What's New with OBI?

Jane Nguyen is another convert to Consolidated Expenditure Reporting after her experiences in User Acceptance Testing.

Jane, finance manager in Radiology at the School of Medicine, has regularly used the ReportMart 279 and 285 reports as part of her work routine. Data currently available from these two RM3 reports and other RM3 expenditure "EXP" reports will be delivered in Consolidated Expenditure Reporting (CER) in the Oracle Business Intelligence platform. (Note: The affected RM3 reports won't be retired until after year-end close. You can see the entire list of in-scope reports.)

Up to now, Jane has used the 279 to verify expenditures such as POs charged to projects, tasks and awards, to see if they are allowable. With the 279, she had to download data to Excel, and then do a pivot table to view and reconcile.

While using CER in User Acceptance Testing, she found she will no longer need to download and pivot. She was able to view and reconcile expenditures directly within the CER dashboard reporting environment, which she found very easy to use and understand.

CER "is very user friendly," Jane said. "I like it a lot. I can see the entire org if I choose to. It's self-explanatory––just a few clicks, and you can move columns around, or you can subtotal. If you can use Excel, you can use CER."

Reminder: CER will be released on March 21, 2016.

CER Saves Time

Patrick Coogan, financial analyst for the Precourt Institute for Energy, discovered during User Acceptance Testing that CER was a major time-saver.

Patrick wrote: "Each month, I use the 'data download' function in RM3 to manually create pivot tables and ad hoc reports for internal clients.

"During UAT, within about 10 minutes, I re-created the same monthly report…and was able to save it to be reproduced at the click of a button. This will save at least 8-10 hours of my time each month."

Access & Training

When CER goes live March 21, users of in-scope RM3 reports will automatically be granted Oracle Business Intelligence CER authority based on the scope of their RM3 authority. After March 21, schools and departments will be responsible for granting authority to new users, as well as monitoring and updating authority.

The rollout of CER brings with it online training to maximize your user experience. For those RM3 users who already have been granted access to OBI reports (Payroll and Labor Management or Expense Requests and Credit Card Activity), no additional training will be required to access the CER reports. However, a new online course, entitled "Overview of CER Dashboard," will be available when CER rolls out on March 21, to help users make the most of CER dashboard reports.

Report users who are new to OBI will be required to take the online training course FIN-0340: Introduction to OBI Financial Reporting before gaining access to CER. Learn more information on access.

See CER Demo

To facilitate a smooth transition for report users to CER, the Evolve Financial Reporting team has been holding a series of information sessions across campus. So far, almost 500 people have attended the sessions, which include a comprehensive demo of the new tool.

If you were unable to attend one (or if you did attend, and would like to see it again), you can find a link to the PowerPoint presentation on the OBI section.

We also have recorded the CER demo.

(Note: If clicking the link takes you instead to the Stanford Video Conferencing page, paste the link into the address bar on that same page and hit "enter." The demo then should run.)