OracleApps Epicenter

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 introduces Online Patching (OLP) using the new adop (AD Online Patching) utility. This replaces adpatch , that means adpatch is no longer supported in R12.2 for direct use.

In 12.2 all patching operations are online, that means:

• EBS will remain available to users during patching operations
• Online users share resources for example Users can enter expense reports while Payables is being patched
• Revenue generating activities were to stay online like Web Orders,Booking Orders,Service Requests
• Downtime required by any patch was predictable
• Patching CANNOT affect the running application
  • Data model changes (tables, indexes…)
  • Code changes ( pl/sql, views, c code, java code…)

This is DBA stuff, but in intrest of subject you can simply understand the Online Patching cycle consists of the following phases:

• Prepare a virtual copy (patch edition) of the running application (run edition).
• Apply patches to the patch edition of the application.
• Finalize the system in readiness for the cutover phase.
• Cutover to the patch edition and make it the new run edition.
• Cleanup obsolete definitions or data to recover space.

The way it works is any patch application occurs on the Patch copy while users are accessing the Run Copy and performing routine transactions.

At one of the many phases of the adop utility called cutover, the application gets restarted and it changes the File System Role for Patch.

The Patch Copy becomes the run copy and the run copy becomes the patch copy . This is where you will require a few minutes of downtime, but is significantly less than the full downtime required to apply a patch or patches.

Business Benefits of Online Patching

• Removes barriers to uptake
• Much easier to negotiate downtime with lines of business
• Much easier to identify downtime windows as they are so brief
• Applications stays online during patch application

Therefore, Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 Online Patching provides a smooth, predictable patching process that dramatically reduces maintenance downtimes while ensuring business continuity

You can refer to Metalink support note #1583902.1 on Online Patching FAQ

So WHAT IS "ORACLE FUSION"?

People often get confuse with this term .To start with, it will be a good idea to know the difference between Fusion Applications and Middleware. Oracle Fusion is composed of two parts: Fusion middle ware and Fusion applications.

1. Oracle Fusion Middle ware aka FMW : Comprises of the Oracle Application Server and other technology stack components that Oracle has acquired in past few years.
   • Fusion Middleware is a family of middleware products covering areas like BI, Identity Management, Content Management and SOA.
   • Each of these areas has it's own stack of products. Fusion Middleware was previously called Oracle Application Server.
2. Oracle Fusion Applications ....you can called as ERP module for Fusion : Oracle Fusion Applications is Oracle's next generation suite of applications that eventually replace E-Business Suite. It will assimilate best of breed features from:
   • E-Business Suite
   • JD Edwards
   • PeopleSoft
   • Siebel.

Fusion Applications is build on top of the Oracle Fusion Middleware technology stack using Oracle's Fusion Architecture as blueprint.

Therefore Fusion you can be refer to any of three things Middleware, Application, Architecture.With this Oracle is not only moving to the next generation technology stack like SOA, BPEL, BAM, JSF, Ajax, ESB, etc, but will also bring together the best in class underpinnings, of each of the incumbent suites, like Business Structure, Security Model, Workflow Process, and Event Models which you will find in later part of discussion.Before let have a quick look on Oracle's Fusion Architecture .

ORACLE FUSION ARCHITECTURE

Oracle Fusion Architecture (OFA) is a standards-based technology reference architecture or blueprint for building applications. Note that Oracle Fusion Architecture is not a product, and can be used without licensing it from Oracle. Many organizations use it to write applications that can run on Oracle Fusion Middleware or that compliment Oracle Fusion Applications.[Adopted http://www.oracle.com]

Oracle Fusion Architecture is based on the following core principles:

• Model Driven: For applications, business processes and business information
• Service & Event- enabled: For extensible, modular, flexible applications and processes
• Information Centric: For complete and consistent, actionable, real-time intelligence
• Grid-Ready: Must be scalable, available, secure, manageable on low-cost hardware
• Standards-based: Must be open, pluggable in a heterogeneous environment

The Oracle Fusion Architecture’s SOA and EDA(event-driven architecture) technology consists of

• An integrated service environment (ISE) to develop services
• A multi-protocol enterprise service bus (ESB) to integrate applications
• A services registry for discovering and managing the life cycle of services
• A BPEL-based orchestration engine to tie services into business processes
• A business rules engine to enable business policies to be captured and automated
• A Web services management and security solution to enforce authentication and authorization policies on services and to monitor services and processes for compliance to SLAs

Combining all you can see the Architectural presentation as fig below:

Fusion Middleware Component for E-Business Suite

In the Fusion Middleware of E-Business Suite, here are the list of components :

On the technology front, Fusion Applications is completely developed using Fusion Middleware 11g on Oracle database 11g. Here is the list of technologies used in developing Fusion Applications:

• BI Publisher
• Application Integration Architecture (AIA)
• Applications Development Framework (ADF)
• Applications Server
• Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)
• Content Management
• Database 11g
• Enterprise Manager
• Fusion apps are metadata driven which is managed by the MDS
  framework

let summarize these all in various components and products and tools

WHAT IS IN FUSION V1.0 ORACLE FUSION APPLICATIONS

Oracle Fusion Applications offer a complete suite spanning seven critical business areas consist of 100+ Oracle Fusion Applications modules which is targeted for first release.These are distributed across the following product families: 34 - Sales & Marketing; 21 - Human Resources; 13 - Financials; 6 - Purchasing; 7 - Projects Portfolio Management; 10 - Supply Chain Management; and 10 - Governance, Risk and Compliance. Majors are:

• Financial management
• Supply chain management
• Procurement
• Human capital management
• Project portfolio management
• Sales
• Governance, risk, and compliance
• Enterprise performance management

 

Not is scope so far(v1.0) are CRM(Service, Call Centre, Order Capture), SCM(Core Manufacturing, Manufacturing Execution),Industry(Public Sector -encumbrance accounting, etc.)

When Fusion is coming out

Hoping Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle Fusion Applications in the sometime in first quarter of this year

Fusion V1 & Fusion V2 functionality

Fusion V2 will be more likly to be more focused for Manufacturing, Supply Chain gaps, more localizations,and public sector functionality

MIGRATION TO ORACLE FUSION APPLICATIONS

The Oracle Fusion Applications platform was built with flexibility in mind,so companies can selectively add modules if and when it makes business
sense.

With the initial release of Oracle Fusion Applications likely focused on point solutions, most users will be concerned with how to integrate Oracle Fusion Applications into their core applications. This will be a substantially easier effort than migrating the entire core functionality

There are options/proposed path which can observed in various Oracle papers.

Here’s a plan for IT side which may be consider to be crafted roadmap for the future of enterprise applications

1. Continue on Your Current Path .That mean you need to evaluate the latest Applications Unlimited releases Oracle Applications releases such as Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3, PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.1, Siebel Customer Relationship Management 8.2, and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1 for the additional value they bring to the businesse .In addition to gaining value today, you will be in a position to upgrade to Oracle Fusion Applications in the future, if and when you choose.
   • EBS -> Fusion Apps
   • PeopleSoft Financials to Fusion Apps
   • PeopleSoft HRMS to Fusion Apps
   • Siebel CRM to Fusion Apps
2. Move to Fusion Step by Step . You need to adopt standards-based technology first. Consider Oracle Fusion Middleware as inhouse new initative and developing skill sets in technologies such as Oracle Application Development Framework, Oracle content management products, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle WebCenter. These tools will help you integrate, extend, and manage your applications environment today and prepare you to add Oracle Fusion Applications if and when you choose by upgrading one environment and then reimplement rest what ever/when ever.
3. Upgrade to Fusion Applications . Decide(if and when appropriate.)
   If you use any functionality that is not part of V1 but still see business value in going to Fusion Apps, this may result in multiple Fusion Apps instances.
4. Adopt a coexistence strategy . Add Oracle Fusion Applications modules to your existing environment or implement “pillars” (human capital management, sales, financials, or supply chain management applications whatever suits) to extend the power of Oracle Fusion Applications into your applications portfolio.

Product Supported Release for Fusion Upgrade

• E-Business Suite :Release 11.5.10, 12 or later
• PeopleSoft: Release 8.8, 8.0, 9.0 or later
• JD Edwards EnterpriseOne: Release 8.11, 8.12 or later 34
• JD Edwards World Release: A7.3, A8.1, A9.1 or later Siebel Release 7.9, 8.0 or later

You can refer to this for details http://www.oracle.com/support/library/brochure/lifetime-support-applications.pdf.

SKILL REQUIREMENT FOR FUSION SPACE

Inhouse IT as well as Consulting companies need skill such as BPM and process governance, to manage an Oracle Fusion Applications implementation.

The following technical skills are need to extend, maintain and support the various components of Oracle Fusion Applications:

• SQL, PL/SQL, JAVA & java script
• XML – Extended Markup Language
• CSS – Cascading Style Sheets
• XSL – Extensible Style sheet Language
• ADF – Application Development Framework
• JSF – Java Server Faces
• Web Services
• BPEL – Business Process Execution Language
• AIA – Application Integration Architecture
• Web Center
• BI Publisher
• OBIEE – Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
• Hyperion Essbase
• WebLogic Server Administration
• Oracle Identity Management

Meanwhile you can keep reading Floyd Teter blog(see right handside blogroll) for more updates & thoughts from Fusion side.

Next few days, will share some more thoughts on hands-On perspective on Oracle Fusion Applications application business modules.until then keep watching this space.:)

If you hear this term first time , read previous post on Fusion and underline application.

Fusion Application announcement came last year prior to OOW 2010.Though fusion application suite is not ready for sale to the public yet, but Oracle Fusion Applications for Finance has many new capabilities that will be welcomed not just by Finance professionals but by line-of-business managers and employees.

Oracle Fusion Financials

The first release of Oracle Fusion Applications Financials covers general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable and collection Management, fixed assets, cash management and employee expenses. As mention is earlier post encumbrance and commitment accounting along with treasury management which included Cash management is excluded from the first version release.

Comparing with existing Oracle ERP(Oracle EBS, people soft like wise) with Fusion ERP, there would be significant Key differentiators.

Key Differentiators feature for Oracle Fusion Financials

Here would like to highlight a few features and capabilities that appeared to be significantly better and different from the other Oracle application suites.

1. Focus on simplified & intuitive user experience: After user logs into the system, based on the roles and privileges he has, a landing page would appear with relevant dashboards and areas to perform his day-to-day activities. No more switching back and forth between responsibilities (like Oracle EBS), all necessary data, transaction information, activities to perform, required analytics, navigation are pushed to him in one single page !!! A General Accounting Dashboard is such a great feature as you can see below:
   1. 
2. Rich User Interface with web 2.0 features for enhanced user experience
3. Integrated Business Analytical layer for better & Faster decision making: This is yet another beauty, where users no longer need to hunt for IT support/in-house IT or run reports in order to get analytical information out of data/transactions. The system shows relevant analytics data on the same page along with transactions when necessary which helps users to make better and faster decisions. This Superior reporting capabilities is enhanced by :
   • Simplified reporting platform natively built on top of a multi-dimensional data model (Multi dimensional Essbase cube has been
     introduced in Fusion Accounting)
   • Single step posting to multi-dimensional balances pre-aggregated at every level, that empower user to see
     • Journals : they can view projected account balances before posting
     • Payables Invoices : they can view supplier holds , identify previously matched lines to prevent overbilling & errors
     • Receivables Receipts : they can Intelligently apply receipts with rules-driven recommendations .
   • Self service and interactive reporting support live drilldowns to source transactions (Even to transactions from non-Fusion ERPs)
   • 
   • If you looks at the above figure you can find these component (left hand side) in diagram
     1. OTBI: Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (used for ad-hoc and transactional data analysis)
     2. OBIA: Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (Used for historic and trend analysis)
     3. BIP: Business Intelligence Publisher (Standard reporting with variety of formats)
     4. Account Monitor, Account Inspector, Smart View (Excel based): Used for ad-hoc analysis and inquiry on financial data
4. Role based Structure for better compliance and security across the organization: Based on the common business practices, various roles have been defined in the system and each role will have certain permission and privilege to perform certain activities. Based on the role user plays in the business, appropriate system roles will be assigned to him. Moreover, apart from hundreds of seeded roles, flexiblity to configure them as per your business needs is still there.
5. Co-Existence Capability: Certain functionalities of Fusion Application are made available to co exist with Application Unlimited systems (EBS, PeopleSoft, JDE,Siebel etc). By integrating such fusion application features with existing ERP systems, customers can leverage certain fusion application features without compromising their existing investments in Application Unlimited ERP systems.
6. Extension ability of data model and user interface which allows users to handle their business requirements without customizing the application.
7. Uncompromised consistency throughout the Applications: Amazingly consistent design and architecture across all Applications functions enhances user productivity to a great extent. Moreover, it also reduces the maintenance and enhancement costs as well.
8. Tight integration with desktop tools: Spreadsheet integration Is another beauty in the application that minimize data entry errors processed data with Fusion.This not only minimize data entry also provide a familiar environment that is highly efficient for user since long time.
9. Embedded Out-of-the-box imaging integration : Oracle Imaging and Process Management provides an integrated document management capability to support accounts payable invoice automations. This will reduce workload by eliminating paper-based processes
10. Best of Basic architectural concept : If you recall Key accounting flex field concept of EBS , Ledger Concept of R12 Financial architectural that is coupled with Peoplesoft tree structures and effective dates concept, that makes Fusion is best of breed. This also armed with use of the Oracle Essbase multidimensional database to hold aggregate GL balances.
11. Multiple balancing segments :You can create balance sheet and other Management reporting package across multiple business dimension

Benefits to EBS Financials Users

Financial user can still can find lot many benefit with Fusion Financial application other than Differentiators mention above.Some of them are:

• Graphical hierarchies (trees)
• Shared reference data (SetId)
• Centralized inter-unit setup and processing
• Rules-based engine for AP matching
• Open item reconciliation processing
• Comprehensive budgetary controls
• Multi-level, flexible cash positioning
• Travel authorizations and cash advances

Hope this post helps you gain a better understanding of Fusion Applications functionality and help to establish a roadmap which you might be thinking for your company/customer in Fusion area.Lets hear more updated from Oracle on this in next few months :)

.

Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management is a modular suite of applications designed to work as a complete enterprise project portfolio management (PPM) solution or as extensions to your existing PPM applications portfolio.

Till date, if you take any project management tools , it's never been complete pacakge in all sense. Some may have excellent accounting and process integration for cost collection and billing, but lacked project management functionality like scheduling. Other’s lacked processing functionalities. Some of them have excellent analytical capablity but have lacking transaction processing capabilities or scheduling functionality.

If you consider PMI Standard for Portfolio Management, "PPM is the centralized management of one or more portfolios, which includes identifying, prioritizing, authorizing, managing, and controlling projects, programs, and other related work, to achieve specific strategic business objectives."

Fusion PPM will be promises for a one-stop shop for project managers. It creates an environment where Project Managers can execute the entire project life-cycle without looking for information from other sources. It will establish standardization, improve efficiency and generate competitiveness. Oracle Fusion PPM (aka Project Portfolio Management) is going to be a major step towards creating a best in class PPM solution covering all aspects of

• Project Costing
• Project Billing
• Project Control
• Project Performance Reporting
• Project Integration Gateway
• Project Analytics-KPI
• Integrated project, financial and contract management(the first integration will be Primavera)
• Optimized and streamlined project delivery
• Comprehensive project planning, execution, control and scheduling solution

Some of the Fusion PPM features deferred for future release are:

• Staffing
• Resource Management
• Grants Management
• Project Scheduling
• Portfolio Analysis
• Cross-Charges
• Earned Value Management

Some of the key features of Fusion Apps –PPM which will impress to everyone are:

1. Improved Usability: PPM enhances user productivity and reduces support costs
2. Embedded Business Intelligence: Improves decision making by answering key business questions while users enter transactions
3. PM Operational Dashboard: Provides near real-time project financial information & exception-based management . see the details in next section
4. Cost Collection Center: Reduces integration costs and provides a consistent user interface across products
5. Contract Based Project Billing: Cuts down on billing errors and improves flexibility of internal project execution
6. Social Project management: Improves communication and collaboration by creating a community for the project team
7. Co Existence with Primavera P6: Allows customers to adopt Fusion applications incrementally based on business needs

A note on PM Operational Dashboard

The key features embedded as part of Project Manager's dashboard in Fusion is called "project scorecard", this they can use to Track and review the overall health a project.

• Capability to view performance at project, task, resource level and by time phases
• Easy access to information, no more navigation across modules and spreadsheets to get the data
• Exception based management, pushing of error/exception to Project Manager for corrective action
• Performance Measures to enable viewing the data according to the context
• Cross-project comparison for various performance measures
• Availability of real time project financial data
• A graphical and tabular overview of performance
• Simpler user interfaces with global search and drill down capability

Integration with Other Application

In addition to Core Financial Management applications, the first release of Oracle Fusion Applications includes Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and Procurement.There is two-way synchronization with Microsoft Project .There is integration with Oracle Fusion Applications Enterprise Contract Management for contract-related data.

This integration will bring lot of advantage

1. Integrated with back office finance operation for Project Financial activity
2. Project Manager Dashboard with Cross-project insights gives better drill down capability
3. Billing & Revenue recognition by contract , makes independent
4. Cost collection and there processing will be faster because of timely insight into validated Project cost

Overall its look Fusion PPM has been designed, keeping in mind the needs of a project intensive organization.

Similar Post

• Oracle Fusion Financials Application
• Oracle Fusion and Oracle Fusion Applications : Overview

Oracle Reference for more details

• Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management
• Oracle Fusion Center

As mention previouly Fusion Applications follows a modular, standards-based architecture, natively built on Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g components and use the Oracle Database as per fig below.

Fig 1: Oracle Fusion Applications Architecture ( Source www.oracle.com)

Lets do a quick recap of some of the key components.

1. Oracle Fusion Applications includes the following product families, or collections of products that are associated with a functional area:

• Oracle Fusion Financials manages financial flows, including assets, ledgers, cash cycle, invoices and payments, accounts receivable, collections, and setup of subledger accounting and tax configuration.
• Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management provides employee management for an organization.
• Oracle Fusion Procurement manages the procurement process including requisitions, purchase orders, and supplier negotiations.
• Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management manages projects, including how to plan, budget, forecast, collect costs, bill customers, and report performance.
• Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management integrates and automates all key supply chain processes, from design, planning and procurement to manufacturing and fulfillment, providing a complete solution set to enable companies to power information-driven value chains.
• Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management manages customers, contacts, and resources, including data quality configuration.
• Oracle Fusion Governance, Risk, and Compliance integrates business intelligence, process management, and automated controls enforcement to enable sustainable risk and compliance management.
• Oracle Fusion Setup is a special product family for supporting the other product families for
  • setting up functional data, this product family includes applications to assist application users . Read this.
  • Oracle Fusion Home page thats provides a Welcome dashboard with a collection of portlets and task flows for answering common questions.
  • Oracle Fusion Applications Help delivers the content that users require in order to complete their tasks. You can have install a local version of Oracle Fusion Applications Help, enabling you to extend and customize the help.

Similar to OracleApps each product family is based on a common Oracle Fusion Applications data model and services.

Normally each product family contain one or more Java EE applications that are specific to Oracle Fusion Applications and deployed to Oracle WebLogic Server. An application can contain multiple products, and a product can also span multiple applications.

A product typically has a one-to-one correspondence with an Enterprise Archive (EAR) file . Similar to EarSales.ear which is an application and Sales is a product.

2.Oracle Fusion Middleware

Oracle Fusion Middleware, comprising the following:

• Oracle Fusion Middleware infrastructure components : This will have common core framework and infrastructure components as:
  • Oracle Fusion Middleware Extensions for Applications
  • Oracle Enterprise Scheduler
  • Oracle Enterprise Crawl and Search Framework
  • Oracle Fusion Functional Setup Manager
• Oracle Fusion Middleware components:The applications for a product family are deployed to an Oracle WebLogic Server domain in the Oracle Fusion Middleware technology stack
  • Oracle WebLogic Server
  • Oracle WebLogic Communication Services
  • Oracle Identity Management
  • Oracle WebCenter
  • Oracle Business Intelligence
  • Oracle SOA Suite
  • Oracle Application Development Framework
  • Oracle JDeveloper
  • Oracle HTTP Server
  • Oracle WebGate
  • Oracle Web Services Manager Policy Manager
  • Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite
  • Oracle Data Integrator
  • Oracle Secure Enterprise Search
• Oracle WebLogic Server

Check it out for more details in this post.

3. Oracle Database

Oracle Fusion Applications uses the Oracle Database to store and retrieve all transactional and reference data and to store design time data in repositories.

The transactional database contains both applications and middleware schemas, seed data, the tablespaces, and all other required packages.

Similar Post

• Oracle's Co-Existence Strategy
• BI in Oracle's Fusion Applications : An Quick Overview
• Fusion's Functional Setup Manager
• Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management - A Brief Overview
• Oracle Fusion Procurement
• Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management
• Oracle Fusion Financials Application
• Oracle Fusion and Oracle Fusion Applications : Overview

In fusion , in order to try any customizations and extensions , you need an environment for testing, before deploying to Production.In Fusion World this is magaed via SandBox Manager. The other terminology you need to get expose is Composer.

Sandbox Manager is a tool that provides a place where users can define and design their changes before putting them into production.

The three types of sandboxes are avaiable

• Metadata, such as non-flexfield UI page customizations :This sandbox supports making changes to the application's metadata stored in the MDS repository.
• Security :This sandbox supports making data security changes.
• Generated flexfields based business components

Sandbox Manager has the following features:

• This stored all changes in the sandbox
• You can have sandboxes to specfic to a user
• Can have many sandboxes running (different users) at the same time
• Make changes over a period of time (long-running sandbox)
• All documents changed can be saved or reverted with one operation
• Migrate sandbox in its entirety from test to production

Usually , there are two types of sandboxes:

• Sandboxes intended to be published.
• Sandboxes intended for "test-only" purposes.

Hope this helps. Next will explore more on "Composer"

What is Digital asset management (DAM)

From Wikipedia ...A digital asset is any form of content and/or media that have been formatted into a binary source which include the right to use it. A digital file without the right to use it is not an asset.

Digital assets are categorised in three major groups which may be defined as textual content (digital assets), images (media assets) and multimedia (media assets)

Not to forgot, DAM as Digital Asset = Digital Content + Usage Rights

That means means, Digital asset management (DAM) is a business process or a software tool for organizing the creation, management, distribution and archiving of a rich media asset. Rich media assets include photos, music, videos, animations, podcasts and other multimedia content.Look the DAM in another Way.

Typical Activities in DAM

Consider these kind of question

• As a marketing Manager I need to find an approved product image to create a new ad campaign…
• As a PR team for the company e-com Site I need to prepare the upcoming summer catalog
• As a content manager I need to manage the “official” repository of “approved” product images…

if you are able to answer above requset then you can easily figure out , what activity is needed for DAM solution.So below is list for Typical activity required in DAM.

 

Manage	Transform	Deliver
Ingest/bulk load source assets Classify & describe assets (cataloging & metadata) Ingestion services (rights, policies, renditions)	Find/Search/Request Collect / Create / Assemble Produce / Review & Approve	Publish / Notify Present the content in the different channels

Oracle Digital asset management

Oracle Digital Asset Management enables organizations to quickly and easily access, manage, share, optimize and re-use corporate digital assets, such as training videos, conference call recordings, movie trailers, commercials, depositions and corporate branding graphics and images.

This is built upon the core Oracle server foundation, providing additional functionality specific to image transformations, formatting and compression, enhanced audio and video streaming, and automatic thumbnail generation.

The Oracle Digital Asset Management bundle includes the following products.

• Digital Asset Manager - Image Manager: Digital Asset Manager adds the ability to create multiple renditions (conversions) for each image. Users can easily access the appropriate size and format for PPT, the Web, or other collateral. Supports input formats such as JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, PSD, and BMP; as well as output formats such as JPG, GIF, PNG, and PSD. Image metadata is extracted and associated with the content item as object metadata.
• Digital Asset Manager - Video Manager: Digital Asset Manager adds the ability to create multiple stream able proxies for each video. Users can easily access the appropriate format and size for their client, network, and viewing needs. Output formats include Real, Windows Media Format, QuickTime, and others. Thumbnails are extracted and presented as a drill down storyboard; closed caption text is extracted and included in the Oracle search index.
• PDF Converter: This enables the automatic publishing of native business content to web viewable PDF. Upon check-in of new business content, a PDF rendition of the native format is generated. This PDF rendition allows web viewing of that business content without the need for the native application.
• TIFF Converter: Tiff Converter automatically converts TIFF images to PDF format upon check-in to the Content Server for easy viewing of legacy content. The conversion of the released TIFF image can occur on the client side or server side and uses the Adobe Acrobat Capture technology. With TIFF Conversion, users can easily view and access managed legacy content (scanned documents) via a browser with the Adobe Reader. Additionally, during the TIFF to PDF conversion, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is performed - enabling users to perform full-text searches of managed TIFF files in the Content Server.
• XML Converter: Oracle XML Converter enables the automatic publishing of native business content to XML format. Upon check-in of new business content, conversion to a XML DTD or user defined DTD, can be configured to occur. This XML file can then be accessed from other Enterprise Applications, as well as dynamically rendered to HTML using the Dynamic Converter.

How it Works

When digital assets such as images and videos are ingested into the Oracle system, a number of additional renditions of varying file formats, resolutions, sizes, etc. are automatically generated allowing users to download and use images without reformatting or requiring the use of native applications such as Photoshop for resizing and perhaps impacting your brand.

The original (native) file is available as well as other additional renditions that were auto-generated into jpg and png formats with varying properties such as size, resolution, color, etc. The number and properties of each rendition are completely configurable. Users can add the graphics they need to utilize and download .

When videos are ingested, renditions along with storyboards are auto-generated .

Catering both all set of Business user

For the business user

Once content is created, the Oracle Digital Asset Management system gives the user multiple options for checking the file into the repository.

All check-in methods (browser-based, WebDAV, integrations with desktop applications, etc.) can automate processes - such as file transformations, multiple renditions of a file being generated, approval requirements, thumbnail generations, etc. - that used to be completed manually.

Oracle Image Converter can quickly reformat an image to the appropriate size, shape, resolution or aspect ratio, alleviating the need to maintain heavy, expensive publishing tools on desktops.

For the IT administrator

Oracle Digital Asset Management provides Web-based administrative functions and a flexible architectural framework to meet the needs of your organization with one solution.

Web-based administrative functions include the ability to easily stop and start servers, edit security permissions, customize metadata, create workflows and view server logs, regardless of your location.

Tech Stack

The Oracle solution is Java-based, easily customizable, rapidly deployable, enterprise scalable and can integrate with other processes and applications, such as portals, CRM and ERP systems.

In Summary, take away

Oracle Digital Asset Management automates routine tasks and provides robust functionality to effectively manage your rich media files.

• Easily view and reuse digital assets: This is done via storyboard tree allows immediate viewing of specific video scenes.
• Create thumbnails automatically to easily search and retrieve files: Increase efficiency by allowing end users to find information quickly via searching for both text and utilizing visual recognition.
• Save storage space and decrease bandwidth usage by compressing files: Save time by significantly compressing large files and utilizing bandwidth more efficiently.
• Convert legacy images to Web-friendly formats: View older files without needing older desktop applications.
• Reduce manual steps in creating multiple renditions: Automatically create multiple formats of a corporate image or video and create additional formats on the fly.
• Control access to corporate brand assets: Easily control security permissions surrounding access to brand assets. Manage only one copy of corporate assets.
• Make corporate audio and video sessions available via the Web: Enable quick and easy browser-based access to presentations, recording presentations, e-learning files, documents, etc.

Before start of this intrested topic, lets have some basics with Q & A.

Q.-What is Business Process?

"A business process is a set of linked activities performed by people and systems that deliver some kind of value through a product or service to internal or external customers."

A simplest example is : Ex: bringing a new employee onboard or receiving an order form from a customer

Q.-What is Business Process Management?

BPM is defined as a strategy for managing and improving the performance of a business through continuous optimization of business processes in a closed loop,cycle of modeling, execution,and measurement.

Q. Then What is Oracle BPM suite...

The Oracle BPM Suite provides an integrated environment for developing, administering, and using business applications centered on business processes.

The Oracle BPM Suite enables you to create process models based on standards with user-friendly applications.

It also enables collaboration between process developers and process analysts.

Oracle BPM supports BPMN 2.0 and BPEL across the process lifecycle starting from modeling and implementation to run time and monitoring.

The Oracle BPM Suite provides a seamless integration of all stages of the application development life cycle from design-time and implementation to run-time and application management.

The Oracle BPM Suite is layered on the Oracle SOA Suite and shares many of the same product components, including:

• Business Rules
• Human Workflow
• Oracle Adapter Framework for Integration
• Spring Components
• Oracle Web Service Manager

Oracle BPM 11g

Simplifies achieving process management success by delivering a complete solution with a unified process foundation, user-centric design, and social BPM interaction via

This simplifies achieving process management success by delivering a complete solution with a unified process foundation, user-centric design, and social BPM interaction as figure 1 ( source oracle.com)

Fig 1: Oracle BPM suite 11G

BPM Technical Architecture

In order to perform four key things like

• Process modeling
• Process simulation
• Process execution
• Process analytics

Oracle BPM Architecture is best described as

Fig 2:Oracle BPM Architecture

whereas Oracle BPM 11g Technical Architecture is best described as per fig 3.

Fig 3: BPM Suite 11G Technical Architecture

Meet some of Key things for Oracle BPM Suites

THE ORACLE BUSINESS PROCESS COMPOSER

The Oracle Business Process Composer is a web-based application that enables business users to collaborate with process developers and designers.

The Oracle Business Process Composer:

BPM WORKSPACE

This is rich and customizable task and worklist interface

This give a high productivity for end-users to manage their tasks

Custom views, processing rules and simple administration for worklist tasks

PROCESS ANALYTICS

Business Process Analytics enables you to monitor the performance of your deployed processes.

It measures the key performance indicators in your project and stores them in pre-defined cubes in the database that enable you to analyze the data in multiple perspectives

THE ORACLE BPM STUDIO

Oracle BPM Studio is a component of the Oracle BPM Suite that enables process developers to create process-based applications.

This enables process analysts and developers to model and simulate business processes.

Oracle BPM Studio comes with Oracle JDeveloper IDE and shares the JDeveloper user interface elements used by the Oracle SOA Suite.

The JDeveloper environment can be customized based on the role selected by the user.

Oracle BPM Studio includes the Analyst Role which only includes process design elements that are useful to business analysts.

Process developers who need access to the complete functionality of the Oracle BPM and SOA Suites should use the default role.

Next post we will be on Roles and Responsiblity used in BPM

“Big Data” is an emerging & continues to be the topic of much discussion and hype.There are some staunch believers of this and there are some who dismiss this as a bubble destined to subside. Companies such as facebook and amazon are already using this. Lets try to understand this whole thing.

WHY BIG DATA?

Take a look on statistics first for Big Data

Web Scale

• 50 billion web pages
• 800 million Facebook users
• 1000 million Facebook pages
• 200 million Twitter accounts
• 100 million tweets per day
• 5 billion Google queries per day
• Millions of servers, Petabytes of data

Varieties of Data

• Video / Audio
• Images / Pictures
• Diverse internal and external data

Sources of Data

• News / Feeds / Blogs / forums
• Groups / Polls / Chats / Wiki

That means world today is generating data at a frenetic pace. Statistics are available on the net that the data is doubled in every X days. The good thing about this data is that it is available and potentially contains useful information. What’s not so good is how to process this information and use it effectively.

The market place has become competitive and will be becoming more in years to come. The key to growth (and survival) is innovation. Big Data can help in uncover the strategies which can help in making the difference. Big Data though, is not a “magic wand” or “one size fits all” approach, rather it will require careful strategising and planning to achieve something tangible. The following sections will discuss the various facets.

Big data can be defined as data which has:(Four V’s of Big Data Consideration)

1. velocity
2. volume
3. variety and
4. value.

The world is producing data with great velocity.Fact reported by IDC is Worldwide digital content will double in 18 months, and every 18 months thereafter.

We heard nowadays that petabytes do not amaze us anymore. As per The Economist In 2005, humankind created 150 exabytes of information. In 2011, 1,200 exabytes were be created

The data is varied today, as well, e.g. structured, semi structured and complex. As Gartner, 80% of enterprise data will be unstructured, spanning traditional and non traditional sources

The fourth one, value, is not so straightforward. The value is something whose unlocking is important.

THE BIG DATA DIFFERENCE

Big data is like traditional data in many ways: It must be captured, stored, organized, and analyzed, and the results of the analysis need to be integrated into established processes and influence how the business operates.

But because big data comes from relatively new types of data sources that previously weren’t mined for insight, companies aren’t accustomed to collecting information from these sources, nor are they used to dealing with such large volumes of unstructured data. Therefore, much of the information available to enterprises isn’t captured or stored for long-term analysis, and opportunities for gaining insight are missed.

USES OF BIG DATA

Typical Example of Big data usage are :

• Log Analytics & Storage
• Smart Grid / Smarter Utilities
• RFID Tracking & Analytics
• Fraud / Risk Management & Modeling
• 360° View of the Customer
• Warehouse Extension
• Email / Call Center Transcript Analysis
• Call Detail Record Analysis

WHICH KIND OF INDUSTRY IS DRIVERS FOR BIG DATA

• Finance
• Telecommunication
• Media
• Life science
• Retail
• Govt

CHALLENGE & OPPORTUNITY

Analysis of big data including new types of data that haven’t been analyzed before , challange is to provides a deeper level of insight into what customers are thinking and how the business operates. The potential payoffs are improving customer retention, selling individual customers more products, and producing items with higher quality and lower rates of return. Studies show that, with proper use, big data can really improve the bottom line to make an impact on overall profitability.

Organizations can well today with Big Data if they succeed in defining

1. What they want
2. They understand about the data they need
3. They understand the data that they have which can be used.
4. They know where to look for the data which they need.

The first and foremost on the list is defining the problem. Once you have this then the next stage of understanding and getting data can be achieved. This requires investment, intellectual, financial and time.

The next stage is analysis once you have your data with you. This analysis should be something which can aid you invgetting what you want and help you with the business.

BIG DATA VENDORS

Big Data is a $70 billion industry and growing at a rapid rate of 15% to 20% a year. In our view, this helps put to rest the notion that ‘Big Data’ is just a fanciful marketing term. Big Data developments will be perhaps the most critical new marketplace for storage solutions providers in the coming decade. [Reference EMC]

ORACLE & BIG DATA

Oracle offers integrated enterprise-ready big data platform, which includes the Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle Big Data Connectors, Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine. By integrating and optimizing the technologies needed to acquire, organize, analyze and decide on big data, Oracle has made it very easy to jumpstart and maintain big data projects.

AT LAST

The World Economic Forum recently declared big data as an asset class.

What are the implications of making better sense of large amounts of unstructured data to uncover business opportunities, strategies, and more.

Is it really an emerging market with lots of innovation, startups, job creation? Or hype. The facts show penetration within the largest FMCG Consumer companies and Social Networks.

Why is it suddenly possible? What are the technical and organizational obstacles, and the most promising areas of opportunity?

What is Oracle doing?

How could we link Oracle Oracle Advanced Analytics BI with HADOOP?

Herewith look forward to start a discussion about BIG DATA .

One unique aspect of a global implementation is that multiple locations may use the same system at the same time.

What if , You need to implement Timezones for each Legal entity like US, UK, Singapore and China in your Global single Instance.

Business transactions need to be accounted for in the correct period, in particular for financial transactions such as invoicing, collections,
etc. In addition, global instances with locations in vastly different geographical regions need the ability to close each location at period end in their own time zone.Therefore , you need to have understanding for Time Zone Features in EBS R12.

Date Fields in Oracle E-Business Suite can be classified under these broad categories

Standard Oracle provides three Time Zone features that can be used:

• Doc ID 402650.1 -UPTZ User-Preferred Time Zone Support in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12
• Doc ID 726851.1 -LETZ (Legal Entity Timezone)

Oracle offers a broad portfolio of products to help enterprises acquire, manage, and integrate big data with existing information, with the goal of achieving a complete view of business in the fastest, most reliable, and cost effective way .

Oracle's Big Data Appliance, and Oracle Big Data Connectors is one such solution and portfolio of products bundled together to provide an integrated solution. The good about Oracle Big Data Appliance comes with fact that the process of Acquire, Organize and Analyze work quite closely with their proven Oracle RDBMS technology and thus gives Enterprises flexibility to cover SQL and NoSQL (Key-Value store databases for unstructured, semi-structured data) within the horizon of their analytical needs.

The Oracle Big Data Appliance is an engineered system of hardware and software designed to help enterprises derive maximum value from their big data strategies. It combines optimized hardware with a comprehensive software stack featuring specialized solutions developed by Oracle to deliver a complete, easy-to-deploy offering for acquiring, organizing and analyzing big data, with enterprise-class performance, availability, supportability, and security.

The Oracle Big Data Appliance integrated software includes :

• Full distribution of Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH)
• Cloudera Manager to administer all aspects of Cloudera CDH
• Open source distribution of the statistical package R for analysis of unfiltered data on Oracle Big Data Appliance
• Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition3
• And Oracle Enterprise Linux operating system and Oracle Java VM

The Oracle Big Data Appliance offers the following benefits:

• Rapid provisioning of a highly-available and scalable system for managing massive amounts of data
• A high-performance platform for acquiring, organizing, and analyzing big data in Hadoop and using R on raw-data sources
• Control of IT costs by pre-integrating all hardware and software components into a single big data solution that complements enterprise data warehouses

Oracle Big Data Connectors is an optimized software suite to help enterprises integrate data stored in Hadoop or Oracle NoSQL Databases with Oracle Database 11g. It enables very fast data movements between these two environments using Oracle Loader for Hadoop and Oracle Direct Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), while Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop and Oracle R Connector for Hadoop provide non-Hadoop experts with easier access to HDFS data and MapReduce functionality.

Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine is purpose-built to deliver the fastest performance for business intelligence (BI) and planning applications. It is designed to provide real-time, speed-of-thought visual analysis, and enable new types of analytic applications so organizations can make decisions faster in the context of rapidly shifting business conditions, while broadening user adoption of BI though introduction of interactive visualization capabilities. Organizations can extend BI initiatives beyond reporting and dashboards to modeling, planning, forecasting, and predictive analytics.

These offerings, along with Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Database 11g, create a complete set of technologies for leveraging and integrating big data, and help enterprises quickly and efficiently turn information into insight.

More Information

Data sheets, white papers and other interesting information can be found here:

• Big Data OverView
• BigData Connector OverView
• Big Data Appliance OTN page
• Big Data Connectors OTN page

Oracle Fusion Applications Documentation Library for links to release notes, guides, licensing information,and more can be found here

You can use this page to learn about Oracle Fusion Applications . You can use the tabs to find user guides, implementation guides, and other documentation resources for each product family.

Other Documentation Links

• Oracle Fusion Applications Technology Library : You can use these library for technical guides such as install, patching,implementation, and extensibility. click here to get .
• Oracle Enterprise Repository : You will get technical information about integrating with other applications,including services, operations, composites, events, and integration tables. click here to get .
• Oracle Fusion Applications Documentation Info Center : To access this you need my Oracle support access. If you have valid access rights , you can get white papers, release notes, What's New and other resources.

Oracle with Endeca plans to create a comprehensive technology platform to process, store, manage, search and analyze structured and unstructured information together enabling businesses to make stronger and more profitable decisions.

Therefore, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery (Formerly Endeca Latitude) is an enterprise data discovery platform for rapid, intuitive exploration and analysis of data from any combination of structured and unstructured sources.

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery enables organizations to extend their existing business analytics investments to unstructured sources – including social media, websites, content systems, email, and
database text - providing unprecedented visibility into data and business processes, saving time and cost, and leading to better business decisions.

With Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, users can:

• Easily combine structured and unstructured data and metadata to understand key metrics in their relevant context and evaluate new business situations.
• Ask unanticipated questions of any data through intuitive, flexible, and highly interactive online discovery applications.
• Mash up and recombine data and visualizations to compose discovery applications.
• Leverage all of the rich metadata of existing Business Intelligence data models and semantic layers as a basis upon which to build discovery applications.
• Unburden IT from the constant chasing of new requirements and non-traditional data sources for incorporation into the data warehouse, enabling them to deliver fast access to relevant data and selfservice to business users while maintaining security, governance, and quality.

The Architecture for Oracle Endeca Information Discovery

Let’s start by briefly reviewing the Endeca Information Discovery architecture. The architecture consists of 3 main components:

• Oracle Endeca Server. This hybrid, search/analytical database provides unprecedented flexibility in combining diverse and changing data as well as extreme performance in analyzing that data. Oracle Endeca Server has the performance characteristics of in-memory architecture however is not memory bound. Oracle Endeca Server is also used extensively as an interactive search engine on many major e-commerce and media websites.
• Studio is a Discovery application composition environment for the Oracle Endeca Server. Studio provides drag and drop authoring to create highly interactive, visually-rich, enterprise- class information discovery applications.
• Integration Suite. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery includes a set of tools used for loading and optionally enriching diverse information—including structured and unstructured content—into Oracle Endeca Server.

This can be best understood as fig 1 below:

Apart from this there are Extensible Value-Added Modules are

• Oracle Endeca Content Management System Connectors- This add-on module allows for integration of content stored in various enterprise content management systems.This is currently supported systems include: EMC Documentum, EMC Documentum eRoom, FileNet P8, FileNet Document & Image Services, Interwoven TeamSite, Lotus Notes/Domino, Microsoft SharePoint, and OpenText LiveLink.
• Oracle Endeca Text Enrichment. This add-on module includes text analysis capabilities for extraction of people, places, organizations, quotes, and themes as well as core summarization capabilities for automatic creation of abstracts or topical summaries.
• Oracle Endeca Text Enrichment with Sentiment Analysis. This add-on module includes all of the Text Enrichment capabilities as well as advanced text analysis for extraction of aggregate sentiment related to each extracted concept. Sentiment is extracted with a score indicating the positive and negative nature of a document or an entity in the document. These scores can be used within the faceted search experience by varying ranges of
  positivity and negativity.

What type of analysis is Oracle Endeca Information Discovery designed for?

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is in supporting a users’ need to better understand the data. In expanding analysis inputs beyond structured content to unstructured sources, users can better understand the color and qualitative insights which support quantitative results.

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery enables this type of analysis through Oracle Endeca Server, a hybrid search/analytical database that is specifically optimized for discovery, not reporting or online transaction processing.

Highly scalable, column-oriented, and in-memory - without being memory bound - Oracle Endeca Server supports navigation, search, and analysis of any kind of information including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured content.

This also provide a broad suite of packaged analytic applications to extend corporate business processes to include unstructured data

• Integrate unstructured data into ERP, Supply Chain, Human Capital, CRM and EPM applications
• Integrate unstructured data into specialized edge applications – PLM, MDM, Web Commerce, Analytic applications
• Extend industry specific business processes and vertical applications to include unstructured data

Search capabilities of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery provide

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery provides two different, and complementary, types of search:

1. Value – or dimension – search provides type-ahead autocompletion that enables users to find attribute values and help disambiguate queries by identifying which attributes contain the search terms.
2. Record search provides advanced full text search across any single or combination of fields, leveraging a variety of configurable term matching and relevancy ranking algorithms to retrieve results for display and analysis.

Know the facts and dependecy with other Prducts

1. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery part of Not of Oracle BI Foundation Suite, this is a separate licensed product.
2. If you don’t run Oracle BI. You can still benefit from Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, beacuse the diversity of supported data sources is a strength of this product.
3. Oracle Endeca Server exposes web services for querying existing BI tools.
4. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery enhances existing business intelligence applications by extending analysis to unstructured sources and supporting exploratory data analysis.
5. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is certified on Exalytics.
6. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery’s primary benefit with respect to Big Data (Read the previous post on Big data) is in solving the problem of Big Variety – relevant data sources for business analysis have never been more diverse, and an increasing share of this information is unstructured.
7. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery and Hadoop are highly complementary technologies

Resources for Oracle Endeca Information Discovery (OEID)

• Product Documentation
• Oracle EID Youtube channel
• Oracle Endeca Information Discovery Wiki

Oracle has released E-Business Suite Release 12.2 on 19-Sept.

Key Highlights for R12.2

• Significant enhancements across an integrated suite of business applications and new Online Patching capabilities .
  • Some of the Key Benefits of Online Patching are:
    • Easier to negotiate downtime with lines of business as minimal downtime is required (minutes vs. hours)
    • Easier to identify potential brief downtime windows, allowing for greater opportunities for patching during the work day
    • Applications stay online during patch application
    • Critical business operations are not impacted
  • This helps Oracle EBS 12.2 enables organizations to reduce planned maintenance times, make better decisions, reduce costs and increase performance.

  • Procurement and supply chain management professionals may benefit from Online Patching – a function aimed at support organizations with high-availability requirements. It is intended to reduce patching and maintenance downtimes.

• In addition, Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 leverages Oracle’s integrated technology stack, Oracle Fusion Middleware, to help drive efficiencies and improve the availability, performance and scalability of applications.

On technical side, Release 12.2 will replace Oracle Containers for Java (OC4J) 10g with WebLogic Server 11g and Database Tier will run RDBMS 11gR2 (or 11gR3 when available and certified) to support Online Patching

New Terminology you might came across in R12.2 is

• AD Online Patching (ADOP)
• Edition-Based Redefinition (EBR)

You can check it out the Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 12.1 and 12.2 Release Content Documents [ID 1302189.1]

Ref : Oracle press release

Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM) is defined as an application supporting control processes for managing events within and between companies in real-time.

This integrated software functionality supports five major business processes including the ability to monitor what is happening within the supply chain, notify the right person in case of a delay or critical event, simulate activities, control your processes and measure your supply chain activities so that you can adapt your business process and make it more effective and efficient. In the graphic you see which core services exist in a SCEM system.

Through these services it is possible to receives updates to events and provides proactive alerts and responses to events throughout the supply chain.

You can take advantage of SCEM to support business in

• Monitoring and Tracking our Supply
• Sharing supply data globally
• Notifying the right persons at the right time when an exception occurs.
• Enabling event reporting

Capabilities of SCEM Application

Helps monitor and track end-to-end business transactions in the Supply Chain by providing a unified view of the business transactions spread across heterogeneous systems.

• Ability to monitor various notable events of a logical end to end transaction in multi-tiered supply chain including activities carried out by the supplier, carriers, to provide visibility beyond your department, beyond your company, to detect an exception and potentially automatically trigger a remedial action.
• Ability to correlate various notable events in multi-tiered supply chain and raise alert for action if delay or non-occurrence of one notable event impacts future activities of the same or other multiple transactions.
• Ability to view real-time auto-refreshed BAM dashboard showing progress and exceptions in color coded display of logical end to end transactions covering all notable events from begin to end throughout the supply chain.
• Ability to trigger email notification based on actionable exception to the transaction occurring in-house processing or during the vendor side processing.
• Allows real time detection and monitoring of business situations and exceptions from huge volumes of event data coming out of numerous sensors and systems, making it ideal for operation managers to quickly respond and take corrective actions.
• Ability to subscribe to an external event streams such as traffic alerts, Sensors, RSS feeds, RFID feeds , synthesize and correlate that massive date with state of the transaction in the system to arrive at potential exception or an action.
• Ability to identify trends and raise an actionable alert.
• Ability to filter out routinely progressing events automatically, and focus only on exceptions thereby improving efficiency of Logistics staff.
• Provides flexibility in modifying Alerts on a live production system without re-generation or re-deployment of the artifacts. Ability to declaratively change the recipient of the alerts/ notification

Oracle BAM Dashboard tracks end-to-end Field Service process too:

• My Oracle Support for issue capture
• E-Business Suite for Field Service & Spares
• Global Trade Management for export compliance
• DHL to track part shipping logistics

SCEM architecture

Oracle Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM) architecture components are as follows

• External Event Sources like B2B messages, Enterprise Event Sources like EBS, Fusion and other Enterprise Applications act as input sources.
• Events relevant to the business process are defined in the Situation template, which are then processed in the mid tier by Oracle Event Processor (OEP).
• Event Routers pick up the relevant events and get the payload associated with the events from the input systems and form the Logical Transaction Object which is cached using Coherence.
• The Situation Processor, or the CEP component, applies the business rules to the stream of events and evaluates them e.g pattern matching, aggregation etc., and arrives at the situation to be monitored which has critical business impact.
• The output (response) of the Situation Processor is sent to the Visualization layers such as BAM dashboards or mobile devices along with alerts and notifications

The current SCEM implementation uses the following Oracle components and technologies from Oracle Fusion Middleware (FWM):

1. E-Business Suite R12.1.3+ (Business event source)
2. Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, (11.1.1.1.6) PS5
   • Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) 11g [SOA composites]
   • Oracle Event Processor (OEP) 11g [Processing events/logic]
   • Oracle Business Activity Monitor (BAM) [Optional: Presentation layer]
   • Oracle Coherence 3.7.1.1 [Caching infrastructure]
   • Oracle TopLink [Persistence Modeling]
3. Client technologies
   • Oracle JDeveloper 11g (PS5) [SCEM Designer - Design Time, customizations]
   • Eclipse IDE (Galileo) [Customizations - optional]

For more information on Oracle Supply Chain Event Management, check the details

The existing bank account number validations for domestic banks only check the length of the bank account number. These validations are performed during the entry and update of bank accounts.With R12.2 the account number validations for United Kingdom are enhanced to include a modulus check alongside the length checks.

• Modulus checking is the process of validating bank account numbers in conjunction with the Banks Sort Code.
• A new concurrent program "Load UK Domestic Account Validations Data" has been provided to load modulus validation data files.

The feature can be disabled by using a Cash Management System Profile (CE: Disable Bank Validations).

If you compare , you can understand this way :

Existing validations:
The sort code should have 6 numeric digits
The bank account number should have 6 numeric digits

New Validation:
The combination of Sort Code and Account Number should pass a modulus check.

Modulus check methods are prescribed by VocaLink (BACS technology partner)
Modulus checking ensures sort code and account numbers are compatible before submitting BACS payment instructions.

BANK ACCOUNT VALIDATION - THE BASICS

A modulus check is an arithmetic check that establishes whether there is a valid link between a given sort code and account number range.

Modulus checking is a vital process within bank account validation for Bacs submissions, ensuring that errors arising during the capturing of data are flagged for the payer's attention to enable them to correct them before they are submitted, thus avoiding costly returned transactions.

So far, There are 3 types of modulus checks that are performed on the UK bank accounts. These are:

• Mod 10– Standard 10 modulus check
• Mod 11– Standard 11 modulus check
• DblAl– Double alternate modulus check.

This feature enhances the existing UK bank account validation model by introducing modulus check validation.

A modulus check will be performed during the creation and modification of the bank accounts and will also be applied on the importing of bank accounts through public APIs.

HOW THIS WORKS

When the bank accounts are entered, the system will now invoke a new modulus check in addition to the existing length check (8 digits) for validating the UK bank accounts.

The modulus algorithm applied on the bank accounts depend on the bank sort codes and is part of the sort codes published by Vocalink.

IMPLEMENTATION: UK BANK ACCOUNT VALIDATION

Implemenation Process can be best understood as below:

In order to use the new validation model, customers need to upload the latest modulus weight table file and Sorting & Substitution data file published by Vocalink.

These concurrent programs allow customers to upload the latest version of these files. Vocalink publish updates to these regularly. Customers can register via Vocalink website to be alerted when a new version has been published.

This Consist of 4 steps process

1) Download 2 files from the VocaLink site:

a) Click on Modulus weight table data (.txt valid from 18/11/13)
Save the file : valacdos.txt [ This will be one the parameter ]

b) Click on Sorting code substitution data (.txt 1Kb valid from 13/06/05)
Save the file : scsubtab.txt [ This will be one the parameter ]

2) These two files must be Upload files to server

3) Then Import : From CM super user responsblity submit a program 'Load UK Domestic Account Validations Data’

4) Make sure System Profile Set - CE: Disable Bank Validations set to YES at site level

If you are using R12.1.2 , user may report some difficulty with Homepage responsblity , therefore they prefer similar to 11i or R12.1

In release 12.1.2 the E-Business Suite homepage has been re-designed using the configurable pages infrastructure.

This is new Enhancement which allows customers to work with a WYSIWYG model of configuration. This allows highly flexible content and layout including the ability to add and move content around the homepage to suit your needs.

These configurable home page provide a new and improved navigator tree which has expandable menus using richer and faster ajax calls and requests are kept within the sidebar to save valuable homepage space. The new tree also eliminates full page render of server-side requests therefore enhancing performance.

What If , you want to Revert back this options. Here are some notes, from our DBA who helped to achieve this.The above changes will result in the expandable menus changing to the older 'link style' menus.

Set the following profiles:

• FND: Applications Navigator Menu Consolidation count : 25 – old is Null
• FND:Slide out menu: Enabled – old is disable
• Enable Configurable Home Page: No
• FND: Personalization Region Link Enabled: Yes
• FND: Disable Configurable Home Page: True — old is false

You can refer to Note :1061482.1: 12.1.2: How to Modify and Enable The Configurable Home Page Delivered Via 12.1.2 for more details.

In R12.2 , there is one important enhancement which transform EBS Financials with Fusion Accounting Hub.

The Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub provides integration for the Oracle General Ledger .

This new enhamcement in term of integration provides you with the opportunity to leverage the Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub with minimal implementation effort and without disruption to your current financial management processes.

You can continue to use Oracle E-Business applications without disruption and you can also continue to account for transactions in Oracle General Ledger without changing their accounting treatments.

Integration between the Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub and Oracle General Ledger includes the ability to transfer full or incremental period balances to the Fusion General Ledger.

You can convert charts of account values and accounting period information to align with Fusion ledger configurations. You can also drill from the summary information posted in the Fusion Accounting Hub back to the Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS).

Integration with the Fusion Accounting Hub enables users to leverage new fusion general ledger capabilities, such as embedded ESSBASE (Extended Spreadsheet DataBASE) integration with real-time analytics, on-line slice-and-dice account analysis, making it easier to run boardroom financial reports, helping generate the boardroom financial reports with great ease.

Payment acknowledgement processing is widely used in various countries in US and EMEA region where Bank provide the acknowledgement/Confirmation.

If you have some customization in existing EBS , and planning to use R12.2 in near term, you can take advantage of out-of-box feature .

This new functionality that has been added to Oracle Payments that allow you to import payment acknowledgement reports containing payment status for bank received payment files.

A "Payment Acknowledgement" for supplier payments in Oracle Payments/Payables is a file that confirms for the payor that their electronic payment (sent to a payee's bank) was successfully transmitted and received ("acknowledged") by the bank. Therefore, this type of Payment Acknowledgement processing starts after successful transmission of the payment file to the supplier's bank. Once the bank receives the payment file, the process generates the acknowledgement file.

With this Import you can :

• Map bank acknowledgment codes with system defined acknowledgment codes
• Import acknowledgment data
• Import multiple acknowledgments per payment
• Review acknowledgment details including bank reported errors and status

Remember , Payment acknowledgment is supported only at payment level.

If you are not using these ACcounting method, then you can use Merged Distributions feature in AR.

• Cash Basis accounting , that mean accounting is created only at the time of receipt of cash.[ Release 12 seeds Subledger accounting methods: Encumbrance Cash and Standard Cash]
• Multi-Fund Accounts Receivable accounting , that means where receivable accounting lines for an invoice are created at the level of invoice line.[ Release 12 seeds Subledger accounting methods: Multi-Fund Accrual - Account Method and Multi-Fund Accrual - Balancing Method]
• Line Level Cash Applications

Merge Distribution Feature

When the Merge Distributions feature is enabled, thereceivable distributions for a transaction are created at the Invoice Header level instead of the Invoice Line level.

All subsequent adjustments and applications against the transactions are also not maintained at the invoice line level , as understood below:

Adjustments and receipt applications are not pro-rated across the invoice lines. This is same way the receivable distributions are created in Release 11i.

The summarized distributions will significantly reduce the volume of data generated for adjustments and applications in Receivables and reduces the volume of data passed to Subledger Accounting for generation of accounting.

Benefits of Business Solution

• This solution will result in significant performance gain for creating accounting entries for receipts.
• This solution will limit the growth of data volume.
• Summary distributions are easier to interpret.

This solution is specially recommended for customers with very large number of lines per invoices, as large number of invoice lines correspond to significantly higher number of distribution lines which are passed for each accounting event to the accounting engine for generation of accounting entries.

How to Enable the Merge Distribution Feature

The merged distributions feature is controlled by the following:

• In the AR System Options form, there is a new checkbox "Create Detailed Distributions" as below:

The checkbox was released as part of Patch 7559194 LINE LEVEL DISTRIBUTIONS NOT NEEDED FOR HEADER LEVEL CASH APPLICATION/ADJUSTMENT, as part of the "Merge Distributions Enhancement".

• By default the checkbox will be checked indicating that AR will create detailed distributions
• To enable Merge Distribution, you need to Uncheck the checkbox

When should the Checkbox be UNCHECKED

When the checkbox is UNCHECKED, Oracle Receivables will create summarized distributions.

The receivable distributions for adjustments and applications are not maintained at the invoice line level, instead a summarized receivable distribution is created at the invoice header level. Adjustments and receipt applications are not pro-rated across the invoice lines. This is same way the receivable distributions are created in Release 11i.

Following is the impact of having the checkbox UNCHECKED: [ source Metalink Doc ID 1081657.1 ]

• When you create Batch Sources (Navigation: Setup > Transactions > Sources), in the Batch Source tab, the checkbox Generate Line Level Balances will be disabled.
• When you create Receipt Applications (Navigation: Receipt > Receipts) in the Applications form, the Apply in Detail button will be disabled.
• When you create Adjustments against transactions (Navigation: Transactions > Transactions, Toolbar Menu Actions > Adjust) in the Account, IDs tab, the Line column will be disabled.
• When using the Receipt or Adjustment APIs, you cannot create line level applications.

Additional Refrence :

• What is the Checkbox 'Create Detailed Distributions' for? Doc ID 1081657.1

The general availability of the next release of Oracle Applications E-business Suite, Release 12.2, is on the horizon.Here is a quick summary of the some key changes and new features across different EBS modules that will be part of this release:

You can refer to Metalink document id: 1302189.1

As you know, one of the most significant new features of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 is Online Patching, which greatly reduces the periods of downtime needed when applying patches.

The two main requirements of online patching can be stated in two simple rules:

• An online patch must not break the running application
• The running application must not break the online patch

Therefore , its important to ensure custom code complies with the new standards that ensure the relevant database objects and code can successfully be patched online. These three utilities exist in R12.2 which helps you to cross check Online Patching requirements violations.

• Online Patching Enablement Readiness Report, which checks the system's preparedness for Online Patching enablement.
• Online Patching Database Compliance Checker (ADZDDBCC.sql), which reports database objects standards violations.
• Global Standards Compliance Checker (gscc.pl), which scans the file system for source files that violate the standards.

The Online Patching Readiness Report can be run at any time before or after the upgrade to Release 12.2. This is particularly useful in checking for future violations

You can refer to the Release 12.2 Upgrade Guide and the Release 12.2 Developer's Guide for more information about these utilities

Which Release Should You Target?

Look for support Update and see where you are and which path is best for you.

Here is Support updates as of Sep 2013 of Four Versions

• 11i: Extended Support stretched 25 months, through December 2015 as a “Sustaining Support Exception” [ as Indicated 1 above ]
• 12.0.x: Extended Support ends January 2015
• 12.1.x: Premier Support stretched 31 months, through December 2016; Sustaining Support stretched 12 months, through December 2019[ as Indicated 2,3 above ]
• 12.2.x: Premier Support ends September 2018; Extended Support ends September 2021

Possible Paths

• Fresh Install or Reimplementation, either you do with:
  • 12.1.3
  • 12.2 and apply 12.2.2
• Upgrade : Direct upgrade path from EBS 11.5.10.2, 12.0.4 and 12.0.6 to 12.2
  • 11i (11.5.1 or better with baseline patch set)
    • Upgrade to 12.1.3
    • Upgrade to 12.2 and apply 12.2.2 RUP
  • 12.0.x
    • Upgrade to 12.1.3
    • Upgrade to 12.2 and apply 12.2.2 RUP
  • 12.1.3
    • Upgrade to 12.2 and apply 12.2.2 RUP

Patch Requirements for Extended Support of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11.5.10 [ID 883202.1]

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 Documentation Library? Click here..

• EBS 12.1.x Info Center (Doc 806593.1)
• EBS 12.2.x Info Center (Doc 1581299.1)