How One Enterprise Reclaimed Its Reporting Future
A story about letting go of the past, embracing the future, and never looking back
There is a particular kind of organizational anxiety that sets in when a technology you have relied upon for years is suddenly end-of-lifed by its vendor. Your team has spent years — sometimes decades — building reports that run the business. The people who built those reports know every quirk, every workaround, every saved parameter. That institutional knowledge is worth far more than the license you paid.
That was exactly the situation facing Hong Kong Airport Authority, a large enterprise running Oracle’s subledger applications — Accounts Receivable (AR), Accounts Payable (AP), and more — across Finance, HR, and Supply Chain. Their reporting backbone was Oracle Discoverer. And Oracle had pulled the plug.
The Discoverer Sunset: A Problem Years in the Making
Oracle officially ended extended support for Discoverer on June 30, 2017. No new patches. No new features. No certifications with modern browsers or operating systems. For years, many organizations — Hong Kong Airport Authority included — kept the lights on, accepting the risk because migration felt too daunting.
The reports were too embedded, the users too dependent, and the alternatives too uncertain. Discoverer was built for a different era. Its UI and UX, never its strongest suits, had aged poorly against modern web-based tools. Running a report meant understanding Discoverer’s navigation paradigm — a paradigm that made sense in 2003 but created friction for every user who joined the organization after the smartphone era.
Business users had to rely heavily on IT teams just to get data out. Every new report request went into a queue. Decision-making slowed. The investment Hong Kong Airport Authority had made in Discoverer was real — years of report-building work spanning AR aging analyses, AP liability summaries, payroll reconciliations, and procurement pipelines — but the platform could no longer be the answer.
The Evaluation: Why Hong Kong Airport Authority Chose Orbit
Hong Kong Airport Authority evaluated multiple products before making a decision. What they needed was not just a reporting tool. They needed a migration path that would honor years of prior work, a modern experience that users would actually adopt, and a platform that could grow with the business.
Orbit Analytics stood out — and for compelling reasons that any enterprise in a similar situation will immediately recognize.
1. The Built-In Discoverer Migration Wizard
This was the single most decisive factor. Orbit ships with a built-in Discoverer Migration Utility that automatically converts existing Discoverer reports — workbooks, worksheets, End User Layers, item hierarchies, item classes, parameters, conditions, and security — into Orbit reports.
No manual rebuild. No months of parallel running. No loss of institutional report logic. What would otherwise take a dedicated team anywhere from several months to multiple years to migrate manually could be accomplished in a fraction of the time.
Hong Kong Airport Authority’s entire reporting estate — the AR and AP reports that finance lived by, the HR analytics that payroll depended on, the SCM visibility that procurement relied upon — transferred across with fidelity. The business did not stop while the migration happened. The lights stayed on.
2. 1,000+ Pre-Built Reports Across Finance, HR, and SCM
Beyond migrating existing reports, Orbit has over 1,000 certified pre-built reports and data models spanning Oracle Financials, Supply Chain Management, and Human Capital Management at its disposal.
These are purpose-built for Oracle EBS and Oracle Fusion environments, covering the exact subject areas Hong Kong Airport Authority needed — AP, AR, procurement, inventory, payroll, and more, making sure they are future-ready. For a team that had spent years building reports from scratch in Discoverer, arriving in an environment where most of what they needed already existed was transformative.
3. Zero IT Dependency for Business Users
One of the most persistent frustrations in Discoverer environments was IT dependency. Every report change, every new parameter, every new column — it went through IT. Users learned not to ask. They worked around limitations with manual Excel manipulations, risking data accuracy and spending hours on work that should have been automated.
Orbit was architected differently. Its self-service reporting capability was designed specifically so that business users can build, modify, run, and share reports with zero dependency on IT teams.
The interface is intuitive. Reports take minutes, not weeks. Filters, parameters, drill-downs, visualizations — all accessible to the analyst who knows the business, not just the developer who knows the system. Report turnaround times that had been measured in days compressed to minutes.
4. Best-in-Class UI and UX on the Browser
Discoverer’s interface was a product of its time — desktop-centric, navigated through menus that required training, and not designed for the way modern users think about data.
Orbit’s HTML5-based, fully browser-native interface made reports accessible from any device without plugins, special clients, or legacy dependencies. Dashboards, charts, pivot tables, drill-down visualizations, and tabular reports are all delivered through a clean, modern interface. Data that used to live in static Excel exports is now interactive, live, and shareable.
5. Connects to Any Data Source
Discoverer’s tight coupling to Oracle EBS was also a constraint. Orbit takes a fundamentally different approach: it connects to any data source with a JDBC driver, including Oracle, MySQL, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and more, as well as cloud platforms and data warehouses.
For Hong Kong Airport Authority — an enterprise operating across Finance, HR, and SCM with data scattered across multiple systems — this meant that Orbit could be a single reporting layer rather than one of many.
GLSense: Purpose-Built for the CFO’s Office
While Orbit’s operational reporting platform addressed the Discoverer migration and the cross-domain reporting needs of AR, AP, HR, and SCM, Hong Kong Airport Authority’s CFO’s office had an additional and very specific requirement: real-time, Excel-native financial reporting directly against the General Ledger.
That need was met by Orbit GLSense.
GLSense is not a generic Excel plugin. It is a purpose-built financial reporting solution for Oracle EBS and Oracle Fusion Cloud GL users. Finance professionals at Hong Kong Airport Authority can now compose Trial Balances, Balance Sheets, P&L Statements, and Cash Flow reports directly in Microsoft Excel — the tool their teams already know and trust — while the data flows in real time from the Oracle GL and subledger applications.
What GLSense brought to Hong Kong Airport Authority’s CFO office:
- Real-time GL access in Excel: The financial statement the CFO reviews at 9 AM reflects the same data the GL accountant was working with moments earlier.
- Drill from balance to subledger detail: A CFO looking at a P&L variance can drill from the summary balance down through journals into subledger transactions — AR invoices, AP payments, payroll entries — without leaving Excel or raising an IT request.
- AI-powered insights: GLSense leverages embedded AI to explain what is happening in the ledger, not just display balances. Anomalies, trends, and variance drivers surface automatically.
- Unified reporting across EBS and Fusion: For organizations running a mixed estate, GLSense provides a single reporting layer across both Oracle EBS and Oracle Fusion Cloud. The CFO’s office sees one coherent picture regardless of what sits underneath.
- Faster period close: The manual assembly of period-end packs from multiple Excel files and system extracts — a process that consumed hours of senior finance time every month — was replaced by a governed, automated, repeatable workflow.
“We have sharpened our focus on value-added activities, transitioning from two-dimensional reporting to multi-dimensional analysis, providing insightful guidance to support the business using GLSense.”
Hong Kong Airport Authority’s Reporting Estate Today
Hong Kong Airport Authority entered the evaluation process with a fragmented reporting landscape: Discoverer for operational reporting across AR, AP, HR, and SCM; manual Excel processes for financial statements; IT as the bottleneck for anything that needed to change.
Today, their reporting estate is simply Orbit.
- Discoverer reports — migrated automatically, preserved, and now running in a modern browser-based interface that users actually enjoy.
- AR and AP subledger reporting — real-time, self-service, with drill-down to transaction level available to finance users without IT.
- HR and SCM reporting — covered by Orbit’s pre-built report library and extended with user-built reports created independently by business teams.
- Financial statements and GL reporting — owned by the CFO’s office through GLSense, live in Excel, with AI-assisted variance analysis and subledger drill.
- IT freed from the reporting queue — able to focus on systems and infrastructure rather than serving as the intermediary between users and their own data.
Why Other Organizations Should Pay Attention
Hong Kong Airport Authority’s story is not unique. There are hundreds of Oracle EBS customers still running Discoverer-era reports, accumulating technical debt with every passing quarter. There are finance teams who spend the first week of every month manually assembling spreadsheets that should be automated. There are business users across Finance, HR, and SCM who wait days for report results that could be available instantly.
Apart from that, Orbit is an excellent solution that’s future-proof, should you move to Oracle Fusion.
The question is no longer whether to move. Oracle made that decision in 2017. The question is what to move to — and whether the migration path will preserve the investment your organization has already made.
Orbit’s answer to both questions is compelling:
- Your Discoverer reports will transfer — automatically and completely.
- Your business users will run and modify reports without IT.
- Your finance team will have live GL access directly in Excel.
- Your domain teams across Finance, HR, and SCM will have a 1,000+ report head start.
- Your entire organization will have a single reporting platform that grows with you — from EBS to Fusion, from on-premise to cloud, from operational reporting to AI-powered analytics.
Hong Kong Airport Authority evaluated the alternatives. They chose Orbit. Their users love it. And their reporting future is entirely their own.
Orbit Analytics is a modern reporting and analytics platform purpose-built for Oracle ERP environments, offering self-service operational reporting, business intelligence, and AI-powered financial reporting through GLSense.
To learn more or to see a live demonstration of the Discoverer migration utility, visit www.orbitanalytics.com
