OTBI (Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence) in Oracle ERP Cloud is a real-time reporting tool that allows users to analyze and extract data directly from Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. These reports provide insights into transactional data without requiring a complex data warehouse or precurated data.
Below are the key Features of OTBI Reports:
Self-Service Reporting: The tools is intuitive and can be easily used by business users with minimal technical skills, enabling them to create their own reports without needing extensive technical support.
Drag-and-Drop Interface: It provides an intuitive user interface with drag-and-drop functionality for report creation.
Predefined Subject Areas: Subject areas are the groupings of related data for specific functional areas, such as Finance, Human Resources etc.
Real-Time Data Access: OTBI reports query live transactional data, offering up-to-date information.
Building OTBI Reports:
Oracle ERP Cloud provides a lot of subject areas for variety of the business areas. While building a OTBI report, we need to correctly identify the Subject area as per our requirement and also identify the correct Business Objects underneath to cater to our business requirements.
Let's see the steps involved in creating OTBI reports.
- Go to Oracle ERP Cloud, go to Navigator. Select Report and analytics.
- Reports and Analytics page will be shown as below.
- Click on browse Catalog.
- Now click on New option and select Analysis from the dropdown.
- For our use case, we are going to create Analysis on Fixed Assets data.
For this, let's select Subject Area 'Fixed Assets - Asset Transactions Real Time'.
- The landing page will be where we will design our OTBI report.
Let's understand various sections of the designer area.
- Selected columns:
Selected Columns area represents Columns which you want to include in your Report output.
- Filters:
Filters area represents where conditions in this OTBI report.
- We are supposed to drag the desired columns from the subject areas on the left side to the Selected Columns area on the right side.
- As we can see, the subject area has many sub folders. Each subfolder has information related to variety of aspects related to Fixed Assets business area.
For example, the Fixed Assets folder has a sub folder named General Information which contains columns such as Asset number, Asset Description, Asset Type Description etc.
- Let's drag some desired columns from Subject area to the Selected Columns.
Once done, these columns will come in this report output.
Searching for columns:
- Now, let's say we want to find and add column pertaining to Asset Cost but we don't know which folder it resides in; then we can search for the desired text in the search area and it should show us the results matching the search string in the Subject Area pane.
- As we can see, we have found Asst Cost column. We can now drag and drop this one on the right side to include in our report.
- If we wish to find which folder this column resides in, then we have mouse over the column and we should be able to see the full path name in the popup.
- Here's what we have selected to be shown in our final report
Viewing output:
- As we can see the output has Analysis can be seen here
Changing Column headings:
- Click on Column Format -> check the Custom Headings checkbox to enable the Column Heading field -> Change the column heading to the desired new value.
- Click OK and the column in our report will now have the updated heading
Creating Parameters for OTBI report:
- Let's see how to add parameters to our OTBI Analysis.
- Navigate to Prompts tab
- Click on + icon and select Column Prompt option. This will show us all the columns from our Selected Columns area. Let's select Asset Number
- We will be presented with a popup where we should select Operator as "is equal to / is in" and User Input as "Choice List"
- This will create a new prompt for the column Asset Number
- If we scroll down to Display area, we'll be able to see how the prompt will be seen in the real report along with the sample values.
Saving OTBI report:
- Click Save Analysis button to save the OTBI Analysis
- OTBI Analysis saved
Running the OTBI report:
- Let's navigate back to Catalog.
- We can see out new OTBI report/analysis here. Let's click on Open option
- We'll be presented with our report with parameter section showing the Asset Number prompt
- Let's select the desired Asset Number from the dropdown and click OK
- We can see our OTBI report has been successfully run for the given parameter and the output is shown.
This is how we can build OTBI analysis/reports and get the real-time reporting from variety of business areas in Oracle ERP Cloud.