ORACLE SALES ANALYZER 11i

The Internet is changing business processes. Businesses are becoming e-businesses. The increased speed and efficiency of e-business requires decision makers to respond quickly and effectively. Oracle^¨ Sales Analyzer combines built-in sales and marketing intelligence, a central, integrated information source, and powerful, Internet-based analytical capabilities. Oracle Sales Analyzer is part of the Oracle E-Business Suite, an integrated set of applications, which is designed to transform your business to an e-business.

Find the Right Data to Analyze: Data Organized for Business Users
With its robust collection of pre-defined document templates and tools for both general and sales-and-marketing-specific analysis, Sales Analyzer helps companies identify and leverage the important business information that is hidden within the data.

The power of Sales Analyzer comes from Oracle Express Server, Oracle's industry-leading on-line analytical processing (OLAP) calculation engine and data cache. Express Server uses a multidimensional data model that reflects the way users think about their business. This multidimensional model expands the row and column approach of spreadsheets into multiple categories of data, called dimensions. Users naturally envision these dimensions as edges of an array. Dimensions such as time, product, distribution channel, and geography categorize and summarize facts, like unit sales.

Express Server is optimized for query and analysis, enabling rapid execution of complex queries such as: "Who are the top ranking customers for CD players this week, through the Internet, in Western Europe, compared to the same week last year?" Unlike third-party client tools, which may simply act as front-end data readers to Express, Sales Analyzer's tight integration with Express Server offers advanced multidimensional query and analysis capabilities.

Find the Right Data to Analyze: Intuitive Data Selection
The heart of Sales Analyzer is the Selector, a robust point-and-click tool for including data subsets in a report or graph. The persistent nature of queries created with the Selector allows users to hone selected data sets in an iterative fashion. Users can intuitively refine data selections in a number of ways, including:

• selecting levels or families in a dimension hierarchy
• specifying attributes, such as color or size
• matching character strings
• controlling top/bottom ranking criteria
• creating user-defined exception criteria

In addition, these selections can be saved and re-used each month, and in different analyses.

The data-aware reports and graphs created with Sales Analyzer understand the multidimensional model. Users can navigate through their selected data quickly and easily, readily rotate and page through dimensions, and drill-down to lower levels of detail.

Analyze the data to answer the questions: Built-In Sales and Marketing Techniques
Sales Analyzer contains inherent intelligence about sales and marketing data. Sales Analyzer enables users to adapt their analysis to changing market conditions and scenarios. Pre-defined calculation types assist users in creating key business metrics, including:

• lag/lead
• percent change
• year-to-date and fiscal year-to-date figures
• moving totals and averages
• indices/shares and variances

Users can extend the pre-defined calculation types to suit their individual business needs using standard arithmetic functions. Customizable measures make it easy to create new metrics for quantitative data analysis. Customizable aggregates allow users to supplement standard hierarchies with their own groupings of dimensional information based on product or industry knowledge; for example, this months product promotions. Sales Analyzer's dynamic graphing capabilities can highlight trends that affect the bottom line.

The Forecast Wizard allows users to predict future values of numeric measures based on historical performance, using a variety of popular forecasting methodologies such as "Holt-Winters," "Single/Double/Triple Exponential Smoothing," and "Linear Trend."

Analyze the data to answer the questions: Standard Sales & Marketing Reports
Sales Analyzer is packaged with additional templates for creating ranking, exception, or combined exception/ranking reporting without any programming. Exception reporting includes the ability to specify exception criteria based on text as well as numerical values.

The Web Analysis Library is a selection of pre-defined document templates that provide an instant picture of key sales and marketing performance indicators. The Analysis Library includes a templates for a variety of categories. For example, exception reports, like "80/20 Product Rule" (the 80% of customers which make up 20% of the business), help marketing managers understand which products are driving sales. "Account Review" reports arm sales managers with the information they need for customer relationship management. Other document categories include "Comparison," "Distribution," "Growth," "Quota," "Ranking," and "Trend" reports.

Executives can use these document templates to get a high-level view of sales and marketing trends and performance. Analysts and other power end-users can use the templates as a starting point for more detailed, ad-hoc analysis. Delivered via the Internet, these templates allow businesses to quickly convey crucial business information to decision makers throughout the enterprise.

With the comprehensive capabilities of Sales Analyzer, users can tackle a variety of sales and marketing-related analysis tasks, such as:

• understanding and forecasting sales trends
• measuring promotional response and effectiveness
• examining customer profitability
• performing product profitability and life cycle analysis

Communicate the Answers: Empower Business Users, Free IS Resources
Sales Analyzer frees business users from relying on IS to generate and distribute reports. Sales Analyzer relieves IS of the burden of custom and routine report generation and allows valuable IS resources to focus on infrastructure and technology.

With Sales Analyzer users independently create reports, graphs, and custom elements--such as measures and aggregates-- and independently share them with others, enabling them to combine efforts across lines of business and throughout the enterprise. Corporate data can be easily accessed, analyzed, and distributed by key decision-makers via the Internet. Sales Analyzer provides a simple and secure method of analyzing critical business information for the people who need it--whether they are across the hall, or across the world. Thanks to the Oracle Express? Web Agent, Sales Analyzer's powerful analytical capabilities are available on any computer with a Web browser. Users can create reports and graphs, or query live data contained in these reports or graphs, to perform ad hoc analysis of sales and marketing data over corporate intranets or the World Wide Web.

With Sales Analyzer executives, managers, and analysts with time and decision critical questions can find the right data to analyze, analyze the data to answer the questions, communicate the answers, and make informed fact-based intelligent decisions.

Technology Benefits: Flexible Data Access and Analysis
Through Express Server, Sales Analyzer provides unmatched flexibility in accessing corporate data from an enterprise data warehouse, a sales and marketing data mart, or other on-line transaction processing (OLTP) data sources. Sales Analyzer can access data that is cached within the Express multidimensional database for rapid analysis of historical, aggregate-level values and calculations. Sales Analyzer can also use the Express Relational Access Manager (RAM) to query a relational data warehouse or data mart, for direct access to more detail-level information. Finally, these approaches can be combined to view aggregate-level data cached within
Express Server, and retrieve detail-level data from the relational data warehouse or data mart. This ability to flexibly access corporate data allows Sales Analyzer to quickly adapt to today's constantly changing corporate data storage techniques and requirements.

Technology Benefits: Data Warehouse and Data Mart Ready
With its powerful multidimensional analysis capabilities, and its ability to access a variety of data sources, Sales Analyzer is uniquely suited for end-user analysis in an enterprise data warehouse or sales and marketing data mart. Sales Analyzer is fully integrated with the Oracle Data Mart Suite? --Sales & Marketing Edition, and can also be used with a data warehouse created with the Oracle Warehouse Builder. This gives business users a choice of out-of-the-box solutions for decision support, whether at the enterprise or line-of-business level.

Oracle E-Business Suite--The Total Solution
Transform the way you conduct business with Oracle's internet-enabled e-business suite. Put your demand chain, supply chain, and internal operations online with Oracle's comprehensive and fully integrated solution. Combine the wide reach of the internet with Oracle's fully globalized product to run your business consistently and accurately worldwide. Reduce costs and complexity by running on corporate internets or the World Wide Web.As a provider of global consulting, education, and support services, Oracle provides the most complete e-business solution available.