What is Oracle BI and what is HRI?

Customers generally have a lot of confusion about what is Oracle BI and how is it different from HRI. Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) offering generally refers to tools that can be used for enterprises data warehouse such as Oracle Express, Discoverer, Siebel Analytics, Data Mining etc. This differs from the BI offering available with Oracle Applications including HR. There are various different reporting solutions available differntiated by the tech stacks on whcih they are built. Some of the common ones are

• DBI (Dashboard): New data warehousing solution with Dashboard developed using Performance Management Framework (PMF)
• Performance Management Viewer (PMV) Reports : Some BI reports and KPI delivered with iRec and HRI use this technology
• HRMSi (Discoverer): Discoverer based operational and strategic reports.
• Siebel Analytic Based reports (Not sure if they are available in R12)
• Embedded Data Warehouse (EDW): Old type of data warehousing solution with discoverer as the front end
• HTML Reports: Oracle Reports based intelligence reports (not available in R12).

As far as HR is concerned, HRI is generally considered as DBI. But is reality there is a lot more avaialbe with the product then just this. When you buy a HRI license you get tonnes of Discoverer reports (150+ workbooks) along with Discoverer ad hoc business areas which can be used to create Ad Hoc reports. There are also a lot of operational Discoverer reports available for which you do not need HRI license and are available with core HR/Payroll/OAB modules. The best way to distinguish if a Discoverer report is a HRI reports or a core module report is to look at the name of the report, all HRI reports start with HRMSi where as others would have BEN or PAY or HRMS.