A very common question asked during Oracle Fusion Financials Trainings for functional people is...what are the different reporting mechanisms available in Oracle Fusion Apps. Everyone knows that there is a sea change in the reporting capabilities in Fusion Financials. Let us touch base on these reporting options. Of course, for any hands on experience of these reporting techniques, have a look at our training packages available on apps2fusion. 

BI Publisher
Yes, this good old BI Publisher is still here in Fusion. The difference from EBS is that in case of Oracle Fusion Applications, the basic BI Publisher reports can be built straight into the browser without the need of any plugin for Microsoft office. Of course if you need pixel perfect cheque printing then you should use the MS Office BI Publisher plugin 

OTBI - Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence 
This solution allows you to build ad hoc reports using ADF view objects on transactional tables. The magic here is that these ADF objects get imported into OBIEE and made available via the subject area. Our hands on trainings in Fusion Financials will walk you through these steps in details. You can build your own reports using OBIEE dashboards by dragging and dropping the available objects from subject area. The beauty of this solution is that the data security layer implemented in APM layer is available for reporting as well because you use the same ADF View objects as are used by the ADF screens. 

Financial Report Studio - Inherited from Hyperion suite of products
The financial reporting studio allows you to run reports on Essbase cubes. As you know, in Fusion Financial the GL balances are stored into essbase cubes. Therefore Financials reports utilize the essbase cube to present financial data in real-time environment. You can build these reports using FR Studio tool that also allows drilldowns to be implemented. We run a training course at apps2fusion for functional consultants, teaching them how to build reports in Financial Studio.

Smart View -- Essbase
Smart View is an excel add-in from Hyperoin Suite that allows users to query GL Balance data real-time within Excel. This again is a very powerful tool, and is very commonly used for analytics defined by the business users. Once the data from Essbase is in the excel, the users can do various things for reporting such as feature. And it works by exploiting some of the capabilities inherent in the cube.

Slice and Dice - Restrict dimensions of your data to a specific value or range of values. This is achieved by point of view in Excel/Essbase. Using Point of View window you can narrow down the data brought back from cube into the essbase. This limits the data that you want display for a set of dimensions of your Fusion General Ledger chart of accounts.

Pivot Tables & Power Pivot Tables - This is the normal excel feature which organizes and aggregates your data so you can view it from a various different perspectives.  Power pivots on top of Essbase Smart view is a Nirvana, because a user can do any kind of modelling as they wish, join up to other data sources without writing a single line of VB Scripting and produce reports as they wish, i.e. reports by the user for the user, in Oracle Fusion Financials

Expansion-  This allows you to expand data values from summary level values into the detailed GL transaction values

Drilldown - It reveals the underlying data that constitutes an account balance. Click on an account balance in Smart View to open up the underlying journals (and drill back further to originating transactions) so you can investigate in more detail. 

Refresh - You cna click the "Refresh" button on the Point of View window in excel of smart view to re-populate the spreadsheet with the latest GL data from live balances in the essbase cube

OBIEE Analytics - Oracle Business Intelligence Analytics
Also known as OBIA, similar concept to R12, it provides information from the pre-built data warehouse that pulls info from Fusion database. Of course this is batch based refresh, and not real-time based as with the other solutions. OBIA is not required and is separately licensed but we do not see a wider implmenetation of this given the advent of In Memory Database coupled with OTBI present in Fusion Financials. 

Anil Passi

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