Customizations in BI Oracle cloud - OTBI
OTBI
(Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence) is a transactional real time
reporting solution for Oracle Fusion applications. Oracle HCM Cloud, CX
Cloud, SCM Cloud and Cloud ERP all have Oracle Transactional Business
Intelligence (OTBI) built into the application. OTBI leverages advanced
functionalities of both BI and Oracle ADF to analyze the data on real time
databases for reporting and other BI requirements.
OTBI Subject
Areas:
OTBI subject areas are pre built meta-data
content for BI reporting solutions with seamless integration in Oracle fusion
applications. OTBI organizes BI reporting data elements such as Dimensions and
Facts based on the business function in RPD Subject Areas. Subject areas are
made up of logical data structures combined together and each of them are
associated with specific application modules (such as General Ledger, Payroll,
Payables, etc.).
Since OTBI analyses and reports on the real time
transactional data, user will notice "... Real Time" suffixed with most
of the RPD subject area names. Also, by default, caching is disabled in OTBI
environment in order to support real time reporting. Even though cross
subject area reporting is possible with OTBI, it is not recommended in view of
report performance using real-time data.
OTBI
Security:
OTBI inherits Cloud apps user roles and security
profiles. Which OTBI subject areas and what data are accesible is determined by
Oracle user security profile. Also the data that can be viewed will be based on
the transactional database schema with user level data security applied.
Customizations
in OTBI:
Oracle allows the following customizations
in OTBI as given below.
·
Create custom subject areas (Only for sales
cloud)
·
Oracle Flexfields
Custom
subject areas:
Users can create Custom subject area for building reports using Application Composer. Similar to on premise OBIEE subject areas, custom subject areas in fusion apps can consist of entities, columns and measure columns as per the business requirements and domain of the Client business. Users can group components from prebuilt subject area to simply form a custom subject area.
Creator
of these subject area can decide the list of columns, Data leveling and
Security of these subject areas. The published CSA can be inactivated or
activated later on, based on the business needs. CSA will be listed with other
predefined set of subject areas in the analysis creator list.
Published
custom subject areas can be edited and then republished whenever changes are
required. Modifying a custom subject area will not impact the reports created
on top of it unless specific columns used in the reports are modified.
Custom
subject areas are secured by access rights based on the fusion apps user roles.
For the role name added, read access will be granted by default. If read access
needs to be revoked, "No Access" has to be selected explicitly.
Flexfields:
Flexfields
in Oracle Cloud are placed holders' fields to hold key information, which can
be preconfigured to capture additional information on the page or fields and are
configurable during the implementation. Regardless of type of flexfield, they
have similar structure. Flexfields are preserved during the application
upgrades also.
Flexfields
are formed by sequenced segments. Segment has value set which stores the values
allowed to be used in the segment. Value set stores the data from transactions.
Flexfields are integrated with the fusion application's Transactional Database.
So security is governed by Oracle user security profile.
All
the Flexfields which required to be available in the BI subject areas need to
be checked on the "BI Enabled" property. RPD Subject areas for these Flexfields
will be different based on its type, like GL related Flexfields can be found
only in General Ledger subject areas. Users can customize and configure on
which presentation table of specific subject area, these new Flexfields columns
to be listed. Upon publishing of these
flexfields, it will be available for analysis creation as other pre-defined
columns.
Some
of the Fusion Applications' columns are not exposed for analysis or reporting
purposes. Only common business process related columns are exposed and pre-defined
analyses and reports are built based on that. For additional customizations
over and above discussed here,
·
Users can reach out to Oracle through Support Request
for customizations.
·
Additionally, BI Publisher can be used to build SQL
statements based data model for report building. SQLs can be executed on the
Fusion Apps database which requires knowledge of the underlying fusion database
but allows more control over data reporting.
- Xavier
N Philip