Oracle e-Business Suite

Most of the time when you go for a pre-sale / sales meeting and lets say you are try to position oracle Service procurement . First question come from Client will be, why I need to Implement / use Oracle Service Procurement when I have iProcurement and I can procure services using Oracle iProcurement.

Answer is very simple and most of the time I found it convincing client,

Yes using Purchase basis feature you can buy services using Oracle Core Purchasing or Oracle iProcurement without Service procurement e.g. User Can enter requisition to buy 5000 AED worth of services and flow will go something like  Quantity 5000 and the Price will be 1 AED so total value of services will be 5000 AED.

True Value Addition by Oracle Services Procurement in this area is more organized and streamlined buying of Services. Real advantage comes once you talk about Contingent Workers (very common in GCC region, everything other Person is contingent worked  J ).  User can buy contingent Labor using Service Procurement in a very structured way. Oracle Service procurement has Standard interface with Oracle Time Labor. Using this Time sheet entries get imported and automatically create the receipts against the Purchase Order and it works even more streamlined if you are in an organization who is using or intended to use Oracle Project Suite.

Bottom Line Service Procurement is primarily about managing contingent labor. It is also a key component of Complex  Procurement.

TIP:- Don’t waste your words in talking about Complex Service Procurement if client business has nothing to do with Complex procurement mean if there is no progress based payment, no Recoupment etc. then Sell service Procurement simply using Contingent Worker Example

Replacement of ETRM/IREP for Fusion Application is Oracle Enterprise Repository. You can access this using following link.
https://fusionappsoer.oracle.com/

Very simply this is a standalone catalog of technical information about Oracle’s Application products.  For E-Business Suite users it equates to the iRepository tool (http://irep.oracle.com/index.html), or for PeopleSoft its similar to the PeopleSoft Interactive Services Repository.

It contains a wealth of information, with the primary purpose of facilitating the creation of Application to Application integrations, and creating extensions and customizations. With this detailed technical knowledge of the inner workings and API’s available for Oracle Applications a better level of code reuse and overall accuracy can be achieved.

Access is available either from Oracle’s globally shared public OER instance, or as part of your local Fusion Application instance deployment. Detail on creating a local OER installation is found in Oracle Fusion Middleware Installation Guide for Oracle Enterprise Repository (E15745-07). The URL’s for OER will be:

• Your local instance URL: http://%5BFusionInstance%5D:%5Bport%5D/oer
• Oracle’s public instance URL: https://fusionappsoer.oracle.com

An OER login may be required, although Oracle’s public instance also supports guest access at this time.

OER catalogs technical components by various attributes, with the key ones being Name, Type, and Logical Business Area (LBA).  LBA is the lower level of the Fusion Applications Taxonomy and is used to tag each technical object with the feature and product that it is owned by and associated with.

The general keyword search actually uses indexes of all the fields/attributes associated with a entry.

Whilst the basic Asset Search should suffice in most cases, and is a simpler UI, the Browse feature (IE required) provides many powerful features and graphical views, including an object hierarchy and the Navigator to display objects related to each other

.

Oracle Enterprise Repository

How To Get The Most From Oracle Enterprise Repository For Troubleshooting Fusion Applications [ID 1399910.1]

There are many useful features that can be used with Fusion Procurement. Here are just some of the more significant examples:

• Both Serial and Parallel Approval for all document types.
• Various ways to configure responses, including features like first responder wins to help avoid lengthy processing times.
• Notification by email as well as several rich dashboard components (e.g. worklist) to show items currently awaiting action.
• Expiration, reminder and escalation features on pending actions.
• Delegation and vacation rules to forward actions to dedicated proxies as needed
• Rich notification content including clickable links to go directly to document details.
• Wide range of attribute values to use in the creation of custom approval processing rules.

Fusion Applications provides standard support for the following methods to derive the list of approvers

• Supervisor Hierarchy. This uses the HCM employee definition, leveraging the specific assignment of a supervisor person to each employee. AMX engine calls HCM to request the users that are in the hierarchy and passes in a starting position (normally the person submitting the purchasing document) and the maximum number of levels in the hierarchy to climb up.
• Position Hierarchy. This uses the Job definitions in HCM and selects all employees tied to the position that gets included in the selected hierarchy. Again this accepts the starting position (person) and the top job level to climb to before completing.
• Approval Group is simple a group of predefined people. This can be a static list or may be custom to generate at run-time based on approval document attribute data.
• Job Level. This works very similarly to the Position Hierarchy whereby it uses start and end Job definitions to traverse the hierarchy and select approvers.

Approvals Management (AMX) is an independent product that comes from the Fusion Middleware SOA Server, and provides general approval services to any product in Fusion Applications. AMX can be considered the meeting point between the powerful and flexible Oracle Business Rules capability and the advanced process control capabilities of Oracle Human Workflow.
The BPEL process that controls approvals has points at which it invokes the AMX services to initiate the approval process. The BPEL process controls the procurement process around approvals, however AMX and Human Workflow are responsible for the entire approval process.

AMX features include:

• The execution of rules that govern the selection and generation of approver lists.
• The sending of notifications to the participants on the generated list.
• The processing of responses from those approvers, and selection of appropriate next approval action.
• The return of the completion status back to the Procurement BPEL process for actioning.

Still eRecords and eSignatures are not supported by AMX in version 1.0.

For Complete Details Please refer to Document Approval in Fusion Procurement Products [ID 1319614.1]

This MOS Note will help consultants to find the exact Version and Patch level for installed components. This is very useful when you are logging an Oracle Service Request.  

OBIA: How to Find Software Versions and Patches in an Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Environment? [ID 1519745.1]

Good News Oracle Business Intelligence Application new version 7.9.6.4 is available to download.

Highlights of the Oracle BI Applications 7.9.6.4 Release:

• New Application – Oracle Manufacturing Analytics with pre-built adapters for EBS Process Manufacturing R12.x and EBS Discrete Manufacturing R12.x and 11.5.10
• New Application – Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Analytics with pre-built adapters for EBS R12.x, EBS 11.5.10 and IBM Maximo 7.5
• Universal Adapter to extend the capability to other source systems
• Certified for OBIEE 11g
• Certified for Exalytics
• Certified for DAC 11g including support for Exalytics / Times Ten, Patching Framework, Dual ETL Support and many other performance enhancements
• Native support for mobile and tablet devices
• Localized in 28 languages
• Supported on Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and Teradata DB
• Rollup patch resolving 122 BI Applications bugs

Good thing so many bugs are fixed. To get solution / work around,  me and my team spent days on Severity 1 Service Requests with Oracle.

OBIA 7.9.6.4: Bugs Fixed in 7.9.6.4 [ID 1528774.1]

Link to Download Software and Documentations

https://blogs.oracle.com/proactivesupportEPM/entry/oracle_bi_applications_obia_7

While Running Full load on Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6.3, when using Source system R12 TASK_GROUP_Load_PartyDimension failed with error Log says the issue is because “duplicate keys found”

Extract from the Log

**********************************************************************************************************************

CREATE INDEX:W_PARTY_D:W_PARTY_D_U1 has started.

ANOMALY INFO::: Error while executing : CREATE INDEX:W_PARTY_D:W_PARTY_D_U1
MESSAGE:::java.lang.Exception: Error while execution : CREATE UNIQUE INDEX
W_PARTY_D_U1
ON
W_PARTY_D
(
INTEGRATION_ID Asc
,DATASOURCE_NUM_ID Asc
,EFFECTIVE_FROM_DT Asc
)
NOLOGGING
with error DataWarehouse:CREATE UNIQUE INDEX
W_PARTY_D_U1
ON
W_PARTY_D
(
INTEGRATION_ID Asc
,DATASOURCE_NUM_ID Asc
,EFFECTIVE_FROM_DT Asc
)
NOLOGGING
ORA-01452: cannot CREATE UNIQUE INDEX; duplicate keys found
EXCEPTION CLASS::: java.lang.Exception

**********************************************************************************************************************

For Resolution:- Download and review the readme and pre-requisites for Patch.14085106.

Fusion Applications OTBI and Descriptive Flexfield

In Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence for Oracle Fusion applications a very good feature is to use DFF to make any analysis. It used to be very painful for any organization to make analysis based on DFF using BIAPPS. Now it’s just matter of few clicks and you are done.

What Oracle says “If a descriptive Flexfield is enabled for Oracle Business Intelligence, the Manage Descriptive Flexfields task displays a BI Enabled checkbox for each global, context, and context-sensitive segment. Select a segment’s BI Enabled checkbox to specify that the segment is available for use in Oracle Business Intelligence.”

a list of all the predefined “BI Enabled”  DFFs available in Oracle Metalink Note Fusion Applications Business Intelligence – List of Descriptive Flex Field Mappings [ID 1509316.1]

A very informative Post by Rajesh Dhanapal from Infosys.

In the current era the customers are not interested to wait for months and years for BI project implementation. The customers are keen on quick wins rather than implementing the BI solution from scratch by following traditional BI approach. The Oracle BI Apps solution provides head start for the organisation to reach the to-be state quicker with reduced time and effort, and reduced risk.Read Details

Rapid Ascent. Breakneck Speed. Lightning Fast. Perhaps even overwhelming. No matter which set of adjectives we use to describe it, social media’s rise into the enterprise mainstream has been unprecedented. Indeed, the big 4 social media powerhouses (Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter), have nearly 2 Billion users between them.

You may be asking (as you should really) “That’s all well and good for the consumer, but for me at my company, what’s your point? Beyond the fact that I can check and post updates, that is.”

Good question, kind sir.

Read Details on

https://blogs.oracle.com/applications/entry/the_future_of_project_management