What is the OpenAir Business Intelligence Connector Really?

A business runs most efficiently when data can be shared across multiple departments quickly and consistently. The OpenAir Business Intelligence Connector offers access (point and click) from OpenAir to present, existing applications, primarily business intelligence and reporting tools. The connector allows you access to OpenAir data without requiring anyone in your company to perform the complex task of writing code.

The OpenAir Business Intelligence Connector also referred to as OABIC, is a way of publishing reports that were created in OpenAir to various business intelligence tools already used by your company. This allows you to create reports and then share them with designated individuals as needed. If changes are made, you can publish your information at any time, so all your recipients have the most updated data.

Publishing action can be done manually or scheduled to publish automatically at a set time, depending on your preference. Keep in mind that automatically scheduled reports can only be run once per day. However, you are able to publish manually as often as necessary to keep recipients up to date.

Explaining OData

Information is transferred via a data protocol known as OData. Think of OData as a well-accepted “language” that many applications both speak and understand. This handy tool allows you to exchange data between two separate applications, provided they both support the protocol. The good news is nearly every BI tool supports OData, and if they don’t there are likely to be plug-ins available to allow for that support.

You can publish both owned reports and shared reports in OData. Shared reports require switches in order to be enabled by OpenAir Support. There are three basic types of shared reports that are able to be published in OData:

 1.  Owner Only

In some cases, you may want to publish the report in OData without allowing anyone but the owner to see the information. In this instance, you may simply publish without sharing, so that the owner can see the data on the OData server without making it accessible to anyone else.

2. Recipients

If you want the people that import the report into a BI tool like Excel to have access to the information, you can publish the report with the “recipient’s” permission set. This allows recipients to only see the data they have access to in OpenAir, protecting sensitive information from being viewed.

3. Owner and Other

You are also able to publish reports with the “owner’s” permission set. However, this is a potentially dangerous practice that is not recommended by Top Step, particularly if you are tracking your actual cost data in OpenAir. The problem with this set-up is that individuals may gain access to sensitive information, compromising some of your company’s data.

Benefits of the OpenAir Business Intelligence Connector

The OABIC is not a free feature of OpenAir, but many companies find there are significant advantages to investing in the tool. When your goal is to make your operations more efficient overall, the automated features included with the OABIC can help you reach this goal in a number of ways:

• Schedule your push: You can schedule your push to your BI tool at a specific day and time, with the ability to schedule reports to run once per day.
• Update and Refresh: When you update the OData server, you can also refresh the screen on your BI tool. The new information will be ordered automatically, according to the newest data placed into OData.
• Refresh Automatically: Now, you can tell your BI tool to refresh the report as frequently as you want. If you set the tool to refresh automatically, the report can publish and update without any human involvement other than opening the BI tool.
• Build reports using tools you know: With the OABIC data flows to the tool your organization already owns and has expertise in using. In addition, BI tools generally have significant flexibility and scalability in the design, display, and distribution of reports, opening up many familiar avenues to your organization to report on data directly from OpenAir.

With numerous ways to create automation within your information reporting and sharing process, the OABIC allows you to provide the most up-to-date information for your team without constant maintenance and upkeep of your processes.

OpenAir is changing how companies do business and the introduction of the OpenAir Business Intelligence Connector is one more asset companies are finding useful. To learn more contact Top Step today and check out our webinar on connecting OpenAir report data to your other core systems with OpenAir Business Intelligence Connector.