The BI Publisher

Every company has its own layout as far as documents are concerned. The logo, the position of the address, the footer. Everything has its place and order. This does right down to the exact wording. Is it an article or a product? Is it a price, a fee or a cost? The keyword here is often corporate design. A company-wide language to the outside world. Depending on the company, this can be elaborated to varying degrees. But in general, it defines the principles of how the company appears to the outside world. Thus, a competitor can become a market companion, or a price can become an amount. But how does an ERP like JD Edwards create an individual invoice? Or a customer letter? An employment contract? JD Edwards already offers everything a company needs “out of the box” in its standard functionality. But to be able to represent the design of a company, Oracle offers with the Business Intelligence Publisher a tool that leaves nothing to be desired. As a simple plug-in for Word, templates can be created with the BI Publisher that are precisely adapted to the situation. And these templates can then be linked to the desired reports in JD Edwards. Using simple XSLT programming, these templates can also react to specific data. If a person, let’s say a contact person at a customer, is stored in JD Edwards, then the gender is also recorded. If you now want to create a standardized letter to this contact person, the BI Publisher template can decide through simple programming whether you want to begin the letter with “Dear Ms…” or “Dear Mr…. “. This sounds trivial at first, but those who have already made this mistake will be very grateful for this mechanism. And this happens without any user interaction! Templates for different languages can also be created. Depending on where the receiver is located, the language is chosen. You just say “print”. The rest happens automatically.