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Oracle® Product Lifecycle Analytics User Guide Release 3.5 E70275-01 |
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# 1 Introduction

## 1.1 Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics Overview

Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics (OPLA) allows you to do the following:

1. Analyze business data thoroughly from multiple perspectives

2. Assess business impact

3. Take timely decisions

4. Trend analysis - providing you with the ability to:

   1. Identify costly processes

   2. Foresee risks

   3. Monitor product performance

   4. Discover new business demands

OPLA is built on the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) application. OBIEE provides interactive Dashboards and Subject Areas that allow you to:

- View Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

- Spot trends using reports and metrics.

- Determine the current state of product quality.

### 1.1.1 Features

The key features of OPLA include the following:

- A library of prebuilt reports, dashboards, dashboard prompts, and filters that present data in interactive charts, graphs, and grids.

- Access to specific objects such as subject areas, dashboards and reports, as per role-based security.

- Ad-hoc query analysis.

## 1.2 OPLA Source Systems

OPLA provides you with the ability to use different source systems. Data is transferred from source systems to the OPLA analytical data store. The transactional data sources are either Agile 9.x or Agile PLM for Process.

While the OPLA foundation is common for the source systems, the analytics available are different. In the OPLA User Guide, the items that are specific to the Agile 9.x (Agile Product Lifecycle Management) source system or to the Agile PLM for Process source system are identified accordingly.

## 1.3 Common OPLA Acronyms

A list of acronyms used in this document is provided here for your reference:

Acronym | Expansion
--- | ---
BI | Business Intelligence
ECO | Engineering Change Order
ETL | Extract-Transform-Load
MDS | Multi-Dimensional Schema
OBIEE | Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
ODI | Oracle Data Integrator
OPLA | Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics
PLM | Product Lifecycle Management

## 1.4 Common OPLA Terminology

Dashboards | A Dashboard is an object that provides personalized views of corporate and external information. A dashboard consists of one or more pages. Pages can display anything that you can access or open with a Web browser, such as results of analyzes, images, alerts from agents, and so on.
Subject Areas | Oracle Business Intelligence presents data in subject areas. A Subject Area is a group of logical tables and logical columns that represent information about the areas of your organization's business or about groups of users within your organization. These are termed as Measures and Dimensions. These columns help analyze specific business processes. OPLA provides subject areas that map to corresponding classes in PLM application. For example, the Customer Complaints subject area consists of all the measures and dimensions that are required to analyze the customer complaints in your organization. In the OPLA application, when you click the Answers link, the OBIEE Answers page appears with a list of subject areas in the Workspace. Click a subject area to view the measures and dimensions on the left pane of the Workspace. Users with appropriate access permissions can drag and drop measures and dimensions into the Workspace to create reports. For more information on creating reports and using the features of Oracle Answers, see OBIEE User Guide.
Dimensions | Dimensions represent the alignment of logical columns (attributes) into different logical dimension tables (entities) that are involved in identifying the details of business process transactions. Examples of dimensions are Time periods, Product lines, Customers, and Suppliers.
Measures | Measures refer to the calculated data or the factual data about the business process with respect to key business entities. For example, in a given time period, the factual data related to customer complaints for a product line gives a better insight into the problems encountered and the solution provided to customers.
Filters and Prompts | Filters are built into requests and are used to limit the results that appear on a dashboard. A report that appears on a dashboard shows only those results that match the filter criteria. Filters are applied on a column-level basis. Certain filters inherit the values that the users specify in dashboard prompts. A prompt facilitates an individual to pass the value to the filters present in built-in reports. Prompts at a page level apply to all the Trend reports, or Time series reports in the dashboard. Report specific prompts, like the CAPA type, help to further drill-down the time series analysis that is based on page level prompts. See Oracle Business Intelligence Answers, Delivers, and Interactive Dashboards User Guide, 'Filtering Requests in Oracle BI Answers' for further information.
Folders | Folders are organizational constructs that hold content saved in the presentation catalog, such as requests created with Oracle BI Answers. A Folder is similar to a UNIX directory or a Microsoft Windows folder.
Guided Navigation | These are links to navigate to the transaction processing application, another dashboard, or a URL. This link can be set up to appear conditionally, based on the results of a report or Key Performance Indicator.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI) | KPIs are key metrics that provide statistics on both the desired and the actual performance of business processes critical to the success of the organization. Example: Current month performance in terms of Complaints Cycle time compared to last 12 months.
Requests (Reports) | Requests are the building blocks of Business Intelligence dashboards. These requests are created using Oracle BI Answers to retrieve and display an organization's data. Data can be displayed in a variety of graphical formats. Links can be established in the chart or table of a report to launch another report and to offer guided analysis.
Star Schema | Star Schema is a relational database schema which contains a fact table associated with a series of multi-dimensional tables.

## 1.5 About This Guide

The Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics User Guide helps you to understand the scope and usage of OPLA applications.

This user guide outlines the following:

- Delivered prebuilt dashboards

- Reports

- Subject areas

- Security setup for OPLA

Oracle recommends that you read the documentation on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, for information on the underlying architecture. This information is available on the Oracle Technology Website`http://www.oracle.com/technology/index.html`.

### 1.5.1 Audience

The Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics User Guide is aimed at the implementation and functional experts who add, modify, or delete reports in the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) Interactive Dashboards.

### 1.5.2 Related Documentation

For a better understanding of the OPLA solution, please refer to the following documents on the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Web site`http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/documentation/agile-085940.html`:

- Agile PLM for Process

- Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)

### 1.5.3 OBIEE Documentation

Go to the Oracle Technology Network`http://www.oracle.com/technology/index.html` website for more information on OBIEE and for more information on the following OBIEE component applications:

1. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) - OBIEE is the foundation for the OPLA application. OBIEE is a comprehensive suite of enterprise business intelligence products that contain the programs, servers, and tools to support broad self-service access across the organization.

2. Oracle Business Intelligence Answers (Oracle BI Answers) - Oracle BI Answers are components within the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition that provide answers to quantitative and analytical queries related to business processes. You can use Oracle BI Answers to create ad-hoc queries into an organization's data.

   This interface allows OPLA users with the appropriate permissions to build and modify Reports or Requests that enable OPLA users to:

   - Explore and interact with information

   - Present and visualize information using charts, pivot tables, and reports

   Requests can be saved in the form of reports which can be shared, modified, formatted, or embedded in a dashboard.

3. Oracle Business Intelligence Delivers (Oracle BI Delivers) - Oracle BI Delivers is the interface used to create Oracle Business Intelligence Alerts based on analytics results. This is a proactive intelligence solution that enables monitoring of business activities. Results specific to out-of-tolerance situations can be detected within reports. The subscribers and target owners can be notified immediately through Web, Wireless, and Mobile communication channels.

4. Oracle Business Intelligence Interactive Dashboards (Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards) - Oracle Business Intelligence Interactive Dashboards provide access points for analytics information. When an OPLA user accesses Oracle BI, the user's default dashboard appears. Dashboards display reports that contain content specific to the needs of individual OPLA users or groups. You can merge the historical and current data sources into a single dashboard. PLM BI users with the appropriate permissions can place results from Oracle BI Answers into dashboards for use by OPLA users.

5. Oracle Business Intelligence Presentation Catalog (Oracle BI Presentation Catalog) - The Oracle BI Presentation Catalog stores content created with Oracle BI Answers and Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards. Content can be organized into folders that are either 'Shared' or 'Personal'. Types of content that can be stored in the Presentation Catalog include Requests created with Oracle BI Answers, HTML content, links to other images, documents, and sites.

### 1.5.4 Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics Documentation

- Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics Readme

- Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics Install and Setup Guide

- Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics User Guide

- Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics Data Reference Manual

- Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics Configurator and Data Mapping Guide

## 1.6 What's New in OPLA Release 3.5

OPLA Release 3.5 introduces the following new features and enhancements.

- Certification for Agile PLM 9.3.5

- Certification for Agile PLM for Process 6.2

- Operational Schema enhancements

- Certification for ODI 11.1.1.9.0

- Certification for OBIEE 11.1.1.9.0

- Performance improvements for Datamart and MDS full loads for Agile PLM (A9) only

- Module selection for Agile PLM (A9) for Operational Data Schema loads.