Oracle Business Intelligence Applications(OBIA)11.1.1.8.1 with ODI

What is OBIA

Oracle BI Applications is a suite of prebuilt business intelligence solutions that deliver role-based intelligence. Oracle BI Applications support prebuilt aggregation and analysis of information from a variety of transactional applications, including Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, as well as non-Oracle applications. These transactional applications are referred to source systems, because they provide the underlying data that source analyses.

 Business case for OBIA

In the above introduction it is mentioned BI solution is pre built and it means:

• A prebuilt data warehouse schema, the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse, with associated extract, transform, and load (ETL) metadata and data-movement infrastructure to support aggregation and transformation for the analysis of data from all transactional sources.
• A pre-built Oracle BI Applications metadata repository to support analysis of the data in the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse.
• A suite of metrics pertaining to how organizations measure performance that your company can select from and apply to your particular line of business.

Benefits of a packaged application are quicker time to deploy, less overall cost, an enterprise view of data, role-based views for all employees, and built-in best practices. For any organization or company  who own the transactional source system of Oracle Ebusiness Suite,Siebel,PeopleSoft ,JDEdwards  OBIA can drastically reduce the time and cost to deploy a BI solution It also provides the flexibility to introduce and implement the analytics one module at a time, for eg: You can implement Financials and then move on HR analytics.

OBIA ERP Analytics consists of the following modules:

Oracle Financial Analytics

Oracle U.S. Federal Financial Analytics

Oracle Human Resources Analytics

Oracle Manufacturing Analytics

Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics

Oracle Project Analytics

Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics

Oracle Student Information Analytics

OBIA Version

I will be going over the new release of OBIA 11.1.1.7.1/11.1.1.8.1 with ODI.  Earlier version that is OBIA  7.9.6 had Informatica as its ETL architecture. The topics I will be covering will be based only the new release of OBIA 11.1.1.8.1 and not an upgrade from 7.9.6 .

The oracle site has only 11.1.1.8.1 for download .So I will be referring to only 11.1.1.8.1 installation and configuration steps. The upgrade path from 11.1.1.7.1 to 11.1.1.8.1 is available on the OTN site. Both have the same BI components but the latest version 11.1.1.8.1 has some bug fixes and enhancements to 11.1.1.7.1 version.

The most significant difference between OBIA 11.1.1.7.1 and 11.1.1.8.1 that I have noticed are

• New Data Lineage Tool allows customers and implementers to track lineage from source to target - improving information transparency across their enterprise 
• Configuration Management expands System Setup and Load Plan definition capabilities, including the registration of multiple instances for the same Product Line Version, UI enhancements to support DW connection configuration and Load Plan definition, and Load Plan definition migration

The different components of OBIA 11.1.1.8.1 are

• Admin console
• BIACM(Business Intelligence Applications Configuration Manager)
• FSM(Functional Setup Manager)
• ODI Console(Oracle Data Integrator Console)
• RPD(Repository)
• Catalog

Success Factors for implementing OBIA 11.1.1.8.1 with ODI Successful BI implementation is a collaborative effort of functional and technical teams in an organization. BI implementation is successful and useful only when the data on the dashboards are meaningful.  And when does data become meaningful in dashboards?  Look at the diagram below:

This diagram depicts the different components that are responsible for the display of meaningful data on your dashboards. Functional configurations is an important task at each and every stage of BI implementation since accurate configurations and mappings translate to accurate data on dashboards. These steps need input from the subject matter experts (SMEs) or the super users of your transactional source system to get the data right. And when the technical folks show the BIACM and FSM UIs to functional SMEs for their input, the questions they would be asked are:

• This UI does not make sense.
• What is all that Mapping about?
• Why you need that input?

The answer that would help:

These functional setups, based on either business requirements or on transactional source system settings or configurations, direct the manner in which relevant data is moved and transform d from source database to target database. Functional setups are also called functional configurations which provides accurate and successful movement of data from (source system) EBS to (database to target Business Analytics Warehouse) Dashboard and they Control the manner in which data is displayed.

 Implementation Phases of OBIA 11.1.1.8.1 with ODI

I will be going over the implementation phases for Oracle BI Applications. A typical product lifecycle consists of the following process, some of which may happen concurrently.

• Installation
• OBIA architecture and components
• Configurations
• Data Load-Domain Load/Data Load/Incremental Load/Issues in Data Load
• Customization to RPD
• Customization to Dashboards
• Migration