Assessment

After a quick review of the customer’s BI Apps implementation, what they had done, how bad the performance was and their key pain points, it was time to get our hands around the problem and open up the hood.  Myself and a small team gathered a large list of about 40 reports that were not performing up to the report author’s expectations.  We made sure we had good coverage from a variety of key ad-hoc power user/report developers – focusing onbreadth was more important than depth.  It turns out that all of the reports in question were developed by these power users; none were Out-of-Box (OOB) reports or modified versions of them.

Next, I did a review of each report and cataloged it.  We ran the reports, looked at their logic and how they were built, and tried to determine a few things about each one:

1. Was there heavy logic in the report?
2. Did it have unions?
3. Was it filtered properly or at all (e.g., did it have a time filter)?
4. Did it do anything unusual?
5. Was it limited by not having a good field to use