A Practical Guide to Implement Oracle E-Business Suite

Copyright © 2016 Anant Porwal.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-2697-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-2698-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-2699-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016903446

Archway Publishing rev. date: 9/26/2016

CONTENTS

Audience

Foreword

Introduction

SECTION ONE

ORACLE E-BUSINESS SUITE APPLICATION FEATURES

Oracle Applications Overview

Oracle Applications Concepts

Oracle Applications Architecture

Multiple Organizations

Multiple Currencies

Multiple Language Support (MLS)

Key Takeaways

Oracle Supply Chain

Purchasing

Inventory

Order Management

Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP)

Key Takeaways

Oracle Manufacturing

Bills Of Material

Cost Management

Work In Process

Master Scheduling/ MRP

Key Takeaways

Oracle Financials

Oracle Assets

Cash Management

General Ledger

Oracle Payables

Oracle Receivables

Subledger Accounting

Key Takeaways

Other Oracle Applications

Human Capital Management

Projects

Oracle Approvals Management

Oracle E-Business Tax

System Administration

Key Takeaways

Oracle Technology

Oracle Alert

Oracle Workflow

Oracle Adi/ Web Adi

Electronic Commerce

Oracle Payment

Business Intelligence

Printing And Communication

Key Takeaways

Oracle Applications Future

Oracle Fusion Architecture

Oracle Fusion Applications

Oracle Fusion Middleware

Oracle Database

Key Takeaways

SECTION TWO

IMPLEMENTING ORACLE E-BUSINESS SUITE

Application Strategy

Implementation Criteria

Goals

Costs

Financial Benefits

Non-Financial Benefits

Other Factors

Return On Investment

Success Criteria

Implementation Approach

Key Takeaways

Project Management

Project Team

Managing Implementation Project

Project Plan

Deliverables

Documentation Standards

Issues Management

Change Control

Risk Analysis And Management

Project Control

Key Takeaways

Implementation Methodology

Oracle Business Accelerators

Standard Implementation

Key Takeaways

Implementation Process

Business Process

Business Requirements

Map/Gap Analysis

Solution Design

Configuration

Development

Customization

Data Conversion

Integration

CRP1

CRP2

CRP3

UAT

Training

Cutover

Post Go Live Support

Key Takeaways

Customization, Conversion, And Integration

Customization

Conversion

Integration

Key Takeaways

Documentation Standards

Business Process Documentation

Requirements

Map/ Gap Analysis

Solution Design

Configuration

Functional Specification

Technical Specification

Test Plan And Scripts

Training

Oracle’s Methodologies

Key Takeaways

Data Backup And Archiving

Database Backup

Data Archiving Considerations

Key Takeaways

Conclusion

About the Author

Disclaimer

INSPIRATION FOR LIFE

We all look to continue our lives through our children and through this journey we try to make them better than we are. This in turn provides us opportunity to reflect back on our lives, learn life lessons, gather inspiration to do more and be better in our lives.

While raising our children we have grown ourselves in our understanding of life, our son Bobby, who from an early age has shown signs of great understanding whether to build largest Star Wars Lego Star Destroyer at the age of eight years or going to World Robotics Championship in high school, has been working diligently day after day to pursue his passion and made us realize the effort that goes to accomplish an achievement in life and fulfill a dream. On the other hand life has thrown severe challenges towards our daughter, Annika, who has amazed us on how she gathers strength everyday of her life and surprises every moment with her charming smile to remind us the purpose of our life, no matter what you do, is to be happy with your life.

Our children, who have provided my wife Leena and me the inspiration of our lives to pick up and face new challenges every day whether to chase a dream or simply to make a day better with a smile, this book is a dedication to them.

AUDIENCE

This book is primarily intended for consultants, employees and project managers who plan to implement the Oracle E-Business suite and help them determine the best course of action with insight into the complexity of the Oracle E-Business suite implementation as well as tools and paths for successful project completion.

The book includes the roles and responsibilities of project team and would be a useful guide for all the members from project managers to individual contributors.

FOREWORD

Over the years enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications have become the staple of transactions processing systems for any company, and in the process to deliver the best solution, vendor companies have come up with various application models and transaction processing systems. Some companies were bought out, while others merged with existing applications, leading to only a few vendor companies being in business today. One such vendor is Oracle, being in the business for several decades, they provide products and services such as databases applications, transaction processing systems, report generation tools, and providing customer service interactions applications. Oracle E-Business Suite or Oracle EBS as it is popularly known is a massive ERP package containing just about any functionality you can comprehend using on daily basis. Oracle E-Business Suite is used by companies ranging from small and midsize companies to large Fortune 500 companies.

With the complexities in implementing these massive packages and leveraging their capabilities, there have been various proprietary methods designed by consulting companies for implementation of these ERP package. After working for several years in implementation of the Oracle E-Business Suite of applications at various clients in diversified industry, I have identified a common methodology and related tasks that have helped the implementation process significantly, and so I want to share my experience on what would be a practical way to implement the Oracle E-Business Suite of applications.

The purpose of this book is to help companies’ project managers and leaders to identify efforts involved in an Oracle E-Business Suite implementation and provides a high level process on how to create a blueprint for their implementation. In addition, this book also highlights major features available in the Oracle E-Business Suite of applications. The book will be useful for any member of the consulting team to guide them on implementation processes and provides a general check list of the items they need to consider in an implementation project.

My philosophy can be summarized in the following quote:

It is important what you get into, but it’s more important what you get out of it.

This applies to everything in life, be it the software application you implement or the college you graduate from. Keeping a goal for each of the important projects in life will define how successful they will be.

INTRODUCTION

A Practical Guide to Implement Oracle E-Business Suite book is about implementing Oracle E-Business Suite of applications in a practical way while achieving the goals and vision of the company with optimum resources and efficiency. With fast changing application technology environments and the cost involved in implementing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) package, it has become a priority for most companies planning to implement an ERP package that cost remains under control while getting the most out of their ERP package. Most of the companies today have a set agenda of what application suites they plan to implement, what their budgets are, and what integration they need to function better than they have been doing in the past.

Let’s talk about the two critical factors for implementation – Time and Cost.

Time has become a critical factor as business changes over a period of time and so does the process to do business. If the implementation is not completed within this time frame, there is a likelihood that people and processes can change as well as environment; that is servers, database, technologies and other applications integrated with Oracle may change adding complexity to the project and driving projects out of schedule and budget.

There have been implementation projects that have been prolonged for various reasons. Some of these are controllable; others uncontrollable. These can include:

• Inconsistent goals within different teams

• Inaccurate project planning

• Insufficient project control

• Project scope being changed during implementation

• Project team being replaced

• Different implementation methodology used at different times

• Team commitment to project

• Changes in technologies

• Budget restrictions have all added to the quality and success or failure of implementation

Cost has played another challenge, as most of these projects are funded based on budgetary funds available and the fact that the implementation is treated as an investment. The ERP package cost consists of two components – Software/ Hardware and Consulting. Software/ hardware costs include servers for hosting application, software licensing and support fees. This most likely will not change significantly whether the project is implemented in six months or two years; however consulting costs will change as it is directly impacted by the team size and duration of the project as most of the projects are implements based on time and expense. Some are implemented on fixed bids with specific deliverables and caveats.

It is more difficult to justify the investment in software implementation if it is prolonged beyond a certain timeframe. Most companies evaluate an ERP package as a return on investment or ROI in financial terms, which in laymen’s terms is financial and often non-financial benefits generated by the new process, while evaluating cost of current process compared to implementing the new package. Analyzing the cost of implementing new software will provide a ROI to help the decision making process.

With all the factors deciding the course of implementation, we still need to have an up and running application. So the question is how do you do it? To answer this question, I have put together this book that lists the factors that need consideration and the tasks that need to be completed for a successful on time implementation of the Oracle E-Business Suite. The purpose of this book is to help people who are part of the team to identify all that is necessary to implement the Oracle E-Business Suite including scope, schedule, deliverables, project control, risk management and more.

Having stated that time and cost are critical for implementing Oracle E-Business applications, we need to have a strategy and clear plan to implement the applications. This book covers important pieces of implementation that will impact the success, including methodology, applications selection criteria, project teams, project management, implementation tasks, customization, software integration, printed documents, communications, and tools.

This book is organized into two sections. The first section provides high level features and functions available within Oracle E-Business Suite of applications to provide the project managers and team members’ guidance on the possible usage of the Oracle E-Business Suite of applications. Following is a diagram that depicts a generic transaction flow.

Fig 1 Generic Transaction Flow

This is a high level flow and there may be additional flows depending on the business process and how the system is configured to address those needs.

The second section describes the implementation process, things that need consideration for an implementation project, starting with the implementation goals, building a team, defining success criteria to implementation lifecycle, methodology, documentation, monitoring and controlling progress, resulting in a path to deliver a successful project.

This book is not going to describe the setup steps for implementing Oracle E-Business Suite application features or how to use the application; that is already very well documented by Oracle. These are generally organized in two sets – Implementation and User Guides. The implementation guide documents set up steps in detail including mandatory and optional setup steps. User guides describe how each form, functionality, or report can be used. The documents also lists various business scenarios and how these can be met with various setup configurations. In addition there are other useful documents sets from Oracle including Technical Resource Manuals (TRMs), which provide technical details including tables and views within the application schemas, Application Programming Interface (API) and Open Interface guides are also available, these documents provide information on how Oracle can integrate with other applications and use built in Oracle functionality to handle integration, these guides are used for development and customization purposes.

At the end of each chapter I’ve provided some high level key takeaways, this will help you define the scope by starting your thought process. These are generic guidance questions, you may want to have a deeper conversation to get ready for implementation.

This book should help with planning an implementation, defining the scope, building the right team, identifying the critical tasks for successful implementation, executing these tasks and controlling the project.

Excellence lies in making end use simple. This is true with everything we do every day from making a smart phone to writing an application code and so does this book!

SECTION ONE

ORACLE E-BUSINESS SUITE APPLICATION FEATURES

ORACLE APPLICATIONS OVERVIEW

Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) or also popularly known as Oracle Applications is an enterprise resource planning system capable of conducting most of the transactions an enterprise does on a daily basis. These transactions include monetary as well as non-monetary transactions. The system ties all the aspects of financial management together. It also is capable of keeping non-financial records in the form of human resource information, customer relationship management, sales development etc.

It can potentially replace all the systems an organization uses for conducting business on regular basis.

Oracle Applications is designed to conduct most transactions for various business processes including Order to Cash, Procure to Pay, Forecast to Produce, etc., and in the process, maintains master data including inventory, suppliers, customers, banks etc. as well as transferring all the transaction from sub ledgers to General Ledger, the repository for all financial transactions, and produce period end reporting documents. It also helps conduct project related transactions, maintains fixed assets within company, keeps track of installed assets at customer locations, and tracks human resource activities from hiring to firing, to name some of the more common applications.

Oracle Applications is a complex system that allows conducting transactions in multiple currencies and multiple languages providing a uniform platform for companies with global operations.

It has the ability to define flexible organizational structures to allow transactions to be conducted between different sets of books, reporting entities, organizations by people belonging to different organizations, enhancing the integration between operations of multiple organizations and countries, in doing so creating appropriate accounting entries in each of these organizations.

Oracle Applications has come a long way over the years and introduced new ways of conducting business via adopting the technology with evolving business needs from a client server environment to java and web based technologies adding new applications along the way.

It has complex business intelligence reporting tools to facilitate management’s decision making process.

There are web applications to make things easier for novice users with limited training. There are portals for trading partners including suppliers, and customers to interact with the company, access relevant data, and communicate with the company on a real-time basis.

There is the ability to connect with suppliers and download their catalogs to enhance procurement efficiency.

Oracle E-Business Suite helps you to maintain customer relationships, share customers/ suppliers across different applications.

There are communication tools that are standard across industry embedded within Oracle E-Business Suite, which help facilitate communicating transactions in an electronic mode including e-Commerce Gateway and XML Gateway as well as email and fax communication abilities.

There are exchanges for improving procurement performance and pricing.

Though most companies are becoming paperless, there is functionality to format and print documents from within Oracle E-Business Suite of applications.

ORACLE APPLICATIONS CONCEPTS

There are a few concepts in the application that prevail across the modules; understanding these would lead to better implementation and success.

Flexfields

Flexfields are flexible structures used across various application modules. This is a concept unique to Oracle Applications, which provides a flexible field’s format to make it adaptable to any organization. Flexfields provides the opportunity for critical and optional information to be captured in the system. There are two types of flexfields in the Oracle E-Business Suite:

Key Flexfield

As the name indicates, these are key in getting the application to work. These need to be defined for each application being implemented, though not all applications have these key flexfields. These flexfields must be defined in order to configure and use the specific application and are required for the functioning of the application features. For example, the accounting key flexfield holds financial account information and will be required for any transaction in any application having financial activity in order to record the transaction to the account it is going to impact. Inventory item flexfields define the item number; this is required for processing of any transactions that involve inventory items, whether purchasing, manufacturing or selling. Following are the key flexfields in core E-Business Suite:

• Account Alias

• Accounting

• Asset Key

• Bank Details

• Asset Category

• Cost Allocation

• Grade

• Item Catalogs

• Item Categories

• Job

• Location

• Service Item

• People Group

• Personal Analysis

• Sales Tax Location

• Sales Order

• Soft Coded

• Stock Locator

• System Item

• Territory

• Training Resource

Defining a key flexfield structure requires thorough analysis of all applications that plan to use it. Modifying the structure retrospectively is very difficult, since there may be an impact on historical transactions or require custom data changes to make them compatible with the new design. Hence it is prudent to conduct requirement analysis of transactions and key flexfields in various applications while implementing new applications.

Descriptive Flexfield

Descriptive flexfields are optional fields and provide flexibility for additional information that is not available in standard Oracle E- Business Suite forms. Most of the tables associated with forms will have these; however these flexfields are not mandatory, unlike key flexfields. They are discretionary fields, so the business can decide which ones to use. Normally these are used for storing additional information not normally available in the form or using these in custom concurrent programs for further processing or reporting. These flexfields are hidden and can be invoked from the form by moving the cursor to the field that looks like a beer mug, once it is configured for use.

These are associated with underlying table used with data entry form; these flexfields provide additional columns to store information at the database level, which are not met by standard Oracle functionality. Descriptive flexfield can be configured to make it context sensitive, so it can be used only for specific context or can be purposed based on the context, it is very flexible and can accommodate varied amount of business usage scenarios.

Workflow Process

Oracle uses workflow technology to depict the flow of work diagrammatically to make it easier for users to understand. For example, to see how a requisition or purchase order was approved, a work flow process depicts individual components of the process in the live environment and the current status of a particular document at a given point of time. This means that when a user is processing a document for approval, the workflow process diagram will actually indicate the current status of the document in the approval process whether it is waiting for approval from a manager or for background process to complete.

Workflow Builder is a tool that allows users to build new or modify existing processes. Oracle comes prepackaged with all the necessary workflow processes to be used by an application; however, users can create new ones as well as modify the prepackaged one. Some of the key transactions that use workflow technology are outlined in the following sections.

Approval Processing

For any transaction that requires approval, Oracle uses workflow technology. These could include requisitions, purchase orders in purchasing, invoices in payables, or journals in the general ledger. For each of these transactions, the document is routed for approval to the appropriate person based on an amount limit, account, category, or item restriction. For example, a purchase order approval is based on the limits a buyer has been assigned, so the document automatically flows through to the person with appropriate authority for approval or in cases where it is routed through hierarchy then it is routed to all people in the chain of approval. Oracle is flexible enough to allow users to configure how the approval process will work.

Sales Order Processing

From the moment a sales order is entered and booked until it is closed, there are various activities that needs to be completed. This is known as the sales order cycle and all activities that are part of a sales order will need to be defined.

The sales order cycle is defined via the workflow process. Each sales order is created, processed, and closed as part of its life cycle; however each sales order can have a different life cycle. For example, a regular stocked product can go through following stages of the cycle with sample workflow process activities:

• Order Entry – Enter order line

• Pricing – Price line for customer

• Scheduling – Schedule ship date based on availability

• Order Booking – Book order

• Picking – Pick line for shipment

• Shipping – Actual shipment and confirmation in the system

• Inventory Interface – Create accounting and update balances

• Order Management Interface – Update order line status

• Invoice Interface – Invoice details to Receivables

• Close – Close line/ order after completing all steps

For a manufactured product, the company may have a different workflow process. For example, the process may involve a design approval to identify whether the design meets the requirements and finance approval to confirm the selling price, which takes into account all the incidental costs for manufacturing and shipping custom products. This product may require special manufacturing, sample workflow process activities may include:

• Order Entry – Enter order line

• Engineering Approval – Design approval

• Pricing – Special price for customer

• Finance Approval – Special pricing approval

• Scheduling – Schedule based on manufacturing lead time

• Order Booking – Book order

• Work Order Release – Manufacture and move to inventory

• Picking – Pick line for shipment

• Shipping – Actual shipment and confirmation in the system

• Inventory Interface – Create accounting and update balances

• Order Management Interface – Update order line status

• Invoice Interface – Invoice details to Receivables

• Close – Close line/ order after completing all steps

The above sales order cycle workflow are samples to indicate workflow is flexible and can be customized as necessary to suit business needs.

Account Generator

All transactions