Building an Enterprise Data Warehouse from Oracle eBusiness Suite is not an easy task. Most organizations, who are newly implementing Oracle eBS, undergo tremendous changes in business processes. Building the EDW concurrently with the Oracle implementation is possible, but carries many risks. More often than not, the EDW team learns of a significant business process change much too late, when development of that data mart has already been completed. Drastic design changes at such a late stage leave insufficient time for testing which invariably results in poor quality of data …

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 …

This is my first post here on this blog. Over the next few weeks, I will focus on how to build an integrated business intelligence platform for Oracle eBusiness Suite - I will initially focus on the Sales and Finance subject areas, as these are the most commonly built data marts in an Oracle Apps environment.
Before I get into any designs, let me spend some time discussing why any company that has Oracle Applications would want to build an Enterprise Data Warehouse. Doesn’t Oracle have it already? The short answer …