Next-Gen Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Reporting with Orbit

The access to vast volumes of data and tools to extract insights from structured and unstructured data, internal and external, have become game-changers in today’s world. However, businesses with already established systems and practices may often find themselves struggling to marry their current infrastructure with future-ready solutions. This often creates silos and slows down growth.

Take reporting for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), for instance. The company has phased out Discoverer and the customers are looking for alternatives. Though there are many alternatives available, often they do not provide all the functionality. This ends up compelling the customers to go for customizations and plug-ins, which adds to the costs and makes maintenance difficult. This also ends up creating silos, defeating the purpose for which investments in next-gen reporting tools were made.

Key Features of Next-Gen Reporting

When looking for next-gen reporting tools for Oracle EBS, it is important to understand some of the key features of such a tool and also your own requirements to add efficiency and give you the desired outcome.

• Quick Implementation:  Oracle reporting tools like Oracle’s OBIEE can take anywhere between 6 and 12 months to implement. As they need a data warehouse to be created, the data can become dated by the time the reports are created, rendering them ineffective. 

• • Low or No Dependence on IT Team: Often business users have to depend on the IT team to generate the report for them to be able to process it for further analysis. Oracle BI Publish, an Oracle reporting tool, one of the alternatives for Discoverer, for instance, is meant for users with technical skills. This can severely impair timely analysis due to delays caused by the IT team preoccupied with other core functions. Users need a tool that they can work with themselves and generate reports on-demand. 
  • Real-Time Access to Data: One of the key requirements for businesses is that users be able to work with real-time data to get meaningful insights and respond to happening trends quickly. This is another reason why self-service is important, as users do not have to wait to access reports and can generate them with real-time data. Being able to schedule report generation is another feature that can help with timely analysis and a must in next-gen reporting tools. Oracle’s OTBI is one such alternative that works only with data from cloud sources.
  • Access Data from Multiple Sources: In today’s work environment, businesses typically invest in multi-platform environments. It could include on-prem and cloud and even multi-cloud environments. Oracle EBS reporting tools need to be able to access data stored in all these different environments to provide a unified view of data. However, many tools are created only for the cloud and cannot pull up data from on-prem systems, creating gaps in knowledge. 
  • Data Governance and Data Security: Data protection and security are becoming very important due to compliance requirements. Any reporting tool should mimic the governance rules of the existing Oracle EBS to ensure that only those authorized have access to the data in question.
  • Excel Integration: Business users are comfortable with Excel, which enables them to maneuver data based on their specific needs. It also lets them create formulae to provide the kind of view they need for informed decision-making. Most available tools do not integrate with Excel and so, business users need to copy the data into Excel to carry on with their analytics. However, this denies them access to real-time data.
  • Drilling Down to Subledger Levels: For certain types of financial reporting, business users need to be able to see up to the last level of the ledger information to get quick answers.
  • Data Visualization: Providing dashboards and analytics with advanced visualization and collaboration capabilities to enable monitoring operational metrics and correlate the information to spot outliers, predict and make informed business decisions.
  • Minimalistic Design: Orbit offers a world-class user experience by removing clutter. When an end-user is trying to access a specific chart or operational report, Orbit’s display is reduced to only the necessary components. 

• Flexibility and efficiency: With increased use comes the demand for fewer interactions that allow faster navigation. With Orbit’s Modern User Interface customers are able to customize or tailor the interface to suit their needs.

Orbit – A Next-Gen Tool

Orbit Reporting and Analytics tool is an Oracle-native tool that integrates well not just with Oracle products such as E-Business Suite, Fusion, PeopleSoft, but also with business systems from Microsoft, IBM, Teradata, Amazon, Magento, Shopify, Salesforce, etc.

It is designed for operational, financial, and strategic reporting and offers a complete set of features allowing IT to model and govern a seamless single source of truth. It empowers users across the enterprise to be self-reliant with no-code to low-code self-service features.

Some of its features make it a complete tool, reducing the cost and maintenance effort. These include:

1. Adapters: Purpose-built plugins to facilitate deep native integrations with business applications
2. Connectors: Standard protocol-driven plugins for integrations with business applications.
3. Packaged Content: Pre-built operational reports and analytics models spanning different subject areas
4. Migration Utility: Set of automated programs and methodologies to expedite migration for legacy reporting tools
5. Cloud Agnostic: Working with Amazon AWS, Google GCP, Oracle OCI, Microsoft Azure
6. Managed Services: Fully manage and maintain Orbit Analytics footprint of application server and database server.

To know more about Orbit next-gen reporting and analytics tool, request a demo here: https://go.orbitanalytics.com/request-demo