Why Contextual BI is critical for users to improve their productivity?

In one of its recent reports, Forrester has recommended Orbit as a preferred tool for instant, plug-and-play operational reporting. The report talks about the importance of giving business users the ability to quickly go from “data to insights”, without wasting too much time. 

With Orbit’s Operational Reporting Solution, it is possible for business users across the organization to pull up personalized reports and gather insights from transactional data that is relevant to them. Thanks to Orbit’s self-service capabilities and pre-built reports, it is possible to generate these operational insights with no involvement or support from IT. 

The Importance of Contextual Analytics and BI

In addition to its operational reporting capabilities, Orbit is also an ideal tool for contextual analytics. In today’s age of data explosion, business users truly value the capability of the BI tool to provide context and perspective. Yes, a report or chart may present data on sales numbers by product category or even insights into why Accounts Receivable (AR) numbers are suddenly increasing. 

But, what if the tool can go one step further and provide context into why that’s happening? 

Why are sales revenues increasing in one product segment? Why is AR increasing? Is it because the sales team is offering longer periods of credit to push sales of a new product? Data and insights become truly valuable when presented with greater detail and context. 

Contextual BI is about answering the “why” of something. It requires the ability to bring together multiple data sets and generate insights by taking in data from multiple sources, building data models, and then offer not just any insight but intelligence with context. 

Orbit’s Quicklets: Information at your fingertips with precision and context

Business users can use our Quicklets feature to get precise, context-specific information immediately. Orbit’s Quicklets are the best way to democratize information.

Your ERP, CRM, and other business systems will have a lot of data and information. Often, it is inefficient to wade through all this information. What if you had the ability to “pull up” exactly the information you need with just a few clicks? 

Enter Orbit Quicklets. To set it up, you need to download Orbit’s AirQuery extension from your browser. Once it’s downloaded, 

1. Select a pre-built template or customize a template based on your needs
2. Drag and drop relevant fields and pieces of content to create these Quicklets
3. Now you’re set! Use the Quicklets as required

The Underlying Magic of Quicklets: Sophisticated Metadata Layering Design

The real sophistication of Orbit’s Quicklets feature comes from the robust data management capabilities of Orbit. In the context of reporting and analytics, data models promote data stewardship and give the most lineage in terms of empowering business users, also enforcing data security in the process.

Orbit’s sophisticated metadata layering design allows organizations to centrally enforce governance and it is a lot easier to maintain a common Semantic Layer than to maintain thousands of individual reports. This makes it possible to build Quicklets for your organization. 

Conclusion: It’s not about big data but relevant data

With Orbit, you don’t have to spend time understanding our software architecture or figuring out our design. We’ve kept it simple enough that the process of setting up Quicklets is quick and efficient. 

In order to generate Contextual BI and information, all you have to do is: 

• Use one of our pre-built templates (or build one for your organization): Think about how you want your data presented and build the Quicklet accordingly. You can toggle between your Quicklet and the operational reports you are analyzing to get a holistic view of the data. 
• Choose the business dimensions you want: As Orbit Quicklets can be integrated into any of the web-based business systems, you can choose dimensions of data stored in Oracle EBS, Oracle Fusion, or any other business application. 
• Build any number of Quicklets as needed: Build any number of Quicklets for dimensions such as employees, suppliers, invoices, purchase orders, and more, based on your specific need. 

By using a combination of operational reports, financial reports, BI, and contextual insights, business users are able to make faster decisions and overall improve their productivity. The holy grail of BI is really the ability to get insights as quickly as possible, along with the right context and perspective.