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What are some best practices for creating reports and using the analytics features in Oracle B2C Service?

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Analytics Best Practices
Oracle B2C Service

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Oracle B2C Service Analytics is a very useful reporting tool that can help you understand what is happening in your Oracle B2C Service implementation.  On the surface, the reporting tool is a fairly straight forward, drag and drop report designer.  However, with more than 1000 unique pieces of functionality and/or options, learning all of the subtle nuances of this tool can take some time.  Adding in large or complex data joins and the many reporting use cases that tend to arise, the learning curve can feel a little daunting.   There are over 750 out of the box reports that can help get you started with your reporting needs.  These range from agent, manager, to administrative reporting across the various different functional areas within Oracle B2C Service.  It is tough to create canned reports that fit every use case since implementations are so very different, but these canned reports are often a great place to start (copy and modify as necessary).

Fortunately, we have a few resources that will help with the learning curve and provide some best practices to help you achieve Analytics enlightenment:

1)  Analytics Best Practice Guide to Improve Report Performance – This PDF attached to the linked community post specifically deals in optimizations and report performance within Oracle B2C Service.  Included are more than 25 best practices, and new feature additions that will help make report optimization easier to handle.  

This document begins with an overview of key terminology, relevant concepts, and a discussion of relevant threshold governors.  With this background presented, the document provides an in-depth discussion of best practices to make Oracle B2C Service Analytics reports run as fast and efficiently as possible, to improve scalability when large data volumes or processing-intensive report queries are involved, and to determine appropriate next steps if encountering warning messages when thresholds will be exceeded.

This guide is intended to be both an insightful and practical tool for developing, tuning and managing reports and analyses within your Oracle B2C Service instance.

2)  The Analytics Cookbook - The Analytics cookbook is intended to be a tool to help you learn Oracle B2C Service Analytics through short YouTube functionality/techniques tutorials and report “recipes” that describe cool use cases.  The tutorial videos walk through one specific area of Oracle B2C Service Analytics to help you better understand how to configure/use that functionality along with subtle nuances and best practices inherent to each area.  The report recipes outline individual specific reporting use cases, report configuration details for those use cases, and the exported XML report definition that can be imported directly into your instance of Oracle B2C Service.  The Analytics Cookbook allows users to learn specific functional areas and incorporate these into cool use cases to help expand your Analytics IQ.  Please note: The Analytics Cookbook is intended to be a living learning tool and will be updated with new technique videos and report recipes as time goes on.

3)  The Report Management [Module] - Did I mention that there are more than 750 canned reports that are delivered with every instance of Oracle B2C Service?  As of the Feb 2013 release, finding the right report for your use case has become a lot easier with keyword searching across report names and descriptions within the Report Management Module.  Although this is not technically a module in Oracle B2C Service, RMM has a nice ring to it so we refer to it that way.  Also included in RMM are administrative tools to help you do things like find all reports with schedules, find out which workspaces are using a specific report, find deferred reports, etc.  More details on the RMM can be found in the linked Analytics Cookbook recipe.

Happy Learning!