Do you know, Oracle’s E-Business Suite is used in over 150 countries.

In order to help global companies lower costs, drive compliant processes, and deploy country-specific capabilities to operate anywhere in the world, Oracle has developed 3 strategies called as localizations, internationalizations, and translations.

Localizations refer to functionality that is specific to certain regions or countries, usually based on regulations, legislation, or business processes in those regions/countries. You can refer to Country Specific Data Sheet for more details.

Internationalizations refer to products with the flexibility to be used worldwide with capabilities to allow for choice of locale (i.e. date format, currency, number format, etc.) and use with multiple languages.

Translations refer to changing the actual User Interface text of a module from English to another language.

Not all modules are translated into all languages, but with each release Oracle provides more and more translations.

The difference

Internationalization and localization are different procedures.

Internationalization is the process of making software portable between languages or regions, while localization is the process of adapting software for specific languages or regions.

Internationalized software can be developed using interfaces that modify program behavior at runtime in accordance with specific cultural requirements.

Localization involves establishing online information to support a language or region, called a locale.These Locale are best understood as Date format, number format, currency, name/address order …etc.In EBS, Profile options control regional preferences (locale)

Whereas, in Translation, Translating product UI strings and Help from English to another language .

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)

There are many kinds of bosses. Nice bosses, nasty bosses, power-hungry bosses, placid bosses, insecure bosses and so the list goes on. So what kind of boss are you? Does your boss fits the description?

Great article written by Geoffrey James on 8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Bosses, from article in Inc Magazine:

1. Business is an ecosystem, not a battlefield.
2. A company is a community, not a machine.
3. Management is service, not control.
4. My employees are my peers, not my children.
5. Motivation comes from vision, not from fear.
6. Change equals growth, not pain.
7. Technology offers empowerment, not automation.
8. Work should be fun, not mere toil.

In Nutshell, The best managers have a fundamentally different understanding of workplace, company, and team dynamics.

What other additional characteristics would you add to this list?

The concept of Business Events in the context of EBS plays a critcal role in enabling event-driven integration with other systems outside the application.

In addition to that, the Business Events in E-Business Suite in particular allow for an exceptionally effective way of decoupling the standard product functionality, available out of the box, from client customizations that seek to adapt the standard product to meet customer-specific business needs. In other words, Oracle Applications developers should consider using Business Events whenever possible when configuring and customizing the standard products.

What are Business Events

“A business event is an occurrence in an internet or intranet application or program that might be significant to other objects in a system or to external agents.”

For example, the creation of a purchase order is an example of a business event in a purchasing application

Oracle Business Events =>Architecture

The Oracle Workflow Business Event System is an application service that leverages the Oracle Advanced Queuing (AQ) infrastructure to communicate business events between systems.

The Business Event System consists of the Event Manager and workflow process event activities

• Is available with both standalone and E-Business Suite Workflow
• Provides event driven processing
• Allows Application modules and external systems to raise events
• Facilitates Oracle Application modules and external system to subscribe to these events
• Subscriptions can be synchronous or asynchronous

Do you know,

• 11i10 E-Business Suite is preconfigured with 915 Business Events
  • Each Business Event represents a ready to use Integration or extension point
  • 915 Outbound Integration/extension points
  • 915 Inbound Integration/extension points
• Integration points centered around the major E-Business Suite flows like p2p, o2c etc

Component Architecture

Typically Business events Component can be best understood as:

Transactional Diagram of business Events can be best understood as:

Below is Architectural Diagram for Inbound Business Events , typical flow consist of

• Event Name
• Payload
• Event Parameter
• Unique Event Key (auto generated)

 

Below is Architectural Diagram for Outbound Business Events , typical flow consist of

• Creates deferred subscription to the selected
• Deferred subscription transfers the event to the customer queue (WF_BPEL_Q)
• Unique consumer is created automatically

Event Manager for Oracle Applications

The Oracle Workflow Event Manager lets you register interesting business events that may occur in your applications, the systems among which events will be communicated, named communication agents within those systems, and subscriptions indicating that an event is significant to a particular system. The Event Manager also performs subscribtion processing when events occur.

Subscriptions for Business Events

• Events that trigger custom code
• Events that send information to Workflow
• Events that send information to other queues or systems

where you can Uses of Business Events

• System integration messaging hubs
• Distributed applications messaging
• Message-based system integration
• Business-event based workflow processes
• Non-invasive customization of packaged applications

PLSQL vs Java Business Event System

Oracle Workflow provides Business Event System implementation within the database (PLSQL) and in the middle tier (Java).

The implementation is exactly the same in terms of the event subscription processing in both these layers but the only difference is how the Developer wants to leverage Business Event System's capabilities for event processing requirements.

With the availability of Business Event System implementation in PLSQL and Java, different subscription processing scenarios can be achieved.

How to Proceed if Business events are required to use

• Design your Business Event/s
• Define your event

Setting Up the Business Event System [Adopted workflow user documentation]

To set up the Business Event System and enable message propagation, perform the following steps:

1. If you want to communicate business events between the local system and external systems, create database links to those external systems.
2. If you want to use custom queues for propagating events, set up your queues.
3. Check the Business Event System setup parameters.
4. Schedule listeners for local inbound agents.
5. Schedule propagation for local outbound agents.
6. If you are using the version of Oracle Workflow embedded in Oracle Applications, synchronize event and subscription license statuses with product license statuses.
7. Ensure that the WF_CONTROL queue is periodically cleaned up to remove inactive subscribers.

For Creating a event in R11i or R12 you can refer to Oracle documentation .

Taking this opportunity to wish reader from everyone a Happy Chinese New Year It’s the year of the Water Dragon according to the Chinese calendar. GONG XI FA CHAI!

BAM represent Business Activity Monitoring.

That means Oracle BAM is Meaningful, Event-driven Intelligence for End-Users tool, used mostly to perform these :

1. Monitor business processes & services in real-time
   • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
   • Service-Level Agreements (SLAs)
2. Analyze events as they occur
   • Correlate events & KPIs
   • Identify trends as they emerge
   • Alert users to bottlenecks & solutions
3. Act on current conditions
   • Event-driven alerts
   • Real-time dashboards
   • BPEL processes & web services integration

Oracle BAM Solutions

1. Provides Development Organization with a set of web-based applications to:
   • Capture real-time data from any database, message queue or application
   • Construct data objects for analysis
   • Define metrics, dashboards, alerts & automated actions
2. Provides IT Operations with key integrations to:
   • Deliver integrated end-to-end process monitoring & management
   • Provide a single, multi-source BAM platform for integrating data & events across all sources, Oracle and non-Oracle

If you are coming from EBS then this post will help you to understand the difference of security model in these two application.

here is quick comparison chart all the major security features of Oracle Application (EBS) and Fusion Application side by side.

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.

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.