Johannesburg, 21 May 2013
News facts
Providing organisations with greater insight more quickly, efficiently and enabling lower total cost of ownership, Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Applications Release 11.1.1.7.1.
Completely redesigned to increase implementation productivity, the new release incorporates significant enhancements across the entire BI Applications product line and introduces new in-memory analytic applications for indirect spend planning and student information analysis.
Leveraging Oracle Data Integrator, Oracle GoldenGate, and new set-up and configuration utilities, the applications can be implemented faster, with reduced costs and improved real-time reporting.
Use of new visualisations, improved user interface and significant data access updates allow users to easily interact with analytics to achieve rich insights.
Pre-built for a range of data sources and business applications, Oracle BI Applications deliver intuitive, role-based intelligence to enable better decisions, actions and business processes.
Built on Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite and part of Oracle Business Analytics, Oracle BI Applications enable organisations to reap the value of a best-of-breed, packaged BI solution, while tight integration with a single, common BI architecture allows businesses to easily extend those solutions to meet their specific needs or build completely custom BI applications.
First in-memory application for spend analysis, forecasting helps customers optimise spending
Oracle Indirect Spend Planning, the industry's first and only in-memory planning application for spend analysis and forecasting, enables procurement and line of business teams to uncover high-opportunity spend reduction areas, monitor and evaluate spend performance, and improve future planning cycles.
By combining powerful what-if analysis and scenario modelling with historical data, users can predict spending amounts and patterns over time to rapidly develop detailed spend plans, enabling them to purchase the right products at the right price from the best sources.
The new application leverages Oracle Essbase server to deliver a rich modelling environment with extremely fast aggregation and calculation. In addition, it integrates directly with Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle's PeopleSoft to incorporate established ERP business rules and constraints, allowing for more realistic modelling scenarios and the creation of actionable plans.
New in-memory application enables academic institutions to make better, more strategic decisions
Oracle Student Information Analytics provides academic institutions with best-in-class reporting and analytic capabilities to increase faculty, staff and student productivity, streamline operations and institutional advancement, and ensure student success.
With pre-built analytics tailored to help higher education institutions match up resources with student needs, the new in-memory analytic application enables institutions to maximise student recruiting efforts, shorten time-to-graduation, improve retention rates, identify successful and unsuccessful courses and optimise faculty workloads.
To speed adoption and time-to-value, Oracle Student Information Analytics provides source-specific business adapters for Oracle's PeopleSoft Campus Solutions and supports third-party solutions through universal adapters.
Enhanced BI applications deliver richer insights faster, more efficiently
Oracle is delivering richer and deeper insight into business applications by incorporating significant functionality across its existing Oracle BI suite of applications.
A new, optional pre-packaged solution that leverages Oracle GoldenGate virtually eliminates the need for a data extraction batch window and minimises the impact on the source system, while providing near real-time reporting.
New features in Oracle Financial Analytics deliver front-line managers greater visibility into budgets and assets, helping them monitor and improve financial performance.
Enhancements include:
Fixed Assets analysis provides a complete picture of the asset life cycle from acquisition through retirement of both transactions and period value.
Budgetary Control analysis allow managers to monitor budget and spending more effectively, helping easily identify top areas of spending and detect exceptions in a timely manner.
Updates to Oracle Human Resources Analytics provide organisations valuable insights to increase workforce productivity and better align pay and performance.
New features include:
Time and labour analysis allows managers to gain insight into hidden causes and costs of overtime, absenteeism and low productivity by reconciling reported time with time posted to projects.
Payroll analysis provides complete information on earnings, and deductions and taxes for employees, allowing organisations to view payroll information at a high level, as well as drill down to better analyse compensation, benefits, taxes and overtime. Customers can rapidly source payroll analysis from EBS, PeopleSoft - including PeopleSoft Global Payroll and third-party solutions through the universal adapters.
Workforce gains and losses deliver insight into employee headcount across divisions and supervisors over monthly, quarterly and yearly time periods, allowing organisations to monitor and analyse movement.
Oracle Project Analytics has been enhanced with new features that enable project managers and accountants to monitor projects and control the risks that lead to overruns.
Updates include:
Resource Management analysis provides project stakeholders with visibility into project requirements, resources, jobs and competencies to monitor utilisation trends, identify underperforming organisations and anticipate resource shortages.
Project Subledger Reconciliation aids project accountants in reconciling differences between the sub-ledger and the general ledger for transactions.
Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics extend insight into inventory levels and costs to promote value chain effectiveness.
New features include:
Enhanced Inventory Analysis gives organisations deeper insight into inventory levels, including cycle count, ageing, expiration/obsolescence and balance.
Item Cost History Analysis helps manufacturers track the historical cost of supply chain-related items.
Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics now includes Sourcing Analysis, which provides increased visibility into corporate spend and complete source-to-pay process with the ability to analyse negotiations, supplier responses and savings opportunities.
By adding support for the Oracle E-Business Suite to Oracle Price Analytics, organisations have a ready means to assess pricing performance, arrest revenue and margin leakage, enabling users to more easily make data-driven pricing decisions.
Additionally, support for the Oracle E-Business Suite in Oracle Service Analytics provides organisations direct access to customer service data, helping them improve the productivity of service centres and increase customer satisfaction.
Supporting quote:
"The business applications our customers rely on daily to manage operations contain a wealth of valuable data about their business, including resources, finances, employees and customers. Unlocking this data can deliver undeniable competitive advantages, yet many businesses still struggle to gain access to the intelligence they need quickly and easily," said Paul Rodwick, vice-president of product management, Oracle. "The latest enhancements and additions to Oracle BI Applications help organisations implement rich analytics more surely and quickly, and provide business users across the enterprise the insights they need to analyse and transform business processes."
"Real-time business insights provide a strategic advantage for our clients, and they are always seeking new ways to leverage existing data to become more nimble and competitive," said Mark Rittman, EMEA technical director and co-founder, Rittman Mead. "The updates to usability and new integrations in the latest release of Oracle BI Applications make it even easier to unlock this information, helping our clients speed decision-making and time-to-value."
Supporting resources:
Oracle Business Analytics
Oracle Business Intelligence Applications
Oracle Business Intelligence Solutions
Watch the recorded webcast: Reduce Spend and Increase Profitability Through Analytics
What's New in Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Applications 11.1.1.7.1 datasheet
Oracle Indirect Spend Planning datasheet
Oracle Student Information Analytics datasheet
Analyst Report: The Total Economic Impact of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems (PDF) white paper