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In today’s dynamic business environment, effective reporting for Oracle Cloud ERP is crucial for informed decision-making. This FAQ guide aims to address the most commonly asked questions about Oracle Cloud ERP Reporting. It covers a range of topics, from the specific reporting needs of various departments to the capabilities and limitations of native Oracle Cloud reporting tools.
For IT decision-makers and business users, this guide provides quick insights into Oracle Cloud ERP reporting and key best practices.
1. What is Oracle Fusion (Oracle Cloud ERP) Reporting?
Oracle Fusion Reporting combines advanced data analysis and reporting within the Oracle ERP Cloud framework. It offers real-time business intelligence and operational insights, enabling organizations to analyze financial and operational data through customizable reports and dashboards. Fusion Reporting streamlines decision-making processes by offering insights into various aspects of business operations, enhancing strategic planning and operational efficiency.
2. Why must your Enterprise Reporting Platform include a modern Operational Reporting solution?
In today’s context just having an enterprise-wide BI platform is not enough. While that would help with top-level strategic planning and management review meetings, for day-to-day business operations, a modern operational reporting solution is a “must-have.” This operational reporting platform is used by various departments to track key metrics (relevant to their individual teams) on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. These reports feed into the process of making operational decisions, which are done with real-time data.
3. What reports are operations teams looking for?
Operations teams focus on detailed reports regarding inventory management, order fulfillment, and production efficiency. They need insights into supply chain operations, production & manufacturing, including demand forecasting, resource allocation, and logistics.
These reports help in optimizing operational workflows, reducing costs, and improving overall productivity.
4. What reports are HR leaders looking for?
HR leaders require comprehensive reports on employee engagement, turnover rates, training effectiveness, and recruitment processes. They also need payroll and benefits data to ensure compliance and effective human resource management. These reports assist in strategizing HR policies and aligning them with organizational goals.
As per Oracle, “Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM is a complete cloud solution that connects every human resource process—and every person—across your enterprise.” Using a reporting solution like Orbit, business leaders in HR can quickly draw people-related insights from personalized dashboards and reports. For instance, the talent acquisition team can plan a hiring strategy in sync with available budgets by easily accessing specific data residing in Oracle Cloud ERP.
5. What reports are Supply Chain Management (SCM) leaders looking for?
SCM leaders need in-depth reports on supply chain logistics, vendor management, inventory control, and procurement processes. They require analytics on supply chain disruptions, cost management, and efficiency metrics to maintain smooth operations and optimize supply chain strategies.
For instance, using Orbit, one of our clients was easily able to spot a shortage of incoming raw materials with the help of pre-built reports in Orbit’s Operational Reporting solution.
6. What reports are Finance teams looking for?
Finance teams seek extensive reports on financial performance, including profit and loss statements, balance sheets, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and cash flow analysis. They need insights into budgetary control, financial forecasting, and fiscal health to guide strategic financial decisions and maintain financial stability.
7. Why are finance leaders choosing a tool like Orbit’s GLSense for Financial Reporting after moving to Oracle Fusion? Is Excel Financial Reporting that important?
One tool that is popular with finance teams in the Oracle E-business suite world is GLWand. However, when customers migrate to Oracle Cloud ERP, they are looking for an easy-to-use Excel Financial Reporting tool for real-time account analysis and the ability to create reports from both legacy EBS data and the latest year’s data in Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP data.
Orbit’s GLSense is the single platform from which this type of multi-year financial reporting can be generated for comparison, analysis, and decision-making.
8. What are the various reporting tools available within Oracle Cloud ERP?
Oracle offers a range of reporting tools like Smart View, BI Publisher, and OTBI. Each tool caters to different aspects of reporting, from detailed financial documents to real-time operational data analysis. These tools provide the flexibility and depth required for diverse reporting needs.
9. What are the key features users are looking for while choosing an Operational Reporting solution for Oracle Cloud ERP reporting?
Users look for features that offer ease of use, customization, and integration with other data sources. They prioritize tools that provide comprehensive operational reporting, financial reporting, support large data volumes, and ensure data accuracy and security. The ability to generate actionable insights quickly is also a key requirement.
Broadly, users are looking for the following capabilities:
- Self-Service Capabilities
- Intuitive UX
- Easy integration with multiple data sources including Oracle EBS, Oracle Cloud ERP
- Integrated data pipelines to move data from various sources into a centralized data warehouse
- Same tool must have the capability to run legacy report, in addition to real-time reports
- Excel reporting with a tool like Orbit’s XLEdge Plugin
- Ad-hoc Data Reporting
- Ability to go from data to insights with maximum efficiency
- SQL DirectQuery for generating custom reports and extracting custom data sets
- Wide Range of pre-built reports
- Data Security and Governance
- Schedule periodic reports with ease
10. Is self-service critical for better operational reporting?
Self-service in reporting tools is increasingly important for enabling users to generate and analyze reports without extensive IT support. This empowers users to access real-time data, tailor reports to their specific needs, and make informed decisions promptly.
Each reporting user is unique, and their role and functional area demand different insights from each report. Orbit Insights feature is a boon to business users; it allows users to personalize the report output and analyze data in various ways and save them as Insights, their personal virtual copies of the original report – without the need to modify the underlying code or without the need to create duplicate copies of the original report.
Most importantly, thanks to pre-built content, business users don’t have to rely on IT to cull out these operational insights.
11. Are there restrictions on the number of rows/volume of data in the reports?
Some reporting tools may have limitations on handling large datasets, which can impact the comprehensiveness and depth of reports. It’s important for businesses to understand these limitations and choose tools that can accommodate their data needs.
Orbit’s Operational Reporting and Financial Reporting tools are wonderful options if you’re looking to generate reports from high volume of data.
12. Why are native reporting tools not enough, and why are users looking for complementary tools like Orbit?
While native Oracle tools offer robust features, they sometimes lack in areas like ease of use, customization, and data integration from non-Oracle sources. Complementary tools like Orbit fill these gaps, offering enhanced functionality and user experience.
For real-time transactional reporting on Oracle Fusion, in most cases, Oracle recommends BI Publisher or Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI). Since BI Publisher has been primarily designed for users with technical skills, many business users cannot generate the reports they need by themselves and need the support of IT to build ad-hoc dashboards or reports.
While a tool like OTBI has several advantages it also comes with several limitations that can impact real-time, operational reporting – especially in terms of efficiency.
Some limitations include:
- OTBI can pull data only from Oracle Cloud Apps and so it is cumbersome to pull data from multiple sources, especially if these data sources are outside of the Oracle ecosystem
- It also cannot access historical data from legacy applications, thereby limiting the type of analytics that can be run
13. Is moving data from multiple sources a challenge?
Integrating data from disparate sources remains a significant challenge in reporting. It requires tools that can not only handle diverse data formats but also ensure data integrity and accuracy.
Enterprises need to adopt a seamless and efficient integration solution (data pipelines) to move data from multiple sources to a central warehouse for BI and analytics. It is an ideal solution for complex data processing workloads, with reliability and high availability.
14. What are key data management capabilities for better reporting?
Effective data management for reporting includes capabilities like real-time data synchronization, adherence to data governance standards, and robust security measures. Efficient data management ensures that reports are accurate, up-to-date, and compliant with regulatory standards.
Data aggregation or consolidation for more accurate reporting and analytics is essential as businesses have adapted a multitude of specialized business applications to stay competitive, and these applications can be home grown, on-premise or cloud applications.
The need of the hour is a data management solution that enables both business users and data engineers and makes their job easier. If the data management tool you implement has a visual data modeler, that would be a bonus as well. Of course, data security and data governance are critical factors as well.
15. What are key features users are looking for in a Oracle Cloud Reporting Solution?
Key Features business users are looking for include:
- Self-Service Capabilities
- Excel reporting with Orbit’s XLEdge Plugin
- Ad-hoc Data Reporting
- Ability to go from data to insights with maximum efficiency
- SQL DirectQuery for generating custom reports and extracting custom data sets
- Wide Range of pre-built reports
- Data Security and Governance
- Schedule periodic reports with ease
Why Orbit is an ideal operational reporting solution for Oracle Fusion
For businesses moving to Fusion, Orbit offers an ideal solution that can not only access real-time data available in Fusion but also historical data from EBS or any other ERP. This enables decision-makers to compare past and current data with ease, allowing them to garner comprehensive insights.
Visit here for more information on Orbit for Oracle Cloud ERP Reporting: https://www.orbitanalytics.com/oracle-fusion-cloud-reporting/
Find out more about how one of Orbit’s customers uses our next-generation operational reporting solution Click here
One of Orbit’s customers, among the world’s largest aluminum rolling companies, uses our operational reporting platform to track a wide range of business metrics and KPIs across departments.
For instance, the supply chain team at the company uses Oracle EBS (Enterprise Business Suite) for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply-chain management. Considering the scale of operations there was a crying need for a world-class reporting and data visualization solution.
Specifically, the client wanted a reporting solution that would help their SCM leaders track data across the entire supply chain – from procurement of raw materials to the final product. Some of the key areas they wanted to track in real-time included:
- Coal Inbound data
- Vehicle Inbound data
- Yard Management
- Inventory Management
- Summary of all key SCM data from Oracle EBS
This was a specific example of how Orbit is being used by the supply chain team. Other teams at the company including finance and production also use Orbit for operational reporting but to track other metrics. Request a demo
