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Scalable Self-Service Reporting & Data Management Solutions for Oracle Fusion Applications

Exploring Modern Options for Integrating Oracle Fusion ERP, HCM, SCM, and CX Data into Your Data Management, Self-service Reporting, and Analytics Solutions — Advantages, Risks, and Best Practices for Informed Decision-Making

Introduction

Many Organizations are migrating from on-premise Oracle applications to Oracle Fusion Cloud applications.  This brings efficiency and standardization in the administration of Oracle applications.  At the same time, business and IT teams are now faced with a new challenge: What are your options for deploying a scalable, modern, secure reporting and analytics platform that leverages the value of their data stored in ERP, HCM, SCM, and CX applications and allows them to combine it with other data sources?  What platforms and architectures will prepare your organization for the rapidly approaching future involving AI and large language models? 

This article will review the reporting and analytics architecture options available for organizations of all sizes that utilize Oracle Fusion Cloud as their enterprise applications.  We will compare the various solutions and offer guidance to help organizations make informed choices for their reporting solution.

Reporting Challenges for Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications

Let’s discuss a challenge organizations face with their Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications.  

You’ve implemented Oracle Fusion applications to streamline operations, improve decision-making, and drive growth. Everything should run smoothly with consistent processes and a unified source of truth across ERP, SCM, HCM, and CX.

But there’s a problem.

Your business users, managers, and executives struggle to access and analyze the data locked within Fusion applications. Business users find OTBI and BI Publisher Reports cumbersome and fall short of expectations for modern self-service reporting and analytics. With the transition to Oracle Fusion Cloud, your organization has lost direct access to the database and operational data, rendering traditional reporting architectures ineffective.

This disconnect creates a host of challenges:

1. Costly Workarounds

Users spend countless hours exporting OTBI report data and BI Publisher report data into CSVs and importing it into Excel, Power BI, or Tableau. Users spend 10 hours or more per week on manual processes, which results in:

  • Time Wastage: Report creators spend more time preparing data than they should, costing businesses over $10,000 per user annually.
  • Underutilized Data: With limited technical expertise, only a fraction of enterprise data is used, leaving valuable insights untapped. The real cost to your business could reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.

2. IT Overload

IT teams are burdened with building and maintaining scripts to transfer data via files or replication into expensive-to-maintain staging databases. This is expensive, time-consuming, and nowhere near the self-service reporting your teams need.

3. Risk of Errors

Manual data wrangling, custom scripts, or file extracts lead to mistakes, resulting in inaccurate reports. For critical areas like ERP, HCM, SCM, and CX, incorrect data can have disastrous consequences.

4. Infrastructure Challenges

Some organizations set up data warehouses in Oracle Cloud, Azure SQL, or Snowflake to make Fusion data accessible. While this approach might be appropriate for large organizations with technical expertise to implement an enterprise data lake or data warehouse strategy, this approach incurs high costs in database and ETL tools, increases IT workload, and adds ongoing maintenance complexity. 

5. Delays in Reporting

Manual processes and IT dependencies slow down report creation and data access. As we know, data delays are missed opportunities.

These manual and script-driven processes are inefficient, risky, and costing your business valuable time and significant resources.  It’s time to move beyond these bottlenecks and empower your organization with an efficient, accurate, and seamless approach to reporting.

Oracle Fusion Reporting and Data Management Solutions

Your goal is to simplify data management and reporting, eliminate bottlenecks, and give users the seamless experience they deserve. Business users should focus on analyzing data, not wrestling with scripts or manual workarounds.  IT teams should simplify data infrastructure, not maintain complex and costly infrastructure. Wasn’t that the purpose of going to the cloud? 

When choosing a reporting solution, keep these factors in mind:

  • User preference for visualization tools
  • Your organization’s standardized data management and reporting platform
  • Total cost of ownership
  • Security and enterprise features

Below, we will review the four broad reporting approaches for Oracle Fusion Applications.

  1. Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence(FDI)
  2. Power BI+Microsoft Fabric Platform
  3. Tableau
  4. Custom reporting packages with some pre-built reports

Fusion Data Intelligence(FDI)

Fusion Data Intelligence is a suite of tools and capabilities provided within the Oracle Fusion Cloud ecosystem to enable businesses to derive actionable insights from their data. It integrates advanced analytics, machine learning, and data visualization with the operational data generated by Oracle Fusion applications. It is an add-on solution to Oracle Fusion Cloud that needs to be procured independently.  

Advantages

  • Provides tools to integrate data from Oracle Fusion applications and external data sources
  • Provides a modern self-service visualization platform via Oracle Analytics Cloud
  • Provides advanced analytics capabilities such as machine learning

Risks

  • The learning curve is steep for business users who are more familiar with Excel, Power BI, or Tableau. Therefore, they are reluctant to learn and use yet another tool. Users might still export data from FDI and visualize it with Power BI/Excel.
  • If your organization has a standardized data management and reporting platform such as Azure/Fabric/Power BI, FDI adds another level of complexity, redundancy, and cost.  
  • Initial cost and total cost of ownership are high compared to platforms such as Power BI

Microsoft Power BI & Fabric Integrated to Oracle Fusion Cloud

Microsoft Power BI, and more recently, Fabric Platform, disrupted the data visualization market with its cost efficiency and self-service capabilities. It is often the preferred and chosen reporting and analytics platform for mid-sized and large enterprises.  

Advantages

  • Power BI offers an easy-to-use, modern, self-service reporting and analytics option for non-technical and technical users. Users are often familiar with Excel and Power Query, so the learning curve for Power BI is easy. 
  • Azure and Fabric provides a scalable data management platform with options to integrate Snowflake, Databricks, and more.  
  • Provides direct connectivity to a wide range of data sources through native connectors and to Oracle Fusion through BI Connector, a certified connector.  
  • The starting cost is low, and the total cost of ownership is competitive
  • Power BI and Fabric provide robust security architecture and scalability options.

Risks

  • The total cost of ownership depends on how you integrate Power BI or Fabric with Oracle Fusion Cloud. The next section will analyze the various integration options.

Key Considerations When Integrating Power BI and Fabric with Oracle Fusion

Integrating the Power BI/Fabric platform with Oracle Fusion ERP, HCM, SCM, and CX application data involves two main approaches.   

  • Direct Connection from Power BI to Oracle Fusion Cloud
  • ETL from Oracle Fusion Cloud to Data Warehouse using Fabric

Direct Connection from Power BI to Oracle Fusion Cloud

Power BI is directly connected to Oracle Fusion data in this architecture through a certified connector (BI Connector).  Report creators use Power BI Desktop with BI Connector Desktop Edition to connect directly to Oracle Fusion OTBI Reports and/or Data Models and create reports, datasets, and dashboards.  They publish them to Power BI Service.  The reports and datasets are consumed and customized by report users.  Reports and datasets are automatically refreshed periodically from Oracle Fusion through a direct connection via Power BI Gateway Server using BI Connector Server Edition.   

Connect Power BI to Oracle Fusion
Power BI to Oracle Fusion Direct Connection with BI Connector

This architecture is simple and easy to manage. It eliminates the need for data warehouses. You can start with Power BI Pro licenses and upgrade to Power BI Premium licenses when your data grows. BI Connector is available as an annual subscription license.  

Watch a demo of this solution.  

ETL from Oracle Fusion Cloud to Data Warehouse using Fabric

Organizations with technical expertise build an enterprise data warehouse(EDW) to consolidate data from multiple data sources and then build a standard reporting layer on top of the data warehouse.  In this case, they bring the Oracle Fusion Data into the EDW with few options.

  1. BICC and Custom Scripts
  2. BI Publisher Reports with ETL
  3. ETL Tools that integrate with BICC
  4. Direct Connection via Fabric

Custom Scripts with Business Intelligence Cloud Connector(BICC)

In this approach, you write custom code to export data from files generated via BICC. It requires deep knowledge of Oracle Fusion schemas, use of UCM files, and managing multiple file exports. Changes in Oracle Fusion require modifications in the custom scripts and delay reporting. This approach is complex, cumbersome, and not scalable for overburdened IT teams. While there is no additional software cost, there is a significant IT cost and opportunity cost of delayed data. 

BI Publisher (BIP) Reports with ETL  

Another approach is to use BI Publisher to generate reports(file extracts) and ETL tools to import them into a data warehouse. This approach is equally cumbersome and heavily dependent on IT and Oracle teams. Change management is difficult and time-consuming. The total cost of ownership could be high due to the development and maintenance costs.  

ETL Tools

An alternative approach is to use ETL tools (e.g., FiveTran).  ETL tools integrate with BICC to manage the cumbersome process and help with the change management. If you already use an ETL tool, this is a viable option.  Cost is typically based on the data transferred by the tool. 

Direct Connection from Fabric 

Many organizations are adopting Microsoft Fabric as the unified data management platform. It integrates data engineering, data science, data warehousing, real-time analytics, and business intelligence (BI) into a single, cloud-based platform. Microsoft Fabric is tightly integrated with Microsoft 365, Azure, and Power BI, making it a robust tool for enabling end-to-end data solutions for organizations that standardize on the Microsoft platform.  

Fabric can now directly connect to Oracle Fusion using the certified BI Connector.  You can build and manage data pipelines for Oracle Fusion data and route them to Azure SQL or Snowflake data warehouses.  You can implement incremental data loads; primary key delete validation, and automatic schema mapping. The direct connection eliminates the need for BICC-based integration or a separate ETL tool. This approach provides a simple and efficient architecture to sync Oracle Fusion data with enterprise data warehouses in Snowflake, Azure SQL, or other databases.   BI Connector has a subscription cost depending on the number of Oracle Fusion Apps(ERP, HCM, SCM, and CX) used. There is no limitation on data volume, data sets, or number of users. 

Microsoft Fabric to Oracle Fusion Direct Integration with BI Connector

Tableau Integrated into Oracle Fusion Cloud

Tableau was a pioneer and could be arguably considered the tool that democratized self-service modern data visualization. Many Tableau fans are loyal to the tool and prefer it for their analytics and dashboarding needs.  

Tableau users can connect directly to Oracle Fusion Cloud through the certified BI Connector.  Report creators use Tableau Desktop (with BI Connector Desktop Edition) to connect directly to Oracle Fusion OTBI Reports and Data Models and create reports, datasets, and dashboards.  They can publish them tothe Tableau server or Tableau Cloud.  The reports and datasets are automatically refreshed periodically from Oracle Fusion through a direct connection via Tableau Server or Tableau Bridge (with BI Connector Server Edition). 

Tableau to Oracle Fusion Direct Connection with BI Connector

 Advantages

  • Offers an easy-to-use, modern self-service reporting and analytics option for non-technical and technical users.  
  • Provides direct connectivity to a wide range of data sources through native connectors and to Oracle Fusion through BI Connector, a certified connector. 
  • Ideal for organizations that have already deployed Tableau as the visualization tool of choice 

Risks

  • Tableau licenses are more expensive than Power BI licenses.
  • If your organization uses a data management platform (e.g., Azure), then Tableau might become a redundant tool.  

Custom Reporting Packages for Oracle Fusion Applications

Finally, a few vendors (e.g., Insight Software and Splash BI) offer custom reporting packages with many pre-built reports for Oracle Fusion Cloud applications.  Such solutions offer a quick starting point for smaller IT organizations since they might not have the resources to create and manage reporting solutions using Power BI, FDI, or Tableau.   However, these solutions might often require additional consulting effort to tailor the reports for individual businesses.   

Advantages

  • Offers a jump-start approach for small organizations.  
  • Provides many pre-built reports that can be customized

Risks

  • These solutions are built using custom reporting platforms.  You are dependent on the vendor to provide integration to various data sources.  
  • There is a learning curve for users. 
  • If your organization has already standardized on a reporting platform such as Power BI, these packages are another tool/platform that must be managed.
  • These platforms’ total cost of ownership varies depending on the packages and customization efforts required.   

Conclusion 

Empowering your organization with modern self-service reporting and analytics for Oracle Fusion Applications doesn’t have to be a struggle. Whether you choose Oracle FDI, Power BI, Tableau, or custom solutions, the key is to pick a solution that aligns with your organization’s goals, tools, and user preferences. 

By choosing the right solution for your organization, you can unlock the value of your ERP, HCM, SCM, and CX data, free up your technical and functional talent, and save your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Most importantly, your teams can now focus on delivering high-value strategic initiatives rather than wasting time and money on cumbersome data management and reporting processes.

We hope you found this post helpful!  See you next week with more valuable insights.  In the meantime, if you have any questions, please contact us

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