What Are Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA)?

Oracle business intelligence applications (also known as OBIA or Oracle BI applications) refers to Oracle’s suite of business intelligence solutions.

The applications include:

• Oracle HR Analytics
• Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics
• Oracle Analytics for Sales
• Oracle Analytics for Finance
• Oracle Analytics for Marketing
• Oracle Analytics Cloud

 

In Oracle’s own words:

“Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Applications are complete, prebuilt BI solutions that deliver intuitive, role-based intelligence throughout an organization…This enables organizations to realize the value of a packaged BI application, such as rapid deployment, lower TCO, and built-in best practices, all on one common BI Foundation.”

While Oracle BI applications do boast of lots of large companies as users of the products, the company itself is obviously going to paint the rosiest possible picture of its suite of BI applications. Anyone who has installed or maintained software of any kind knows that even the most mature solutions will have challenges and warts.

In this post we’ll go into more depth on each of the applications housed under Oracle’s BI umbrella, and will address some of the features, strengths, and potential challenges associated with OBIA.

Products & Features

As a collection of applications Oracle BI has a number of different products with different specific use cases and features. We’ll walk through some of the most popular products and their features here.

Oracle HR Analytics 

Oracle HR Analytics offers organizations an efficient way to process human resources data, utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. This analytics platform allows for more informed decision making, providing users with interactive dashboards and reports that make it easier to identify trends. 

Features of this product include the ability to visualize data from multiple sources and generate reports that provide insights into employee performance and productivity.

Oracle Supply Chain & Order Management Analytics

Oracle Supply Chain & Order Management Analytics provide a single platform to analyze the entire supply chain from order placement to delivery. It brings key insights into inventory management, product demand forecasting, customer satisfaction levels, and order processing efficiency to help companies make quicker and smarter decisions related to their operations. 

Features of this product include advanced analytics capabilities such as predictive forecasting, real-time visibility into supply chain operations, and automated order processing capabilities. 

Oracle Analytics for Sales

Oracle Analytics for Sales offers actionable insights into sales and customer engagement data in real-time via AI-powered dashboards. Predictive analytics helps uncover areas of improvement in product launch success, cross-selling opportunities, customer retention rates and other key metrics. 

Features of this product include detailed analysis of marketing campaigns performance by leveraging AI technologies such as natural language processing and machine learning.

Oracle Analytics for Finance 

Oracle Analytics for Finance presents users with a comprehensive platform to understand financial information including expenses, revenue forecasts, cash flows, capital investments and more. Visualizing this data helps uncover patterns quickly while predictive analytics can assist in predicting future trends as well as enhancing operational performance. 

The features of this product include integrated financial data analysis tools on one platform with up-to-date report generation capabilities.

Oracle Analytics for Marketing

Oracle Analytics for Marketing provides insight into customer behavior across different channels that allows companies to analyze digital campaigns performance as well as improve pricing strategies or product features such as value optimization algorithms or automated segmentation capabilities. 

Oracle Analytics Cloud

Oracle Analytics Cloud is a cloud-based enterprise solution ideal for storing data securely and leveraging AI capabilities such as natural language processing and machine learning for faster analysis results. The solution helps businesses gain quick access to insights about their data so that better decisions can be made faster. Specific features offered with cloud service are secure storage on the cloud with unlimited scalability along with access to Natural Language Processing (NLP) powered analytics tools.

Integration Challenges & Issues

Generally speaking Oracle BI users are already using Oracle products, and particularly Oracle ERP. Even with that being the case, there can be a number of possible implementation challenges for Oracle BI products:

• Incomplete Set Up
  Like many companies Oracle pushes a lot of “complete solution” and “out-of-the-box” type of language around the BI applications, but of course you need to understand the reporting end users are looking for and ensure that any additional configuration (which you’ll almost certainly need) is implemented.
• Bad Data In 
  Like any business intelligence solution Oracle BI is only as good as the data you feed it. If you’re transitioning to Oracle BI products to solve specific data issues, make sure that the origin points of your data are feeding accurate information and that you’ve addressed any “root cause” tracking and data issues.
• Strategy & Process 
  Like with accurate vs. “dirty” data, obviously any analytics tool is only as useful as the way that you apply the insights you get from the tools. Make sure you understand what questions you’re trying to answer, and that the relevant parties have the appropriate training and access to data to get the most out of all of the Oracle BI Applications.

 

Documentation & Training

Oracle has a robust set of documentation relating to its BI applications, though like much documentation it can be fairly dense, text-heavy, and difficult to navigate. Given the potential pitfalls outlined above it’s often helpful to have hands-on training for your most frequent users. If you’re limited in terms of internal expertise and resources, hiring a vendor like Argano who has not only experience with Oracle’s full suite of products but also adjacent technologies, combined with Oracle BI integration, can be a great option for ensuring full adoption of the BI suite of products from those whom will get the most benefit.