Description
The article approaches the subject of business intelligence in the context of ERP projects, and presents the experience of a real industry project, its development and the problems it faced.
The Impact Of Organization Changes On Business
Intelligence Projects
ANA RAMONA LUPU, RAZVAN BOLOGA, ION LUNGU, ADELA BARA
Computer Science Department
Academy of Economic Studies
Piata Romana 6, Bucharest
ROMANIA
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
www.ase.ro
Abstract: The article approaches the subject of business intelligence in the context of ERP projects, and
presents the experience of a real industry project, its development and the problems it faced. It offers an
insight into the main three phases of the project and it analyses the impact of technical problems and of
company changes on the BI project, revealing the strengths and the weaknesses of the proposed solutions.
The conclusions of the article can be useful for all of those who are involved in building business intelligence
solutions to reveal some of success factors, to prevent or to solve some of the inherent problems related to this
type of projects.
Key-Words: - Business Intelligence, ERP, organization changes, critical success factors
1 Introduction
We live in the Information Age, when having proper
information means being competitive. Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) systems meant a huge step
in providing an integrated business environment, as
they put together all the data, the applications and
the people of a company. The central element of an
ERP system is its unique database, which stores very
big volumes of data, organized in thousands of
tables. The ERP’s database complex schema is not
adequate for data analysis and reporting. Of course,
there is hidden a lot of useful information, but it
requires the use of “intelligent” tools for extracting
it. Business Intelligence seems to be the answer to
that problem and in the last five years or so, most
companies applied business intelligence tools to
mine for information from their ERP.
A short definition tells us that: “Business
Intelligence is the process of getting enough of the
right information in a timely manner and usable
form and analyzing it so that it can have a positive
impact on business strategy, tactics or operations”
[1].
BI Systems must have the ability to allow managers
to view data in different perspective, to drill-down
and roll-up to aggregate levels, to navigate and on-
line query data sets in order to discover new factors
that affect business process and also to anticipate
and forecast changes inside and outside the
organization.
2 Problem Formulation
A purported 60%-70% of business intelligence (BI)
applications fail. The root causes for these failures
are not related only to the technology but to
organizational, cultural, and infrastructure issues[4].
This paper will present a real experience of
developing a large business intelligence project, and
analysis the difficulties and the problems met as the
project was developed, and finally formulates some
lessons learned of use for future implementations.
2.1 The context: an Oracle Application ERP
implementation.
This paper will describe a BI project experience
developed in the context of implementing Oracle
ERP solution to a big company from Romanian oil
industry services, with a complex organizational
structure, having over 15000 employees.
In the beginning of the project, the company
structure looked like showed in Fig.1.
The ERP project apparently started on a solid
ground, with FI module implementation at the
central unit. The ERP project then continued by
implementing Oracle FI in all company branches,
sectors and working points.
Proceedings of the 7th WSEAS International Conference on Simulation, Modelling and Optimization, Beijing, China, September 15-17, 2007 414
Fig.1 The company structure at the
begnning of the project
As usual, the implementation generated the need for
processes reengineering and revealed important
flaws of the company structure and management. As
a result, the company decided to hire some
experienced international consultancy company to
manage the entire process of organizational change.
Changes affected company structure, business
information and material flows and the way they
were registered by accountability, management and
reporting hierarchy. New sub organizations were
created, others were joined or eliminated, and there
were planned modernization and technological
changes measures.
After operating the changes, the organizational
structure looked as follows:
Fig.2 Present company structure
There were some obvious advantages brought by
this new view of business:
Better transparency;
Better cost control over cost centers;
Better resource management;
Higher efficiency;
Cost reduction (as a result of personnel
reduction or relocation).
The next project phase was the implementation of
the Logistics modules and Workover modules.
2.2 The BI project
The BI project started when the financial module
had already been implemented at the central
quarters, so there were available data to fulfill the
reporting needs of the management and to analyze
the major economic parameters.
In the beginning, the project seemed to be a classical
one, and we followed the classical phases [2]:
1. Planning: enterprise infrastructure
evaluation; project planning – that was
performed in the same time with the analysis
for the ERP project.
2. Business analysis – project requirements
definition; data analysis; application
prototyping and metadata repository
analysis.
3. Design – database design; ETL design;
metadata repository design.
4. Construction – ETL development;
application development; data mining;
metadata repository development
5. Deployment – implementation; release
evaluation.
These phases of the project were completed almost
entirely twice: first for the initial company structure
and second for the modified company structure.
BI team faced three important types of problems:
• technical problems – the initially allocated
resources were reduced, as the initial estimations
of the data volume were overcome as soon as
the BI module was implemented in the entire
company.
• communication problems – there was a lack of
availability from the company personnel, as they
were already overwhelmed by tasks related to
the ERP implementation and by activities related
to the consultancy companies cooperation, all
that added to their day by day activities.
• Organization changes problems – the BI
project was from the very beginning under the
sign of change. Beside the changes due to the
Central quarters
Local
branch 1
Local
branch n
Local sector
11
Local sector
12
Produc-
tion
Services
Local sector
n1
Local sector
n2
Produc-
tion
Services
Central
quarters
Construc-
tion
division
Mainte-
nance
division
Transpor-
tation
division
Work-over
division
Local
sector c1
Local
sector c2
Local
sector cn
Local
sector m1
Local
sector m2
Local
sector mn
… …
Proceedings of the 7th WSEAS International Conference on Simulation, Modelling and Optimization, Beijing, China, September 15-17, 2007 415
technical aspects, the drastic structure changes
in the company negatively influenced the
relevance of the initial business analysis, and
often made some of the developed reports
irrelevant or inapplicable.
The work was performed with gaps, as there was
always some top management decision to make that
would have affected the BI project. The initial plan
was revised over and over, so it somehow lost its
power as management tool. The entire structure of
incomes and outcomes categories and their
corresponding accounts were changed in the middle
of the project.
We will focus on the technical and organizational
structure aspects, as the communication problem is
more like a project management problem, and is not
in our area of interest for the moment.
3 Problem Solution
The system described in this article is built over
stages and sub-stages proposed in [3] and the
solution include the following technologies: data
warehouse realized with aggregate data and virtual
model, OLAP technology, data mining facilities,
analytic SQL functions. The interface is based on a
Business Intelligence Portal that integrates all these
technologies and offer direct access to the system
from anywherere, anytime.
3.1 The technical solution
First Phase
In the beginning, we simply used Oracle Discoverer
ver. 10.1.2.1, which works on a virtual data
warehouse build over the database. Multi-dimension
structures like dimensions and fact tables are
automatically transformed from relational sources.
We started with low data volumes, generated by the
use of the FI module at the central quarters. Oracle
Discoverer Desktop was installed on the computers
of the main decision makers, that were going to use
it.
We developed reports for analyzing Cash Flows,
Budgets, Costs, Expenses and Incomes only for the
central head quarters. The number of rows involved
in these reports was in average 100000/month, so we
did not need a large amount of resources.
Second Phase
When the FI module was installed in the entire
company, we faced the problem of having to go to
each of the sectors to install the product and instruct
the managers how to use it and some other IT
persons how to ensure the maintenance and future
development. So, we integrated Oracle Discoverer
with Oracle Application Server Portal 10g Release
2, and the solution became available on-line,
allowing everybody to access information according
to their established privileges. But, this decision had
a negative impact on the performances: the working
speed decreased as the required memory space
increased from 32 GB server shared as Discoverer
needed, to 64 GB server shared as Oracle Portal
needed.
1
st
Phase 2
nd
Phase
Fig.3(a) Evolution of technical solution – initial
phases
We didn’t manage to obtain a dedicated server for
Oracle Application Server because of very high
hardware resource cost. In this phase, we had to
develop reports for analyzing Cash Flows, Budgets,
Costs, Expenses and Incomes for the central head
quarters and ten sectors with different area of
production. So, the number of rows involved in
these reports was over 1, 5 million/month. Under the
circumstances, with low allocated resources and a
large amount of data per month we needed to find
another solution to increase the speed and reduce the
loading time for reports.
Third Phase
When the other ERP modules started to be
implemented, we were facing serious problems. We
decided to construct a data warehouse so we also
integrated Oracle Data Warehouse Builder and
Oracle
DB
Oracle Designer
Reports
Oracle Designer
Reports
Oracle DB
Materialized
views
Oracle Portal
Oracle Designer
Reports
Proceedings of the 7th WSEAS International Conference on Simulation, Modelling and Optimization, Beijing, China, September 15-17, 2007 416
Oracle Data Mining into Oracle Portal. Unlike
Oracle Discoverer, in Warehouse Buider data is
physically stored into a special repository, build on
the database. The role of Oracle Data Mining was to
supply additional analysis power.
This solution was a success because data is
aggregated in the central data warehouse, the ETL
(Extract, Transform and Load) process is built
separately, off-line so it doesn’t affect the reporting
zand analytical time. We built new types of reports
related to production (costs and allocated resources),
workover, purchasing orders, transactions per
account from all functional modules, etc. We
succeed in extracting data from all modules and
aggregating them in one central data warehouse with
subdatamarts from financial, production, purchasing
orders and order entry modules. The final solution is
described in the next figure:
Fig.3(b) Evolution of technical solution – final phase
The number of rows involved was now over 3
millions/month, and the performances were finally
satisfying.
3.2 Organization change impact
Major business reorganization is one reason BI
project typically get hosed [5]. As we illustrated in
Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 we faced such an important
business restructuring. More, the initial scope
estimation proved to be inexact, and it had to be
reevaluated in the second phase of the project, so the
project gain new dimensions.
As a result, most of the analysis results had to be
reevaluated, and database design and repository
design had to be revised and seriously extended,
having an important impact over technical and
human resource requirements. The BI team had to be
enlarged and it was itself a problem, as there were
no other BI specialists available, and other two new
persons had to be employed and trained.
Many of the reports developed in the first part were
inapplicable. All these generated important time loss
and inefficiency; it often happened that after getting
complete specifications, data gathering, and
completing of the report design, during the
validation meeting we were communicated the
whole perspective was changed. This had impact not
only directly upon efficiency, but our team members
got to be confused or demoralized.
But, all these changes had their good aspects. As the
consultancy company progressed in elaborating the
new business view, they inevitably brought out the
reporting needs. At some point, it was raised the
question of a BI solution necessity.
Our team was invited for discussions, and we had
the chance of proving the great advantages of BI
over the existing reports (Microsoft Excel reports or
native Oracle Applications reports):
Flexibility, scalability and responsiveness to
changes;
Integrated data across platforms and data
sources;
User friendly, dynamic, web-enabled tools
for analysis;
Management reports with real-time and
worldwide access;
Reduced IT support requirements;
High degree of control over data security.
A demonstration based on the customized reports
developed in the first phase had a relevant impact.
Another positive aspect at this point was the attitude
of end-users. If they were previously reluctant to
changing their old tools (Microsoft Excel and other
Office applications) and learning how to use a new
one, they were now eager and motivated to do it as
the old reports were no longer valid. And the truth is
that they come to love it in very short time, as the
new reports were very flexible and easy to use and
they interfaced directly with the ERP application and
other data sources.
The end-user involvement is very important to
developing functional BI solutions, as project
requirement and scope are set by users, they know
exactly the data they need and they will test and use
the result of the project. There are voices claiming
there were a shift of authority and ownership in BI
projects, from IT to business side [3], although none
of the sides involved is comfortable with it.
ERP Oracle E-Business Suite – functional modules
Financial: General Ledger, Account Payables, Account
Receivables, Cash Management
Comercial: Purchasing, Order Management, Inventory,
Engineering, Bills of Material, Work in Process, Master
Scheduling/Material Requirement Planning
Other sources: spread-sheet, text files, e-mail etc.
Data ware house, central and with data
marts
Aggregate and virtual
ETL
Friendly graphical interface, any
ware and any time access Oracle
Portal
OLAP
Data
mining
Oracle
Warehouse
Builder
Oracle Discover
Administrator
Oracle Portal
Oracle Discover
Desktop
Oracle Data
Miner
Oracle Database
10g
3
rd
Phase
Proceedings of the 7th WSEAS International Conference on Simulation, Modelling and Optimization, Beijing, China, September 15-17, 2007 417
4 Conclusion
Developing Business Intelligence Systems involve
time, high-costs and human resources, efforts and it
involves many risks like: system design, data
quality, and technology obsolescence. System design
risks stem from poor conceptualization of an
enterprise’s true business needs before the
technology is deployed. Data quality risks relate
primarily to whether or not data has been properly
cleansed. Technology obsolescence refers to the
failure on the part of the vendor to anticipate new
technologies. A solution for covering these risks is
Business Intelligence Portals integrating data from
data warehouses that are integrating and make the
content of other business intelligence tools available
online.
One important conclusion is that, more than
technical reasons, organizational and infrastructure
dysfunction endanger the success of the project;
We could see on our own expense that when there
are no supporting business decisions, the BI project
is paralyzed. So, the main factor in conducting such
a project is business rather than IT. Following this
direction, after our project implementation was
ready, the maintenance and further development of
BI reports were entrusted to two selected end-users,
specially trained, but not to the IT department.
Simply combining data warehouse and data mining
engines on the top of an Enterprise Resource
Planning system will never provide a viable
response to the changing management needs. A
competitive advantage can be obtained only by
adding business-oriented personalization so that the
information provided can fulfill the particular needs
of end-users and empower dynamic analysis and
decisions.
A business intelligence project is like a battle, but
the result is worthwhile fighting for, considering the
important benefits. Enterprise wide BI is becoming
nowadays a necessity for providing widely and
easily available information throughout the
organization.
References:
[1] Wally Bock, Questions about Business
Intelligence, December 2000,http://www.bockinfo.com/docs/bifaq.htm
[2] Larissa T. Moss, Shaku Atre - Business
Intelligence Roadmap. The Complete Project
Lifecycle for Decision Support Applications,
Addison-Wesley Professional, p.15, 2003
[3] Larissa T. Moss, Organizational Barriers to
Business Intelligence (Part 2),http://www.businessintelligence.com/ex/asp/cod
e.135/pagenum.1/xe/article.htm
[4] Larissa T. Moss , Organizational and Cultural
Barriers to Business Intelligence, Cutter
Consortium, Executive Reports, November
2001,http://www.cutter.com
[5] Mitchell A. Ocampo, Overcoming the Barriers
to Business Intelligence Success, EMC
Corporation Publications, May 2007,http://www.emc.com/solutions/microsoft/pdf/H2
740_overcom_barriers_bus_intell_success_ep_ld
v.pdf
Proceedings of the 7th WSEAS International Conference on Simulation, Modelling and Optimization, Beijing, China, September 15-17, 2007 418
doc_450322358.pdf
The article approaches the subject of business intelligence in the context of ERP projects, and presents the experience of a real industry project, its development and the problems it faced.
The Impact Of Organization Changes On Business
Intelligence Projects
ANA RAMONA LUPU, RAZVAN BOLOGA, ION LUNGU, ADELA BARA
Computer Science Department
Academy of Economic Studies
Piata Romana 6, Bucharest
ROMANIA
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
www.ase.ro
Abstract: The article approaches the subject of business intelligence in the context of ERP projects, and
presents the experience of a real industry project, its development and the problems it faced. It offers an
insight into the main three phases of the project and it analyses the impact of technical problems and of
company changes on the BI project, revealing the strengths and the weaknesses of the proposed solutions.
The conclusions of the article can be useful for all of those who are involved in building business intelligence
solutions to reveal some of success factors, to prevent or to solve some of the inherent problems related to this
type of projects.
Key-Words: - Business Intelligence, ERP, organization changes, critical success factors
1 Introduction
We live in the Information Age, when having proper
information means being competitive. Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) systems meant a huge step
in providing an integrated business environment, as
they put together all the data, the applications and
the people of a company. The central element of an
ERP system is its unique database, which stores very
big volumes of data, organized in thousands of
tables. The ERP’s database complex schema is not
adequate for data analysis and reporting. Of course,
there is hidden a lot of useful information, but it
requires the use of “intelligent” tools for extracting
it. Business Intelligence seems to be the answer to
that problem and in the last five years or so, most
companies applied business intelligence tools to
mine for information from their ERP.
A short definition tells us that: “Business
Intelligence is the process of getting enough of the
right information in a timely manner and usable
form and analyzing it so that it can have a positive
impact on business strategy, tactics or operations”
[1].
BI Systems must have the ability to allow managers
to view data in different perspective, to drill-down
and roll-up to aggregate levels, to navigate and on-
line query data sets in order to discover new factors
that affect business process and also to anticipate
and forecast changes inside and outside the
organization.
2 Problem Formulation
A purported 60%-70% of business intelligence (BI)
applications fail. The root causes for these failures
are not related only to the technology but to
organizational, cultural, and infrastructure issues[4].
This paper will present a real experience of
developing a large business intelligence project, and
analysis the difficulties and the problems met as the
project was developed, and finally formulates some
lessons learned of use for future implementations.
2.1 The context: an Oracle Application ERP
implementation.
This paper will describe a BI project experience
developed in the context of implementing Oracle
ERP solution to a big company from Romanian oil
industry services, with a complex organizational
structure, having over 15000 employees.
In the beginning of the project, the company
structure looked like showed in Fig.1.
The ERP project apparently started on a solid
ground, with FI module implementation at the
central unit. The ERP project then continued by
implementing Oracle FI in all company branches,
sectors and working points.
Proceedings of the 7th WSEAS International Conference on Simulation, Modelling and Optimization, Beijing, China, September 15-17, 2007 414
Fig.1 The company structure at the
begnning of the project
As usual, the implementation generated the need for
processes reengineering and revealed important
flaws of the company structure and management. As
a result, the company decided to hire some
experienced international consultancy company to
manage the entire process of organizational change.
Changes affected company structure, business
information and material flows and the way they
were registered by accountability, management and
reporting hierarchy. New sub organizations were
created, others were joined or eliminated, and there
were planned modernization and technological
changes measures.
After operating the changes, the organizational
structure looked as follows:
Fig.2 Present company structure
There were some obvious advantages brought by
this new view of business:
Better transparency;
Better cost control over cost centers;
Better resource management;
Higher efficiency;
Cost reduction (as a result of personnel
reduction or relocation).
The next project phase was the implementation of
the Logistics modules and Workover modules.
2.2 The BI project
The BI project started when the financial module
had already been implemented at the central
quarters, so there were available data to fulfill the
reporting needs of the management and to analyze
the major economic parameters.
In the beginning, the project seemed to be a classical
one, and we followed the classical phases [2]:
1. Planning: enterprise infrastructure
evaluation; project planning – that was
performed in the same time with the analysis
for the ERP project.
2. Business analysis – project requirements
definition; data analysis; application
prototyping and metadata repository
analysis.
3. Design – database design; ETL design;
metadata repository design.
4. Construction – ETL development;
application development; data mining;
metadata repository development
5. Deployment – implementation; release
evaluation.
These phases of the project were completed almost
entirely twice: first for the initial company structure
and second for the modified company structure.
BI team faced three important types of problems:
• technical problems – the initially allocated
resources were reduced, as the initial estimations
of the data volume were overcome as soon as
the BI module was implemented in the entire
company.
• communication problems – there was a lack of
availability from the company personnel, as they
were already overwhelmed by tasks related to
the ERP implementation and by activities related
to the consultancy companies cooperation, all
that added to their day by day activities.
• Organization changes problems – the BI
project was from the very beginning under the
sign of change. Beside the changes due to the
Central quarters
Local
branch 1
Local
branch n
Local sector
11
Local sector
12
Produc-
tion
Services
Local sector
n1
Local sector
n2
Produc-
tion
Services
Central
quarters
Construc-
tion
division
Mainte-
nance
division
Transpor-
tation
division
Work-over
division
Local
sector c1
Local
sector c2
Local
sector cn
Local
sector m1
Local
sector m2
Local
sector mn
… …
Proceedings of the 7th WSEAS International Conference on Simulation, Modelling and Optimization, Beijing, China, September 15-17, 2007 415
technical aspects, the drastic structure changes
in the company negatively influenced the
relevance of the initial business analysis, and
often made some of the developed reports
irrelevant or inapplicable.
The work was performed with gaps, as there was
always some top management decision to make that
would have affected the BI project. The initial plan
was revised over and over, so it somehow lost its
power as management tool. The entire structure of
incomes and outcomes categories and their
corresponding accounts were changed in the middle
of the project.
We will focus on the technical and organizational
structure aspects, as the communication problem is
more like a project management problem, and is not
in our area of interest for the moment.
3 Problem Solution
The system described in this article is built over
stages and sub-stages proposed in [3] and the
solution include the following technologies: data
warehouse realized with aggregate data and virtual
model, OLAP technology, data mining facilities,
analytic SQL functions. The interface is based on a
Business Intelligence Portal that integrates all these
technologies and offer direct access to the system
from anywherere, anytime.
3.1 The technical solution
First Phase
In the beginning, we simply used Oracle Discoverer
ver. 10.1.2.1, which works on a virtual data
warehouse build over the database. Multi-dimension
structures like dimensions and fact tables are
automatically transformed from relational sources.
We started with low data volumes, generated by the
use of the FI module at the central quarters. Oracle
Discoverer Desktop was installed on the computers
of the main decision makers, that were going to use
it.
We developed reports for analyzing Cash Flows,
Budgets, Costs, Expenses and Incomes only for the
central head quarters. The number of rows involved
in these reports was in average 100000/month, so we
did not need a large amount of resources.
Second Phase
When the FI module was installed in the entire
company, we faced the problem of having to go to
each of the sectors to install the product and instruct
the managers how to use it and some other IT
persons how to ensure the maintenance and future
development. So, we integrated Oracle Discoverer
with Oracle Application Server Portal 10g Release
2, and the solution became available on-line,
allowing everybody to access information according
to their established privileges. But, this decision had
a negative impact on the performances: the working
speed decreased as the required memory space
increased from 32 GB server shared as Discoverer
needed, to 64 GB server shared as Oracle Portal
needed.
1
st
Phase 2
nd
Phase
Fig.3(a) Evolution of technical solution – initial
phases
We didn’t manage to obtain a dedicated server for
Oracle Application Server because of very high
hardware resource cost. In this phase, we had to
develop reports for analyzing Cash Flows, Budgets,
Costs, Expenses and Incomes for the central head
quarters and ten sectors with different area of
production. So, the number of rows involved in
these reports was over 1, 5 million/month. Under the
circumstances, with low allocated resources and a
large amount of data per month we needed to find
another solution to increase the speed and reduce the
loading time for reports.
Third Phase
When the other ERP modules started to be
implemented, we were facing serious problems. We
decided to construct a data warehouse so we also
integrated Oracle Data Warehouse Builder and
Oracle
DB
Oracle Designer
Reports
Oracle Designer
Reports
Oracle DB
Materialized
views
Oracle Portal
Oracle Designer
Reports
Proceedings of the 7th WSEAS International Conference on Simulation, Modelling and Optimization, Beijing, China, September 15-17, 2007 416
Oracle Data Mining into Oracle Portal. Unlike
Oracle Discoverer, in Warehouse Buider data is
physically stored into a special repository, build on
the database. The role of Oracle Data Mining was to
supply additional analysis power.
This solution was a success because data is
aggregated in the central data warehouse, the ETL
(Extract, Transform and Load) process is built
separately, off-line so it doesn’t affect the reporting
zand analytical time. We built new types of reports
related to production (costs and allocated resources),
workover, purchasing orders, transactions per
account from all functional modules, etc. We
succeed in extracting data from all modules and
aggregating them in one central data warehouse with
subdatamarts from financial, production, purchasing
orders and order entry modules. The final solution is
described in the next figure:
Fig.3(b) Evolution of technical solution – final phase
The number of rows involved was now over 3
millions/month, and the performances were finally
satisfying.
3.2 Organization change impact
Major business reorganization is one reason BI
project typically get hosed [5]. As we illustrated in
Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 we faced such an important
business restructuring. More, the initial scope
estimation proved to be inexact, and it had to be
reevaluated in the second phase of the project, so the
project gain new dimensions.
As a result, most of the analysis results had to be
reevaluated, and database design and repository
design had to be revised and seriously extended,
having an important impact over technical and
human resource requirements. The BI team had to be
enlarged and it was itself a problem, as there were
no other BI specialists available, and other two new
persons had to be employed and trained.
Many of the reports developed in the first part were
inapplicable. All these generated important time loss
and inefficiency; it often happened that after getting
complete specifications, data gathering, and
completing of the report design, during the
validation meeting we were communicated the
whole perspective was changed. This had impact not
only directly upon efficiency, but our team members
got to be confused or demoralized.
But, all these changes had their good aspects. As the
consultancy company progressed in elaborating the
new business view, they inevitably brought out the
reporting needs. At some point, it was raised the
question of a BI solution necessity.
Our team was invited for discussions, and we had
the chance of proving the great advantages of BI
over the existing reports (Microsoft Excel reports or
native Oracle Applications reports):
Flexibility, scalability and responsiveness to
changes;
Integrated data across platforms and data
sources;
User friendly, dynamic, web-enabled tools
for analysis;
Management reports with real-time and
worldwide access;
Reduced IT support requirements;
High degree of control over data security.
A demonstration based on the customized reports
developed in the first phase had a relevant impact.
Another positive aspect at this point was the attitude
of end-users. If they were previously reluctant to
changing their old tools (Microsoft Excel and other
Office applications) and learning how to use a new
one, they were now eager and motivated to do it as
the old reports were no longer valid. And the truth is
that they come to love it in very short time, as the
new reports were very flexible and easy to use and
they interfaced directly with the ERP application and
other data sources.
The end-user involvement is very important to
developing functional BI solutions, as project
requirement and scope are set by users, they know
exactly the data they need and they will test and use
the result of the project. There are voices claiming
there were a shift of authority and ownership in BI
projects, from IT to business side [3], although none
of the sides involved is comfortable with it.
ERP Oracle E-Business Suite – functional modules
Financial: General Ledger, Account Payables, Account
Receivables, Cash Management
Comercial: Purchasing, Order Management, Inventory,
Engineering, Bills of Material, Work in Process, Master
Scheduling/Material Requirement Planning
Other sources: spread-sheet, text files, e-mail etc.
Data ware house, central and with data
marts
Aggregate and virtual
ETL
Friendly graphical interface, any
ware and any time access Oracle
Portal
OLAP
Data
mining
Oracle
Warehouse
Builder
Oracle Discover
Administrator
Oracle Portal
Oracle Discover
Desktop
Oracle Data
Miner
Oracle Database
10g
3
rd
Phase
Proceedings of the 7th WSEAS International Conference on Simulation, Modelling and Optimization, Beijing, China, September 15-17, 2007 417
4 Conclusion
Developing Business Intelligence Systems involve
time, high-costs and human resources, efforts and it
involves many risks like: system design, data
quality, and technology obsolescence. System design
risks stem from poor conceptualization of an
enterprise’s true business needs before the
technology is deployed. Data quality risks relate
primarily to whether or not data has been properly
cleansed. Technology obsolescence refers to the
failure on the part of the vendor to anticipate new
technologies. A solution for covering these risks is
Business Intelligence Portals integrating data from
data warehouses that are integrating and make the
content of other business intelligence tools available
online.
One important conclusion is that, more than
technical reasons, organizational and infrastructure
dysfunction endanger the success of the project;
We could see on our own expense that when there
are no supporting business decisions, the BI project
is paralyzed. So, the main factor in conducting such
a project is business rather than IT. Following this
direction, after our project implementation was
ready, the maintenance and further development of
BI reports were entrusted to two selected end-users,
specially trained, but not to the IT department.
Simply combining data warehouse and data mining
engines on the top of an Enterprise Resource
Planning system will never provide a viable
response to the changing management needs. A
competitive advantage can be obtained only by
adding business-oriented personalization so that the
information provided can fulfill the particular needs
of end-users and empower dynamic analysis and
decisions.
A business intelligence project is like a battle, but
the result is worthwhile fighting for, considering the
important benefits. Enterprise wide BI is becoming
nowadays a necessity for providing widely and
easily available information throughout the
organization.
References:
[1] Wally Bock, Questions about Business
Intelligence, December 2000,http://www.bockinfo.com/docs/bifaq.htm
[2] Larissa T. Moss, Shaku Atre - Business
Intelligence Roadmap. The Complete Project
Lifecycle for Decision Support Applications,
Addison-Wesley Professional, p.15, 2003
[3] Larissa T. Moss, Organizational Barriers to
Business Intelligence (Part 2),http://www.businessintelligence.com/ex/asp/cod
e.135/pagenum.1/xe/article.htm
[4] Larissa T. Moss , Organizational and Cultural
Barriers to Business Intelligence, Cutter
Consortium, Executive Reports, November
2001,http://www.cutter.com
[5] Mitchell A. Ocampo, Overcoming the Barriers
to Business Intelligence Success, EMC
Corporation Publications, May 2007,http://www.emc.com/solutions/microsoft/pdf/H2
740_overcom_barriers_bus_intell_success_ep_ld
v.pdf
Proceedings of the 7th WSEAS International Conference on Simulation, Modelling and Optimization, Beijing, China, September 15-17, 2007 418
doc_450322358.pdf