Customer Interface

Customer Interface aka RACUST is a concurrent program that is responsible for the import and update of AR customer information from open interface tables to AR Customer tables. Check out the details here.

TCA Application Programming Interface (API)

TCA API’s are an integrated set of PL/SQL code designed in a highly modular fashion, that are easy to understand, maintain and extend.These are modular approach defaults and validates users who enter information, defaults information not provided by the user and calls the appropriate entity handler to perform the business related tasks.

Use of the TCA APIs allows you much more control of inserts and updates over the customer interface.

EXCEPTION AND ERROR MESSAGES

• Customer Interface (RACUST)
  When the customer interface executes, a report is generated. You can view the output by selecting the request and then choosing View Output. Here are details for all Error code.
• TCA API
  The APIs provide an extensive error-handling and error-reporting mechanism whereby all errors encountered in the different phases of API execution are reported and put on the message stack. You can refer to TCA API documentation for further details.

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TCA Customer setup in Oracle EBS requires these 20 set up steps :

1. Setup AR and HZ profile options
2. Setup Tax Location Flexfield
3. Set up flexible addresses
4. Create custom address styles (if required)
5. Define Flexible Address Validation
6. Define Customer Profile Classes (optional)
7. Define customer lookups
8. Enter parties and customer accounts
9. Enter Customer Account Information
10. Assigning Profile Classes to Customers
11. Setup Customer General (Header) Information - Customers Field Reference
12. Enter Customer Addresses
13. Assign a Business Purpose to a Customer Address
14. Enter Customer Account Contacts
15. Enter Customer Telephone Numbers
16. Assign Banks to Customer Accounts
17. Assign Payment Methods
18. Enter Marketing Information
19. Enter Customer Telephone Numbers
20. Creating Customer Account Relationships

Trading Community Architecture (TCA) is a structure which was based out of R11 Customer Model designed to support complex trading relationships to cater additional need which further extended in R12 with Supplier and Bank. So, TCA is a data model that allows you to manage complex information about the parties, or customers or suppliers or bank who belong to your commercial community, including organizations, locations, and the network of hierarchical relationships among them.

What is Trading Community Architecture (TCA)?

What is TCA, the Trading Community Architecture? Is TCA an Oracle Applications module? Is it functionality within an Oracle module? These are few common question, and there are often many answers given.

The TCA is a data model that supports the entry and management of entities that you interact with. So lets revisit the concept.

Trading Community Architecture is a Very flexible, very robust model which defines the components involve in trading within in E-business Suite.

The implementation of technology and applications to allow users to create and maintain relationships among entities

The universal data schema for customers, prospects, suppliers, distributors, resellers, consortiums, bank across all Oracle EBS applications

TCA not only allows for the tracking of relationships between the implementing organization and its trading partners, but also tracks relationships between the trading partners themselves.

You should also note, TCA is neither an Oracle Applications module nor requires separate license.

If you see TCA guide, you can find these are the key features of TCA

• Provides a foundation for a single source for customer information.
• Ability to represent all business entities as a “Party” (organizations, people, groups, relationships) and to handle them the same way. This approach provides flexibility to accommodate all B2B, B2C and hybrid models in the same repository.
• Many-to-many relationships between Parties and Locations, that allows for less duplication and easier updating.
• Capability for advanced relationship modeling between entities within the trading community. Any party can figure in any number of Party Relationships even within matrix hierarchies (relationship networks).
• Ability to setup and maintain any number of party classifications which can be used for reporting and assignment purposes.
• Extensible data model to enable various business data requirements.
• In reality , three entities Drive in the TCA model , which are Party, Account, and Relationships.

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As per TCA model,each party can have multiple customer accounts and you might chose to merge two of those. This is customer (account) merge as discussed in last post.

Within TCA model, the concept of “Customer” is separated into two layers: the Party layer and the Account layer

• CRM applications are referring to the Party layer when they refer to “Customer”
• Other applications, on the other hand, are considering to the Account layer, when they refer to “Customer”

Party Merge

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