Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Human Resources12
Finance, Procurement, and HR18
Analytics in the Cloud30
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Oracle Business Intelligence Applications
In use at more than 4,000 companies worldwide, Oracle Business Intelligence Applications support leading enterprise applications, including Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle’s PeopleSoft, Siebel CRM, and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, and offer high-performing analytics at a lower cost. This reference e-book contains success stories summarizing how Oracle Business Intelligence Applications customers have achieved real business results. We hope you find this representative sample of customer success stories a valuable resource. We will be updating this e-book on a regular basis so stay tuned.
Table of ContentsChapter 1: Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 2Chapter 2: Making the Business Case 8Chapter 3: Customer Spotlight—Human Resources 12Chapter 4: Customer Spotlight—Finance,
Procurement, and HR 18Chapter 5: Customer Spotlight—Analytics in the Cloud 30Chapter 6: Big Ideas 34Resources 401 -
Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, part of the Oracle Business Analytics product family, are complete, prebuilt business intelligence (BI) solutions that deliver intuitive, role-based intelligence for everyone in an organization—from frontline employees to senior management—to enable better decisions, actions, and business processes.
Video: The Intelligence Guy: Build vs. Buy.Watch the Video (3:58)Faster Implementation, Lower Risk, and Better Business Results
The majority of BI solutions available are costly, require many months to implement, and are difficult to modify. In contrast, Oracle Business Intelligence Applications are prebuilt solutions
2designed for faster deployment at lower cost and lower risk, so they provide better business results. These solutions enable organizations to gain insight from a range of data sources and applications, including Oracle E-Business Suite; Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards solutions; Oracle Fusion Applications; and third-party systems.
Oracle BI Applications. Faster Time to Value.Expand View3 -
Oracle Business Intelligence Applications include prebuilt data models, more than 5,000 metrics, and best practices based on Oracle’s experience across tens of thousands of customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) automation implementations.
In addition, Oracle Business Intelligence Applications are built on the Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation, a comprehensive, modern, and market-leading BI platform. This enables organizations to realize the benefits of a packaged BI application, including rapid deployment, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and built-in best practices, while providing the ability to easily extend those solutions to meet their specific needs, or build completely custom BI applications—all on one common BI architecture.
Oracle BI Applications. Rapid Performance Insight.Expand View4Decision-Ready Analytics and Best-Practice Content
The ability to monitor metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) is the lifeblood of performance management. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications include more than 3,000 reports, 5,000 metrics, and 500 dashboard pages across dozens of functional areas, as well as prebuilt extract/transform/load (ETL) adapters and business logic to tap into a multitude of common operational applications and data sources. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications provide the following benefits.
- Finance professionals have visibility into cash flow, gross margins, operating expenses, account balances, and business unit profitability.
- HR professionals gain insights into headcount trends, employee attrition rates, and the effectiveness of training programs.
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- Procurement and supply chain professionals can track parts and material trends, supplier performance, trade discounts, and warranty return costs.
- Marketing professionals can monitor the efficiency of promotions and campaigns and make adjustments that maximize success rates.
- Sales professionals can more effectively forecast revenues and transactions, manage the pipeline, and track key opportunities.
- Service managers can optimize call center and depot staffing levels, identify problem areas that need attention, and respond more effectively to customer service calls.
- Manufacturing operation managers can reduce production costs, increase product quality, and improve customer service levels.
- Executives gain cross-enterprise views of their businesses, incorporating metrics and KPIs from multiple lines of business and data sources.
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Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Deliver Significant ROI According to a Study by Leading Independent Research Firm
“BI helps you make better decisions.” That’s how the value of business intelligence is often described. But underlying any BI investment is the question, “What am I going to get for my money?” In March 2012, Oracle commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the total economic impact and potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises can realize by deploying Oracle Business Intelligence Applications.
8After conducting in-depth interviews with four Oracle Business Intelligence Applications customers, the study found that the companies realized the following key benefits.
- Significant ROI: A three-year risk-adjusted return on investment of 97 percent, with a 20-month payback period
- Lower procurement spend: 5 percent lower procurement costs in the first year, and 7 percent lower in the second year
- Accounts payable savings: Savings of more than US$1 million per year by the third year
- Lower inventory working capital: A 15 percent reduction in inventory for the affected product categories over three years
- Increased gross sales and prices: An increase in gross sales of 0.4 percent in affected parts of the organization, and an increase in average sales price of 0.3 percent over three years
- IT and business labor savings: Efficiencies in both the IT and business sides of the organization
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Video: The Intelligence Guy: HCM Analytics.Watch the Video (4:08)
McKesson Improves Workforce Analysis of 1.4 Million Employees Across 500 National Health Service Organizations
McKesson Information Solutions UK Ltd. (McKesson) delivers solutions and services to more than 99 percent of all National Health Service (NHS) organizations across England and Wales, as well as to private sector customers. As part of its service to NHS, McKesson manages the world’s largest human resources (HR) and payroll system, which serves more than 1.4 million NHS employees and allows up to 4,500 concurrent users. McKesson is dedicated to helping its customers deliver high-quality
12healthcare by reducing costs, streamlining processes, and improving the quality and safety of patient care in the United Kingdom.
Challenges
McKesson needed to
- Provide a new strategic facility to improve and enhance workforce reporting and analysis for more than 1.4 million employees with easy-to-access, visual dashboards throughout NHS
- Enable fast, accurate access to HR information and reports to improve management decision-making across NHS hospitals and ambulance stations in England and Wales
- Enable NHS managers to analyze HR information for more than 1.4 million NHS employees to improve staff and patient safety, decision-making, and control
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Solutions
McKesson deployed Oracle Human Resources Analytics and are able to
- Deliver fast access to detailed human resources business intelligence across more than 99 percent of NHS trusts in England and Wales
- Provide management with immediate information about staffing levels (for example, the number of nurses on a hospital ward) to enable rapid responses to changes in staffing requirements
- Provide vital HR management information, such as details on work permits, consultant registrations, and performance appraisals, at the click of a mouse, improving efficiency, safety, and compliance
- Calculate statistics from more than 1.4 million employee records on long-term trends, such as an increase in the average age of midwives within the NHS, flagging emerging staffing requirements and initiating action to address them
14- Provide information on training courses completed to highlight where training must be carried out to meet regulatory requirements or individual objectives
- Improve system performance, accelerate reporting, reduce the number of reports by consolidating key facts and requirements into single dashboards, and eliminate the need to schedule overnight reports to deliver timely information in an easy-to-use format
- Enable users to drill down into reports to get greater detail and granularity on specific workforce-related statistics to improve management decision-making and control
- Empower users to customize dashboards to meet individual requirements, building on key templates to deliver information from Oracle Human Resources to help health service managers make more-informed decisions
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Why Oracle
To ensure its customers’ success, McKesson selected Oracle Human Resources Analytics as the best solution to deliver comprehensive reporting and detailed workforce data in an easy-to-use format. Oracle Human Resources Analytics provides detailed reporting and analysis of more than 1.4 million NHS employee records, across more than 500 separate NHS organizations.
“Oracle was also fully committed to making this Oracle Human Resources Analytics implementation successful for NHS and worked closely with us, providing help and advice throughout the initiative. Together, we have proven the performance and scalability of the solution for more than 1.4 million NHS employees,” said Ian Leath, enterprise solutions director, McKesson Information Solutions UK Ltd.
16“The speed and functionality of Oracle Human Resources Analytics has transformed workforce reporting throughout the NHS. Staff members can now access relevant, detailed information much more efficiently and are fully confident that they are using the latest technology and timely data,” Leath said.
Hologic Improves Business Visibility and Access to Critical Information with Oracle Business Intelligence
Video: Hologic Manages Global Growth with Oracle HCM Analytics.Watch the Video (2:41)17 -
Video: The Intelligence Guy: Procurement Analytics.Watch the Video (3:31)Video: The Intelligence Guy: Financial AnalyticsWatch the Video (4:08)18
London Borough of Havering Preserves Community Services and Facilities in the Wake of Budget Cuts with Help from Advanced Business Intelligence
The London borough of Havering is the third-largest borough in greater London, with a population of 230,000 and an area covering 27,742 acres, of which almost half is green space. Its administrative authority—Havering Council—provides education, housing, waste management, transportation, leisure facilities, and other local government services to the borough’s residents, businesses, and visitors.
Challenges
The borough needed to
- Identify where the council could cut expenditures through smarter financial, procurement, and human resources management to meet a 7.1 percent government funding cut without eroding service quality to the local community
- Gain timely, accurate, cost-per-service data to support planning and budgeting and make the financial and human impact of cost savings visible to decision-makers
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- Track and compare the costs and services provided by subcontractors that manage waste disposal and cleansing on behalf of the borough, to ensure they deliver the best value for the money
- Identify how to reduce social care, housing, education, and transportation services costs—accounting for 80 percent of Havering’s budget—while maintaining high-quality standards, in preparation for 2014 government funding cuts
Solutions
The Havering Council chose Oracle Financial Analytics, Oracle Spend Classification, Oracle Human Resources Analytics, Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation, Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics and are able to
- Capture and scrutinize critical financial, procurement, and human resources data to deliver meaningful intelligence that budget holders, department heads, business managers, analysts, and planners can use for fact-based decision-making
20- Deliver key performance indicator dashboards, refreshed daily, to 400 executives with speed-of-thought, self-service drill down to data less than 24 hours old—removing the need for the IT team to extract figures from the previous month’s data that could be up to six weeks out-of-date
- Benefit from intuitive dashboard functionality, personalized data views, and multiple reporting formats to rapidly gain user adoption after minimal training, streamlining the cultural transformation to an accountable, business-driven environment
- Reduce by 50 percent the time managers spend examining statistics to produce strong business cases for additional social or community-care funding
- Cut―from six to four―the number of buildings that the council exclusively occupies, using business intelligence to assess and compare total costs of running the buildings
- Benefit from accurate, timely data on the cost of providing education, leisure, and community care, and gain the ability to analyze the use of each service and identify where savings could be made with minimal impact on citizen satisfaction
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- Reduce back-office staff by one-third, from 245 to 160, using business intelligence to analyze cycle times for routine activities and standardize use of more-efficient processes
- Achieve the council’s target of saving US$4 million in the first year and annually thereafter, without closing parks, libraries, or other public amenities
- Exceed the efficiency target in the second year after deployment, saving US$2.4 million in the first quarter alone
Video: Chris Nelms from Ameren talks about Oracle Spend and Procurement Analytics at Collaborate 2014.Watch the Video (4:12)22Home Office Improves Management and Reduces Costs by US$12.4 Million with Self-Service Business Intelligence
Home Office is a United Kingdom (UK) ministerial department responsible for immigration and passports, border control, drug policy, crime policy, and counterterrorism. Its mission is to ensure visible, responsive, and accountable policing throughout the country.
Challenges
Home Office needed to
- Deliver accurate, trusted HR and finance business intelligence through a dashboard to more than 7,000 managers throughout the organization
- Provide a centralized data source and reporting to deliver timely, relevant, and accurate financial, HR, and procurement information across the organization
- Eliminate the cost of producing thousands of manual back-office reports
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- Improve financial visibility to support decision-making around key operational activities such as immigration, border control and crime policy
Solutions
Home Office implemented Oracle Financial Analytics, Oracle Human Resources Analytics, and Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics running on Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite and are able to
- Deliver accurate, trusted, information in dashboard format to more than 7,000 managers throughout the organization
- Replace multiple disparate information silos containing inaccurate data with a single, centralized version of truth to improve the management of key operational areas such as border and passport control, immigration, and policing
- Reduce the costs of producing manual reports by US$8 million (£5.2 million)
- Reduce the time needed to produce financial and human resources reports, from up to four hours to approximately 10 minutes
24- Reduce the number of people needed to produce manual reports
- Improve budgetary control and gain a clearer view of overspending, underspending, and planning, with detailed and timely reports
- Deliver human resources reports in a timely way, enabling managers to make informed staffing decisions quickly
Why Oracle
Home Office chose Oracle to rapidly deliver BI to 7,000 managers. The organization needed a self-service platform that was easy and flexible to use, and that would integrate with its existing enterprise resource planning system—Oracle E-Business Suite. Speed to deployment and the flexibility to make future changes were also key factors. Home Office considered alternative options, but only Oracle could deliver the needed capability.
In particular, Home Office liked the dashboard interface for Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite, which automatically provides personalized reports to guide managers and enable end users to find answers quickly.
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Home Office used Oracle Business Intelligence Applications with minimal customization, which, together with prebuilt connectors for Oracle E-Business Suite, were key enablers in completing the implementation in just 13 months.
“Oracle Business Intelligence enables managers to access and act upon information quickly and confidently. Dashboards, giving all managers a single view of the resources they are responsible for, have made it possible to compare and boost performance. The ability to quickly produce reports to respond to new or unique requirements has made the organization better equipped to identify and respond to change,” explained Matt Vale, head of business intelligence team for the Home Office’s Adelphi Services Unit.
Gemological Institute of America Makes Laboratories More Efficient and Productive with Timely and Rich Operational Data
The Gemological Institute of America (GIA) is the world’s foremost authority on diamonds, colored stones, and pearls, and is the world’s largest diamond-grading entity. Its mission is to ensure public trust in gems and jewelry by providing the education, laboratory services, research, and instruments to accurately and objectively determine gemstone quality.
26Challenges
GIA needed to
- Improve throughput and operational efficiency across the institute’s laboratory operations (part of GIA’s new lean business model) by expanding insight into the types of services ordered, the number of stones graded, the location where they were graded, and more
- Provide more-timely insight into laboratory operations for improved decision-making
- Enable business analysts to spend more time identifying and studying trends, as opposed to creating reports, and provide them with on-demand access to the data they require
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Solutions
GIA deployed Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, Enterprise Edition Plus; Oracle Financial Analytics; and Oracle Human Resources Analytics and are able to
- Provide interactive online operational, financial, and HR reporting and data analysis, gaining granular visibility into daily activities and finances for more-informed decisions
- Provide analysts and laboratory managers with timely operational data and reports, which are refreshed twice per day―eliminating a manual, spreadsheet-based reporting process that required four hours daily to complete and resulted in a one-day delay in reaching regional laboratories
- Combine finance, time and labor, and laboratory production information to enable integrated global reporting and support the introduction of a lean business model
- Advance efforts to improve laboratory efficiency and productivity with detailed and timely information on the number and type of grading services ordered daily, by location, inventory levels, number of stones graded and completed in each lab, and the time spent on each stone
28- Gather the intelligence required to load balance services across the organization’s laboratory network to optimize utilization and accelerate stone-grading services
- Improve analyst productivity and impact, giving them on-demand access to information and the ability to drill down into data, freeing time previously spend on report development
- Expand the use of the BI tool to track laboratory service quality
Why Oracle
GIA uses Oracle Database and PeopleSoft applications, so it logically considered Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle Business Intelligence Applications when seeking a BI solution. This fact alone, however, did not drive the selection process. Gartner’s upper-right ranking of Oracle’s solution in its Magic Quadrant report and its low administration overhead weighed heavily in the decision. Sabra Norris, global director of financial planning and operational analysis for GIA, also cited the solutions’ flexibility and ease of use as important factors. Business analysts can readily create new reports and easily access the information they need without IT team support.
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McGrath RentCorp Improves Business Reporting and Analytics Capabilities with Cloud-based Business Intelligence Solution
McGrath RentCorp is a diversified business-to-business rental company. It rents and sells mobile modular buildings, electronic test equipment, and liquid and solid containment tanks and boxes, primarily in the United States and Canada. Through its business units, Mobile Modular, TRS-RenTelco, Adler Tanks, and Enviroplex, the company serves a broad spectrum of industries, including the telecommunications, construction, education, petrochemical, and environmental sectors.
30Challenges
McGrath RentCorp needed to
- Gain expanded insight into key performance indicators (KPIs) across the company’s diverse operating units, which include groups that provide electronic testing equipment, groups providing modular classrooms, and containment tank rentals and related services
- Give line-of-business managers and sales personnel on-demand access to information about equipment and building rental sales, procurement spend, and other business metrics, without IT team support
- Create a highly flexible and scalable BI environment that could evolve with the organization and its requirements
- Roll out the BI environment rapidly to accelerate return on investment
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Solutions
McGrath RentCorp selected Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Managed Cloud Service and Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Managed Cloud Service and are able to
- Gain expanded insight into finance, sales, procurement, and other KPIs
- Enable line-of-business managers from finance, sales, and other areas to track and analyze critical KPIs, such as building and equipment rental sales, services sales, gross profit, first month rental revenue, average contract term, and average actual term, to enable more-informed decisions
- Increase visibility into each division’s spend as well as factors that drive revenue and costs, and equip the company to ultimately gain visibility into the complete procure-to-pay process, enterprisewide
- Enable sales team members to access and drill down into customer sales data from their mobile devices, keeping them informed, driving more-productive customer meetings, and facilitating rental and service fee collection
32Why Oracle
“We wanted a tier 1 ERP vendor and considered a few options. The tipping point for Oracle E-Business Suite was Oracle E-Business Suite Lease and Finance Management, which was a perfect fit for our business. We then selected Oracle Business Intelligence for its robust capabilities, flexibility, user-friendliness, and native integration to Oracle E-Business Suite, as well as its ability to easily integrate data from third-party vendors,” said Tiffany Smith, applications manager, McGrath RentCorp.
Video: Elizabeth Arden's Success with Oracle HCM Cloud.Watch the Video (5:26)33 -
Ambulance Victoria Uses Analytics and Modeling to Serve the Expanding Needs of a Growing Population
Since 1883, the ambulance services that operate in Victoria, Australia, have addressed the emergency medical needs of the country’s most southeastern mainland state. Over the years, those services have consolidated into one entity—Ambulance Victoria—which answers calls for help from the metropolis of Melbourne and the surrounding rural territory, covering 227,000 square kilometers and 5.5 million people. How has an organization that started with a single horse-drawn ambulance evolved to earn a global reputation for superior patient outcomes?
“We’re an organization with a proud history of using data very widely to improve the welfare and survivability of our patients,” says John Dousset, manager of enterprise architecture at Ambulance Victoria. For example, paramedics are armed with special notebooks to capture empirical data about each patient at the time of treatment. Dousset’s team at Ambulance Victoria has embarked on an ambitious program to use data collection and analytics to ensure more patients get the care they need.
34Dousset talked to Profit magazine about how Ambulance Victoria has evolved, the innovative ways his coworkers are using data to visualize solutions, and what technology he is watching now.
Profit: How has Ambulance Victoria changed in recent years?
Dousset: Ambulance Victoria has a long history of serving the community, and has done so with a lot of support from the community. In 2008, Ambulance Victoria was created as a single entity by merging the state’s three remaining ambulance services: Metropolitan Ambulance Service, Rural Ambulance Victoria, and the Alexandra District Ambulance Service. We now serve the entire state with 250 branches, 3,000 paramedics, and 1,000 volunteers, with four fixed-wing and five helicopter aircraft for fast connections between rural communities and major specialist facilities in the metropolitan region.
On average, we’ve seen about 4 percent of annual growth in demand for our services since 2000. This is due to factors such as population growth, an aging population, increasing numbers of people living alone, increased outpatient services and early discharges, and limitations to other health services in rural
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settings. Ambulance Victoria received approximately 830,000 requests for assistance in 2011–2012, which is fairly substantial. But we can’t simply increase resources to service that growing demand, so we have had to figure out how to do more with what we have.
Profit: How does technology help you do that?
Dousset: To be more efficient with our resources, we knew we needed to do two things. First, we needed to improve our operational decision support in real time: Where are our resources? Which resource should go where? Second, we needed to work on the business side: What is our profit, what is our loss, what is our margin? How can we improve our transport costs?
Last year Ambulance Victoria had a running deficit of about AU$3.3 million, but the organization still undertook a major investment in Oracle analytics and reporting solutions. Part of the reason upper management embraced this plan was that I could demonstrate how we could reuse the same technology stack to enable multiple business processes. We didn’t need to buy a unique technology stack just to support different business processes.
We invested in Oracle technology and were able to use one platform to launch a major analytics and reporting program, centered around three business objectives. The first was to
36introduce advanced resource modeling: What would happen if we increased the number of paramedics? What would happen if we increased the number of cars? The second was "We invested in Oracle technology and were able to use one platform to launch a major analytics and reporting program..." centered on workforce planning, because an aging population also means an aging workforce for us. The third was centered purely on financial modeling, including margin models and models about product cost. This is critical because with the creation of Ambulance Victoria we picked up multiple systems with multiple business processes and variable definitions of our data.
Profit: How can analytics help managers or paramedics in the field do their jobs better?
Dousset: There are probably half a dozen key events that occur in the treatment of a patient, starting from the time of an emergency call. For example, when our paramedics accept a call, they push a button on an in-vehicle mobile data terminal device. That is an event that arrives in our real-time data feed along with a geospatial coordinate that gives us the ambulance’s location. Every five seconds we receive an update on the vehicle location’s coordinate, which tells us that an ambulance is en route from point A (say, the scene of an accident) to point B (presumably a hospital).
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Right now, we have a proof of concept going that would allow hospital workers to see how many ambulances are scheduled to arrive—and when they should expect them. We are also starting to figure out how to publish data, such as what resources are stationed at the hospital and which hospitals are full or becoming full. When we get that information to our hospital emergency departments and our own team leaders, then they can start to make some real-time decisions to improve the overall resource management.
Business intelligence should not be something that’s away in the corner of the office and difficult to consume. Really, it’s about having the correct information starting point "Business intelligence should not be something that’s away in the corner of the office and difficult to consume." and the right level of visualization to fulfill a business need—such as real-time operational decision support, reporting for our CEO and board, and financial modeling for the CFO. Analytics and reporting should be simple enough for everyone to use to assist in their daily tasks. Where possible, users should be enabled to drill up and down the data presented.
38Profit: What else are you excited about, looking forward?
Dousset: Looking downstream, one of the things that really interests me is figuring out how to leverage Twitter and other social media tools. Are there things we can access and blend into our analytics and reporting? Social media could also be useful in providing context for major events and helping us plan an appropriate response.
Also there’s the innovation side of it: Can I share data with other emergency service organizations this way? I’m keen for B2B integration. What if I can send members of other organizations an XML feed in real time, guaranteed messaging, with a common message model? Then they send me something back that I can surface through a tablet or a device in the field. Lo and behold, our paramedics can see a fire line, they can see where other resources are—such as police officers and other paramedics—and they are provided more information to assist in their in-field decisions.
In the end, Ambulance Victoria is a vital member of the overall healthcare system that saves lives. It is about resource management and providing the best care possible to the community in the most efficient and effective manner. We’ll always be looking for innovation and technology to help keep Ambulance Victoria as one of the leading ambulance services in the world.
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White Papers and Reports
- Forrester Report: The Total Economic Impact of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications
- White Paper: Oracle ERP Analytics
- White Paper: Oracle CRM Analytics
Videos
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