According to the latest CIO study published by IBM in September 2009, Business Intelligence and Analytics are the two top priorities for CIOs for 2009 and 2010.

We all know how difficult it can be to get data out of any ERP system for meaningful reporting and analytics. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne offers a choice of databases (SQL-Server, DB2 and Oracle), operating systems and hardware. It offers 70 application modules to support a diverse set of business operations.

There are several report options within EnterpriseOne which may satisfy power users and analysts. Oracle suggests its JD Edwards Enterprise One users to use their BI Publisher for enhanced reporting and BI functionality.

The following paragraph is directly taken from the Oracle Datasheet for BI Publisher and explains the integration overview:

To generate process driven reports, a customer will create or use an existing JD Edwards EnterpriseOne report to generate XML. A BI Publisher template will be created, uploaded, and associated with a JD Edwards EnterpriseOne report. This new report definition allows users to associate different templates and translations to the existing report. This report definition automates the reporting process from the initiation of the report to the delivery of the final output. For analysts initiated inquiries, these queries can be developed directly in BI Publisher using the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne driver. This allows users access to the JD EnterpriseOne data and execute the reports using the BI Publisher interface without the need of an EnterpriseOne UBE.

So, does this sound easy enough for you to create a business intelligence solution for your company, particularly if you do not have internal access to this expertise or do not want to pay huge amounts of consulting fees for external consultants and other costs involved with such a process? I don't think so.

This is the reason why there are several third party reporting and analytics tools available for JD Edwards. We always recommend a solution which includes proper ETL functionality to build a data warehouse or data mart, programmatically creates OLAP cubes which can be used by any front-end tool.

BDA (Business Data Analysis) is such a reporting and analysis tool which offers a data warehouse with pre-defined interfaces for many JD Edwards applications and it comes with a fantastic front-end analysis tool. Analysis applications like sales analysis can be built in a matter of days and the pricing is very attractive and fits into the current economy where budgets are tight, but better information is needed.