The Power of the Oracle Enterprise Command Center

As our ERP systems hold more and more data, users can sometimes feel overwhelmed in seeing the wood for the trees and easily identifying the day’s top priorities requiring action.

From Oracle Release 12.2.4 onwards, you now have the ability to use Oracle’s much-acclaimed Enterprise Command Center (ECC) functionality. These are a series of out the box dashboards that provide an intuitive graphical display of the data held within the E-Business Suite (EBS) modules, enabling the user to quickly see a high-level overview as to what is happening currently or did happen in the business.

The dashboards are intended for use by a range of users from departmental managers through to operational resources and are designed to provide a ‘live” analysis for various aspects of the business. 

Oracle’s Enterprise Command Center enables users to rapidly explore various aspects of the business and allows them to quickly identify the day’s most important business challenges. The system also has the capability to drill-down from the summary data that is displayed or refine their search using the consumer-like filter functionality.

Each time amendments are made via the search or filter options; the powerful engine within the system automatically re-calculates and re-summarises the data displayed. 

This allows the user to access the interactive visual components to effortlessly locate and retrieve any transactions requiring attention. And with this simplified process, there’s no need to use any custom or standard operational reports, scripts, or even the conventional search screens. Even the transaction screens are pre-populated with the drill-down data from your information discovery with no re-querying of data necessary.

Enterprise Command Center Framework

The power of the ECC dashboards is down to the ECC Framework that it sits on top of. This middleware technology is a powerful and scalable piece of architecture and consists of three layers:

Interactive User Interface layer: This development framework allows code-free creation of dashboards using a drag and drop layout design.

Service Layer: This allows the client to define a dataset and perform advanced functionality such as, for example, aggregation and rollups, against the data. 

Core Engine: This is the main engine, that absorbs the data from its source E-Business suite module. This process analyses the data to allow fast and advanced data access.  

The ECC framework enables Oracle EBS users to make easy modifications to the design of the dashboards and provides the capability to access additional data from within E-Business Suite, including advanced data retrieval functionality such as aggregations, rollups, etc.

Highlights of Oracle’s Enterprise Command Centers

• No additional costs for licensed users of the respective modules.
• Enables easy identification of priority and act on priority transactions.
• Dashboards are accessed from within the E-Business Suite menu.
• Dashboards can easily be extended to include additional data attributes held in the E-Business Suite.
• Dashboards utilise the existing security functionality that is part of the E-Business Suite – e.g. it adopts the same functional and data security models that the user already has access to.
• Multi-lingual support.
• An additional server is recommended to support ECCs.

Oracle Development

The dashboards are continuously being enhanced by Oracle development with new dashboards being added as standard, and more modules within the e-business suite being supported. In addition, new functionality is being added to the command center framework. 

Oracle has stated that they will update the Command Center Framework twice yearly and customers using the Enterprise Command Center will be expected to upgrade to the latest Oracle ECC Framework within 12 months of its release.

For those companies considering the R12.2 EBS upgrade, the latest release that came out in May 2020 now has 28 different command centres with 95 dashboards across the entire E-Business Suite. 

(Below is a list of the current command centres available to EBS users)

Receivable Command Center Example

Below is the Receivables Command Center initial Dashboard. It shows the user a high-level complete overview of all your open receivables position by Aging Bucket and which Customers have the most past-due.

In order to understand this more, I can easily see that the majority of our debt is very old i.e. over 90 days overdue. So, to understand the breakdown of this more, I can simply double click on the “Over 90 Days” bar within the graph on the left and the data presented is automatically updated and re-summarised.

Looking at the graph on the right-hand side, I can see the top list of customers who have the worst debt positions. I can easily see that A.C Networks is by far the worst payer.    

Now I can either use the consumer-like filter functionality on the left-hand side and pick the Bill-To Customer from the list or simply click on the horizontal Bar for A.C Networks in the graph itself. This refines our analysis to overdue invoices for A.C Networks and the dashboard again automatically updates all the summary data and transaction list at the bottom of the screen. The transaction list is sorted based on the greatest overdue amounts, and so I can now tackle these first, and even drill down to the actual AR transactions by simply selecting the Transaction Number hyperlink.