This post is to discuss the integration of various modules of e-Business Suite from an Oracle Service Contracts perspective. It should give an idea to consultants who wish to determine dependencies and to understand how the different modules communicate data between each others.To start , you can memorize this figure as below.

• With Inventory
  • Manages items associated with Oracle Service Contracts agreements and contracts: services, usages, warranties, subscriptions, and serviceable items
• With Advanced Pricing
  • Supplies the information to price the services and usages sold on the contract.
• With Order Management
  • Raises sales orders from which warranties and extended warranties are created.
  • Inventory is used to define serviceable products and service items (warranties and extended warranties)
• With Quoting
  • Provides quotes for sales orders
• With Receivables
  • Service Contract is integrated with the Oracle Receivables module for generating Invoices. In the Receivables we have to define Transaction sources and associated Transaction types which will be used for generating Invoices from Oracle SC. In the Service Contract we have to use the Accounting Rule, Payment Terms, and Invoicing Rule that will be used for the respective Contracts.
• With Bills of Material
  • Associates warranties with serviceable items
• With Install Base
  • Provides details of trackable items and the tracking of counters.
• With CMRO (Complex Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul)
  • Provides details of preventive maintenance programs, that may be associated with service contracts.
• With TeleService
  • Manages service requests
  • Retrieves contract details for a customer such as account, end date, status,contract type& number on all of their contracts.
  • Looks for the preferred engineers for a particular service.
  • Has visibility to coverage levels & times, reaction & resolution times for coverage, billing rates and types for a specified coverage.
• With iSupport
  • Provides customer access to service contracts to view entitlements, preferred technician, response and reaction times via self service mechanisms
• With Depot Repair
  • Provides details for repairs, exchanges, replacements, and loaners, which may update the contract coverages.
  • Has visibility to coverage details.
• With Field Service
  • Provides details about service and repairs to be carried out in the field.
  • Has visibility to coverage details

Hope this helps.

First enhacement is Contracts in any OU can be accessed w/o changing responsibility

• Approvals:Flag a contract if it requires approval based on renewal type
• Manual contract creation
  • New negotiation status “Draft”
  • Create New HTML contract search form (Swan) with more flexibility to search
• Billing:
  • Suspend billing functionality
  • Multi price list usage on the same contract (single currency only)
• Pricing:
  • Service Contract request type has been seeded in advanced pricing:
    • Leverage DFF’s
    • Other fields can map to Pricing entities like qualifiers/modifiers, etc. In 11i it was limited to OM and Quoting forcing to write PLSQL to grab DFF’s from SC.
  • Discounting can be applied on the contract header, lines and sublines. Earlier it was only at Subline level.
• Other Module Integration:
  • Install Base terminations and Transfers are tied to Service contracts. Whenever an install base record is transferred to a new owner, a new service contracts can be created. Earlier in 11.5.10, it worked similarly only for terminations.
  • New profile for these install base transferred contracts is OKS: Transferred Contract Identifier.

A Service Contract is a mutual agreement between the customer and the supplier for the products and services being purchased. Oracle allows us to create the following types of Service Contracts:

• Warranty
• Extended Warranty
• Service Agreement
• Subscription.

Oracle Service Contracts is the module that provides functionalities to manage above listed contract the simplest way possible.

Oracle does not provide any interface tables and concurrent programs to import the legacy contract data. The only way to import them is through these API's. All the above types of contracts can be created with the same API.

The OKS_CONTRACTS_PUB is the main public API provided by the Oracle Contracts for Service application. The individual APIs are defined as procedures in this package

Service Contract Public API - OKS_CONTRACTS_PUB

The OKS_CONTRACTS_PUB is the public API provided by the Oracle Contracts for Service application. Within this package, other APIs are specified as independent procedures. Following are the key APIs included in OKS_CONTRACTS_PUB:

• CREATE_CONTRACT_HEADER: This API is used to create contract header information.
• CREATE_SERVICE_LINE: This API is used to create contract line for each contract header. This single procedure creates the service/Usage/Warranty line depening on the line type passed.
• CREATE_COVERED_LINE: This API is used to create covered lines (also called sublines) for each service line.
• CREATE_BILL_SCHEDULE: This API is used to create the billing schedule for each Service/Usage line.

Service contracts (also called service agreements) are contracts that are usually sold to customers to support, repair and/or maintain some product or service that the customer owns.

These contracts often take advantage of the ability to bill on a recurring basis either monthly,quarterly or annually and can give the customer the ability to pay for their services in advance or in arrears of the period of service.

The most important Process in service Contract is Authoring. Let's explore in details..

Authoring

By using Oracle Service Contracts, you can author an original contract, define a contract from a template, or copy another contract. Business rules can be set up to force contracts to go through an approval process to ensure that the contracts are accurate and satisfactory. A quality assurance (QA) check is invoked before the approval workflow is begun. If the QA results show an error,then approval cannot proceed.

Authoring Business Flow

Service Contract provide and Facilities the steps required of the Author to Sign Service Contract . The Flow Consist of these steps:

1. Enter Service Contracts
   • Create contract from existing contract, template, or quote.
   • Add contract terms & conditions.
   • Add contract parties and further contract details.
2. Define Contract Renewal Triggers
   • Define renewal rules.
   • Define repricing rules.
   • Define billing rules.
3. Apply Customer Payment Information
   • Enter credit card information.
4. Review Contract For QA Compliance
   • Define quality guidelines for contract QA.
   • Run QA check for the contract.
5. Approve Contract
   • Manage approvals from company signatories.
6. Sign Contract
   • Communicate contract terms & service level objectives.

The Process -Author to Sign

The Author to Sign Contract process includes the following steps:

1. Its start with Discussion with customer and the vendor for options.
2. The contracts administrator creates the new contract, by using a template, the copy function, and so on.
3. The contracts administrator authors the contract.
4. The contract is submitted for online quality assurance check to make sure that all information is accurate and complete.
5. The contracts administrator submits the contract to the manager for approval.
6. The contracts manager approves the contract.
7. The contracts administrator sends the contract to the customer who then approves and signs it.
8. The contracts administrator signs the contract.
9. Once both the vendor and the customer have signed the contract, the contract becomes active and the customer is delivered the contract items according to the terms and conditions of the contract.

This Contracts for Service business flow includes the following steps as mention below:(refer to Fig 1 )

1. Create Quote: In the Quoting module a quote for a customer is created. The quote contains serviceable items, which are linked to a warranty. In addition to this, the customer may have ordered extended warranties for the items.
2. Create Sales Order: Based on the quote a sales order is created in Order Management. The sales order is pick released, ship confirmed, and fulfilled.
3. Update Install Base: The ship confirmation updates the customer’s Installed Base.
4. OKS Contract: As the customer ordered items, which have a warranty attached to it, a warranty contract gets automatically created in Contracts for Service. The same for the ordered extended warranties: A contract is created in Contract for Service that captures the extended warranties.
5. Author OKS contract: Alternatively a Service Contract for the extended warranties can also be created
   manually.
6. Create Invoice: The Main Billing Process in Contracts for Service creates regular invoices for the service offerings in the contract based on the used billing stream information in the contract.
7. Service Request: After a certain time the customer got problems with one of the purchased products and enters a service request against the product.
8. Reaction/Resolution Time: The system checks the reaction and resolution times which are part of the Service Contract for this product and sets Respond By and Resolution By dates in the service request.
9. Problem Resolution: The customer’s problem got resolved within the service cycle, such as Depot Repair or Field Service, depending upon how it is been setup.
10. Charges: During the resolving process the service department charges for expenses, used materials,and labor costs.
11. Apply Entitlements: Depending on the customer’s entitlement, which are part of the Service Contract for the repaired product, the customer gets reductions on the expense, material, and labor costs.
12. Submit to Order Management: The reduced charges are submitted to Order Management.
13. Create Invoice: The Order Management fulfillment process creates an invoice for the charges of the service requests.
14. Close Service Request: As the customer’s problem is resolved and the charges are passed to Order Management, the service request can be closed.

The QA Check is an automated process that verifies the contract contains the required and correct information. A QA checklist consists of one or more processes (PL/SQL Procedure, PL/SQL Package and Approval Workflow) which are executed at the time of launching QA check. Results of the QA check are returned to user on a screen immediately to troubleshoot any issue with Service Contract Authoring and maintenance.

Oracle provides a seeded QA check list which is also a default one for service contracts. In addition to the seeded QA checklist, we can define other checklists for Service Contracts to meet the specific business needs. The seeded QA checklist is executed automatically for any contract, even an additional QA check list is created for the contract.

What are the prerequisites?
All the processes must be defined in the Process Definitions form prior to be selected for a QA checklist.

QA check in Contract Life Cycle:

1. Contract Authoring: After entering all the required information in the Service contract authoring form contract needs to be submitted for a contract approval workflow. On the Summary Administration tab of Service Contract Authoring Form, there is a Submit button that launches the QA check and then allows the contract to progress through the Approval workflow if it passes.
2. Contract Maintenance: Contract maintenance includes various types of contract changes such as addition or termination of a service or usage line, changes in billing schedule, price changes etc. QA check is required in order to validate the consistency of the contract after every change. At this stage QA check is launched from the Actions menu.

Define QA check Process

You can define the Process :

Contract Service Contract Manager .. Setup .. Contract .. Process Definition

Launch a QA check

Action -> QA Check

Following are examples of issues that are tracked in the QA check:

• Failure to create a billing schedule for the customer.
• Failure to include an e-mail address for the customer contact.
• Absence of sales credits for contract lines.
• Customer credit on hold.

In OKS, A billing schedule(or typically consider Billing agreenment schedule) determines when the customer is billed for the services they receive.

Therefore you must specify billing schedules for each contract that you author in Oracle Service Contracts.

Those Contract indirectly created in Oracle Order Management need not to create a billing schedules again.

Typically billing schedules can be defined at the contract header, the contract line, or the subline level.

In order to initiate and complete the billing process for a month, you must run the following concurrent programs:

1. Service Contracts Main Billing :This program is run from OKS side. It generates a log file of the total value processed, total value successful, and total value rejected for billing. According to pricing attributes set up in the contract and billing schedule, detailed
   transactions are generated in the Service Contracts billing interface table.
2. AutoInvoice Import Program :This imports the billing transactions from the Service Contracts Main Billing Program into Oracle Receivables and generates the invoice details.AutoInvoice is used to import Transaction Batches and Typically used transaction source as OKS_CONTRACTS.
3. Service Contracts Fetch Receivables Info for Billing :This concurrent request obtains the invoice number and tax from Oracle Receivables, and updates the contract billing history. This information is displayed in the contract’s billing history.

Contract Header Creation : For creating contract header API is:OKS_CONTRACTS_PUB.CREATE_CONTRACT_HEADER

Line Creation : You creating lines you can this api OKS_CONTRACTS_PUB.CREATE_SERVICE_LINE

Sub Line Creation : This is important when underline item is IB track able then we can create covered product sub line with IB link established. API you can use is: OKS_CONTRACTS_PUB.CREATE_COVERED_LINE

UPDATING CONTRACT HEADER - You can use okc_contract_pub.update_contract_header API to Update contract Header

okc_contract_pub.update_contract_header
( p_api_version => 1.0,
p_init_msg_list => okc_api.g_true,
x_return_status => l_return_status,
x_msg_count => l_msg_count,
x_msg_data => l_msg_data,
p_restricted_update => okc_api.g_false,
p_chrv_tbl => l_chrv_tbl_in,
x_chrv_tbl => l_chrv_tbl_out);

UPDATING CONTRACT LINE - You can use okc_contract_pub.update_contract_line API to Update contract Lines

okc_contract_pub.update_contract_line (
p_api_version => 1,
p_init_msg_list => OKC_API.G_TRUE,
p_restricted_update => OKC_API.G_FALSE,
x_return_status => l_return_status,
x_msg_count => l_msg_count,
x_msg_data => l_msg_data,
p_clev_tbl => l_clev_tbl,
x_clev_tbl => l_x_clev_tbl
);

CASCADE DATE -You can use oks_bill_sch.cascade_dates_sll to cascase date in billing agreement(schedule). You just need to pass only the contract line ID

oks_bill_sch.cascade_dates_sll
(
p_top_line_id => <OKS Contract Line ID>,
x_return_status => l_return_status,
x_msg_count => l_msg_count,
x_msg_data => l_msg_data
);

DEFAULTING ATTRIBUTES FROM LINES TO SUBLINES : You can use below API for daulting attributes

oks_attr_defaults_pvt.default_lines_to_sublines
(
lines_sublines_tbl => l_line_table,
x_return_status => l_return_status,
x_msg_tbl => l_msg_tbl
);

CREATING CONTACT AT CONTRACT HEADER LEVEL :You can use okc_contract_party_pub.create_contact to create contact at header.

okc_contract_party_pub.create_contact (
p_api_version => 1,
p_init_msg_list => fnd_api.g_true,
x_return_status => l_return_status,
x_msg_count => l_msg_count,
x_msg_data => l_msg_data,
p_ctcv_rec => l_ctcv_rec,
x_ctcv_rec => l_x_ctcv_rec
);

UPDATING CONTACT AT CONTRACT HEADER LEVEL :You can use okc_contract_party_pub.update_contact to create contact at header.

okc_contract_party_pub.update_contact (
p_api_version => 1,
p_init_msg_list => OKC_API.G_FALSE,
x_return_status => l_return_status,
x_msg_count => l_msg_count,
x_msg_data => l_msg_data,
p_ctcv_rec => l_ctcv_rec,
x_ctcv_rec => l_x_ctcv_rec
);

CREATING CONTACT E-MAIL ADDRESS AT CONTRACT HEADER LEVEL :You can use OKS_EXTWAR_UTIL_PUB.Contact_Point to create contact at header.

OKS_EXTWAR_UTIL_PUB.Contact_Point (
p_api_version => 1,
p_init_msg_list => 'T',
P_commit => 'F',
P_contact_point_rec => l_cpoint_rec,
x_return_status => l_return_status,
x_msg_count => l_msg_count,
x_msg_data => l_msg_data,
x_contact_point_id => l_x_contact_point_id
);

Sales Credit : For creating sales credit separately, we will have to use API:OKS_SALES_CREDIT_PUB.INSERT_SALES_CREDIT.