What is a BI analytical application ?

A BI analytical application provides the following four key components:

1. Pre-built ETL to extract data from the operational tables in the transaction system  and load to the data warehouse
2. Denormalized Star schema which is optimized for BI queries
3. Best practice metric and calculation libraries that are created based on the data warehouse and operational sources.
4. Pre-built graphics, reports, dashboards, and alerts that designed for specific roles and business processes

It is actually a very lengthly process to build an BI analytical application.  That is why people now buy the pre-built BI analytical applications.

Aging Reports and DSO (Daily Sales Outstanding)

Account Receivables aging report and Daily Sales Outstanding are two metrics commonly seen in the Financial Analytics for measuring the performance of the Account Receivables, Credit Management, and Collection departments. Here are how they are calculated, who the users are, and how they may affect the business decisions.

Bookings Analysis

Bookings Analysis is to help managers to manage the demand. Although the data may come from Order Management, Contract Administration, or Project Accounting systems, the primary interest in the booking analysis is from sales and marketing perspectives.

The analytics application should provide the bookings analysis to help demand managers understand the pattern of booked orders or work and the future revenue trends for the business, enabling the evaulation of current status against the expecation and the actions to increase sales, the deal size, volume of future pipeline.

Booking can be measured by quantities or dollars.

Book to Bill Ratio

Book to Bill ratio is the ratio of orders booked for future delivery to orders being shiped immediately, and therefore billed.

The 4-4-5 Calendar

Some organizations use the 4-4-5 calendar for managing their accounting periods. it is a common calendar structure for some industries, such as retail.

The 4-4-5 calendar divides a year into 4 quarters. Each quarter has 13 weeks which are grouped into two 4-weeks “months” and and one 5-week “month”. The grouping of 13 weeks may be set up as 5-4-4 weeks or 4-5-4 weeks, but the 4-4-5 seems to be the most common arrangement.

When a 4-4-5 calendar is in use, reports with period by period comparison or trend over periods do not make much sense. You can still do the comparison of a period over the same period in the prior year. You can also have the week by week data comparison.

See also: The 13 period calendar

Oracle Business Intelligence EE 10.1.3.2 (MAUI) Available in eDelivery

Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2 (the Maui release) is now available in edelivery.oracle.com for downloading for evaluation purpose.