Implement Oracle Business Intelligence (Volume 1)

Buy from Amazon

Book's Overview (This site is best viewed in Firefox)

The first volume of OBIEE implementation series, Implement Oracle Business Intelligence – Volume I, starts Business Intelligence exploration journey by refreshing concepts about data and information. Treading on its route towards practical implementation, the book presents concise but concrete definitions about a range of Oracle BIEE components. 

Besides concept presentation, the essence of this book is a practical scenario which initiates with the setup of BI environment and guides its audience in detail the use of various OBEEE tools to answer typical business questions put up by procurement department of an organization in an effort to implement organization’s strategy to reduce cost, evaluate processes, establish vigilance, and take informed timely decisions. 

The book’s theme can be summarized as under:

•    Business Intelligence and related concepts presentation
•    Acquaintance with and utilization of various Oracle BIEE tools and features
•    Practical Implementation in a department of a fictitious organization
•    Provide scattered information in one place to preserve audience time

Each chapter in the book focuses on some particular OBIEE components, provides key concepts about them and describes how they can be used to resolve business problems. For example, the Performance Management chapter is designed to present the following information:

Utilized BI component and related concepts
What is Scorecard?
What is Key Performance Indicator (KPI)?
Strategy Tree, a visual strategy presentation tool

Problem Scenario
What is the average unit price of a particular product, procured through multiple suppliers?
How much time is taken by a clearing agent to clear shipments (performance monitoring)?
How long does it take finance department to make duty payments (avoid demurrage cost)?

Hands On
Create KPIs to provide the required information.
Create strategies and objectives using Scorecard tool to monitor performance.
Create a strategy tree to visually present organization’s strategy and performance

Summary
Provides a summary of what the audience learned in the chapter.

This book deals with the issues of a particular department (procurement) and provides solutions to cope with them using Oracle BIEE. I’ve plans to write few more books like this one for other departments (Finance, Export etc.) to address their particular problems.

Intended Audience
Implement Oracle Business Intelligence (Volume 1) is intended for anyone willing to learn how to dig intelligence from the data mine using Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. This book is beneficial for people responsible to organize and present data for making critical and timely business decisions such as top management, managers, business analysts, programmers, report specialist and information consumers. It follows a case study of Import (procurement) department in a fictitious organization where several key issues of this department are resolved proactively using this robust Oracle technology. The book is designed in such a manner that it first presents the components and features of OBIEE, then the problem scenario faced by the department, and finally the hands-on exercises to resolve the issues using the described components and features.

Case Study
There is nothing more than a good hands-on book to evaluate a technology. This book, Implement Oracle Business Intelligence (Volume 1), follows an intuitive approach and provides unique practical examples to explore Oracle BIEE. In this book, I've specifically focused on problems faced by Imports (procurement) department of an organization. But, the techniques applied here are generic and can be utilized for other situations as well. Let's take a look at the case study presented in this book.

The Import department of ABC Corporation is using an Imports Management and Information Software, The Import Manager, to manage its imports proceedings. The software produces several key reports to provide insight into the imports process, but
individually. The Imports department head, Mr. Frank, wants to see all the information at a glance. In addition, he needs some specific reports and vigilant information that the existing software cannot deliver proactively. He discussed the problem with the IT head and put-up the following questions:

1. What are my future payments due to banks?
2. What is the status of in-transit shipments?
3. What is the import volume of each category?
4. What is the comparative imports volume?
5. What is the import volume of individual products?

In reply to the above queries, the IT department suggested a dashboard that would display all the information on a single screen.

ABC Corporation is using Oracle 11g database on the back-end. So, the development team has decided to take advantage of the most robust tool, Oracle Business Intelligence, to prepare a professional looking dashboard for Mr. Frank. The team initiates the project by conducting an analysis on the existing application and corresponding database objects.

Besides the above five questions (answered graphically on the main dashboard page), there are many more discussed in this book to answer business questions of Imports department and to evaluate performance of internal departments and external business partners.See Table of Content

Note: This book is available in color and b/w formats on Amazon.