Multichannel campaign management aka MCCM is all about interacting and communicating with prospects and customers across a range of different online and offline channels.

Campaign may have both way digital and traditional.

Digital is most enabled with the use of internet technology like email, mobile marketing, website engagement and social media is consider as
where as traditional marketing are typically have such channels as direct mail or point-of-sale interaction.

MCCM is part of Integrated marketing management – where both sides of marketing function operations and the campaign management functions, are aligned, synchronized, and efficiently adding value to each other.

Multi-Channel Campaign Management (MCCM) mostly deal with

• Creating, executing and managing multichannel campaigns : Enables companies with to define, orchestrate and communicate offers to customer segments across a multichannel environment, such as direct mail, call centers, websites, e-mail and communities
• Campaign planning, tracking and reporting
• Specific, basic campaign management functionality, such as segmentation, campaign execution and campaign workflow

IBM-Unica, SAS, Teradata-Aprimo and Oracle(Siebel) are consider to be good vendors in the multichannel campaign management tools.

Last Year, Oracle added Siebel Campaign Management and analytics solutions on Oracle Exadata Database Machines for performance improvements to data warehousing and query processing for segmentation and data mining scoring.

One of the Oracle aquisition ATG to incorporate digital marketing capability into its offerings (by start leveraging Siebel Marketing and Real-Time Decisions (RTD) integration for offer management/decision capability with integrated Web content.)

Oracle Identity Management is major security infrastructure component of Oracle Fusion Applications .

Oracle Fusion Applications leverage Oracle Identity Management for foundation security services; identity administration (identity life cycle management, self-service account request and password management, enterprise role management); authentication and trust management (single sign-on, identity federation, privacy); access control (risk-based authorization, fine-grained entitlements, web services security); identity and access governance (audit and compliance reporting, segregation of duties, conflict-resolution management, attestation, role mining and engineering, identity and fraudprevention analytics); and directory services (persistent storage, identity virtualization,synchronization, and database-user security).

For detailed explanation of Oracle Identity Mangements integration with Oracle Fusion Applications refer this whitepaper published by Oracle.

Friend of mine working in retail sector asked some queries on Oracle Access Manager usage, quickly revisited one of training note when working in health care, both the sectors extensively using these products.This Post is collection is high level overview for Oracle Access manager.

What is Oracle Access Manager

Oracle Access Manager (OAM) is IAM solution for web access management and user identity administration. Oracle Access Manager is designed to support complex, heterogeneous enterprise environments. Oracle Access Manager consists of two tightly integrated components:

• the Access
• Identity Systems

The Identity System provides delegated administration of user profiles and workflow for creating, updating, and deleting these profiles. It also provides applications for user self registration, password management and dynamic group management. The Access System provides access control and single sign-on to Web applications and J2EE resources (EJBs, servlets, etc.) running on a variety of Web and Application servers.

Two Products and there Generally Available (GA) dates

Components

Oracle Access Manager consists of tightly coupled Identity and Access Systems. These two systems are integrated, so that a profile change made via the Identity System takes effect instantaneously for access evaluation by Access the System. The Access and Identity Systems also include web server agents namely, WebGate and WebPass, for all leading Web and Application servers. The following components are shipped with Oracle Access Manager:

1. Identity Server
   
2. WebPass :A WebPass is a web server plug-in that passes information back and forth between the web server and the Identity Server over the Oracle Identity Protocol (formerly Netpoint or COREid Identity Protocol). Hence, WebPass is the presentation tier of the Identity System. By default, WebPass renders its content as HTML so that it can be accessed through a browser. But in addition, it provides a Web Service interface, known as IdentityXML, which SOAP-based clients can leverage to programmatically interact with the Identity System. The idea behind IdentityXML is that it allows the integration of business logic governing identity administration process to be available and easily integrated with existing applications in a SOA environment
3. Access Server
   
4. WebGate :WebGate is an out-of-the-box access client for enforcing access policy on HTTP based resources; hence it is the Access System’s web Policy Enforcement Point or PEP. The WebGate client runs as a plug-in or module on top of most popular web servers, and intercepts HTTP requests for web resources and forwards them to the Access Server where access control policies are applied. WebGates are optimized to work on web server environments, as are streamlined for the HTTP protocol, and understand URLs, session cookies, HTTP redirects, secure sessions (HTTPS); and also implement policy caches that improve WebGate’s performance and allow for scalability in highly trafficked sites
5. Policy Manager :Access Manager’s Policy Manager is a browser-based graphical tool for configuring resources to be protected and well as creating and managing access policies, so it is the Access System’s Policy Management Authority or PMA The Policy Manager provides the login interface for the Access System, communicates with the directory server to manage policy data, and communicates with the Access Server over the Oracle Access Protocol to update the Access Server cache when policies are modified.

Get Clarified on -Oracle Access Manager differ from OracleAS Single Sign-on

They are similar products in that both perform user authentication. However Oracle Access Manager also provides powerful policy-based authorization functionality to web and J2EE resources, which OracleAS Single Sign-on does not. They are currently separate products and can be used together in a single environment if required. Oracle Access Manager access also provides integrations with a broad set of non-Oracle products and platforms.

2 factor authentication(including RSA SecurID, X.509 certificates)…etc [Adopted from oracle Documentation]

The Oracle solutions supports 2 factor and X.509 authentication for user authentication with Oracle Access Manager.

• RSA SecurID Authentication: Oracle Access Manager supports RSA Security features and provides the SecurID authentication plug-in and components needed to integrate a native SecurID authentication scheme into Oracle Access Manager policy domains for Web single sign-on. See “Integrating the RSA SecurID Authentication Plug-In” for details.
• Smart Card Authentication: Oracle Access Manager supports smart card authentication with Active Directory and IIS Web servers using ActivCard Cryptographic Service Provider (CSP) for Windows 2000, ActivCard Gold utilities, and ActivCard USB Reader v2.0 in homogeneous Windows environments. See “Integrating Smart Cards” for details.

Oracle Cash Management is an open integrated solution for managing your company/enterprise-wide cash cycle. In addition to seamlessly integrating with other modules from Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Cash Management’s open interfaces allow company to easily integrate with external systems, giving timely access to global cash information . Companies those practicing and prepares cash forecast, they can project cash flows from Oracle General Ledger, Oracle Receivables, Oracle Payables, Oracle Payroll, Oracle Projects, and Oracle Purchasing. The Forecasting Open Interface allows you to also project cash flows from external systems. With the Forecasting Open Interface’s distributed database support, you can generate a forecast that combines relevant transaction information from both local and remote databases which may be across region .

Oracle Cash Management lets you automatically or manually record and reconcile bank statements, matching against system transactions using rules and tolerance levels. You can review and correct any import validation or reconciliation errors online. Oracle Cash Management can automatically reconcile correcting statement lines against error statement lines and provide an audit trail for verifying correction of bank errors.

Fig 1: Cash Managment

Oracle Cash Management supports electronically downloading of bank statements from the bank. The Bank Statement Loader program supports standard formats such as BAI2 and SWIFT940, as well as user-defined formats. Bank statements are reconciled with payments in Oracle Payables and Oracle Payroll, receipts in Oracle Receivables, and journal entries in Oracle General Ledger. You can also reconcile with payments and receipts from other systems, including settlements from Oracle Treasury, using the Reconciliation Open Interface. The Reconciliation Open Interface is extensible, executing your custom logic when reconciling external transactions.

If you are implementing, you can refer these post that will be great help for you.

• Period Close Processing Checklist -> R12 Cash Management
• R12 : Cash Management Period Closure
• R12 : Cash Management & SLA
• R12 :Bank Statement Reconciliation
• XML based statement for Cash Management
• Implementing SWIFT MT’s within EBS
• Managing Cash , EBS and SWIFT

The following examples represent the majority of global deployments.

According to Meta Group(now Gartner),customers typically consider several points when deciding on a global strategy:

1. Local vs. Global Operations
   If a customer operates locally, they typically have decentralized processes and business unit independence; if they are operating as a global enterprise, they typically have a high degree of interdependency among business units.
2. Multilingual vs. Single Language
   Customers must decide between having a single language user interface and supporting multiple local languages.
3. Centralized vs. Regional Strategy
   The key trend is enabling a global view of customers and suppliers. A centralized strategy with a single global implementation involves stronger controls and a higher degree of standardization. A regional multisite deployment strategy honors local autonomy and has fewer centrally enforced controls.

In order to gain visibility into the Complete Procure-to-Pay Process, implementing Oracle Procurement & Spend Analytics, part of the Oracle BI Applications product line is not a bad idea, this enables companies to optimize supply side performance by integrating data from across the enterprise value chain—enabling executives, managers, and frontline employees to make more informed decisions.

Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics allows companies to more effectively manage their expenditures and improve business performance by

• Providing timely direct and indirect spending data to all departments
• Enhance Insight into Supplier Performance—you can monitor price, delivery, and product quality to determine best – and worst – performing suppliers. Improve contract usage and compliance.
• Identifying cost savings across business units, geographic locations, products, and procurement organizations
• Improving performance by identifying suppliers that price inconsistently or do not adhere to price schedules

• Control Employee Spend —Understand how the money related to travel and expenses is being spent by gaining a complete picture of Employee Expenses

With complete, end-to-end insight into spend patterns and supplier performance, organizations can significantly reduce costs, enhance profitability, increase customer satisfaction, and gain competitive advantage.

If you are planning to implement , the latest version you can get is 7.9.6 is which is enhanced version over previous versions.

• It contain 4 Dashboards ( that makes 23 dashboard page, 234 reports, 335 metrics) as below;
  • Spend Analyzer Dashboard (New) -The Spend Analyzer Dashboard provides complete insight to the spend patterns of the company that helps to systematically identify opportunities for cost-savings, and execute sourcing programs to improve procurement’s contribution to organizational objectives.This is to create visibility to spending patterns for both direct and indirect spend, enabling users to identify and realize the savings opportunities, with the ability to do the spend analysis by commodities, suppliers, supplier locations, buying locations, business units, cost centers, buyers and contract usage.
  • Employee Expenses Dashboard (New)-These dashboard help to understand how the money related to travel and expenses is being spent through creation of a complete picture of Employee Expenses, including approval cycle times, expenses by expense type, and expense report status
  • Procurement Dashboard Enhancements :This provides visibility necessary to monitor and optimize Procurement effectiveness on a continual basis to identify bottlenecks and take proactive and corrective actions to minimize impact. Example analyses include tracking unprocessed and unfulfilled requisitions or monitoring PO input ratios.
  • Supplier Performance Enhancements :This enables organizations to have a complete picture of the performance of their suppliers, including complete supplier scorecards, supplier price performance, delivery performance, product receipt quality, on-time payment ratings, payment activity and volume and payments due / overdue analysis.
  • New reports and metrics for Spend Analysis,Procurement efficiency, and Expenses.
• It has enhanced Invoiced Spend, Contracts Compliance and Price variance and Optimization Analysis
• It Support UN-SPSC
• Adapters for 11i.8, 9, 10, 12, and 12.1

Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics comprises the following:

• Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics
• Oracle Supplier Performance Analytics

Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics Module
This Provide a complete visibility into direct and indirect spend across the enterprise, payment, and employee expenses.The Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics application is comprised of these subject areas:

• Total Spend: This is a summary subject area that provides the ability to do comparative analysis and report on requested spend, committed spend and actual spend across suppliers, company, products, commodities and associated hierarchies for both direct and indirect spend in detail to allow complete visibility of spending across your company.
• Purchase Orders: Mostly deal with committed spend, and Purchase orders of the suppliers of an organization across suppliers, company, products, commodities and associated hierarchies at purchase order line level
• Purchase Order Costs: This mostly deals with committed spend and Purchase orders of the suppliers of an organization across suppliers, company, products, and commodities and associated hierarchies at cost center (distribution line) level.
• Purchase Cycle Lines: Mostly used to report cycle time performance such as Requisition to PO lead time, PO to Receipt lead time, P2P lead time of the Suppliers within company.
• Purchase Schedules: Mostly deal with order shipments of an organization across suppliers, company, products, commodities and associated hierarchies at purchase schedule line level
• Purchase Requisitions:Mostly deal with spend and PR’s of the suppliers of an organization across suppliers, company, products, commodities and associated hierarchies at purchase requisition line level
• Purchase Requisition Status: This is based out of requisition status along the approval cycle of Purchase requisitions of the suppliers of an organization. It’s populated only by Universal adapter.
• Purchase Receipts: This is a detailed subject area that provides the ability to report on actual spend and Purchase Receipts
• Employee Spend: This is a detailed subject area that provides the ability to report on employee spend of an organization across employees, company, cost center and associated hierarchies.

Supplier Performance Analytics Module
This helps companies to get complete picture of the performance of their suppliers, including complete supplier scorecards, procurement cycle times, supplier price performance, delivery performance, product receipt quality, on-time payment ratings, payment activity and volume and payments due / overdue analysis.

The Supplier Performance Analytics application is comprised of these subject areas:

• Supplier Performance. The Suppliers functional area contains targeted reports and metrics that allow you to analyze the timeliness, reliability, cost, and quality of goods provided by your suppliers.
• Supplier AP Transactions: This is a summary subject area that provides the ability to analyze payment performance and payment due analysis of the suppliers of an organization across suppliers, company, location, products, commodities and associated hierarchies.

I was recently asked by Packt Publishing to review Yemi Onigbode’s “Oracle E-Business Suite 12 Financials Cookbook”. I just finished few Chapters reading the book, and wanted to share some thoughts.

This is a good resource for EBS users and Financial consultant. The format of a “recipe book” is a wonderful idea, and is perfect for folks who are looking to become effective with EBS skill very quickly, looking for a point solution to an immediate problem, or just needing some creative inspiration when working on their user support or identifying key functionalities of the Oracle modules, to demonstrate a pilot to obtain the core requirements

The book’s 9 main chapters successfully provide more than 50 recipes to demonstrate the EBS R12 Financials core modules and their functionality. This book will give readers a step-by-step tour of the EBS R12 Financials core modules. The receivables process from billing to collection, including revenue accounting will be shown along with how to handle cash, create bank accounts, reconcile bank accounts, and create cash forecasts. Readers will not only learn how to create customers and manage sales orders, including shipping, pricing, and creating invoices, but also administer the general ledger, accounting setup, sub-ledger accounting, e-business tax, and create journals.

The authors have done a good job in selecting their recipes to cover common use cases most of support staff/consultant will face. This allows readers with a specific issue to skim through the Table of Contents for a relevant recipe and then work through the provided example.

Oracle E-Business Suite 12 Financials Cookbook is a good resource for a wide range of users specially for support staff who is working from end user side. This book is for EBS Financials specialists who want a broader understanding of particular areas of the financials modules.

You can read more about here: http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-ebusiness-suite-12-financials-cookbook/book

For company operating in multiple countries and have Single Global Instance, may have to understand the features of globalization (formerly internationalization) support in Oracle E-Business Suite. Things which is covered under internationalization are:

• Unicode Support
• Multilingual Support (MLS)
• Regional Preferences (Locale) :Date format,number format,currency,name/Locale, support address order …etc.
• Calendars
• Currencies
• Timezones
• Address Management
• Single, Complete Data Model

Oracle EBS & National Language Support(NLS)

NLS setting gived ability to run in a language other than English and have ability to use date, number, and currency formats specific to certain country or region

Sometimes referred to as Locale , in EBS sometime you heard NLS patches…these are special patches that provide language translations including user interface labels, menus, and some Oracle seeded setup data.

Oracle EBS and Unicode Support

Unicode is a universal character set which includes all major scripts of the world in a simple and consistent manner

• Oracle database supports two Unicode character sets:
  • AL32UTF8: based on latest Unicode standard, currently 5.0
  • UTF8: on maintenance mode and supports Unicode 3.0 standard

Take a note, AL32UTF8 is the default Unicode database character set for Oracle EBusiness Suite installation in R12.1 when multiple languages are selected, where in 11i and R12 earlier had UTF8

Moreover ative character sets are still supported in EBS.

Oracle encourage to covert to AL32UTF8, as its support more characters and languages.

Fusion Apps will only support AL32UTF8 character set.

Those who is potentially looking for move to AL32UTF8 can explore Oracle Database Migration Assistant tool to provide an end-to-end
solution for migrating your databases from legacy encodings to Unicode

Oracle EBS and Multilingual Support (MLS)

That means Oracle E-Business Suite supports running multiple languages on the same instance simultaneously

Any number of supported languages (aka NLS patches) can be installed in a given instance

This Supports 34 languages covering 92 countries.

• American English, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Canadian ,French, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish,German, Greek , Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Indonesian,Japanese, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Lithuanian,Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Traditional Chinese, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese

Indonesian,Lithuanian,Ukrainian, Vietnamese are new in R12.1

you can enable Languages via License Manager Page.

When MLS is enabled you can notice the number of rows in Base Table(xxxx_B) and Translation Table (xxxx_TL)

Base table row contains language-independent attributes

That means for each row in base table, N rows exist in translation table corresponding to the N installed languages

One row for each installed language contains translated textual attributes

Regional Preferences that we call as Locale

These are typically consist of

• Profile Settings :Some of the regional preferences (locale) is controlled via Profile . The setup can be done by administrators at various level like Site,Application,Responsibility & User. Setup for aech user can override default setting with preferred values
• User Preference Page

• Site Level Profile Options :ICX: Client IANA Encoding is used for IANA character encoding determines character set of HTML based
  UI on client tier (Browser), this should be set to an IANA encoding equivalent to database character set. Recomebded is to set at site level
• User Level Profile Options : These are the some
  1. ICX: Language : This is defaulted to application language if no language is selected at login time. This profile determines language of email notifications, which can also be set to user’s preferred language
  2. ICX: Territory : This profile should be set to user’s territory (country), if this correctly setup , then it is used in conjunction with language code to pick the correct translation resources such BI Publisher templates .
  3. Client Timezone : R12 of Oracle E-Business Suite includes as standard a feature called User-Preferred Time Zone Support. In most existing E-Business Suite implementations, all users interact with the system in the “corporate time zone”, which will normally be the time zone of the headquarters of the implementing company, and the time zone in which the database runs. This means that remote users have to be aware of the time difference between their location and that of the corporate headquarters.This should be set to user’s Timezone.

     Users see date-with-time fields in their preferred (local) time zone, and can enter dates with time in this time zone.

     The data in the database continues to be stored in the standard corporate time zone

  4. FND: NATIVE CLIENT ENCODING : This is used to set the client (user) PC encoding, this also determines character encoding of file name and content. The will be used while exporting/importing spreadsheet data, uploading/downloading text files. Its Recommended to use the pre-set default value
  5. ICX: Date format mask : This can be set to user’s preferred date format
  6. ICX: Numeric characters : This is used to get any of these support combination.
     • Comma / period (10,000.00)
     • Period / comma (10.000,00)
     • Space / comma (10 000,00)
     • Space / period (10 000.00)
     • Single quote / comma (10’000,00)
     • Single quote / period (10’000.00)

International Calendar Support

R12.1.1 support Arabic Hijrah(The official calendar in Saudi Arabia with Arabic Hijrah month names ),English Hijrah(The official calendar in Saudi Arabia with English transliterated Hijrah month names). Users can choose their preferred calendar.

Hope this post helps to understand the latest internationalization suppport for Oracle EBS.

What is Sensitive Administrator Functionality?

These are Administrator / Developer Functionality.Some of Oracle EBS forms and pages allow a user to modify the functionality of the applications by specifying values such as

• SQL statements or fragments
• HTML fragments
• OS commands

These are designed-in SQL injections or XSS injections.

These screens may constitute a security risk if used in an unauthorized fashion and should be disabled, controlled, and audited in production environments.

There are several types of these sensitive pages in EBS, and they are controlled by different mechanisms. These are typically grouped into the following categories:

1. Oracle Forms Controlled by Function Security
2. HTML Pages Controlled by Function Security
3. Pages and Forms Controlled by Profile Options
4. Pages Controlled by JTF Roles and Permissions Profiles

#3 as,Pages and Forms Controlled by Profile Options , typically Includes:

1) for the feature OA Framework Personalization

Profile Code :FND_CUSTOM_OA_DEFINTION (“Personalize Self service Defn”)

Recommended Settings :No

If this profile option is set to Yes, the user can perform “Admin Personalization” for OA Framework-based pages.

2) for the feature Form Personalization/Examine

Profile Code :Combination of profiles:FND_HIDE_DIAGNOSTICS and DIAGNOSTICS

Recommended Settings :

• FND_HIDE_DIAGNOSTICS: Yes
• DIAGNOSTICS : No

These profiles control the Help->Diagnostics->Examine choice on the pulldown menu of Oracle Forms-based forms. The default value of FND_HIDE_DIAGNOSTICS (Hide Diagnostics menu entry) profile option is Yes, meaning the Diagnostics menu entry is hidden. If it is set to No, the Diagnostics menu entry is visible to the user.

If DIAGNOSTICS (Utilities:Diagnostics) is set to Yes, then users can automatically use these features. If Utilities:Diagnostics is set to No, then users must enter the password for the APPS schema to use the Diagnostics features.

Wrap-up

You can refer to metalink note #1334930.1 and use the same SQL queries(sensitive_page_access.sql ) to determine who has access to these

• SQL scripts drive off of page and form names (not functions)
• Slower, but ensures we pick up custom functions that include these

You should reduce and eliminate access to these pages by admins.

You need to use Fine Grained Auditing to audit the tables associated with these pages.

Two days back browsed Mysuppot via iphone, looks great.

Yes, you can finally login to metalink aka Oracle my support on your smart phone .Its good to see Oracle launched myoracle support for mobile, which can help you expand online content to new platforms . Though current release seems with Limited functionality as compare with normal HTML version.

Just go to http://support.oracle.mobi/

You just need to sign in with your regular My Oracle Support “SSO” user name and password, and then you should be good to go.