Oracle eBusiness Suite – Enterprise Command Centres (ECC)

You may have read in my first blog post about how Cliff Godwin and
Muhannad Obeidat talked about Enterprise Command Centres (ECC) at this years UKOUG. They certainly demo well, so I thought it worthwhile doing a little research to understand capabilities and see what they offer an eBS user.

With no real operational reporting since Discoverer (unless you count BI Publisher\XML Publisher), it appears that Oracle are investing in eBS reporting and data discovery with this latest product. This of course is not the first time, we had Daily Business Intelligence previously, which was very limited in its scope. Oracle have committed to investment in ECC’s with a further 6 functional areas being released next calendar year.

What are ECC’s? Essentially they offer users a series of dashboards that come out of the box, and allow ‘information driven navigation’, or as most of us would call it drill-down! Every time you click on a graph, link, or filter the data on the dashboard is refreshed to reflect the selection. Oracle label this as ‘conversation with the data’, which I think is a nice way of putting it, and it really does work and is intuitive to use. You can drill down all the way to the transaction level and the eBS form will open. ECC’s also inherit eBS security and therefore you do not need to worry about this.

Some of the functionality current available includes:

• Searching
• Data Visualisation
  • Summarisation Bar
  • Lots of different Charts \ Graphs
  • Tag Cloud (which are cool!)
  • Results Tables

Installation – The installation instructions are available on My Oracle Support note ID 2409163.1. It is interesting to see the resource requirements on this, for example if you have 15 data sets with 2 million records each and 50 named users, then you would need a minimum of 2 cores, 32gb of memory, and 80gb disk space. They also reccomend this sits on a standalone server, although it can use the apps tier for eBS.

Once installed and configured, there is a series of concurrent programs to load data into the ECC’s, which similar to a BI ETL has to be run in full mode first, followed by being scheduled for incremental loads. Finally you can grant the ECC roles to specific users who you want to access them.

Availability – ECC’s are available at no additional cost to licensed users of the owning Oracle eBS applications. They can be applied to Release 12.2.4 and higher. The following command centers are currently available:

• Oracle Assets Command Center
• Oracle Payables Command Center
• Oracle Receivables Command Center
• Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Command Center
• Oracle Inventory Management Command Center
• Order Management Command Center

Oracle advised at UKOUG Apps 18, that they had 6 new dashboards that would come along next calendar year, along with continued enhancements. Hopefully they will also provide the tooling for customer to do extensions to these themselves.