Reporting is a key aspect of any enterprise-level organization. Increased visibility into the ongoings of specific areas and activities allows for better decision-making and forecasts. From an Enterprise Resource Planning perspective, reporting offers insights into the wider organization and any regulatory entities that may require regular reports from an organization. Here, we’ll explore the key reporting tools for Cloud ERP users, and how users can take advantage of the reporting capabilities in Cloud ERP.
The Importance of Reporting
Reporting gives visibility and transparency to projects, helps stakeholders make data-driven decisions, allows managers to monitor organizational health in different areas, and can allow for effective planning and projections. In addition to being a useful tool for organizations to make better, more strategic decisions, there are cases where creating reports is imperative for external regulatory entities, depending on the industry.
Effective reporting facilitates good communication across organizations as reporting ihelps manage risks and provides a way to benchmark performance on an individual and organizational level. By making data-driven decisions performance improves, which, in turn, helps companies achieve their strategic goals. Having accurate and readable reports assists in deciding what key metrics are important for well-informed decision-making, trust, and credibility to improve between the company and clients, communication improves by presenting data in a format that is easily understood by stakeholders, saving time and effort and, of course, improving productivity.
OTBI and BI Publisher – What They Are and When to Use OTBI vs. BI Publisher?
OTBI stands for Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence, which is a tool primarily used for ad-hoc reporting. This service offers interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations that allow users to display data from the system easily. As a rule of thumb, BI Publisher, on the other hand, is best used when creating reports that the business would consistently use, just with different data. For more on the specific differences and use cases for OTBI and BI Publisher, read more here: Oracle Cloud Reporting: OTBI and BI Publisher
Key Prerequisites to Using Reporting Tools
When looking at these reporting tools available, be sure to consider the following prerequisites to utilizing reporting tools:
Sequel Query Language:
Both BI Publisher and OTBI use SQL, so being literate in SQL will assist users in creating the types of reports they most want. In OTBI users can use SQL to modify analyses so that you may retrieve data and manipulate it customized. In BI Publisher, users would use SQL to define data sets or to perform data transformations.
OTBI – Prerequisites:
Before using OTBI, ensure that data is readily available, accessible, and good quality. Closely look to see that security is set up appropriately, paying particular attention to employee roles and restrictions in access to sensitive data based on their roles. Before getting started with OTBI it is also a good idea to establish at least a baseline understanding of the layout of the OTBI environment. Also, as mentioned above familiarity and background in SQL is useful to make reports even more customized.
BI Publisher – Prerequisites:
Make sure that BI Publisher can connect to whatever data source you are trying to create reports from. This can require some initial configuration if this hasn’t been done already. Having an idea of report templates and data model designs available is key to ensuring users are ready to begin building the desired reports. These templates will ensure data models are correctly connected to the appropriate fields in your reports. Integrating BI Publisher with your Oracle Cloud Application on the HCM side as well as ERP side is useful for creating automated reports that are sent to the correct people and users based on things like their roles.
No matter where you and your organization are in your Cloud ERP reporting journey, Elire is able to assist in enabling and configuring your desired reports and dashboards. If you are you brand new to reporting and need guides or tutorials on how to create one, or have you been making reports for years and are looking for some change with the software you use to make things more efficient or better meet your needs, Elire’s team of Cloud consultants is ready to assist. Reach out to Cloud@elire.com to connect with our team and in the meantime, learn more about optimizing Cloud here.
