Enterprise Resource Planning BI: A Look at
Capabilities and Value Propositions
Wednesday, August 16, 2006, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Bjarne Berg,
Director, Business Intelligence, MyITGroup Ltd.
Assistant Professor, Computer Science, Lenoir-Rhyne
What We’ll Cover
•
Overview ERP - BI
•
What are the vendor’s doing
– a look at SAP’s and Oracle’s many tool suites.
•
Real-time ERP BI merges with operational reporting
•
The future of ERP BI
•
Wrap up
2
Evolution of ERP Data Warehousing
Complex (score cards,
budgeting, planning, KPI)
Horizontal approach
(2nd generation)
Integrated analytical
(3rd generation)
Emerging
(1st generation)
Vertical approach
(2nd generation)
Interactive Mgmt.
reporting (OLAP, MQE)
Toolsets &
accelerators
Level of Pre-delivered Content
Source: Mike Schroeck, David Zinn and Bjarne Berg, “Integrated Analytics – Getting Increased Value from
Enterprise Resource Planning Systems”, Data Management Review, May, 2002;
Adapted: Bjarne Berg “How to Manage a BW Project”, BW & Portals Conference, 2004, Orlando
Analytical applications
for specific industries
3
A Logical Enterprise DW Architecture
Metadata
Source Data
Extract
Operational
Data Store
Transform
Data
Warehouse
Functional Area
Invoicing
Systems
Purchasing
Systems
General
Ledger
Other Internal
Systems
External Data
Sources
Custom
Developed
Applications
Purchasing
Data
Extraction
Integration
and
Cleansing
Processes
Marketing
and Sales
Corporate
Information
Data
Mining
Translate
Attribute
Summation
Calculate
Product Line
Derive
Location
Applications
Summarize
Segmented
Data Subsets
Summarized
Data
Synchronize
Statistical
Programs
Query Access
Tools
Data Resource Management and Quality Assurance
Source: Bjarne Berg, “Introduction to Data Warehousing”,
Price Waterhouse Global System solution Center, 1997
ERP Data warehousing – Example: SAP Business Warehouse
KPI & Scorecard
Formatted
• Simple
• Easy to view
• Limited nav
• Aggregates
Flat Reporting
• Formatted
• Print
• Form based
• Static
• Predictable access
OLAP Reporting
• Drill Down
• Slice and Dice
• Analyse
• Data Mining
• Search and discover
Source: SAP AG, 2005
5
Oracle’s Legacy Approach to BI
Oracle Business Intelligence Applications
Oracle's analytic applications include corporate performance
management, interactive dashboarding (i.e. from Oracle’s Financial
Analyzer), and embedded analytics. It is pre-built, industry specific
analytic applications for BI based on business functions and user
roles.
Oracle Business Intelligence Suite
Business Intelligence Suite is intended for executives, managers, and
front line workers , and include ad hoc query and analysis, proactive
intelligence and alerts, advanced reporting, and predictive analytics.
Oracle Data Warehousing
The Data Warehousing products include a graphical environment that
supports design, deployment, and management of data warehouses. It
include parallel database technology, and a suite of data access and
management tools.
6
What We’ll Cover
•
Overview ERP - BI
•
What are the vendor’s doing
– a look at SAP’s and Oracle’s many tool suites.
•
Real-time ERP BI merges with operational reporting
•
The future of ERP BI
•
Wrap up
7
SAP’s packaged DSS solutions
SAP’s Integrated BI solution is known as NetWeaver.
SAP NetWeaver™
This is a group of product components including:
People Integration
1. Data Warehouses (BW)
1.
2.
3.
4.
Corporate Performance mgmt (CPM)
Business planning & simulation (BPS)
Business Consolidation services (BCS)
Stakeholder relationship mgmt (SRM)
3. Data Mining (inside BW)
4. Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO-BI)
Portal
Collaboration
Information Integration
Business
Intelligence
Knowledge
Management
Master Data Management
Process Integration
Integration
Broker
Business Process
Management
Life Cycle Management
2. Strategic Enterprise management (SEM)
Composite Application Framework
Multi-Channel Access
Application Platform
J2EE
ABAP
andOS
OS Abstraction
Abstraction
DBDB
and
…
.NET
WebSphere
5. Supply Chain Event Manager (SCEM-BI)
6. Customer Relationship Manager (CRM-BI)
The DW is the source of the data for
all these integrated analytical
applications (iAnalytics)
8
SAP’s Front’end strategy
BEx is the 'umbrella name' for many of the presentation tools in BW,
such as BEx Broadcaster, BEx Query Designer and BEx workbooks
etc.
9
SAP’s first attempt at ERP BI (starting in 1998)….
1. BEx Workbooks is Excel 'on steroids'.
2. BW queries can be opened in Excel
3. Queries can be refreshed and standard Excel functions can be used
This was a great tool for
financial analysts and power
users, but casual user hated it!!
10
Today’s SAP web reports
The most common way of deploying BW queries are through a
standard, or customized web template with built-in navigational
features. BW provides a global web template that can be enhanced with
logos, colors, fonts and additional features using BSP or JSP.
11
General Issues with SAP’s Business Warehouse Web Reporting
The pre-delivered BW’s web template does not
always provide the functionality required.
Currently lacking functionality includes:
• Creating favorites/bookmarks that can be accessed from any machine
• Printing fit to page, report info, data status, basic formatting
• Ability to search for reports within the end user roles
• Definitions of characteristics and key figures are not available
• Online user help is not available in the web template
• No standard tool to target specific users about system status/changes
• On-line training is missing
As a result, most customers enhanced the functionality
of their web templates using development tools such as
HTML and Java Script, ABAP, WAD.
12
Oracle’s Approach to ERP BI
Oracle’s answer to SAP’s NetWeaver is the Collective packaging of
Fusion BI and their analytical applications
-
Source: Oracle, March 2006
13
Oracle’s Corporate Performance Management applications
Today, the CPM applications include 6 different areas,:
Balanced scorecards, Enterprise planning and budgeting,
Daily business intelligence, Public sector budgeting,
Financial consolidation hub and Profitability manager
Source: :White paper: Oracle Fusion
Applications, March 2006
14
Oracle’s Interactive Dashboards & embedded analytics
The daily business
intelligence is
presented in
46 overview pages,
287 KPIs and
769 delivered reports
(as of July 2005)
The interactive dashboards and embedded analytics covers a variety of
scenarios and many of them allows drill down to the supporting transactions
in the data warehouse or the transaction system.
15
Source: :White paper: Oracle
Fusion Applications, March 2006
PeopleSofts’ Enterprise Performance Management - EPM
PeopleSoft’s approach to
ERP analytics is through
20 datamarts and a set of
analytical applications.
These are the 20 pre-delivered
data marts that comes with
ETL programs as well
16
PeopleSofts’ EPM BI Applications
PeopleSoft’s analytical applications.
These analytical
applications runs on
top of the 20 predelivered datamarts
from PeopleSoft.
17
Source: :White paper: PeopleSoft
Enterprise Performance Management,
What is Oracle going to do with it all?
Oracle has already integrated the Siebel's analytic solutions in Oracle
Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (as of March 2006).
The challenge for Oracle is to expand the Fusion analytics platform to
create the next generation of integrated BI applications. This will
include a combination of the Business Intelligence Suite and Oracle
applications.
More industry specific analytics
is also needed and in 2007 Oracle
plans to add more content for
higher education, pharmaceuticals
and financial services.
18
What is Oracle going to do with it all?
Before the 2nd quarter of 2007, Oracle plans to deliver specific analytical
updates by integrating their Business Intelligence Suite with:
PeopleSoft Enterprise,
- JD Edwards EnterpriseOne,
- Oracle E-Business Suite applications.
-
-With
the release of PeopleSoft Enterprise version 9.0 there will be new
enhancements to Enterprise Performance Management capabilities.
-Oracle
will also continuing development of more daily business
intelligence features in E-Business Suite version 12.
What we see is two tracks: One with continued development of legacy and
heritance ERP BI applications, and on track with the ‘to-be’ vision of integrated
analytics based on the Oracle fusion and business intelligence suite.
19
Making sense of it all….
Level of Embedded Analytics
Complex (score
cards, budgeting,
planning, KPI)
Horizontal approach
(2nd generation)
Integrated analytical
(3rd generation)
Oracle E-business
suite applications
SAP APO
Oracle BI suite
Enterprise edition
PeopleSoft
EPM
Emerging
(1st generation)
SAP Strategic
enterprise mgmt
SAP BW
Siebel BI
Vertical approach
(2nd generation)
Oracle BI suite
standard edition
Oracle BI suite
standard one edition
Interactive
Mgmt. reporting
(OLAP, MQE) Toolsets &
accelerators
Level of Pre-delivered Content
Analytical applications
for specific industries20
What We’ll Cover
•
Overview ERP - BI
•
What are the vendor’s doing
– a look at SAP’s and Oracle’s many tool suites.
•
Real-time ERP BI merges with operational reporting
•
The future of ERP BI
•
Wrap up
21
Real-time DW merges with operational reporting
– What are the issues with XML?
•
In the late 1990s, companies explored XML as a silver bullet to get timely transactional
data into data warehouses. The idea was to provide instant synchronous updates to the
decision support systems as the transactions occurred. While the concept sounds
simple, it has major implications.
•
First, the transaction system has to create a fixed format document for each
transaction, something that can be quite time-consuming. Second, the documents
often become large due to tags and metadata embedded in each record. For example,
transactions based on the proposed XML protocol - extensible messaging and
presence protocol, or XMPP - carry both open and end tags for each data point. If you
want to send a simple record with a first and last name, it may look like:
<first_name>Jim</first_name>
• <last_name>Smith</last_name>
•
ISSUE: While the record contains only 8
characters (Jim Smith), the transmitted
document contains 55 characters.
22
Real-time DW merges with operational reporting
– What are the issues with XMPP and SIMPLE?
•
XMPP was great at handling simple records such as SMS traffic, but it had
a huge overhead when transmitting large volumes of transactions
(something it was never intended to do).
•
On the other hand, a drawback of the competitor, SIMPLE, was that it
provided core support for single text messaging but had little support for
other formats. Therefore, each vendor had to build their own extensions,
which were often incompatible.
•
Another problem with SIMPLE was that it supported the old user data
protocol (UDP) as well as transmission control protocol (TCP) in the
transportation layer.
ISSUE: Because UDP has few quality controls, data packages can be
dropped and data lost with limited ability to restart or track the process.
23
Real-time DW merges with operational reporting
– What is BAS / BAM and BizTalk?
•
With this latest release of BizTalk, which is based on the .NET platform, Microsoft
provided a clearer alternative to the very confusing standardization race that had
literally dozens of overlapping standards and approaches to EAI.
•
The core architecture of BizTalk 2004 is a simplified server system. For a decision
support system in an EAI framework, BizTalk provides the Business Activity Services
(BAS) to be installed on the source system side to provide the messages. The
administrator of the data warehouse can also monitor the load process from many
source systems using BizTalk's business activity monitoring (BAM) tool.
•
Currently, BizTalk has been enhanced to
provide better network load balancing
(NLB) and an enhanced management console
called MMC for remote management and
configuration of multiple source systems
with BAS installed.
24
Real-time DW merges with operational reporting
– What is SAP Doing?
•
One of the core components of NetWeaver is SAP Exchange
Infrastructure (XI). SAP XI provides integration between
SAP components such as BW for data warehousing,
Strategic Enterprise Management tool for analytics as well as
a variety of components for knowledge management, customer
relationship management (CRM) analytics, advanced planning and
optimization (APO) and SAP's portal product and non-SAP components.
•
Today, SAP has based its core messaging architecture on the XML standards,
and the direct access architecture is based on the connectivity provided by
Java (J2EE). SAP XI also support interface standards such as RosettaNet,
CIDX and UCCnet.
•
With the release of NetWeaver BI 7.0, last month, SAP is taking another step
closer to providing a true real-time data warehouse.
25
What We’ll Cover
•
Overview ERP - BI
•
What are the vendor’s doing
– a look at SAP’s and Oracle’s many tool suites.
•
Real-time ERP BI merges with operational reporting
•
The future of ERP BI
•
Wrap up
26
TREND: More visualization tools (I.e. SAP’s Visual Composer)
A Visual Composer is a tool to visualize the data. It is a browser-based
intuitive modeling and design tool for rapid application development and
prototyping in a code-free development environment.
SAP NetWeaver‘s
Visual Composer
27
TREND: Virtual OLAP – an Oracle approach
•
Virtual OLAP is a trend of merging operational and analytical data
in a logical manner.
•
Since the merger is virtual, it can have zero lag time and therefore
provide real-time analytics.
•
Many companies such as the GL company is providing tie-ins to
Oracle applications and databases that can logically merge the
data as well as transform the data to external indexing engines
for extremely fast query accessing.
28
TREND: Virtual OLAP – an SAP approach
•
SAP launched the BI accelerator at the end of June 2006.
•
This tool takes BI and/or operational data and creates a
proprietary indexing system that allows users to access the data
very quickly.
Query performance can
be 100s of times faster
than traditional ROLAP.
29
Source: Alexander
Peter, SAP AG, 2006
Trend: BI applications are creating ‘new’ date to the DW
•
In Data warehousing v2.0 (Bill Immon’s new terminology), we are
using BI applications to create new data that needs to be fed to the
data warehouse, and /or the transactional system
•
Tools are now available to build association data sets that creates
updates based on BI findings (i.e. customer segmentation, risk,
profitability flagging etc).
30
Images: Bhanu Gupta, ASUG 2005 Illinois chapter
Most ERP BI projects are abandoning the vendor delivered
methodologies
All major vendor’s have ‘proposed’ BI methodologies, but they are
predominantly based on traditional approaches to building transaction
systems.
When to Select Different Methodologies
High
Joint Application Design
(JAD)
SDLC methodologies
are for building
transactional systems.
System development Life-Cycle
based methodologies
(SDLC)
Time to
Delivery
Extreme Programming
(EP)
For ERP BI, there are
several other
alternatives.
Rapid Application Development
(RAD)
Low
Low
High
Impact of Failure
Source: Dr. Bjarne Berg, SAP Project Management Conference - Oct. 2005, Las
31
Vegas “How to pick JAD, RAD, XP or a SDLC Methodology for your IT project”
What We’ll Cover
•
Overview ERP - BI
•
What are the vendor’s doing
– a look at SAP’s and Oracle’s many tool suites.
•
Real-time ERP BI merges with operational reporting
•
The future of ERP BI
•
Wrap up
32
Your Turn!
Dr. Bjarne Berg
Director of Business Intelligence
MyITgroup Ltd.
bberg@myitgroup.com
33