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.

DBI for HRMS

DBI for HRMS delivers some extremely powerful dashboards and reports that help managers to take strategic decisions. It uses the data stored in HRMS table to build a data repository (similiar to data warehouse, except that data sits on the same server as the OLTP system). The repository is refreshed daily to provide managers with the latest enterprise level metrics.

What can you do with DBI

1. Contains Dashboards, KPI's and reports for enterprise level reporting
2. Allows users to look at headcount, turnover, new hires, transfers, salaries by various views such as supervisor, job function, job family, performance rating, length of service, geography etc.
3. Uses supervisor hierarchy, allowing managers to view data only for people reporting to them
4. Truly enterprise reporting solution. It does not use security profiles and business groups to restrict data
5. Comes with extensive drill down, slicing and dicing features
6. Allows users to drill down to detail of every transaction. (e.g. when viewing turnover, managers can look at terminated person's details)
7. Allows you to refresh the repository in full and incremental mode.
   

Difficulties in implementing DBI

Even though I was involved in the development of the module, there are a few situations that can complicate matters (grrr...)

1. Bad Data: DBI is extremely sensitive to data, any small issue with data will be magnified when reporting through DBI. Cleaning bad data can prove to be a big task when implementing DBI
2. Build Custom Reports: Even though oracle delivers tools to design your custom reports, but there are several limitations and would require extensive design and development effort. It would be just like any other BI project.
3. Extend delivered reports: If you want anything other then personalizing the reports and dashboards, its going to be difficult. My suggestion is don't even attempt it. DBI uses extremely complicated data structures and SQL's to present those number.
4. Hierarchies: DBI uses supervisor hierarchy, many of the customers might want to use either a position hierarchy or an organization hierarchy for reporting. Current version of dbi does not allow you to do that.
5. Debugging Issues: Debugging DBI issues can be complicated. Its best you call Oracle Support and seek the help of the development team (they are extremely helpful trust me..i used to be one of them :))
6. Handling Contingent Workers: If you are using the CWK person type creating contingent workers, you are ok. If you have contingent workers created as Employee be ready for some fun. Even though DBI delivers functionality to handle such situations, it going to take some effort to get the number correct.