Oracle Data Integrator –

• To be used for Bulk data
• Helps lower total cost of ownership among data-centric architectures.
• An easy-to-use interface combined with a rich extensibility framework helps improve productivity and lower development costs.
• Fully integrated with Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, and Exadata to put data at the center of your enterprise.
• In addition, ODI is open and standards-based to work with 3rd party applications as well as Oracle’s applications.

Oracle Golden Gate

• A high-performance software application for real-time transactional change data capture, transformation, and delivery, offering log-based bidirectional data replication.
• The application enables to ensure that your critical systems are operational 24/7, and the associated data is distributed across the enterprise to optimize decision-making.

DRM is a master data management tool used to administer hierarchies, attributes, and metadata used by various types of applications.

The DRM tool can act as a centralized enterprise hierarchy management solution serving a wide range of downstream BI, EPM, ERP, operational, and other systems.

Common applications of the DRM tool include management of GL chart of accounts,customer and employee attributes, and product information .

Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management (DRM), Fusion Edition functions as a master data management solution where reporting structures are maintained, analyzed, and validated before moving throughout the enterprise. Data Relationship Management does the following:

• Manages business entities, hierarchies, attributes, and mappings across multiple systems.
• Validates data relationships and calculates attribute values using business rules.
• Enforces referential integrity across all subscribing systems and hierarchies.
• Enables you to create and manage alternate views.
• Merges independent data sets from different sources and combines them into a master set.
• Maintains historical versions for comparative reporting and analysis.
• Tracks all hierarchy and attribute changes with a full-featured audit log.
• Can serve as the main point-of-entry to update subscribing systems or be used subsequently for reconciliation and analysis.

You can use Data Relationship Management to manage charts of accounts segment values and hierarchies for Oracle General Ledger.

You can create new segment values, edit their properties, and maintain hierarchies using DRM. This information can be synchronized to one or more general ledger instances using a concurrent request program in the Oracle E-Business Suite.

DRM can integrate with other systems, Oracle or non-Oracle systems. The simplest way to let flow the data in between systems is by Import/Export.

Export can be done to a flat file or a database table where as import can be done via flat file. Additionally, customization can be done through API to perform the same.

DRM is also an Analytical Master Data Management tool. It allows creation of an enterprise view of analytical dimensions, reporting structures, performance measures and their related attributes.

DRM can also be considered a change management tool, as it is often used to facilitate the combination of disparate General Ledgers, product mappings, customer data sets, and other business information.

Mergers and acquisitions are frequently reliant on DRM to enable different systems to be able to communicate with each other.

DRM enables organizational consistency, managed change and becomes the foundation for any technology project

Oracle MDM Suite – These are the set of applications (MDM Hubs) designed to consolidate, cleanse, enrich, and synchronize these key business data objects across the enterprise and across time.

It includes pre-defined comprehensive data models with powerful applications to load, cleanse, govern and share the master data with all business processes, operational applications and business intelligence systems.

This includes following components –

• Oracle Customer Hub (Siebel UCM) – Enables an enterprise to manage customer data over the full customer lifecycle.
• Oracle Product Hub – Provids customers to centralize all product information from heterogeneous systems, creating a single product repository that can be leveraged across all functional departments. Details can be obtained at previous post
• Oracle Site Hub – Delivers a competitive advantage in site-driven business decisions
• Oracle Supplier Hub – Provides all the tools needed to onboard, evaluate, and manage suppliers across your trading lifecycle
• Oracle Data Relationship Management – A powerful financial reference data master, with best in class hierarchy management capabilities, and a business user friendly enterprise dimension mastering tool with deep integration into Enterprise Performance Management (Hyperion)

Oracle Exadata Database Machine

Oracle Exadata is the only database machine that provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and OLTP applications, making it the ideal platform for consolidating on private clouds.

It is a complete package of servers, storage, networking, and software that is massively scalable, secure, and redundant.

Simple and fast to implement, it is ready to tackle your largest and most important database applications – and often them 10 times faster, or more.

Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine

The industry’s first in-memory BI machine that delivers the fastest performance for business intelligence and planning applications

Best-in-class enterprise BI platform, in-memory analytics software, and hardware optimized to work together

Advanced data visualization and exploration to quickly provide actionable insight from large amounts of data

Fastest solution for business intelligence, modeling, forecasting, and planning applications

Access to all Oracle and non-Oracle enterprise data sources

No limits on your users, your data, or your applications

Oracle Advanced Analytics

Oracle Advanced Analytics extends the Oracle database into a comprehensive advanced analytics platform through two major components: Oracle R Enterprise and Oracle Data Mining.

With Oracle Advanced Analytics, customers have a comprehensive platform for real-time analytics that delivers insight into key business subjects such as churn prediction, product recommendations, and fraud alerting.

Oracle NoSql Database

The Oracle NoSQL Database is a distributed key-value database. It is designed to provide highly reliable, scalable and available data storage across a configurable set of systems that function as storage nodes.

Key Features are

• Simple Data Model
• Scalability
• Predictable Behavior
• High Availability
• Easy Administration

Oracle Big Data Appliance

An engineered system optimized for acquiring, organizing, and loading unstructured data into Oracle Database 11g. It combines optimized hardware components with new software solutions to deliver the most complete big data solution.

Pre-integrated full rack configuration with 18 of Oracle’s Sun servers that include InfiniBand and Ethernet connectivity to simplify implementation and management

• Cloudera distribution including Apache Hadoop to acquire and organize data
• Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition to acquire data
• Additional system software including Oracle Linux, Oracle Java Hotspot VM, and an open source distribution of R

Oracle Big Data Connectors

Suite of software designed to connect big data software with data in Oracle Database 11g.

• Oracle Loader for Hadoop
• Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop
• Oracle R Connector for Hadoop
• Oracle Direct Connector for HDFS

Prior to posting to the General Ledger, the Receipts Journal Report and Sales Journal display the transactions that would be posted to the General Ledger .

In Release 12 this program has been replaced by the following:

• Create Accounting or Submit Accounting – This generate accounting entries in Sub-ledger Accounting (XLA). You can run this from any AR Manager responsblity , and can be done via Control > Request > Run (Create Accounting).
  • The Parameter Transfer to General Ledger denotes whether or not the records created by Create Accounting in the XLA tables will be posted to the the General Ledger Tables.
    • If YES – the process will automatically call Transfer Journal Entries to General Ledger for you and your records are transferred from XLA to GL and your entries are posted.
    • If NO – then you need to explicitly run program Transfer Journal Entries to General Ledger to pickup the final accounted transactions from the subledger (XLA Tables) and move them on to GL.
    • Take a note : If you have transactions with Accounting Rules, you need to run Revenue Recognition PRIOR to running Create Accounting otherwise the invoice will not be picked up for accounting, OR you can use Submit Accounting instead.
• Submit Accounting – This process is an Oracle Receivables-specific counterpart of the create accounting process .
  • The Parameter Create Accounting determines whether you want to spawn the Create Accounting process as well – this is equivalent to running it standalone as in step 1 above
  • The Parameter Transfer to General Ledger denotes whether or not the records created by Create Accounting in the XLA tables will be posted to the the General Ledger Tables.
  • If you enter YES – the process will automatically call Transfer Journal Entries to General Ledger for you and your records are transferred from XLA to GL and your entries are posted.
  • If you enter NO – then you need to explicitly run program Transfer Journal Entries to General Ledger to pickup the final accounted transactions from the subledger (XLA Tables) and move them on to GL. See step 3 on how to do this.
• Transfer Journal Entries to General Ledger : If in either of the previous steps: Create Accounting OR Submit Accounting, you entered NO for the parameter Transfer to General Ledger, then you need to run this step explicitly.

Data Flow: When this Transfer done , these tables tables involved in the Transfer to GL and GL posting.

Subledger Tables

• XLA_AE_HEADERS
• XLA_AE_LINES
• XLA_DISTRIBUTION_LINKS

Transfer Journal Entries to GL (XLAGLTRN) process takes the subledger journals and inserts records into the Interface Tables

Interface Tables

• GL_INTERFACE / XLA_GLT_<groupid>
  • If you are using primary and secondary ledger , Two group IDs are created
  • One for the primary ledger and one for the secondary ledger.
  • Two journal import processes are spawned in this case, one for each group_id.

There is profile option “Disable Journal Import” (when set to Yes) prevents the GL Transfer from invoking the Journal Import.

The interface table used in this case is GL_INTERFACE. Setting this profile option is not recommended if you are using Oracle General Ledger.

Journal Import (GLLEZL) then reads from the interface table and creates records in the GL Tables

GL Tables

• GL_JE_BATCHES
• GL_JE_HEADERS
• GL_JE_LINES
• GL_IMPORT_REFERENCES

Hope this helps.

Account Hierarchy Manager in GL

Account Hierarchy Manager is fully integrated with Oracle General Ledger. With this you can create and manage values and hierarchies for your Accounting Flexfields using the Account Hierarchy Manager just as you can in General Ledger.

All changes made in Account Hierarchy Manager are reflected in GL upon saving and your entire chart of accounts is available in Account Hierarchy Manager.

Working with account structures and hierarchies in Account Hierarchy Manager is easy and intuitive because of the graphical interface. In addition, performing what-if manipulations for account structures is a simple process using the Account Hierarchy Manager.

You can:

• Graphically create, maintain, and review account structure hierarchies.
• Define new parent and child segment values, as well as change parent/child dependencies.
• Create new rollup groups from the Account Hierarchy Manager and have your changes reflected automatically in both the Key Segment Values and Rollup Groups windows.

Oracle R12 – Hierarchy Manager Limitations

Oracle Release 12 in its standard form supports a repository for master data in the form of segment values.

Oracle Hierarchy Manager does not cater to maintenance of multiple forms of hierarchies within a CoA Segment

Integration with non-financial systems not possible and hence the flexibility to report on multiple business scenario’s for non financial \ MIS data not possible, therefore no flexibility to version hierarchies for ‘What-if’ analysis

Oracle DRM solution

Oracle DRM manages the core / alternate hierarchies and acts as source of hierarchies for downstream systems. Next post will be focus on Oracle DRM solution.

Timezone handling is bit tricky in EBS. Currently you may have only two options:

1. Entering data in the standard corporate time zone as recommended by Oracle
2. Entering data in their own local time zone and using a custom solution to resolve the issues that arise when comparing data across transactions in different time zones.

If your company/Client uses the second approach (entry in local time zone), enabling the user preferred time zone feature might result in unwanted date with time conversions (local date with times that are converted to the user preferred time zone) because the system assumes that all dates with time are stored in the corporate time zone.

If your company uses the standard corporate time zone for all business transactions, you can enable the user preferred time zone feature and have the choice to continue working in the standard corporate time zone as before, or to set your preferred time zone and start interacting with the system in your preferred time zone.

If you do not set the user level time zone preference, then the system will continue to operate in the standard corporate time zone as it always has, even though user time zone support is enabled for the implementation.

Lets discuss out-of-box LETZ feature.

Legal entity timezone(LETZ) feature will automatically report transactions in the relevant period .

In other word LETZ means that you can choose between recording accounting transactions according to a single worldwide reference location or by referring to the time zone of the legal entity involved. It means that you can select to have a rolling close, which allows you to close periods in relation to the local date, or you can continue to use a single world-wide reference when period close should take place.

This feature was introduced in 11i10 in Controlled Availability status and is also available on R12 – also in a Controlled Availability status.

Enbling LETZ

It required two simple steps to achieve this :

1. Turn on and Set the ‘Enable Legal Entity Time Zone’ profile option to ‘Yes’ at site level.
   • Profile Option, ‘Enable Legal Entity Time Zone’, has been added and is available at site level only.
   • By default, this profile option is visible to the system administrator only. You will need to change its control access in the ‘Application Developer’ responsibility before it can be turned on.
2. Set up the Time zone of the legal entity in HR Locations . Leave it blank for Non LETZ entities.

How this works:

When the user preferred time zone feature enabled, date with time fields will be converted to the user’s preferred time zone.. That means if these profile setup :

• ‘Server Timezone’ profile must be set at the Site level, and must be set to the same standard corporate time zone as the database
• ‘Client Timezone’ profile must be set at the userlevel
• ‘Enable Timezone Conversions’ must be set to ‘Yes’ (‘Y’) at the Sitelevel.

Changes to support Legal Entity Time Zone have been made in Purchasing, Receiving, Inventory, Cost Management, Order Management and Process Manufacturing applications

Limitation

• Legal Entity Time Zone features do not address encumbrance accounting transactions. Therefore you should not enable these features if you are using encumbrance accounting.
• Oracle Reports do not display transaction dates/times in Legal Entity Time Zone, including internal reports which are used in the period end reconciliation process.
• Legal Entity Time Zone has not yet been addressed entirely throughout Supply Chain Management (SCM).
• Legal Entity Time Zone features do not address Periodic Costing, and Consigned Inventory Pay-on-Use Invoice Creation.
• As per Oracle Note, in Oracle AR except for auto-invoice or debit memo documents created through upstream products such as Order Management and Procurement , all the dates for manually created transactions within Financials will be defaulted to the corporate time zone.
  • If the user wishes to enter a manual transaction and default certain dates (GL dates) in the context of the legal entity and not in the context of the corporate time zone (server time zone), the user will need to manually adjust the date and not accept the system defaulted date.

Limitation

Therefore when Implementaing , legal Entity Time Zone features make sure this does not changes to financial information, and therefore is recomendated

• Work with Senior Finance person to determination as to whether the solution is correct for your company teams and get their buy-in.
• Work with Oracle engagement team for Oracle Development approval for supporting LETZ. Remember this is still Controlled Availability status
• Explore if you need to implement ‘User Preferred Time Zone’ along with LETZ.

Suggested Reading

• Understanding Time Zone Features in Oracle E-Business Suite 12

What is Auditing of data?

In simple terms it is defined as a procedure to examine a set of data carefully for accuracy with the intent of verification.

What is the need for auditing?

Any company is accountable for the data it stores. So any modification that is done to the data impacting the company financially or legally should be traceable to its source. The data may include sales/purchase orders ledger accounts, employee records etc.

Auditing in ERP.

• ERP software of a company is used to do all the transactions of the company. It may also store account information of clients and other sensitive data.
• Access to such data should be controlled.
• Any illegitimate modification could cost a company heavily.
• Company should be answerable for any change to this data.
• Hence an audit component in the ERP is very much vital.

Oracle Fusion – search for “the world changed in the past 5 years”

• 400 customers on Oracle Fusion Applications

Interesting article on the state of the Oracle Fusion Apps.

http://blog.softwareinsider.org/2012/12/31/market-maker-11-steve-miranda-oracle-fusion-applications-update-the-inside-story/

Must read it.