and should help you better understand all of the solution types available for deployment. We conclude this chapter by discussing some of the emerging business needs that will lead to a further blending of data warehousing and transactional systems. In subsequent chapters in this section of the book, we provide more details as to how and why you’d
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4 Part I Oracle Business Intelligence Defined
deploy transactional business intelligence and data warehousing solu- tions. We also discuss some of the platform strategies for deployment.
After the introductory first section of this book, we describe in much greater detail the area of business intelligence that you are probably most interested in: custom-built data warehousing solutions using Oracle databases. We provide examples of how you can design, use, and manage various capabilities of the Oracle database and Oracle business intelligence tools. In the final section of this book, we discuss best practices and strate- gies for deployment of such solutions.
Although the primary audience of the book is information technology (IT) professionals, we begin this book with the following warning: build- ing a business intelligence solution as an IT project without sponsorship of or buy-in by the lines of business is likely to end in very limited success or career-limiting failure. For many of you, the non-technical portions of this book in the best practices section might initially be of the least interest, because your interest is centered in IT and implementing technology plat- form solutions. However, applying techniques described in that section could determine whether your project is viewed as successful.
Business Intelligence and Transactional Applications
Transactional applications generally provide business intelligence to busi- ness users through reports that reveal current data in transactional tables. Oracle’s E-Business Suite of applications, PeopleSoft applications, JD Edwards applications, and Siebel Customer Relationship Management applications all provide this level of business intelligence. Reporting is selected and deployed based on key business requirements (KBRs) and most commonly displayed as key performance indicators (KPIs) in a dash- board using portal technology.
Most companies also deploy business intelligence solutions that rely on a complementary data warehousing strategy when reporting and analysis becomes more complex and summary level information is appropriate. Oracle’s PeopleSoft and JD Edwards’ EnterpriseOne applications are often surrounded by the PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) data warehouse to enable such reporting through analytical applications. Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications are similarly often surrounded by Business Analytics Applications built upon a relationship management warehouse model. Other application ven-
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Chapter 1 Oracle Business Intelligence
5 The Oracle E-Business Suite leverages more of a blended approach to
delivering business intelligence applications as many of these applications rely on data in summary levels of transactional tables. The Enterprise Plan- ning and Budgeting application, a more complex analytical application, leverages Oracle OLAP technology in a separate multi-dimensional cube.
At the time of publication of this book, Oracle has described many aspects of Project Fusion, Oracle’s future single set of transactional appli- cations that provide a migration path for current deployments of the E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel CRM applications. The business intelligence solutions provided for this next generation of applications will continue to provide a blending of transactional business intelligence and incorporate data warehousing concepts.
Among Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft EPM offerings, a num- ber of common business intelligence applications are provided including a balanced scorecard, activity-based management, and enterprise planning and budgeting applications. In addition, the Oracle E-Business Suite has Daily Business Intelligence. We’ll briefly describe what these applications do in this chapter, and describe them in more detail in Chapter 2.
Where multiple transaction processing vendors’ data models are present, a variety of integration approaches are also possible. We include a discus- sion of some of those in this chapter.
Daily Business Intelligence
To speed deployment of management reporting showing real-time transaction-level data, the Oracle E-Business Suite features Daily Business Intelligence. Many key management roles are pre-defined, including roles of Chief Executive Officer, vice president of operations, vice president of procurement, vice president of service contracts, project executive, market- ing manager, sales manager, manager of e-mail, profit center manager, and cost center manager.
A performance management framework is provided to define KPIs (or measures) and dimensions, set targets, and subscribe to alerts. Out-of-the- box, over 250 key measures are predefined, including revenue, expenses, costs of revenue, contribution margin, gross margin, percentage margin, total headcount and average salary per employee, lead activity, lead con- version, purchase order purchases, contract leakage, inventory turns, and project revenue. Common dimensions are supported across the E-Business Suite modules, including time, geography, customer, supplier, item, ware- house, currency, manager, organization, project organization, sales group,
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6 Part I Oracle Business Intelligence Defined
Reports are typically at the day level with period-to-date calculations available for any day. Data is aggregated at multiple levels of the time dimension, including day, week, month, quarter, and year. Report pages are provided out-of-the-box for profit and loss, expense management, compli- ance management, HR management, operations management, order man- agement, fulfillment management, project profitability management, product lifecycle management, profit operations management, quote man- agement, marketing management, leads management, sales management, sales comparative performance, opportunity management, procure- ment management, procure-to-pay management, and service contracts management.
Figure 1-1 shows a dashboard view provided by Daily Business Intelli- gence for sales management of forecasts with KPIs available for sales group and direct reports forecasts, pipeline and weighted pipeline, and won to period.
Balanced Scorecard
Executives have long sought a strategic management tool based on mea- surements of financial status, customer feedback and other outcomes, and internal process flows that illustrate the state of the business and expose areas where improvement might be desirable. In 1992, Drs. David Norton and Robert Kaplan developed such a tool and named it the Balanced Scorecard. This tool is often used at companies focused on Total Quality Management (TQM), where the goals are measurement-based manage- ment and feedback, employee empowerment, continuous improvement, and customer-defined quality.
Figure 1-1: A sales manager’s view within Daily Business Intelligence
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Chapter 1 Oracle Business Intelligence
7 A Balanced Scorecard incorporates a feedback loop around business
process outputs and the outcome of the business strategies. This double- loop feedback provides a comparison to financials that results in a more balanced approach to business management. Typical metrics viewed show present status of an organization, provide diagnostic feedback and trends in performance over time, indicate which metrics are critical, and provide input for forecasting.
Oracle’s E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft brands offer Balanced Score- card products that will be merged into a single product in Oracle’s next generation Fusion applications. KPIs are viewed through a desktop inter- face enabling achievement of business goals to be monitored and strategic actions to be taken and recorded. The E-Business Suite Balanced Scorecard can leverage KPIs present in Daily Business Intelligence. Scorecards and associated reports are created with design tools present in the products.
Figure 1-2 shows a typical balanced scorecard strategy map showing the status of various processes.
Figure 1-2: Typical Balanced Scorecard strategy map
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8 Part I Oracle Business Intelligence Defined
Enterprise Planning and Budgeting
Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and their staffs plan budgets, forecast financial achievements, and monitor and analyze the results. Oracle’s E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft brands each offer Enterprise Planning and Budgeting (EPB) tools (see Figure 1-3) that will be merged into a single offering when Oracle releases the next generation Fusion applications. Since EPB solutions provide updates to the transactions systems, each branded version of EPB today features seamless integration with corre- sponding general ledger products. The E-Business Suite tool leverages Oracle’s database OLAP Option for analysis and leverages the Enterprise Performance Foundation (EPF) that includes predefined schema, open interface tables, and loader engines. The PeopleSoft version leverages the EPM schema and loading capabilities.
By deploying an EPB solution, what-if budgeting analyses can be com- pared. EPB can enable consistent and repeatable methodologies to be put into place for planning budgets and agreeing upon forecasts. Models can be shared. The analyses results can be viewed through a portal or shared through e-mail, worksheets, briefing books, or spreadsheets.
EPB reports and budgets can include multiple currencies. Historic results can use the actual exchange rates while planned projects can incor- porate budgeted exchange rates.
Figure 1-3: Oracle E-Business Suite Enterprise Planning and Budgeting
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Chapter 1 Oracle Business Intelligence
9 Activity-Based Management
Although transactional applications typically show costs of components, gaining an understanding of total costs of product, services, or customers can require a more targeted application. Activity-Based Management (ABM) solutions provide a means to map these individual costs including activities, materials, resources, and products or services. As a result, it becomes possible to understand the profitability of customers, products, channels, and markets. Oracle’s E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft brands each offer ABM tools. These will be merged into a single offering in Ora- cle’s next generation Fusion applications. Today, each is integrated with the brand’s corresponding general ledger offering.
Using an ABM solution, activity costs can be analyzed for setting appro- priate charge-back rates, establishing performance benchmarks, and target costing of new product development. Activities, materials, and other costs can be mixed and matched in preparation for bids or based on sales vol- ume projections. Unused capacity costs can be tracked.
Oracle Integration Components Enabling Business Intelligence
A classic approach to providing a single version of the truth, where multi- ple transactional applications exist, is to build a data warehouse. This is common practice where the goal is to store and analyze years of transac- tional history and where data quality in source systems is a known issue. However, alternative integration strategies are sometimes used where only recent transactions are needed for business intelligence. Solutions based on Oracle technology components are enabled through what is called Oracle Fusion Middleware, also known as the Oracle Application Server.
A variety of solutions exist. Data hubs can be leveraged to create a master data model where the goal is a common representation of key per- formance indicators around customers, financials, and other areas. Busi- ness activity monitoring can provide an alert-based solution for viewing transactional changes from a variety of sources. BPEL can be used to define business processes among different systems. An Enterprise Messaging Service can be deployed to link data feeds among widely differing sources.
Integration strategy is a lengthy topic and covering it in detail is not a goal for this book. However, we do provide an introduction to some of the key concepts here.
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10 Part I Oracle Business Intelligence Defined
Data Hubs
Data hubs are centralized repositories used to reconcile data from multiple source systems. They are often used where companies have deployed mul- tiple vendors’ transactional solutions with different data definitions and where it is desired to have a single location where an official definition lives. Reconciled data can be enriched with other data, viewed, and created or updated. In some situations, data might be sent back in a correct form to source systems (although this can introduce additional workload on those systems, so it is less common in practice). Although hubs are sometimes confused with operational data stores (an ODS is shown in Figure 1-5 later in this chapter), a hub is different in that it usually points to data residing in the originating systems without physically moving the data into the hub.
Oracle’s first hubs were based on the E-Business Suite schema and include the Customer Hub, Financial Consolidation Hub, Product Infor- mation Management Data Hub, Citizen Data Hub, and Financial Services Accounting Data Hub. Because of this, Oracle’s hubs are well integrated with Daily Business Intelligence and the Balanced Scorecard products. Oracle also offers a Customer Master Data integration hub created by Siebel prior to the acquisition by Oracle.
Business Activity Monitoring
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) enables the monitoring in real-time through dashboards of business services and processes, including correla- tion of KPIs to business processes. The goal is to enable business executives to take corrective action in a much more timely fashion.
Unlike traditional business intelligence tools that rely on periodic polling to update information, BAM uses an alerting infrastructure to update the dashboard when changes occur. Hence, BAM is a true monitor of changes and can be paired with traditional business intelligence tools where further analyses may be necessary. BAM can also be used as an infrastructure for custom dashboard monitoring across multiple source systems. Business managers can define and modify their own dashboard pages.
Oracle also builds and provides BAM-based applications such as the PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management (CRM) dashboards. For example, the Enterprise Sales Dashboard provides a real-time view into rev- enue attainment, pipeline status, and sales-team performance. The Enterprise Order Capture Dashboard displays the status of orders, revenue quotas, and order throughput. Enterprise dashboards for Service, Helpdesk, and Human Resources Helpdesk monitor case and e-mail throughput, service-level
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Chapter 1 Oracle Business Intelligence
11 BPEL Process Manager
As companies move toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for deployment of business processes, assembling these reusable processes together into business process flows is desirable. The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) is an XML-based language that enables the building of such process flows. The Oracle BPEL Process Manager is Oracle’s tool providing the necessary infrastructure to design, build, and monitor the flows. It has support for asynchronous interactions, flow control, and compensating business transactions.
When using Oracle BPEL, you first synchronously define needed ser- vices to be invoked, then define exception handling procedures, build assignments of relevant XML information that should be leveraged in the decision making process, define triggers for callback services, and define conditional branches. Oracle BPEL includes an automated testing inter- face, including audit trails and debugger. Figure 1-4 shows the BPEL Console interface.
After testing, you can deploy to a J2EE application server (most com- monly Oracle Fusion Middleware Application Server). In production, the business asynchronous flow is initiated, then asynchronous callbacks are received, and the process flow subsequently branches to and presents the appropriate business outcome.
Enterprise Messaging Service
In SOA and other deployments where trickle feeds of data are needed in order to integrate distributed applications, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) solutions are becoming common. The ESB provides an underlying messag- ing infrastructure.
12 Part I
Oracle provides an ESB solution through the Oracle Enterprise Messag- ing Service (OEMS). OEMS is built upon the standards-based Java Message Service (JMS) and the J2EE Connector Architecture (J2CA). It can be integrated with non-Oracle messaging infrastructures such as IBM WebSphereMQ (MQSeries), Tibco Enterprise JMS, and SonicMQ. Various service levels are possible for persistence and recovery, including in- memory, file system, and database-backed message persistence.
Custom Data Warehouse Solutions
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, decision support databases began to be deployed separately from transactional databases and were instead deployed into what became known as data warehouses. This model of sep- arating the workloads was driven by the need to report on, query, and ana- lyze increasingly large amounts of data with varying levels of complexity. An important goal was not to impact the transactional systems while doing this. There was much debate during the 1990s as to whether a single enter- prise data warehouse with a third normal data model was appropriate as the separate database, or whether the right solution was departmental data marts deployed with star schema. As the decade progressed, the tradeoffs associated with each approach became understood.
■ Oracle Business Intelligence Defined