Credit Management in OLTP

Account receivables can have a big impact to the cash flow of an organization. Bad credit can hurt your company’s bottom line. Manging customer credits help the company to manage the risk and avoid the issues.

In this post, I will touch credit check and credit limit, centralized and decentralized credit management, and credit limit currency.  This is a a result of studying various credit management features in the OLTP system. The objective is to understand how the these various system works and understand how the credit management process looks like, and how BI can help in these processses.

ABC Analysis in Inventory Management

 I did some study on the ABC Analysis in Inventory Management.  It is also useful in business analytics.  I will cover what it is and how it is supported in various ERPs. Finally, how it may be used in analytics application.

RFM Analysis

RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) analysis is used by marketing to determine their campaign targets. It is based on three metrics from the previous sales records:

Why do people not report by Month in the Gregorian calendar?

1. The number of days is different in each calendar month.
2. The week and month cannot be aligned.  The number of weekends is different in each calendar month.
3. The number of working days is different in each calendar month.  It ends up that the number of days in each quarter is also different.
4. The period closing day will fall into different days in each period.  The accounting department prefers always close the period by a given day in a week, such as Wednesday or Friday.

13 Period Calendar

I will discuss the following topics:

• What is the 13 period calendar?
• Who uses the 13 period calendar?
• How is it different from the 4-4-5 calendar?

Data Warehouse Basics

Here is a link to my Data Warehouse Basics presentation slides. I explain what is a data warehouse, what is characteristics of a data warehouse, and what the data warehouse deployment looks like.

A good OBIEE web demo from New York City’s City Wide Performance Reporting

New York City now enables the public to monitor the city’s performance by making the OBIEE based dashboard and report online.

Here is the link to their CPR (City Wide Performance Reporting) site : http://www.nyc.gov/html/ops/cpr/html/home/home.shtml

Database Tuning - drop unused indexes

Index is very useful during query, especially in data warehouse.   However, it adds the overhead in the storage and ETL process.

I found an excellent article about how to monitor  the index usage in Oralce.   You should periodically run the index monitoring process and pro-actively drop those un-used indexes.

Bitmap Index - when to use it?

I will cover how Bitmap index work, when to use it and how to use it in this article.

How does it work?

The bitmap index stores the column values in bits. Each bit represents a single value. For example, the gender column has two possible values: Male and Female. three bit will be used in the bitmap to capture the index on the gender column. A good example can be seen in reference 1. So the more distinct value is, the more space is required to store the bitmap.

Internally, the database engine, like Oracle, uses a map function to converts the bit location to the distinct value. (See reference #2) Many bitmap indexes can be used together since database can merge it, so this can improve the response time. (See Reference #3 for the example of merging the index on Marital Status and Region)

When to use it?

BI Applications and Embedded BI, Part 4

This is my 4th post about the embedded BI. The key is that a OBIEE and OBIA warehouse based solution is embeddable to the OLTP system as long as the OLTP system can provide the basic support.

In this article, I will discuss one of the key enabling technology - integrated authentication.

BI Applications and Embedded BI, Part 3

I would like to go over some of the embedded BI related technologies you can use to make the data from BI Apps embedded in the OLTP systems.

In this post I will describe the Micro ETL feature from DAC.

Cost Center Hierarchy and Performance Management

Cost Center Hierarchy is an important dimension is the Performance Management system. The cost center concept is described in many Managerial Accounting books. I think that going back to where it was originated help us to understand how it should be designed and used in a Business Analytics Data Warehouse.

A cost center is described as an essential element used in the responsibility accounting reporting system. Here are the major concepts about the responsibility accounting and cost center described in the managerial accounting field.

Your questions about OBIEE or OBIA

Some people left me messages in my MeeboMe. If you have questions about Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition and Oracle BI Applictions. Here are the links to the public discussion forums:

Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition

Oracle BI Applications

A white paper on leveraging the power of UNSPSC for BI

I found a white paper on www.UNSPSC.org site about the same topic I wrote last week:

Here are what I learned about UNSPSC:

• It has a 4 level hierarchical structure. It can be used for drill down and roll up data.
• It is very useful for spend analysis.
• It can also be used in sourcing to identify the suppliers. It can be use to measure the supplier’s performance by grouping the supplier and establish the benchmark.
• It was an effort of merging United Nation’s code and D&B’s SPSC.
• It can be extended. The custom codes can be defined as the further breakdown of the standard code
• It supports multiple languages.

Use the Industry Standard Code in Data Warehouse

Several well-developed industry standard code schemes can help you to capture the information. Here are advantages for you to adopt the industry standard codes in your information system:

• Save the time to develop the coding scheme by yourselves
• Apply the best practice from the industry
• Ease the exchange data between trading partners (B2B)
• Facilitate the data and application integration (A2A)
• Consolidate your information into a data warehouse cross multiple internal/legacy systems

Here are some of the well-known industrial standard codes I am aware of or have been involved in the past:

EBS R12 Legal Entity Model

One of the new enhancement we did to Oracle BI Apps version 7.9.4 is to supports the EBS R12 Legal Entity Model.  Here are some pointers to the resources to understand the E-Business Suite Legal Entity concept:

8 Things - Orablog Tag

I was tagged by David Haime as part of the game of tag.  Here is the 8 things about me people might not know:

Oracle BI Applications 7.9.4 is available on OTN

The latest version of Oracle Applications is now available in Oracle Technology Network.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/ias/htdocs/101320bi.html

Here is the direct link to software.

Here are some of the new features of this releases:

Oracle VPD and Oracle BI EE (Part 1)

Oracle database allows you secure the access to the table rows using the virtual private database feature.  It is one of the enabler for the EBS organization based security.

Oracle BI EE also provide the data security in the BI server based on repository setup.  However, can we also use the database feature together with our BI deployment?

Essbase and IBM DB2

I read an interesting article, “IBM DB2–Minus OLAP” from the SQL Server magazine. Essbase used to be OEM-ed and re-branded by IBM as IBM DB2 OLAP server for ten years. The relationship stopped two yeas ago.
Many DB2 customers actually built their custom analytics applications on the top of Essbase.