Getting Started With BI in Fusion

Applications
Introduction
Customizing reports, charts, tables, and dashboards is a common requirement for an enterprise
application, as everyone expects to be able to see just what they want - and this goes way
beyond mere personalization. Examples are reports with newly added fields (flexfields, custom
fields/objects), reports that include company-specific calculations, or just simply reports that
remove unimportant data for a particular task.

Fusion BI Architecture
For simplicity let's consider there to be only two types of BI output used in Fusion Applications.
The first is a Report, often generated to record past activity, usually in tabular format, and is
commonly stored and shared with other teams or managers. An example might be a monthly
expenses report. The second type of BI output is known as an Analysis and is usually embedded
in a page and visually displays information that can be used to make immediate business
decisions, such as a line chart showing a sales decline. Whilst analyses can be printed they
usually facilitate direct action, such as drilling-down into the actual data in the application and
performing a task. These two terms - Report and Analysis - are often used interchangeably,
however the creation of each is distinct, using separate tools and as shown in the screenshot
two process flows.

Next let's define a few acronyms to explain the technology components that make up the
overall BI capabilities in Fusion Applications. This is a very short description just to give you a
feel of the use-cases for each tool.

 OBIEE - Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. This is the parent product
from-which or within-which the other components derive. This can be seen as the BI
 Server(s), and is installed either on a standalone host that's integrated with the Fusion
Application instance, or (more commonly) installed as part of the Fusion Applications
middleware suite. The tool has components originating from Seibel analytics solution,
and was also previously known as BI Answers. OBIEE is most commonly associated
with creating Analysis output.

 BIP - Business Intelligence Publisher (or BI Publisher). It originated from Oracle E-

Business Suite's move away from Oracle Reports to a new modern meta-data driven
tool for generating pixel-perfect Report output used for printing and archiving. In
Fusion Applications, BIP is actually fully integrated as a component inside the OBIEE
server(s).

 OTBI - Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence. This capability was expressly

development for Fusion Applications, providing raw data from the live transactional
tables for use with complex analysis tools previously dependent on a
OLAP/Warehouse data store (i.e. time-lagged by an ETL process). This again is
seamlessly integrated in Fusion Applications, with the only clue to its use being the
suffix of 'real time' in the subject areas shown when creating reports and analyses.

 OBIA - Oracle Business Intelligence Analytics. Many organizations with to go beyond

the standard Oracle Application reports and analysis shipped with the product, and as
such there is an advanced suite of analysis-based solutions that can be implemented.
For Fusion Applications these are already included and deployed as standard in the BI
Catalog.

Although not covered here products such as Fusion Financials and CRM also leverage use data
warehouse components to provide multidimensional analysis to support predictive functional
capabilities.
The BI Catalog
The following screenshots illustrate the difference between Reports and Analysis at run-time.
The first is a simple Analysis that is embedded in purchasing pages, and here run from the BI
Catalog. You'll notice its visual style and its type is clearly labeled.

The next screenshot shows a BI Publisher report, also run directly from the catalog. This
launches in a new window and shows a PDF document created with the output based on the
values supplied.

Under Published Reporting -> Data Model

Create a New Data Set (of SQL Query type)

You would need to take special care while selecting Data Source (Logic Below):
a. If you are Building Finance reports use : ApplicationDB_FSCM
b. If you are Building HCM reports use : ApplicationDB_HCM
c. If you are Building CRM Reports use : ApplicationDB_CRM
For this example we use ApplicationDB_FSCM
When you browse the BI Catalog you'll notice that there are two top level folders: /My Folders/
and /Shared Folders/. These are significant because all the content saved into My Folders is
private available to your user only, whereas all the seeded content is in the Shared Folders. Also
in the Shared Folders is the /custom/ folder which is where new analysis and reports you have
created should be stored so that upon patching or upgrade your reports are preserved. As with
all customizations, it is recommended to copy seeded BI reports and analysis, and to change
and implement the new copies.

Development UI Access and BI Administration

If you create a new BI output from Fusion Applications, as shown in the first screenshot, you'll
be taken into one of two BI composer wizards. For creating an analysis you'll be in BI Analytics
Composer which gives you a simple UI for designing and developing visual output. For reports
you'll be placed in BI Publisher which also has a wizard-like guided flow. Should your
requirement be beyond the simplified capabilities of these composers however, both BI
Publisher and BI Analytics offer a more powerful development interface that permits advanced
features such as creating calculated values, adding custom formulas, and more custom layouts.
Indeed if you wish to start from this advanced BI development tool, and not in a composer,
then you can login to your BI Server using the http://[BIServerDomain]/analytics and from here
you will see the screen below which provides all catalog administrative and development
features.

So far we have considered only Reports and Analyses based on the seeded underlying data
model, known as the Subject Areas, and although what is delivered out of the box is very
comprehensive there may be a requirement to change or extend this base. This requires full BI
Administration access, wherein you can edit the Oracle BI Repository metadata layer, known as
the RPD.

Scheduling the Report to get Output Via Email

We now need to schedule this report such that it gets delivered to some specific email address
at a regular interval. For this we need to select the ‘Action’ icon and then choose the ‘Schedule’
option
The ‘General’ tab would hold pre-defined values and it should be left as is

On the output tab we need to provide the following details:

Attribute Name Attribute Value
Name ScheduledExcelOutput
Layout SampleEmpDataReport
Format Excel(*.xlsx)
Locale English (United States)
Timezone (GMT-11:00) Midway – Samoa Time (ST)
Calendar Gregorian
Save Output Checked

The Destination Section should hold below details

Attribute Name Attribute Value

Destination Type Email
*To <DF Any Valid Email id>
Cc PDF (*.PDF)
Reply To
Subject
Message
We also need to enter details in the Schedule tab (we are scheduling the report to send output
every minute)

Next we need to click on ‘Submit’

We should be able to get emails from bipublisher-report in the specific email address
mentioned
Security
Obviously accessing the above Composer or Development tools requires security grants, as not
every use should be allowed to create and customize reports and analyses. There are two main
privileges to look out for:
 To access both of the Composer tools there is a privilege entitled "Access to BI
Composer".
 To edit Analyses there is a privilege entitled "Access to Analysis”.
Both of these are granted to the “BI Platform Author” Job Role which also provides full control
permissions for the /Custom. Folder. This role quickly enables you to edit, copy, and create
analysis and reports, and to copy and edit BI dashboards. In addition, many other seeded job
roles inherit the privileges above within their related Duty Roles.

Obviously all new analysis and reports need security, and this is simply done by selecting
the Permissions menu option available under the more link for each report or analysis. From
here you can add application (duty) roles from the existing security definition and select what
they can do (read, edit etc).