Beyond Enterprise Command Centers

A few weeks ago my colleagues Pam Follett and Becky Fite delivered a joint webcast: Enterprise Command Centers on a Cocktail Napkin, showcasing advanced features of Enterprise Command Centers (ECC). The session was as fun as it was educational.

ECC is the biggest area of enhancement in Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) in the past few years, and they bring rich operational reporting to the professional users of the application. ECC helps you answer questions that are only revealed as you start to delve into your data.

Many organizations haven’t picked up on ECC as they mistakenly felt that EBS’s days were numbered. This simply isn’t true, as I went into in a previous blog. It looks like the message is now out and I see more and more customers exploring whether ECC makes sense for their organizations.

I mentioned that ECC is about operational reporting. Now, this isn't going to replace your month-end reporting pack or the reporting lists that we so rely on. What it does is allow you to explore the data in each module, drilling down in the way that makes most sense as you explore the transactions behind it.

Oracle has done a good job of creating ECC dashboards in each of the modules, which have been delivered over time, and are constantly being improved as customers ask for more. But did you know you could extend those dashboards?

Pam and Becky started the webcast talking about their favorite sports. Pam is an avid F1—or rather Ferrari—fan, and Becky…well let's just say that Becky is a cheesehead. Sadly, the webcast replay is slides and audio only, so you don’t get to see them dressed for the occasion!

The concept, or the story they told, was that of an organization selling sporting goods. A simple retail model, but for each branded item sold there was a royalty paid to the relevant sporting body. Something we can all understand. In their presentation they continued this theme, showing how you could use an EBS extension (in this case APEX), to hold additional information, such as the royalty required, and add it to your ECC dashboard so that you can drill into the royalties for each organization. During their demonstration they covered both simple and advanced extending functionality, which gave them a rich solution to the problem at hand.

This was one of our best attended web casts in quite some time, and with many later replays, it clearly shows the level of interest in ECC.

Has your organization considered ECC? It makes so much sense. ECC takes the data you have in a transactional format and delivers it to you aggregated for the module with full drill down capability. This is done through a series of in-memory indexes, so the data is refreshed on a regular basis via a series of incremental concurrent programs.

ECC is such a powerful addition to Oracle E-Business Suite, I'm surprised more people aren't using it. Plus there’s no additional Oracle license cost. It’s part of your existing EBS investment.

If you're interested in what ECC can do for you catch up on our webcast or simply Ask Inoapps.