Questions on Enterprise Planning and Budgeting

Question

Hi,
First of all: this may be a very wrong place for posting these questions. However, I could not find a forum that seemed closer to the matter so I try it anyway.
With EPB close to hitting the streets, some questions starting popping up - especially now that Oracle has recommended one of my customers - who is just starting out with Business Intelligence and are not E-Business Suite users - to embark on the EPB course.
It is stated by Oracle that EPB - although it is an integrated component of the Oracle EBusiness Suite – can be used as stand-alone product. You can load data into interface tables. Questions:
Does EPB work on its own Data Warehouse and if so, is this DWH also available to other OLAP tools for Analysis? Or should organizations doing Analysis and Reporting apart from EPB have a separate DWH for those OLAP queries?
Does Oracle recommend loading data directly from operational sources into the FEM Interface Tables or does Oracle think it best for non-EBusiness Suite customers to set up a Data Warehouse independently of EPB and in a later stage implement processes to extract data from that DWH into the FEM Interface. Are the FEM Interfaces tables at the operational (fact) level or do they already have some sort of consolidation in them?
Can Oracle somehow convince us that while EPB does not provide hooks for customization it will offer reports desired by non-EBusiness Suite customers with potentially very varied businesses? How much of EPB benefits are you missing out on if you do not have the E-Business Suite? What is EPB then giving you that with OWB and BI Beans/Discoverer you can not easily build yourself?
The specific case of my customer: they have clear requirements for Management Information. Most of these are about analyzing histrical data (the classic slicing and dicing); forecasting and budgeting would be a nice to have in the longer run. They currently do not have a proper Data Warehouse. They have a consolidation point for some operational data. No dimensions have been defined, no data cleansing is performed and some data is not available at all. I am wondering whether EPB would be the proper tool for them to start with. Given their requirements as well as their lack of current experience with BI as well as the relative uncertain situation with regard to the data sources, I would feel more comfortable with a more down-to-earth approach: start designing a DWH and the processes to populate it as well as developing the most urgently needed reports. In that case, EPB would be brought in at a later stage – when the organization as well as the data management is ready for more advanced stuff.
Is there anyone, especially from Oracle, who would care to comment? Also on my feeling that Oracle’s recommendation to use EPB is perhaps somewhat influenced by Oracle’s desire to build up references and experience with this brand new tool – that, as I understand it, is not even generally available – only a “controller release” is available right now.
Thanks for anyone for your insights.
best regards,
Lucas

Answer 1

Lucas
Please note these are not official Oracle or my employers answers, just my interpretation. Hope this might help though.
"Does EPB work on its own Data Warehouse and if so, is this DWH also available to other OLAP tools for Analysis? Or should organizations doing Analysis and Reporting apart from EPB have a separate DWH for those OLAP queries?"
EPB has it's own EPF schema, which it shares with Oracle's other CPM applications, but it's not a traditional warehouse schema arranged as a star schema, you're not supposed to load data directly into it, and it's really designed for storing data that needs to be loaded into AWs for analysis. You'll therefore still need to build your own warehouse schema, and then load data (through the interface tables) into the EPF schema for use with EPB.
"Does Oracle recommend loading data directly from operational sources into the FEM Interface Tables or does Oracle think it best for non-EBusiness Suite customers to set up a Data Warehouse independently of EPB and in a later stage implement processes to extract data from that DWH into the FEM Interface. Are the FEM Interfaces tables at the operational (fact) level or do they already have some sort of consolidation in them?"
It depends. Data can be loaded directly into the EPF (new name for FEM) schema, but you'll probably want to cleanse and transform it first, most probably in a data warehouse. The data that goes into the EPF schema is at transaction level, and EPB will perform any aggregations as it loads data into it's AW. Of course data in the form of balances - that goes into the EPF balances table - will be to an extent already summarised (or at least snapshotted) but the twenty user data tables are just regular fact tables, with the granularity set to whatever you require.
"Can Oracle somehow convince us that while EPB does not provide hooks for customization it will offer reports desired by non-EBusiness Suite customers with potentially very varied businesses? How much of EPB benefits are you missing out on if you do not have the E-Business Suite? What is EPB then giving you that with OWB and BI Beans/Discoverer you can not easily build yourself?"
Too early to see really, especially as no-one apart from Oracle has done an EPB implementation yet. With regard to the question about what EPB gives you that OWB and BI Beans don't already give you, I think the relevant bit is "you cannot easily build yourself". EPB is an application, not a toolset, and it'll appeal to those people that want to buy a supported planning and budgeting application from Oracle, that integrates with e-Business Suite and doesn't require them to build everything from the ground upwards. With OFA and OSA you could have course build a similar application yourself, using Visual Basic or Express Objects and Express Server, but for most people buying it from Oracle was a more sensible solution.
"The specific case of my customer: they have clear requirements for Management Information. Most of these are about analyzing historical data (the classic slicing and dicing); forecasting and budgeting would be a nice to have in the longer run. They currently do not have a proper Data Warehouse. They have a consolidation point for some operational data. No dimensions have been defined, no data cleansing is performed and some data is not available at all. I am wondering whether EPB would be the proper tool for them to start with. Given their requirements as well as their lack of current experience with BI as well as the relative uncertain situation with regard to the data sources, I would feel more comfortable with a more down-to-earth approach: start designing a DWH and the processes to populate it as well as developing the most urgently needed reports. In that case, EPB would be brought in at a later stage – when the organization as well as the data management is ready for more advanced stuff."
Yes, I'd agree with this approach. EPB isn't the place to start integrating and consolidating data, and the EPF schema isn't where you'd want to store your complete data warehouse. You could of course, using the twenty data tables and the user defined dimension tables, but you'd pretty much be limited to querying via EPB (the schema isn't really suitable for querying directly using tools such as Discoverer) and the AW that EPB creates wouldn't be suitable/supported/documented for use by regular OLAP API tools such as Drake or the BI Beans. If it was down to me, I'd build the warehouse as normal, using OWB or any other ETL tool, create my dimensional model as normal, then take selected data out and put it in the EPF schema, and then carry out my planning & budgeting using EPB. I'd then still run Discoverer / Discoverer "Drake", or BI Beans or any other ad-hoc query tool against my warehouse schema for the warehouse "power users", and use EPB as the application for my finance and planning department,