22/09/2010 by Simon Tomey.

The heart’s desire of every accountant is to be able to see a report and then click on a section of this to get further detail. We’ve found a way of doing this using BI Publisher in EBS.

The classic situation (which is so well catered for by the likes of Discoverer and BI Answers) is the ability to drill down to further information when performing analysis. You get your top level summary report and you want more information for the areas that are of interest to you. For example imagine wanting the account analysis report information, but summarised by account code with the ability to drill down to the sub-ledger detail underneath. Well now you can.

We’ve managed to set this up using bursting in BI Publisher. By creating a series of templates which hold all the information required for all the various drill down permutations, we can enable users to start with a top level report and drill through various paths to open further detailed reports.

The great news is, that this uses the standard free, integrated Oracle BI Publisher bursting technology. It’s a little complex, but not so complex that we can’t show you how to build you own suites of reports. Just look out for all those accountants, with the desires of their hearts fulfilled…

See below for a mock up we’ve done of this. (yes I know the totals don’t quite add up, but you get the idea of how to do it, I hope).

We create a series of templates which allow the user to jump from one report to another, to follow a “drill path”, using automatically generated hyperlinks.

We run the bursting request to create all the output files, populate the hyperlinks and send them to the appropriate folders.

The user then opens the top level report (either from the directory, or just viewing the output).

The report then contains a series of automatically generated hyperlinks which will follow the “drill path” you have specified when you designed the report.

The hyperlinks enable the user to “drill down” to further levels of detail. (The hyperlink merely opens a new report relevant to the item selected).

The number of drill down levels are not limited (but you may wish to keep it to just a few).

You may wish to enable users to go directly to the full detail.

I’ll post an update when we have done more. Meanwhile you might need to get us in to train you so you can make your own journey of discovery in satisfying the heart’s desire of your accountants.

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30/06/2010 by Matt Stocker.

The Oracle Government User Group was held last month (13 May 2010) and we were privileged to be invited to share both the exciting potential of BI Publisher and the ways in which it can transform an organisation’s reporting capabilities. With good overall attendance, it was great see some familiar faces as well as meet some of those who were attending for the first time.

In case you haven’t attended an Oracle User Group before, these groups are run by Oracle users for the benefit of other users and cover topics ranging from the upgrade path to R12 to the specifics of certain functionality such as reporting – which is where BeLife comes in.

For this particular presentation, Simon Tomey (Consulting Director) and Adam Penchoen (Consultant) focused on the specifics of creating a BI Publisher report. Whilst there are some technical elements, it is entirely feasible for a non-technical user to get to grips with the process as it involves use of standard Microsoft Office functionality.  Due to this, use of BI Publisher enables organisations to be much less reliant on technical experts, which in turn leads to internal empowerment, improved reporting capabilities and reduced investment costs.

As you can probably tell, BI Publisher and its capabilities excite us and it was great to see that others were excited too. Those who attended our presentation were, in the main, interested in the free capabilities that BI Publisher offers and were either looking at or were already using it to replace Discoverer, FSG or other third party reporting applications.

Whilst BI Publisher can tend to be a lesser-known capability within EBS, it certainly seems that awareness of it is growing. With BI Publisher’s key role within the Oracle EBS R12 release and, beyond that, the Oracle Fusion upgrade, it would seem that its importance is only set to grow.

Many of those attending our presentation also reported that there are many advantages to BI Publisher when compared to other options. In fact, our presentation followed a presentation by George Gallagher (Jephson Housing Association Group and one of our clients), who shared his experience of converting to BI Publisher. He explained that BI Publisher had reduced reports users’ reliance on himself, as users were able to run reports themselves once they had been created or, in some cases, reports could be run automatically through bursting.

If you’re interested in finding out more about implementing BI Publisher yourself, feel free to get in touch and we’d be more than happy to talk you through what’s involved.

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07/06/2010 by Simon Tomey.

There’s great news for FSG users and Discoverer users – you can emulate the functionality of these packages using BI Publisher.  Not only does this mean you get great output, but you apply some of the cool BIP functionality too (such as “bursting”).

Following on from an earlier presentation at the UKOUG (where I think I rather missed the point) I recently did a fresh presentation at the UKOUG on converting FSG’s and Discoverer reports to run in Oracle BI Publisher.  Loads of people ask me if it is possible to convert FSG’s and discoverer reports to run in BIP.  Well you can, sort of, using data templates.  Read on… 

Not only can Oracle BI Publisher transform existing reports to produce impressive attractive output, but you can write completely new reports too.  Data templates are part of BI Publisher and enable to extract anything at all out of Oracle applications by writing your own SQL and presenting the output as a BI Publisher report.  In BI Publisher, you can include your own parameters and can apply some of the more interesting BIP technology such as bursting reports to email overnight.

One particularly compelling solution is the replace some of your dull routine FSG or Discoverer reports with impressive BI Publisher output (PDF, Excel, HTML, RTF).  You’ve got the SQL already, you just have to lift it into your data template.

We’ve recently converted FSG reports into burstable PDFs or spreadsheets with run time parameters for one client.   For other client’s we’ve replaced routine discoverer reports with attractively formatted impressive scheduled BIP reports. 

Click here to download the presentation and let me know if you’ve got any questions http://oracle.belife.co.uk/UKOUG%20-%20Transforming%20Discoverer%20and%20FSG%20Report%20v1.0.zip

The presentation focuses on data templates and what can be done rather than exactly how it is done.   (Warning BIP is not well suited to ad hoc queries).  If you want to read about data templates in general, you might also like to check out an earlier post of mine (http://blog.belife.co.uk/2009/08/03/data-templates/).

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