You are on page 1of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

Himanshu Gupta Meenakshy Pillai Rishabh Gupta

February 1, 2010

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

Table of Contents
1. 2. 3. 4. INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................... 3 BUSINESS CHALLENGE................................................................................................................. 3 KEY CAPABILITIES ........................................................................................................................ 4 CAPABILITIES & BI PUBLISHER ................................................................................................ 4 Capability # 1: Ability to create highly formatted reports in an efficient way...................................... 5 Capability # 2: Ability to develop and maintain reports efficiently, independent of the layout changes, using common desktop tools ................................................................................................................. 6 Capability # 3: Ability to be used by resources/staff with minimum training and skills. ...................... 7 Capability # 4: Ability to deliver reports to multiple delivery channels on a schedule basis. .............. 8 Capability # 5: Ability to efficiently create reports in different languages including bidirectional languages .............................................................................................................................................. 9 Capability # 6: Ability to access data from multiple data sources including web services and OLAP cubes. .................................................................................................................................................... 9 Capability # 7: Ability to split the data conditionally and unconditionally into different datasets ...... 9 Capability # 8: Ability to be integrated easily with the source system E-Business Suite .................... 10 Capability # 9: Ability to secure reports using predefined roles ........................................................ 11 5. 6. 7. 8. BIP V/S OTHER REPORTING TOOLS ....................................................................................... 12 IMPLEMENTATION CRITERIA.................................................................................................. 15 LIMITATIONS ................................................................................................................................. 16 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................. 17

Page 2 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

1. Introduction
A business intelligence (BI) system is a key component of a companys IT framework. It is the component that enables business users to report on, analyze and optimize business operations to reduce costs and increase revenues. With BI, business success is realized through rapid, easy access to actionable information. Business intelligence applications have made an impact on organizations around the world, enabling companies to have more insight into their business than ever before. The mix of enterprise reporting with business intelligence made possible to acquire true competitive advantage from obtaining and sharing business information. Over the years, reporting requirements have moved up from being a rudimentary listing of records to progressively more complex reports and analysis, based on a variety of data sources, multiple media formats and varied business user requirements. Today, any reporting and BI toolset should be able to span a wide range of reporting and business analysis needs, enabling end users to go from standard reporting to dashboard overviews to deep interactive analysis. But with the increase in the complexity of requirement, the challenges associated with reporting also have grown multifold. A change as small as moving the address a few millimeters to the right because of the introduction of a new office stationary, can disturb the elaborate formatting and layout of a report achieved as a result of long development cycles. The formatting and layouts may vanish once the document is printed since the printer is unable to recognize the character sets used in the document. To sum up, some common reporting challenges encountered in the business intelligence arena are: Complicated report development tools require highly skilled staff or extensive tool training. Business users are not empowered to create their own look and feel for the reports due to the non-user friendly interfaces. Limited document formats supported. Reports which are formatted using third party formatting tools loose some part of the formatting upon printing/emailing/faxing. No easy means of creating and maintaining translated copies of the document. Support for limited data sources only like relations databases, flat files etc. Limited support for event driven report scheduling. High development costs.

2. Business Challenge
A large scale manufacturing company operating at different geographies uses Oracle EBS for purchase and procurement and oracle reports for financial and operational reporting. The individual regions face the following difficulties with the existing reporting system: The region of United Kingdom is unable to present the balance sheet at their annual shareholders meeting as the report does not meet the government specifications for layouts and formats. The region currently uses a third party tool for report layout and format generation and pays a substantial amount as license fee for the tool. There is also a scarcity in the IT staff who are skilled in the particular tool. The Eastern European region has to create multiple copies of the reports in different Slavic languages since the suppliers insist on having the invoices and credit notes in their respective languages. Any change in the report query requires the updation of all the copies.

Page 3 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

The newly opened delivery center in Middle-East also faces the problem of generating documents in the bidirectional Arabic language as required by some vendors. Some regions want to adopt the Japanese regions practice of differentiating among invoices, credit notes, debit notes, maintaining one layout for each type of document, but is facing the challenge of the overhead involved in creating the layouts and integrating them with the data set along with the lack of skilled IT staff required for the report format generation. The regions would also like to do away with the process of manual calculation of withholding taxes which is done currently by obtaining the tax rates and rules published in the government websites. A common cry from all the regions is the ability to automate the emailing or faxing of documents and reminders to the suppliers on a schedule basis. The regions also want to include their forecasting and budgeting data from Hyperion system in the year-end reports, but currently this comparison is done by comparing reports against the excel sheets where Hyperion data is downloaded. The regions would like to implement a security setup that allows the discreet use of reports and report contents. The preference is to reuse the existing roles and responsibilities assigned to the users in the E-business Suite for the reporting system as well.

3. Key Capabilities
After analyzing the problem statement, the key capabilities required of the reporting system that should replace the existing system are identified as: Ability to create highly formatted reports in an efficient way. Ability to develop layouts without specialized third-party software but using easy-to-learn, common tools Ability to deliver reports to multiple delivery channels on a schedule basis. Ability to efficiently create reports in different languages including bidirectional languages Ability to access data from multiple data sources including web services and OLAP cubes. Ability to split the data conditionally and unconditionally into different datasets Ability to be integrated easily with the source system E-Business Suite Ability to secure reports using predefined roles

4. Capabilities & BI Publisher


Let us now look at the above identified capabilities in detail, and how BI Publisher features can address them:

Page 4 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

Capability # 1: Ability to create highly formatted reports in an efficient way.


Many organizations publish annual reports, brochures, invoices and bills, financial portfolios, purchase orders, and other vital business documents. Companies are always looking to add value to these documents by enhancing the graphics, charts, and other visual representations of critical business information. In the problem statement, had the firm been able to comply with the layout requirements for the balance sheet, as specified by the government, they can service the share holders in a better way providing the right information. BI Publisher makes that possible, by enabling the rapid creation of boardroom-quality reports. BIP Solution: BI Publisher capabilities offer graphics of the highest quality for creating outwardfacing materials, including annual reports, brochures, invoices, and billing statements. The result is clean, crisp illustrative charts and graphs for printing and distribution.BI Publisher provides both pre-defined, pixel perfect report design and automated runtime report layout options, empowering users to create operational reports to their exact specifications. Users have the unique ability to accurately insert sections of a report, or even multiple reports, into a single dashboard page.BI Publisher offers graphics of the highest quality for creating outward-facing materials, including annual reports, brochures, invoices, and billing statements. The result is clean, crisp illustrative charts and graphs for printing and distribution. In our problem statement, any business user with a Web browser can create publish-ready content directly from BI Publisher without the need for a separate publishing product. The result is an online publish-ready document that is fully navigable. Intra as well as beyond document drill capability can also be included, so that the publish-ready document can serve as a mini business intelligence environment from directly using multiple options like PDF or HTML or MSWORD. The below listed powerful features of the BI Publisher reporting tool enables pixel perfect reporting efficiently : Advanced Charting Interactivity Conditions Parameters Sort Hide Precision and Control Conditional Formatting Formulas and Functions Multiple table and forms layout Bar Coding Rich text formatting

Sample Customer Balance Letter

Page 5 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

Sample Check Format

Capability # 2: Ability to develop and maintain reports efficiently, independent of the layout changes, using common desktop tools
The IT staff of the firm creates reports for different users, which vary only in terms of the look and feel and the underlying query remaining more or less the same. For each of the reports, they need to extract the and use it for building reports. BIP Solution: Oracle BI Publisher provides a new reporting paradigm in the market place. Traditional reporting tools hold the data source (query), layout and translation in a single executable file. BI Publisher takes the approach of splitting the three components apart. This makes reporting much more flexible and easier to maintain. With the layout now independent of the data, this allows developers across the various regions of the firm to start consolidating their data sources into fewer extraction programs. No longer do they have to have one query, one layout. A single data extraction can now support multiple layouts

Page 6 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

allowing users to apply various layouts to a single data source and generate completely different report outputs. The development team can also free itself from the perennial problem of having to build and maintain layouts formats. The layout templates for each of the document types such as invoice, credit notes, and debit notes can be built once using familiar desktop tools such as MSWord or Adobe Acrobat. The firm can have huge savings in time and effort in getting reports to their end users. At every stage the process is faster: Developing data extraction programs the IT department can use various methods for extracting data one of the fastest being the BI Publisher data engine. At its most basic, give it SQL and it will return XML data. Building Layouts no longer a tedious thread of email between business analyst and developer to get the layout just right. The analyst knows the requirements intimately and can build the layout him or herself and get it right first time. Then pass to the developer for deployment to the server. Deploying - while using E-Business Suite or Online, BI Publisher is plugged into the application and deployment is simple. There are options to deploy data sources and templates to either the file system or the database.

Capability # 3: Ability to be used by resources/staff with minimum training and skills.


The manufacturing firm, when deciding to implement a replacing reporting system that is capable of producing reports that comply with all the layout and data specification, requires procuring of required third party reporting tool and hire resources skilled in the tool. The existing resources need to be trained to enable them to use the new tool. It would be a tremendous saving for the firm, if it can implement a system which can be learned easily by the employee. BIP Solution: With the exit of third party specialized format generation tools from the development phase, the company no longer needs skilled resources to generate reports. Users who are familiar with common desktop tools such as MSWord and Adobe Acrobat can very well create templates of their own as per reporting requirements using the Template Builder and integrate the dataset. The users can have previews of the report to incorporate any changes they want to before the actual report is generated. Reports can even be built by functional users with a little practice. The following tools are integrated with BI Publisher to make the development of layouts and analysis of reports easier:

Page 7 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

Analyzer: The Analyzer tool allows the user to compare data from a report in a cross-tab area. The Analyzer for Excel, a desktop tool, enables the user to export the results of a report to an Excel spreadsheet and then log in to BI Publisher Enterprise from Excel to refresh data, apply new parameters, and apply a template to the report data. It also allows for the creation of Excel templates and their upload to the BIP server the user can then access and run reports from an Excel session. Template Builder: The Template Builder for BIP is a Word add-in to be used for rtf templates. Clicking on the Template Builder link in a folder, installs the MS-Word add-in to create report templates. Upon installation, a BIP menu and BIP toolbar are added to Word. Instructions and tutorials are located in the readme and help files delivered with the tool. The template builder enables the user to perform the following: a. Connect to the BIP server to retrieve data and build a template. b. Provides a central location for report designers to locate all of the company's data sources and reports. c. Insert report elements such as data fields, tables, charts, or cross tabs d. Validate the template. e. Template Viewer: preview template in any supported output type with sample data. f. Perform calculations on fields within the template. g. Build and upload template via a direct connection to BIP server. h. Data comes from the connection (built for each data source) selected. i. Templates can be published (attached) directly to the report from Word. j. Build and upload templates in disconnected mode. k. Download sample data from the BIP server. l. Connect to sample data through the Word template. m. Load completed template from BIP server.

Capability # 4: Ability to deliver reports to multiple delivery channels on a schedule basis.


The firm would like to generate printed or faxed copies of the reports for filing and presenting in meetings. It also plans to send automated reminders and notices of payments to vendors and email invoice copies. These online copies of the documents should mirror the physical copies send through post. BIP Solution: BI Publisher can print documents in batch directly from the report server. The invoices, credit notes and debit notes generated can be emailed, faxed and/or scheduled for batch printing for mailer copies. Through the ability to define custom filters for document conversion, it is ensured that the formatting is not lost due to incompatibility with the printer. For fax servers, the filters will convert the document to the TIFF format. This ensures that the documents maintain their layout and formatting irrespective of the delivery channel.Additionaly, BI Publishers allows the specification of usernames, passwords and authentication types ensuring that only the appropriate user can print/fax/email documents. The after report triggers or notifications can be a convenient way to let the IT Staff know about the completion/failure of a batch. Operational reports that are of common interest to a group and require inputs from the members of the group can be directed to a common "Web Folder" or "Web Share" as soon as they are generated with notifications send simultaneously. The regions thus can have their requirement of scheduling reports through multiple channels fulfilled in a very efficient way.

Page 8 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

Capability # 5: Ability to efficiently create reports in different languages including bidirectional languages
The firm requires reports in different languages for its various regions. Reports which are functionally same across every region, needs to be developed in each of the languages and a change in layout to one of the reports requires change in all other reports, if the report in question has a firm wide defined format. BIP Solution: BI Publisher supports internationalization of the business, allowing regional offices to report and manage their documents locally. Report layouts can be created for any combination of 185 languages and 244 territories. These layouts are converted to industry-standard files for easy in-house translation or delivery to third party translation providers. Because each translation is a separate file, modifications can still be made to the layout without impacting translations. BI Publisher also offers advanced bidirectional and font handling support and does away with the need of having installed languages, language specific printers, and DB Character set. It supports the following character sets: CJK BiDi MLS Unicode BI Publisher is exclusive in providing the Unicode and bidirectional language support. The tool can cater to the multi language reporting requirements of the various regional offices of the firm with its support for translations and bidirectional languages. Its ability to generate reports independent of the character sets and printers makes it a feasible choice for developing reports that do not lose formatting on printing.

Capability # 6: Ability to access data from multiple data sources including web services and OLAP cubes.
Critical service providers like tax administrators are increasingly supporting electronic filing of documents that can save significant amounts of money by avoiding paper handling and processing costs, while at the same time, ensuring higher quality data, and greatly lowering the filing and reporting burdens for end consumers. Tax authorities supply the tax administration guidelines and filing and payment rules to the taxpayer communities within their jurisdiction These guidelines, forms, rules, regulations and instructions are all instances of content management and this content is increasingly being composed and managed as XML documents providing for flexibility. BIP Solution: BI Publisher can format any well-formed XML data, allowing integration with any system that can generate XML or any data source available though JDBC with the ability to merge multiple data sources into a single output document. The data can come from a database, an HTTP XML feed, a Web service or a previously generated XML file which can be placed in a directory to use as data input to your reports. The sources can also be an OLAP cube or databases such as Oracle, SQL Server or an XML database. This enables the company to use the forecasting information from Hyperion as a source and develop strategic reports for use.

Capability # 7: Ability to split the data conditionally and unconditionally into different datasets
The firm requires a solution that would automate the generation of reports which vary according to specified conditions.e.g.An invoice report would make use of the invoice data generated and would require to be send to the corresponding vendors based on the vendor names or email

Page 9 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

addresses mentioned. For each of the report the layout may vary slightly or the output format may vary due to the vendor requirements. BIP Solution: Using BI Publisher's bursting, a single report can be split based on a key in the report data and deliver the report based on a second key in the report data. Driven by the delivery key, a different template, output format, delivery method, and locale can be applied to each split segment of the report.BI Publisher's bursting engine accepts a data stream and splits it based on multiple criteria, generates output based on a template, then delivers the individual documents through the delivery channel of choice. The engine provides a flexible range of possibilities for document generation and delivery. This feature proves very useful whenever there is a requirement for: Invoice generation and delivery based on customer-specific layouts and delivery preference Financial reporting to generate a master report of all regional centers, bursting out individual regional reports to the concerned manager Generation of pay slips to all employees based on one extract and delivered via e-mail

Capability # 8: Ability to be integrated easily with the source system E-Business Suite
BIP Solution: Oracle BI Publisher can be used either as a standalone installation or can be integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite. It comes along with support for a wide range of datasources, OOTB templates and Oracle Reports to Publisher Conversion Assistant which is very much the need of the reporting system that is using Oracle Reports currently. Thus the translation of existing reports to the BIP reports shall be fully automated. In addition it can also be integrated seamlessly with the Oracle Applications such as: PeopleSoft J D Edwards Enterprise J D Edwards World Oracle Discoverer Oracle Business Intelligence Oracle Hyperion Planning Siebel (Replaces Actuate reporting and provides OOTB reports along with Actuate to Publisher Conversion Assistant.)

Page 10 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

Oracle 10g, Oracle BI Apps, Oracle BI, SQL Server

PDF HTML Power Point Email

E-Business suite, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft, Siebel XML

Printer Layout Templates Oracle BI Publisher


Word Acrobat JDev Excel Flex Others

Excel Flash Fax RTF CSV XML EDI Repository

OLAP Cubes

e-commerce

Web Services

EFT

Data Sources

Layout Formats

Output Formats

Destination

BI Publisher - Extract Once, Publish Multiple Times

Capability # 9: Ability to secure reports using predefined roles


The firm requires a strong security policy to be implemented which would enforce proper authorization and access control that gives the right users the visibility to reports and the data within. BIP Solution: BI Publisher Security Supports: a. LDAP Server: BI Publisher can be integrated with LDAP servers to manage users and report access. Create the users and roles within LDAP servers and then configure the BI Publisher server to access the LDAP servers. b. Oracle E-Business Suite: BI Publisher can leverage E-Business Suite security to enable the E-Business Suite users to log in to BI Publisher using their E-Business Suite credentials. When BIP security is integrated with the E-Business Suite security,EBusiness Suite responsibilities become available as roles in the BI Publisher security center.

Page 11 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

c.

Oracle BI Server: BI Publisher offers integration with Oracle BI Server security so that the administration of the BI Publisher users can be done through the BI Server Administration tool.

d. Oracle Database: BI Publisher offers integration with Oracle Database security so that it can administer the BI Publisher users with the Oracle Database users. Thus using BI Publisher integrated with the E-business Suite facilitates the easy implementation of a security system that does not require the redefinition of roles and responsibilities of the users.Additionaly, BI Publisher provides the following mechanisms to build a secure environment for reporting: Public Access: BI Publisher allows users to set up public access folders. Any user can access the reports in this folder without entering credentials. Digital Signature: Oracle BI Publisher supports digital signatures on PDF output documents. Digital signatures enable the verification of the authenticity of the documents that are sent and received. Oracle BI Publisher can access the digital ID file from a central, secure location and at runtime sign the PDF output with the digital ID. The digital signature verifies the signer's identity and ensures that the document has not been altered after it was signed. Proxy Authentication BI Publisher supports proxy authentication for connections to the following data sources: Oracle 10g database Oracle 11g database Oracle BI Server For direct data source connections via JDBC and connections via a JNDI connection pool, BI Publisher allows selecting "Use Proxy Authentication". When the Use Proxy Authentication is selected, BI Publisher passes the user name and password of the individual user (as logged into BI Publisher) to the data source and thus preserves the client identity and privileges when the server connects to the data source.

5. BIP v/s Other Reporting Tools


Now that we have seen that the BI Publisher can be a good choice for replacing the existing reporting system in the problem statement, let us also take a look at the alternatives available in the market. The market for BI tools is a booming one and most of the products do the basics. They take out the manual process of spreadsheet updation and query writing and allow analysts to slice and dice data any way they want. What makes them different? Cost and average number of users, among other things. BI vendors also vary in their offerings of features. Below is summarized comparison of the BI reporting features required by the problem statement across the leading BI tools: Problem Statement Consideration BI Publisher Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Flex Cognos Framework Manager (Metadata designer), Report Studio, Analysis Business Object Desktop Intelligence, Designer, Business view manager OBIEE Oracle Reports To design layouts etc need to use the

Design Tools

OBIEE Answers

Page 12 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

Builder, or XML IDEs to design layouts

Studio, Queries Studio

internal design tools available e.g. Queries wizard, Data wizard, Report wizard, Graph wizard YES YES NO NO YES YES

Bursting Dependencies on Installed Language Dependencies on Database Character set one/multiple layouts possible for different languages Need for expensive language specific printers

YES NO

YES NO

NO

NO

NO

NO

YES

Language Support

NO

YES

NO

NO

YES

NO

YES

YES

YES

YES

Possible Data sources

Databases, Packaged applications, Web Services, HTTP feeds, File Data Sources, Any source that provides a JDBC connection

XML Oracle OLAP RDBMS Excel

Excel (DAO)Database type (Access,dBASE, Excel, Lotus) Database FilesConnect to standard PC databases that reside locally ODBC (RDO)ODBC data sources OLAP- OLAP cube as a data source OLE DB (ADO) XML

XML Oracle OLAP RDBMS Excel

XML JDBC Oracle OLAP Text files (both delimited and fixed format

Delivery Channels

Online Reports

YES

YES

YES

YES

YES

Page 13 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

Publish to a portal

YES

YES

YES, publishing wizard

YES, OBIEE Dashboards Send to email, printer, fax, PDA

YES

Sent to fax, printers, email, WebDav or ftp

YES

YES

YES

YES

Integration

Application Integration: E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, J. D. Edwards, Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, Oracle BI Discoverer Oracle Application Express (APEX), Oracle Hyperion Planning

SDK provided in Java, C# for integration

SAP BW, Oracle, Share point

Oracle Hyperion

E business suite

Batch report generation

YES

YES

YES

NO

YES

Output formats

PDF, HTML, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF, Flash, e-Text (for EDI/EFT), CSV, and XML

CSV, Excel, HTML, PDF, XML

HTML, Excel, PDF, XML, RTF

CSV, Excel, HTML, PDF

PDF, RTF, XML, HTML, Excel, HTML, CSS

Page 14 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

Role based authorization and access to report folders and data sources

YES

YES

YES

Role based authorization and access to report folders and datasources

YES

Single Sign ON support 9 Security PDF document security password protection, control on print, copy and text etc PDF Digital Signature

YES

YES

YES

YES

YES

YES

YES

NO

NO

NO

YES

NO

NO

NO

NO

6. Implementation Criteria
If the manufacturing firm described in the problem statement, decides to go for BI Publisher, it has the option to use either a standalone installation of BI Publisher or integrate BI Publisher to the E-Business suite. The below table shall help in deciding which flavor to use: Comparison Criteria BIP Enterprise Server (StandAlone) Connects to any databases that supports the use of JDBC drivers Data Extraction 2 Various types of Data SourcesSQL, Data Template, OBIEE, OLAP MDX, Discoverer, Web Services, HTTP / RSS feeds, File Scheduler available, scheduler can be configured with different types of databases - Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Sybase, etc.

No 1

BIP with EBS Meant for only Oracle DB i.e. the db that EBS is using. Can connect to others but requires licensing Oracle Reports or PLSQL base concurrent programs can extract data from DB. Can use BIP Data Templates to extract from other sources e.g. XML file, Excel, etc Scheduling is managed by concurrent manager. Tight integration with CM to generate output based on user driven

Scheduling

Page 15 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

template and output format selection.

Security

Multiple security models supported-BIP security, OLAP, EBS security, database security, OBIEE security. Web service APIs available for BIP integration with any application Template formats supported RTF, PDF, XSLFO, Flex, Excel Online Analyzer and Excel Analyzer utilities available for data analysis BI Desktop is able to connect to Enterprise Server to design and upload reports to the server.

Adheres to EBS security i.e. users, responsibilities, reporting groups,etc

Web Services

No web services API All formats except Flex is supported. Excel templates under controlled release. Not available in EBS

Tools

Feature not supported in EBS

Bursting

Bursting configuration can be set on the Report Editor screen, UI based. Delivery to email, fax, ftp, webdav, http and printer are supported Complete UI to manage users, roles, admin, reports, scheduling, etc

Bursting is set by configuring a control file (xml file). Delivery channels not available out of the box, requires custom code to deliver documents using BIP APIs Leverages Oracle Application Framework UI to manage templates.

10

Delivery

11

UI

7. Limitations
The use of Oracle BI Publisher as the reporting solution can pose the following functional limitations for report development: . 1. A wide spreadsheet cannot be created using the RTF template if the number of columns is more than 64. 2. Incorporating additional logic or business rules in the reports requires XSL coding which can prove to be cumbersome for report developer who is not well versed in XSL. 3. Templates cannot be designed in MS Excel for creating reports.Also, any sample report templates available in Excel cannot be imported into MS Word so that RTF templates can be created and used for report development.

Page 16 of 17

A Case Study on Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

4. BI Publisher is limited in its support for drill down reports and reports requiring display of hierarchical relationships. 5. BI Publisher outputs cannot be published in separate tab sheets on the same Excel document.

8. Conclusion
BI Publisher seems like an apt candidate to replace the existing reporting system of the manufacturing firm because of the following in built features it has: 1. Easy generation of complex and different report layouts with minimum efforts. 2. Use of desktop tools like Adobe Acrobat and MSWord in generating reports. 3. Support for reuse of templates for different languages. 4. Support for bidirectional languages. 5. Easy integration with E-business suite. 6. Support for data sources like webservices and Hyperion cubes. 7. Support for report delivery to multiple channels like email, fax, and printers without losing formatting of reports. 8. Support for scheduling of reports. Some of the functionalities such as scheduling of reports and availability of multiple delivery channels can be supported by other reporting tools as well. But the ease of development of report layouts by users with minimal trainings, the ability to generate complex layouts using common tools and reuse them across languages, along with support for bidirectional languages are abilities which are unique to the BI Publisher. These, when combined with other commonly required features like scheduling, support for multiple data sources, bursting etc make BI Publisher a recommended solution for the problem statement.

Page 17 of 17

You might also like