In general, most ERP vendors will offer a vast range of Reports covering all aspects of the business. Not all of these standard reports will provide the flexibility of information required nor the ability to drill down. It is also likely that the response times for high level summary reports will be slow and will place undue incremental load onto your system at key points in the month impacting all system users response times.

This is due to the fact that all ERP systems (including Oracle’s) have been built on relational database technology which is good at processing transactional data but is poor at processing summary information.

If you add to this the technical capabilities necessary to develop reports and the normal IT backlog of work, then the flexibility of retrieving new information or the same information in a different format can be a major restriction on any business.

have 2 key approaches to dealing with this conflict.

Our first approach is to provide a standard Business Intelligence system, based on a shadow OLAP data base which is specifically designed for report production. This near real time data online system would allow for specific drill down capabilities and a certain amount of end user report generation providing flexibility of information and removing the need to enter into the IT queue for key report development.

Our second approach is via a packaged solution from one of our partners the “GL Company” which gives direct “Really Real Time” access to your Oracle ERP (E-Business Suite and Enterprise One) production database via a virtual OLAP view of the data. This system which comes a with a large volume of canned reports and full drill down to transactions from within a single screen. The product's powerful aggregation features allow you to work with extremely large volumes of data to produce high level management information with minimal systems impact and provide high levels of flexibility for end user report production.