Becoming a Fusion HCM Reporting Specialist

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At first reading, the wealth of reporting options available to Fusion customers is a little confusing. How do you know your OBI EE from your OTBI and your BIP from your OBIA? Hopefully this post will clear it up a little.

OBI EE – Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition

OBI EE is the BI engine behind much of the other applications. It isn’t exposed on its own, but is used to build some of the other solutions. It also gives you BI Composer, which allows you to create your own simple analyses and has a wizard-based interface for end-users (which is in some ways similar to PS Query, however it’s much simpler to use as you select data from Business Objects rather than the raw tables).

OTBI – Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence

Real-time BI, self-serve reports and ad-hoc queries. Fusion Apps comes with pre-built OTBI content for each of the major modules (currently 60+ reports, 100+ metrics and a number of dashboards). OTBI is a BI layer built with OBI EE and is part of Fusion (therefore it uses the same data security as Fusion). I would think that OTBI would be the ‘first port of call’ for most BI needs.

BIP – Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (aka BI Publisher)

This will be a familiar tool to most users, certainly those coming from the PeopleSoft world as it has been part of PeopleSoft for quite a while. This is the tool to use to create highly formatted output from Fusion. Currently cloud customers cannot create new data models for BIP reports.

OBIA – Oracle Business Intelligence Applications

Based around a pre-packaged Data Warehouse and also built using OBI EE. This is designed for deeper, more complex analysis of trends and historical data rather than short real-time analytics or ad-hoc queries. As this relies on a Data Warehouse it’s not currently available in the cloud, although I suspect this is only a matter of time. It is however, licensed separately.

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