Optimizing Oracle Applications: OBIEE

Strong business intelligence and analytics capabilities are essential for the modern business. The right BI and analytics platform will help you better understand your historical performance metrics, and also make better estimates about where your organization will be in the months and years to come.

Despite the many advantages of BI and analytics, businesses continue to run into roadblocks with adoption. 99 percent of companies say that they want to become more data-driven, but only one-third of them would call their efforts successful thus far. In many cases, this is due to the choice of BI platform itself – even including popular enterprise BI software such as Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (OBIEE).

Benefits of OBIEE

OBIEE is a software suite that contains a variety of applications for robust business intelligence, analytics, and reporting. Notably, OBIEE is a fully self-service solution, allowing business users to work completely independently without the help of IT. Employees can easily create interactive dashboards and visualizations that make it easier to find trends and insights hidden within their enterprise data.

Common Issues with OBIEE

Although there’s no denying the tremendous utility of OBIEE, the platform is also susceptible to many common issues with performance and scalability. Because problems may arise at so many levels – from the presentation and BI servers to the database and underlying infrastructure – performing root cause analysis on OBIEE can be technically challenging.

Optimizing OBIEE: Case Study

OBIEE users often find that the software isn’t immediately adaptable to the unique complexities of their business IT environment. One of our recent clients, a leading multinational fast food company, was experiencing OBIEE scalability and speed issues that caused them to reach out to Datavail.

The client has more than 6,000 employees who regularly use OBIEE, as well as up to 600 concurrent users at any given time. Unfortunately, generating and displaying reports through OBIEE was sometimes (unpredictably and unacceptably) slow. This created major roadblocks for essential business activities, including reordering stock and approving pending invoices.

Datavail’s team of data experts helped the client perform root cause analysis of their Oracle applications to find the origin of their issues. They discovered that the RPD file of the client’s OBIEE database was misconfigured, which made the software unable to handle the volumes of users and data during peak activity.

•        The system was not configured to support enough concurrent users during times of peak activity.
•        The cache was not automatically set up to handle the volumes of customer data that the client needed to process.

By solving these misconfiguration issues, the client is now able to generate OBIEE reports in less than a minute and has also doubled productivity when processing and approving invoices.

Final Thoughts

Datavail’s status as an Oracle Platinum Partner makes us the ideal choice for your OBIEE needs. We handle every stage of the Oracle software lifecycle, from deployment and long-term support to strategic consulting and planning.