One of the first things I do when I run into performance issues with ETL loads is to look at the source and target table statistics. Have they been collected before the current select / insert statement was issued?
It turns out that in Oracle BI Apps the #ETL_ANALYZE_WORK_TABLE parameter is turned off by default when a load plan is generated. This can make doing a high level review of your load plan execution tricky since there will be steps that will seem to be gathering statistics, when in reality, the ODI code generator just puts a placeholder instead of the code for statistics. An example of this is shown below:
SOLUTION:
Once I realized what the issue was with statistics not being gathered for my work tables I was able to zoom into the ETL_ANALYZE_WORK_TABLE variable by looking at my generated load plan as depicted below, and change its default value to Y. The variable is defined globally so once you change the definition this new default value will apply to any newly generated load plans.