ETL is key, BI is key-er!

What can you do when your first BI prototype is very successful? Learn how to use this to your advantage.

The recession is here…
And the cost cutting season has begun. We know the drill: across the board budget cuts, new projects delayed, the organization chart de-layered, voluntary retirement packages and, of course, reduction in force and severance packages.
This is not just an exercise in reigning in escalating costs. The more agile organizations also take such opportunities to align their corporate workforce to the new realities of their business and acquire new employees with the skills that are more suited to their  core competencies and evolving business focus.
This brings into focus …

I presented at New England Oracle Applications User Group conference this month on how to build a flexible BI infrastructure if you have Oracle Applications and, have licenses for Daily Business Intelligence. I did the project using Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (erstwhile Siebel Analytics), but in reality, you can use this approach with virtually any BI tool from Business Objects, Cognos or any other. Financials, HR and the Distribution Modules (OM, Inventory, PO) are the easiest to implement.
If you want more details on all the fact and dimension tables for these modules, …

Years back, in an Oracle user conference, I saw this very pithy slide:
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Let’s admit it. Most of us who have been in this field for a while have had the sad experience of seeing the latter outcome some time during our careers. Failed projects are harsh realities that most organizations face. We, professionals, learn from these failed initiatives, and apply the knowledge to detect problems early and remedy them effectively.

I have earlier talked about the merits of an agile, customer-focused approach to a data warehouse greatly enhances the chances of success for the project. In this post, I will outline a plan to staff such a project and how to get things started.
Christening
Hopefully, before embarking on a data warehouse initiative, you have done ample due diligence to form the basis and business justification for such a project. You have probably identified the key benefits you want to derive and the most important business questions you want to answer. You …

Prove the numbers. No one in the enterprise is as concerned as Finance to prove the numbers correct. Disparities and inaccuracies in financial numbers not only present a distorted picture of organizational performance, they also carry the threat of huge regulatory consequences. That is why, even before Finance starts using the data warehouse for analysis, they validate and reconcile the details with the different sub-ledgers to prove that the summaries indeed tie to the details. This task is not trivial and if business rules are not vetted and understood well …

The Finance department is almost always the heaviest user of the data warehouse. They get consolidated numbers from all business operations and this is where concern for profit, cash flow and balance sheet is the greatest. The Finance department analyzes all costs, all revenues and provides information to management that drive initiatives or corrective action across the business. People in Finance understand how the board and banks see the numbers and how the shareholders and the investment community value them. The company I am currently doing a project was recently sold to …

In many multi-part series, I will lay out the design for the Enterprise Data Warehouse from an Oracle eBusiness Suite. Obviously, these will be by business areas. I will start with the core financial module – the General Ledger. Let’s try to put a structure to each of these series:
Part 1 – Functional Overview
Part 2 - Key Reporting / Analyses
Part 3 - Target design and considerations
Part 4 – Source Schema, Key queries, ETL maps, business rules
And more as needed for the topic under discussion.
Part 1: A short Overview of Oracle …

I came across this interview of Bill Hostmann, research vice president and conference chair of the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit, held this week in Chicago. This set me thinking today over lunch. Here’s what he says:
“The big message is going to be around tying together information, decision making and performance management. How do we get at the right information to make the right decisions that will drive the performance that the business demands? That’s a shift from the traditional business intelligence focus, which was about query tools, reporting tools, OLAP …