Oracle Narrative Reporting – Part 1

In this blog post, we will be focusing on EPRCS Security access rights and roles available.

EPRCS Overview

• Oracle Enterprise Performance Reporting Cloud Service (EPRCS) is a Cloud solution for management and narrative reporting. It provides a secure and integrated solution that offers a collaborative and process-driven approach. Cloud maintenance, patching, and back-ups are managed by Oracle.
• The workflow process provides collaboration, commentary, and delivery of management reporting through EPRCS objects which are stored in a Library. The library can be organized by folder and managed through security.
• EPRCS allows users to easily combine both data and narrative content on report objects called Doclets. Doclets are grouped together in a report package. “Doclet” is used to perform check-in and check-out process to manage versions.
• Extended Microsoft Office tools (Word, PowerPoint, etc.) can be used to provide the output of management reports. This includes an intelligent and intuitive simplified UI that can be accessed via desktop, mobile, and the web.
• User Roles: Provides user types such as owners, authors, and approvers and role-based security and auditable access on desktop and mobile devices.

Figure 1 EPRCS Architecture

EPRCS Security

EPRCS enables secure collaboration between users. One can control which users can edit which Doclets. This allows users from various departments and areas to all contribute to the same report package thereby safeguarding sensitive data. Inside EPRCS, security is provided at three levels:

Figure 2 EPRCS Security Roles

System-Level Roles:

• For EPRCS environments two sets of roles are created. One set is for Production and another set is for Pre-Production. Pre-Production allows EPRCS customers to keep security differentiated for testing purposes.
• Roles can also be combined into groups under My Services via the Custom Roles tab. It is considered best practice for assigning security to users based on groups, rather than individually. The five predefined roles are as below:

Artifact-level Security:

Figure 3 Artifact level Security

You automatically have permission to edit, delete, and maintain that artifact when you create an artifact (report package, folder, application). You can grant security by users and groups to the artifacts created. Users without access cannot see or access that artifact. Artifacts can be given the following forms of permissions:

• Administer: Unrestricted view and change privilege to all artifacts.
• Write: Enables users to add folder content.
• View: Enables users to view only the artifact.
• Use: Enables the user to see the application in the library.

Figure 4 Access in Report Package

Figure 5 Access to Application

Data Security:

Figure 6 Data level Security

It determines the level of security, in which data access permissions can be granted to users. Data level security can be set through Dimension-based access: either by setting the READ access or NONE access.

Figure 7 Dimension-based access

Grant access to parts of data in a model. This grant may be at an individual level or by cross-dimension/intersections.

Figure 8 Data Grant level access

To Summarize:

• EPRCS is a powerful reporting solution that is secure, collaborative and intuitive meant to complement and combine reporting from various types of technologies.
• Simplify the report creation and distribution process.
• Collaborate with content contributors and reviewers.
• Access through Mobile or desktop – when you want, how you want.
• Publish book – quality financial and management reports.
• EPRCS has a wide variety of functions that can take it anywhere in an organization to meet unique reporting needs with its cost-effective pricing and is a great entry point for new cloud customers.

Part 2 will be on “EPRCS Workflow Setup and Details”: where we will talk about the workflow approvals and sign-off process related to the publishing of the reports.