Enterprise Reporting Integration

Business intelligence and enterprise reporting offerings are still too difficult for most business users to use effectively. Users have to navigate between many reporting tools and reporting environments. It is often unclear to them which report contains the information they need. If they need to get supporting information, there is nothing that helps them get that information.

This is caused by a lack of tight integration between the ERP application and the Enterprise Reporting tools. While EAI and ETL tools focus on providing back-end transactional integration between systems and portals focus on providing means of categorizing content, Enterprise Reporting Integration allows business users to seemlessly navigate between reports and application pages, while keeping the context of where they are in a business process.  

How does lack of integration affect my Users?

Users work within their application and its menus, pages and forms.  BI and Reporting tools are ancillary products that sit outside the enterprise application.  Although, there is loose integration between the products and/or portals to help combine their functions, the main issue arises  when a user crosses from one product into another.  For example, if the user is on a specific application page, and they want to easily navigate to a logically related report, they cannot do so with a single click while transferring the specific page/field/value context over to the report for filtering.  Even if someone has programmatically altered the system and constantly maintains it as reports are created/changed, the sheer volume of pages and reports is too difficult to manage and maintain manually.  The typical result is that the user does without, and is left to find/navigate to their own report, then copy/paste the field/value before they can see the results they need from the report.  

What should happen?

By simply hovering over any field on any application web page, the user should see a popup menu of all logically related reports (across any of the supported enterprise BI/reporting products).  By selecting a choice from the menu, the user should be immediately transferred into that specific report and the specific page/field/value context should be transferred to the report automatically.  Conversely, the user should be able to just as easily hover over report fields and popup the logically related application pages (or even other reports), and once again be transferred seemlessly back and forth without loosing context.  It should be as easy to navigate application pages and reports as it is to navigate the web.

How does this differ from a Portal?

Enterprise applications come with their own portals, but so do the Third-party BI and Reporting tools.  So who's portal do you use?  You may start with the Application's portal, but even then, not all application pages are "portal-ready" because the application may pre-date portal technology.  Basically, to obtain any benefit from portal techology, someone (from IT) has to pull together all the related content (i.e. all the logically related app pages and reports) and manually cross-link them together while ensuring that the appropriate context is passed.  Navigation has to be enabled from every field on every page and every report.  Doing this manually (i.e. using current Portal Tools) will expend alot of time and manpower, if you want to achieve seamless integration across the various products.   Even if you did have the time and manpower to do it initially, the ongoing maintenance will be prohibitive.  Current Portal technology is simply not designed to handle this situation.

Introducing the ERI Toolkit

The ERI Toolkit is a product that allows you to link together enterprise application systems to BI/enterprise reporting technologies.  This is accomplished without pulling content into a portal, without requiring modifications to your existing applications and without adding any upgrade or support risk. By utilizing the ERI Toolkit, you  allow your users to navigate to other content from within the context of both your PeopleSoft application and your reporting tool.

This infrastructure  allows your users to navigate with a single click between systems as part of a single business process flow.


Example

A user looking at a purchase order page, within the enterprise app (e.g. PeopleSoft),  can hover over the vendor name field (specifically vendor: ABC) and popup the reports logically related to purchase order vendors.  By selecting a report from the menu (e.g. Crystal Enterprise, PS/nVision, Search Engine, etc.) , the user is transferred into the desired  report, automatically supplied with the context of vendor: ABC.  From inside this report, the vendor can likewise hover over any report  field and once again see a popup of logically related application pages or other reports.  Once again by selecting from the menu, the user can navigate at will without losing the context.  No manual coding, no application changes, and no report changes necessary. This translates into immediate productivity for both the user as well as IT.  In essence, each page of your application (and each report) is turned into an implicit portal automatically, and puts BI/Reporting right inside your workflow.