Management Reporting from Oracle E-business Suite (EBS)

If not, and you would like to, please read on………

The Issue with inadequate Management Reporting

Management Reporting from Oracle E-business Suite (EBS) contains basic standard reports most of which are not very user friendly to work with. Most of my clients have had to use either internal or external resources to have specific reports produced. One of the main reporting tools used was Discoverer but Oracle no longer supports this tool. However, when it comes to management reporting it is down to OBIEE or other third-party data warehouse systems to be used.

I recently worked with a client who had inherited a copy of their ex-parent company’s EBS version with OBIEE. OBIEE was not configured for my client so unfortunately it was unusable.

This left my client with no management reporting whatsoever.

The immediate concern was to provide an orderbook followed by sales reports and an order fill report.

The Management Reporting Solution

Using a sql script it was possible to extract the data required which could then be imported to an Excel file. However, I convinced the client to invest in a ten User license for Blitz Report^TM.

Blitz Report^TM is a toolkit which is seamlessly integrated into the Oracle EBS system. Once installed, which takes a DBA around 30 minutes to complete, the toolkit allows sql scripts to be written or imported and then run within the system. It also allows Oracle Discoverer reports to be imported and run or even modified within the toolkit. A preformatted Excel file is produced with the results within seconds onto the user’s desktop.

This solved the problem of the Orderbook and made the constant change requests easy to accommodate as no dba installation of individual reports is required. Individual reports can be modified and are available to the users immediately.

The sales and order fill reporting was a little more complicated in that different report configurations were required.

Blitz Report^TM has two features which made this requirement extremely easy. First templates are produced which allows for different combinations of data to be used in each template. Then pivot tables are specified allowing specific data for filters, columns, rows and values to be specified. The result is an Excel workbook with the base data in the first worksheet and the pivot table in the second worksheet. Selecting any summary row in the pivot table allowed the base data supporting that value to be seen.

This allowed the creation of both gross and net sales reports filtered by business group, country, region, customers, product groups etc. and providing cost margin data only to the Executive Management team.

Finally, to obtain the dashboard, the required graphs and images required are added to the workbook output from the finished report. This workbook is then imported back into Blitz Report^TM. The next time that the report with this template is run the graphs and images will be automatically produced with the corresponding data.

These reports can then be scheduled to run automatically at respecified intervals and to be mailed to recipients or placed into specified server directories.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Blitz Report^TM proved to be a perfect and fast solution to the reporting problem of my client at an extremely affordable price. A fully working free version is available and was used for a three-month proof of concept period after which it remains free but with a limitation of 30 reports. Having seen the benefits, my client upgraded to a 30-user license.

The immediate benefits included:

Perfectly formatted Excel reports delivered in seconds

Create new or ad-hoc Oracle EBS reports in minutes

User configurable reports, reducing IT dependency

Includes seeded reports for all core process areas

Toolkits for tuning, data management and IT support

Data governance and audit tracking

Central report repository with full version control

BI Publisher and Oracle Discoverer replacement tool

Oracle EBS forms interface for immediate user adoption

Oracle Enterprise Command Center (ECC) Integration

Interested to see more? 

Contact us to see Blitz Report™ in action tailored to your own needs and to arrange a free demonstration at your convenience or for an informal discussion of your requirements.

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