Tuesday, April 28, 2009

E-Business Suite Implementation Stages

Whatever is the nature of the project we have different teams working towards a same goal (question of who is doing what). Each project goes through several stages: from gathering business requirements to production go live (question of when). In this process we go through a number of testing cycles to keep the progress in check.



These questions of who, what and when drives the demand for number of instances in eBusiness Suite and when they are needed. Typically go through the following process (Simplified) before we go live.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Multi-Org Functionality

Introduced as Standard functionality in Release 10.7, Multi-Org is a key component of Oracle E-Business Suite:

1. Provides Secure access to different organizations of the enterprise
2. Supports multiple organizations of the enterprise structure in a single database.

In Release 11i, an individual Operating Unit is assigned to an
individual application Responsibility.
To see and work with data that is relevant to a specific
Operating Unit, users choose the appropriate Responsibility
after logging on to Oracle Applications.

Operating Unit
In the applications of the E-Business Suite that use Multi-Org
functionality, an Operating Unit is the primary organization unit
through which you secure transaction data, but also create, process,
and report on financial applications data.
An Operating Unit can be used to model an autonomous business unit
that performs one or more business activities and creates transactions
with financial impact.

Organizations
In general, an organization can be a company, department, division,
cost center, or virtually any other organizational unit within a business.
The organizational units relevant to Multi-Org in the E-Business Suite
are defined and stored using the Oracle Human Resources (HR) application.
Organizations are assigned classifications that determine their type and use.
These classifications include "Business Group", "GRE/Legal Entity",
"Operating Unit", "Inventory Organization", and "HR Organization".
The organizations described below are the cornerstones for securing
transactions and modeling an enterprise in the Oracle E-Business Suite.
How the user assembles these building blocks to logically model the
enterprise dictates the permitted interaction of the organizational
units and the flow of transactions between them.

Business Group
The purpose of the Business Group is to partition human resource
information.
The Business Group is the highest level in an organization structure
hierarchy in the E-Business Suite.
You can use the Business Group to model the consolidated enterprise
or a major division of a company that is an employer.

HR Organization, GRE/Legal Entity in Oracle Human Resources
The HR Organization classification is applied to the organizations to
which the user assigns employees.
This includes Business Groups, and in the United States it is also
applied to organizations of type "GRE"(Government Reporting Entities)
The GRE in the Oracle Human Resources products is the same organization
as the Legal Entity that appears in the Oracle Financials products.
The GRE represents the real-world legal entity that pays employees,
withholds their taxes, and provides reports on various matters
concerning them to government agencies.
In the Financial Applications of the E-Business Suite the Legal
Entity appears as GRE/Legal Entity when the Oracle Human Resources
application is installed.

Legal Entity in Oracle Financials
The Legal Entity represents a legal company for which the user
prepares fiscal or tax reports.
Tax identifiers and other relevant information are assigned to
this entity.
The GRE/Legal Entity organization classification in the financial
applications is used primarily for Cross-Organization Reporting for
selected reports in Release 11i of the E-Business Suite.

Operating Unit
The Operating Unit is the organization unit through which you create,
process, report on, and secure financial applications data.

Inventory Organization
The Inventory Organization is an organization for which you track
inventory transactions and balances.

Set of Books
In the E-Business Suite, a Set of Books is the financial reporting
entity that secures journal entries and account balances within the
Oracle General Ledger application.
It is neither an organization nor an organization classification in
the context of Multi-Org.
Generally, a Set of Books is used to represent a legal entity or a
group of legal entities.
Each Set of Books may have a different chart of accounts structure,
calendar and functional currency.

Organization Structure in Oracle Applications
It is the relationship of a Set of Books, Legal Entity, Operating Unit
and Inventory Organization that defines what is referred to as a Financial Organization Hierarchy in the Oracle E-Business Suite.

Points to be taken care:-

1. Business Group is the highest level of the structure and has no
accounting impact.
Legal Entities,Operating Units and Inventory Organization belong
to a single Business Group.
The Business Group also determines which employees will be available
to the Set of Books and Operating Units related to the Business
Group.
2. A Set of Books is the highest level that impacts Accounting.
A Set of books is associated with a single Business Group, but
mutliple Set of Books may be associated with a single Business
Group.
3. Legal Entities are associated with a Set of Books.
One or more Legal Entities may be associated with a single
Set of Books, and multiple Legal Entities may be associated
with a single Business Group.
4. Operating Units belong to a Legal Entity. One or more
Operating Units may be associated with a single Legal Entity.
5. Inventory Organizations belong to an Operating Unit.
An Inventory Organization can serve multiple Operating Units
within the same Set of Books. Inventory Organizations can be
associated with any Operating Unit(s) within the same Set of
Books. The relationship between Inventory Organizations and
a Set of Books is financial (creation of requisitions and
replenishment of supplies). For example, requisition transactions
are created against an Inventory Organization, which then have a
financial impact in the Set of Books.


MULTI-ORG
The following are the summarized steps for implementing Multi-Org
in Oracle Applications or when converting from a Non Multi-Org
environment to a Multi-Org environment.

Step-1.Develop an Organization Structure.
A successful implementation of Multi-Org begins with defining
your organizational structure in the multi-level hierarchy used
in Oracle Applications. The levels include:
• Business Group
• Set of Books
• Legal Entity
• Operating Unit
• Inventory Organizations

Step-2.Define Set of Books.
After determining your accounting calendar, currency and chart
of accounts structure, define all necessary Sets of Books.
If your enterprise structure will require multiple Business Groups,
you should define each Set of Books before Business Groups.

Step-3.Define Locations.
After determining your accounting calendar, currency and
chart of accounts structure, define all necessary Sets of Books.
If your enterprise structure will require multiple Business
Groups, you should define each Set of Books before Business Groups.

Step-4.Define Business Group(Optional)
You should define all your Business Groups before defining
any other type of organization. You must have at least
one Business Group. For fresh installations, Oracle Applications
provide one pre-seeded Business Group, "Setup Business
Group".
You can define additional Business Groups as needed for your
enterprise. We recommend that you modify the pre-defined Business
Group instead of creating a new one. If you decide to define a new
Business Group, instead of modifying the pre-defined Business Group,
then you need to set the "HR: Business Group" profile option at the
Responsibility level for the new Business Group. Oracle Human
Resources automatically creates a security profile with the Business
Group name when you define a new Business Group.

Step-5.Associate Responsibilities with Business Groups(Optional)
If you have multiple Business Groups, or if you do not choose to
use the default Business Group provided by Oracle Applications,
you must associate each Responsibility to one and only one Business
Group. If you are upgrading to Multi-Org, you must also associate
previously created Responsibilities to the appropriate Business Group.
You associate a Business Group with a Responsibility via the
"HR: Business Group" system profile option.

Step-6.Define Organizations
Define all your other organizations, i.e. Legal Entities, Operating
Units, and Inventory Organizations.
You can perform this step and the next step
(Define Organization Relationships) at the same time. The steps
are presented separately to emphasize the difference
between the organizational entity and the role it plays in your
organizational structure.

Step-7.Define Organization Relationships
Define your organization relationships by assigning classifications
to each organization.
Attributes of certain classifications relate organizations and the
roles they play.
You can classify an organization as any combination of Legal Entity,
Operating Unit, and Inventory Organization.
Specify your organization classifications in the following order:
1. Legal entities. Attach the Legal Entity to a Set of Books.
2. Operating units. Attach the Operating Unit to the correct Legal
Entity and Set of Books.
3. Inventory organizations. Attach the Inventory Organization to the
correct Operating Unit, Legal Entity and Set of Books.
If you have more than one Business Group, change to the Responsibility
associated with the desired Business Group and continues defining your
organization classification.

Step-8.Define Responsibilities
Define your Responsibilities for each Operating Unit by application.
Carefully consider your naming conventions for the Responsibility
names in a Multi-Org environment. It is a good idea to use
abbreviations of the business function and the organization
name to uniquely identify the purpose of the Responsibility.
Examples of naming conventions are Payables Manager IND
or IND Receivables Super User.

Step-9.Set MO: Operating Unit Profile Option
Set the Oracle Applications system profile option "MO: Operating Unit"
to link each Operating Unit to a Responsibility.
You must also define the default Operating Unit by setting the
"MO: Operating Unit" profile option at the site level in the system
profile option hierarchy. If this is a fresh installation, the
default Operating Unit can be any Operating Unit you have
defined. If this is an existing installation, you should assign
as the default Operating Unit the Operating Unit to which all
existing data should belong.

Step-10.Convert to Multi-Org Architecture
One of the options in adadmin is to convert to Multi-Org
architecture. Choosing this option will enable the Multi-Org
Support feature as well as add Operating Unit context to all
existing data. This process will also replicate seed data to all
Operating Units that have been defined.
Before your database administrator runs this step, you must have
defined an Operating Unit and set the site-level profile option
"MO: Operating Unit" to use your new Operating Unit. This profile
option tells adadmin what Operating Unit it should use when
converting your existing data. If you define additional Operating
Units, the seed data will be replicated for all Operating Units.
Once you have converted to Multi-Org Architecture, the Convert to
Multiple Organization Architecture option does not display on the
menu as you have already Multi-Org installed in your database.

Step-11.Verify Order Management System Parameters
If you have different item validation organizations for your Operating
Units, use Order Management "System Options" window to set the necessary characteristics for each Operating Unit. This allows Order
Management and Shipping Execution to default the tax code and
revenue account information correctly. The "Item Validation
Organization" setting indicates the Oracle Manufacturing
organizations that items are validated against. All transactable
items must be defined in this organization. This setting was
previously controlled through the profile option "OM: Item
Validation Organization".

Step-12.Set Profile Options specific to Operating Unit
Some profile options, including "AR: Receipt Batch Source" and
"AR: Transaction Batch Source", reference data that is secured
by Operating Unit. You must set these profile options at the
Responsibility level. You should choose a value corresponding
to the Operating Unit of the Responsibility.

Step-13.Define Inventory Organization Security
With Inventory Organization security you can restrict Inventory
Organization access to specific Responsibilities. You may want
to restrict your manufacturing users to certain organizations
according to your organizational hierarchy.

Step-14.Implement the Application
After the steps above are complete, go into each Operating Unit
and set up the Oracle Applications products. The following products
must be set up for each Operating Unit in which you intend to
perform the functions:
• Oracle Cash Management
• Oracle Order Management and Shipping Execution
• Oracle Payables
• Oracle Projects
• Oracle Purchasing
• Oracle Property Manager
• Oracle Receivables
• Oracle Release Accounting
• Oracle Sales Compensation
• Oracle Sales and Marketing
• Oracle Service
• European Localizations
• Latin America Localizations
• Regional Localizations

Oracle Fixed Assets, Oracle General Ledger, Oracle Inventory,
and the rest of the Oracle Manufacturing products need to be
set up only once for the installation, not once for each
Operating Unit.

Step-15.Secure Balancing Segment Values by Legal Entity(Optional)
Create your security rules to secure data entry and inquiry for
balancing segment values in each Legal Entity.
Assign your security rule(s) to all Responsibilities associated
with the Legal Entity’s Operating Units. If you need to further
secure balancing segment values for each Operating Unit of a Legal
Entity, you can define additional rules and assign them to
all Responsibilities associated with the relevant Operating Units.

Step-16.Run the Multi-Org Validation Report(Recommended)
After you have implemented Multi-Org, run the Setup Validation
Report to identify any setup problems. Some of the error conditions
that the report finds may be optionally deleted by running this
report, while others require that you change your setup. All
suggested changes can be optionally confirmed so that you may retain
your implementation even if it fails validation.
Optional Steps
After you have implemented Multi-Org and run the Setup
Validation Report, you have the option to set up the
following data that may be necessary depending on
your business and regulatory requirements:
• Document sequencing rules
• Intercompany Selling/Shipping relationships
• Cross-Organization Reporting infrastructure.
You also may need to set up Domain Conflicts to maximize the
concurrency of programs.

Relationship between the Organizational units of E-Business
Enterprises:




Multi-Org

Important Profile Options as part of Integration

You must set up the following Profile Options:

1.%HR%USER%TYPE% or HR: User Type
2.%HR%SECURITY%PROFILE% or HR: Security Profile and the
3.%HR%BUSINESS%GROUP% or HR: Business Group

4.%GL%SET%OF%BOOKS% or GL Set of books

5.%MO%OPERATING%UNIT% or MO: Operating Unit
6.%MO%SECURITY%PROFILE% or MO: Security Profile

Switch to SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR Responsibility and set the above Profile Options.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Profile Options in Oracle Applications

Profile options provide flexibility to Oracle Apps. They are a key component of Oracle Applications.

For the learners of Oracle Applications, understanding Profile Options is mandatory.

Profile Option
The Profile Option acts like a Global Variable in Oracle.

Why does Oracle Provide Profile Options?
These are provided to keep the application flexible. The business
rules in various countries and various companies can be different.
Hence the profile options are delivered by Oracle in such a manner
avoid hard coding of logic, and to let the implementation team at
site decide the values of those variables.

What happens when you login to Apps

Firstly and surely there is a URL for Oracle Applications that is structured possibily in below format, possibly in below format, although it can vary from version of apps.

http://machinename:portnumber/OA_HTML/US/ICXINDEX.htm
http://machinename:portnumber /oa_servlets/AppsLogin

When you join an Oracle Applications development team for an employer, you will first be given URL of the development environment.

In any Oracle Applications Implementation project (assuming it has gone live, there are minimum of three environments, each with three different URL's and different database instances.

These are:-

1.Development Instance
2.Testing Instance
3.Production Instance

As a techie, you will be given URL, User Name and Password of the development environment.

What happens when you login?

1.Your login gets authenticated against the table named fnd_user for
your username and password. This is called user definition screen.
Only System Administrator have access to this. The screen below is
where username and password is defined.

2.As you can see below, this username=MANNAMALAI is attached to
responsibilities. It is this assignment to the responsibility that
controls what a logged in person can do and can't do. In layman's
words, a responsibility is a group of menu.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

My Favorite Author - Robert T. Kiyosaki

Robert T. Kiyosaki

The main reason people struggle financially is because they spent years in school but learned nothing about money. The result is, people learn to work for money... but never learn to have money work for them.

Born and raised in Hawaii, Robert is fourth-generation Japanese American. He comes from a prominent family of educators. His father was the head of education for the State of Hawaii. "After high school, Robert was educated in New York and upon graduation, he joined the U. S. Marine Corps and went to Vietnam as an officer and a helicopter gunship pilot.

Returning from the war, Robert's business career began. In 1977 he founded a company that brought to the market the first nylon and Velcro "surfer" wallets, which grew into a multi-million dollar worldwide product. He and his products were featured in Runner's World, Gentleman's Quarterly, Success Magazine, Newsweek, and even Playboy.

Leaving the business world, he co-founded in 1985, an international education company that operated in seven countries, teaching business and investing to tens of thousands of graduates.

Retiring at age 47, Robert does what he enjoys most... investing. Concerned about the growing gap between the haves and have nots, Robert created the board game CASHFLOW, which teaches the game of money, here before only known by the rich.

Although Robert's business is real estate and developing small cap companies, his true love and passion is teaching. He has shared the speaking stage with such greats as Og Mandino, Zig Ziglar, and Anthony Robbins. Robert Kiyosaki's message is clear. "Take responsibility for your finances or take orders all your life. You're either a master of money or a slave to it." Robert holds classes that last from 1 hour to 3 days teaching people about the secrets of the rich. Although his subjects run from investing for high returns and low risk; to teaching your children to be rich; to starting companies and selling them; he has one solid earth shaking message. And that message is, Awaken The Financial Genius that lies within you. Your genius is waiting to come out.

This is what world famous speaker and author Anthony Robbins says about Robert's work.

"Robert Kiyosaki's work in education is powerful, profound, and life changing. I salute his efforts and recommend him highly."
During this time of great economic change, Robert's message is priceless.

Current Implementation Modules and Business Scenairo

1. Implemented GL,AP,AR,FA,INV,PO,OM,WMS for 2 Locations.
2. Implemented Oracle India Localization for 2 Locations- 1. Delhi 2. Hyderabad
3. As per client and business requirement we had 2 seperate Legal Entities,
Operating Units, Inventory Organization - All falling under one Business Group.
4. Functional Currency is INR which remains same for 2 Locations.
5. Also we had 2 Seperate Set of Books.
6. Primary Currency being USD.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Currently working in India Localization (Trading Organization with 2 Operating Units)

Oracle India Localization (Version 11.5.9) and upgrade (Version 11.5.10.2 )
How to check the current India Localization Patchset level installed on the instance
The latest India Localization Patchset is IN60107 (Patch Number = 5498551)If the Patch Number 5498551 is applied, your current India Localization patchset is IN60107. This can be verified by running the below selectselect * from JAI_APPLIED_PATCHES where Patch_number = 5498551/

If the Patch Number 5498551 is not applied, the India Localization Patchset should be IN60106 or below.This can be checked by running the below statement:-select * from JA_IN_INSTALL_CHECK_INFO where name like '601%'/

Check the Current India Localization Patchset level installed on an Instance
India Localization mainly acts based on the Descriptive Flexfields (DFF's)
The DFF's attribute 1 to 5, 14 and 15 will be used by India Localization patch. If we have any data in that field we have to move it manually and check whether the data's were moved safe to other fields and then we can apply the patch. If we have not moved the data's from the appropriate field and if we apply India Localization Patch it will delete all the data in the fields 1 to 5, 14 and 15 and will use for India Localization.
This check is mandatory since India Localization patchset installation scripts will delete any previous registrations of attributes 1 to 5, 14 and 15 with Global Data Elements in the DFF's (AP_INVOICES, AP_INVOICE_DISTRIBUTION, FA_ADDITIONS, FA_MASS_ADDITIONS, FND_COMMON_LOOKUPS, MTL_SYSTEM_ITEMS, PER_ORGANIZATION, RCV_SHIPMENT_HEADERS, PO_LOOKUP_CODES)