Unlocking The Power of Dashboards in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2
Provide modern data visualization options to your Oracle E-Business Suite and get ready for the cloud while you’re (still) in EBS
The technology for presenting data visualization from different areas in Oracle E-Business Suite is already shipped with version 12.2 and can be leveraged with JDeveloper (which can be downloaded for free).
As long as you are using the EBS 12.2 technology stack to extend the functionality of the existing modules, you can create interactive dashboards showing different types of charts, use pivot tables, gauges, export to Excel, and even show your data in fully functional maps.
And this gets better: once you learn to use these techniques you will acquire the skills not only to provide the same outstanding solutions to cloud users, but also to go beyond the standard functionality without invasive customizations (this fits in perfectly with Larry’s Ellison OOW15 key note remark where he mentioned that in the Oracle ERP cloud you have to “think extend, not change”)
Here’s one example of a Customer Transactions Dashboard that presents information about transactions from customers of a specific region in three different ways:
1. Table (with options to filter records to be retrieved)
2. Pie Chart showing grouped transactions by customer depending on the criteria selected in the previous section
3. A fully functional map showing the location of the retrieved customers.
In another example of a General Ledger dashboard that can be found here, you can see Actuals and Budget balances represented in different data visualization components such as Pivot Tables, Gauges and Bar Charts.
ADF can be a complex framework and some may say it’s hard to learn. But once you understand the basics, plus your existing knowledge of the Oracle EBS tables, you can create SQL Queries to expose data controls that can be used to represent these graphical visualizations.
If you are an Oracle E-Business Suite professional like me, I’m sure you are keeping an eye on how the ERP Cloud matures. Until then, we can use our existing tools to get ready for the new paradigm in our business. In a fun and productive way we can modernize our EBS business users UX while building the skills for the ERP Cloud era.
The feedback I received so far from my colleagues about applying this technology to Oracle EBS is very positive. While I think that in-depth knowledge of ADF and advanced programming in Java and Groovy is required for developing complex extensions, relying on your SQL skills and tables structure knowledge is enough to present a rapid and inexpensive BI solution for Oracle E-Business Suite users.
