Introduction

Managing EBS projects and upgrades can be a challenge at the best of times. Consulting teams with a mixture of functional and technical skills can benefit from having a ready made toolkit to take care of the project tasks such as exporting master data, tracking changes and creating new operational reports without the hassle of registering new concurrent programs and reports. Blitz Report toolkit is an easy to use add on for EBS, it resides in Oracle forms so there are no new commands to learn and has no data limits on the output. Whether you have 5 million records or just a few thousand, it will generate perfectly formatted Excel or CSV files. Consultants with their favourite SQL scripts can drop them directly into Blitz Report and start sharing the output with the rest of the teams, and with full version control. Further, you can control what tables Blitz Report is able to access using standard Oracle Virtual Private Database (VPD) security policies at row and column level.

Audience:

Relevant for Oracle EBS implementation and project support consultants managing extensions or upgrades

Business users that need to validate reports generated by the consultants

ECC dashboards:

If you are planning to upgrade or install ECC dashboards from scratch, they are inclusive with EBS licence fees from version V12.2.4. For more information on the procedure, then follow the article: Oracle Enterprise Command Center Framework upgrade from V3 to V4

Blitz Report Toolkit

The toolkit concept allows users to manage and export data from Oracle EBS, including the Enterprise Command Centers as highlighted in the overview below. There are 4 key components:

  1. Database Health and Tuning reports which includes a comprehensive suite of AWR and foundation (FND) reports.
  2. Support and Data Migration reports which include automated BR100 extracts for setup and data migration, and alerts for critical processes such as integrations and concurrent requests.
  3. Operational reports that cover the core processes such as Record to Report, Order to Cash and Purchase to Pay as well as allowing the replacement of Discoverer and BI publisher reports with the import functions provided
  4. Time Critical reports that are geared towards mass exporting volume data

How it works

The toolkit concept is a major time saving add-on for EBS projects. During project life-cycle it becomes difficult to manage all of the SQL scripts necessary to run an effective project and instead project managers rely on consultants to track the correct versions of their SQL scripts on their laptops or by email. This becomes challenging with any change in personnel over a projects lifetime. We believe that all SQL’s run against EBS should be tracked in a central repository, especially as these scripts can take significant time to create. With Blitz Report all your essential project and support scripts are placed under your EBS instance to manage safely.

The author of any SQL script, simply pastes it into Blitz Report form for version traceability and sharing, allowing consultants to pick up the script at a later date and generate the output directly through the standard concurrent requests mechanism. There is no need to use sysadmin to create new programs; Blitz Report takes the name of the SQL file and prefixes it together with Blitz Report executable to make a unique report name. The Excel output contains the SQL and the parameters used in the second sheet, whilst the data is output to the first sheet. If the data overruns the Excel sheet limit, it creates subsequent sheets to ensure that all data is available for the export. There are no performance limitations found with XML or any need to make tedious templates for the output formatting, all of this is handled automatically during the Blitz Report generation. It is possible to retire tools such as SQL Developer or Toad by providing developers and supporting consultants with Blitz Report instead, ensuring all security database profiles at column and row level are observed.

Toolkit highlights

  • Uses the EBS forms interface  –  one hour training, enhanced short key usage
  • Follows EBS assignment rules – no additional security setup
  • Integrates within any EBS form – replaces CVS export function without the hour glass wait
  • Creates perfectly formatted Excel – No formatting or data size issues
  • Uses VPD data policies – restricts sensitive data, e.g. HR
  • Imports BI Publisher reports – improves performance – no XML layer
  • Imports Discoverer reports – replaces & enhances Discoverer reports
  • Creates data exports for analytics & dashboards – outbound interface to MS Power BI
  • Exports ECC data to Excel – overcomes data limitations and CSV files
  • User defined report layouts by configuration – reduced IT dependency

Example reports supplied with Blitz Report

The full library is available here

Examples

  1. FND (application foundation) extracts, including values sets, account hierarchies, profiles, menus  and key flexfields for setup tracking
  2. Master data extracts for chart of accounts, ledgers, items, suppliers and customers
  3. Setup (BR100) tracking, for Invoice and Sales Order transaction types, ASCP sourcing rules, Sub-inventories, Locators, etc
  4.  Audit of any data using the standard EBS audit setup but with clear reporting of delta changes and inclusion of none tracked columns
  5. Monitoring of interfaces, including AR Autoinvoice, Material transactions, AP Invoices, etc
  6. Period close transnational checks, speed up month end with daily alerts on any critical interface
  7. Monitor database health with a suite of AWR reports that remove the challenge of understanding the standard AWR
  8. Exports for Invoices (AP/AR), Sales Orders, Price Lists, Approved supplier lists, etc
  9. Track patches that have been applied by adpatch
  10. Workflow monitoring and status alerts

These are just a few examples of our available reports, new reports can be created within minutes. Or you can import BI Publisher or Discoverer reports complete with their assignments and parameters, speeding up the development process without administration overheads. Reports can be migrated from each EBS instance that they are developed on, making the implementation process straight-forward without version challenges.

Summary

Blitz Report toolkit follows Virtual Private Database – (VPD security) allowing you to protect sensitive data. It can be up and running within an hour and requires virtually no training as it resides in standard EBS forms.

The Blitz Report Toolkit provides methods for exporting mass data from any EBS form by using our Excel export engine, overcoming data limitations and formatting issues associated with CSV files. For support and consulting teams, reporting delivery time is reduced and version tracked in your EBS instance together with full audit comments with every migration.

Here are some example videos for creating reports to cover essential project tasks:

For more Blitz Report ideas and report examples you can visit our Enginatics YouTube Channel.

To arrange a demonstration please follow the live demo link, or try the Blitz Report for yourself in our demonstration instance.

The Blitz Reportsoftware is free to use for your first 30 reports which includes a 30 minute guided installation with your DBA team, find out more at enginatics.com