The Feature

Contingent Worker and Her Supplier Start Date

You can encounter this feature if you are using Oracle iExpenses and Oracle Payables with contingent workers.

The Feature

A contingent worker starts working on a specific date. Her AP supplier record is not created until few days later. So the effective date of her HR assignment starts before her supplier record was created. When a contingent worker then tries to enter her expenses for the dates prior to the existence her AP supplier record, Oracle rejects the expense report.

The Workaround

Ugly, but there is one … The user has to create and submit an expense report with an item date AFTER the date her supplier record was created. Once she created and submitted the expense report (it can be withdrawn and deleted if needed), she will then be able to submit her expenses for the dates prior to the creation date the supplier record, but after her start date as a contingent worker. There isn’t a way to change supplier start date.

Please provide comments or contact me at marian.crkon@itsafeature.com if you have any questions.

How To Disable Delegation of iExpenses Notifications

Following steps provide instructions on how to disable delegation of authority for iExpenses notifications. This will prevent users from delegating their notifications, and hence their expense report approval authority, to other users. The Grant Worklist Access function is new in Release 10.5.10, and can only be disabled using the Oracle Personalization Framework, instead of be excluded as menu function.

Set Notification Reassign Mode to Transfer

You can read more about the notification reassign mode in the Do You Want to Delegate or Transfer That Oracle Notification? story.

• As System Administrator: Navigate to Profile > System
• In the Find System Prodile Values window, enable responsibility flag, and enter ‘Internet Expense’
• In Profile field, enter ‘WF: Notification Reassign Mode’. Click Find.
• Set the profile option as follows:Site=Reassign, Responsibility=Transfer.
• Save you changes.

Disable “Grant Worklist Access” function by using Oracle Personalization Framework
• As System Administrator: Navigate to Profile > System. In Profile field, enter ‘Personalize Self-Service Defn’. Click Find.
• Set the Personalize Self-Service Defn to ‘Yes’.
• Switch to Internet Expenses responsibility.
• Navigate to Expenses Home page
• Click on Worklist Access under Notifications section on Expenses Home page
• On Worklist Access page with button ‘Grant Worklist Access’, click on Personalize Region
• Click Apply.
• Click on pencil (Personalize) on the Table : Worklist Access User Information List line.
• On Personalization Properties page, find the field Rendered.
• Change the value from Inherit to false
• Apply
• Click on Return to the Application link at the bottom of the page.
• The ‘Grant Worklist Access’ function is now hidden.
• Disable Personalization Framework. System Administrator: Navigate to Profile > System.
• In Profile field, enter ‘Personalize Self-Service Defn’. Click Find.
• Set the Personalize Self-Service Defn to ‘Yes’.

Catching Up with an Aussie World Traveler

I caught up with my friend Greg Hare, an independent Oracle consultant with whom I worked over ten years ago on an Oracle Financials upgrade project in Pilsen, Czech Republic. Greg is an Australian who lives with his family in South Africa, and travels for Oracle implementation work all over Africa and Middle East. Here are few excerpts from our conversation.

I can’t believe it’s been 10 years since we’ve seen each other and worked together. Time sure flies…

Yes. I can’t believe I’m doing the same thing as I was 10 years ago. That is worse!

Have you ever thought about doing anything else? Like retire for instance?

I would, but I need more money to live comfortably. Maybe I should move to Slovakia. I did look at buying a business a few years ago.

Marian inserted his picture in the MSN Messenger.

Can you see my picture now?

Yes. You look exactly the same.

That’s not what my wife says… So what you’ve been up to since Pilsen? I remember you were in South Africa, India, where exactly are you now? Could you give me a little chronology of places and clients?

I am in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I am contracting to Intec who do Telco billing software. I have developed an interface product for their software to Oracle Financials (in India). I have just arrived here. I was at Oracle Czech in Prague until January 1998, then Sydney for a few months, and Cape Town since. Exceptions were Nigeria for a year in 2004, Kenya for 6 months 1999/2000, and the odd trip (like this) since.

That’s what I call a Globe Trotter!

Fortunately most of the places were good. Riyadh does not fall into that category.

Do you get mistaken for an American? (Not that there is anything wrong with that!)

Fortunately not. I guess I still exude Australian.

So what is your specialty now? Do you call yourself a developer, business analyst, system architect?

My title with Intec was Systems Architect. I specified the new software we developed, did some development, testing, etc. A jack of all trades, plus project management.

How can other clients benefit from the interface you did? Where can we find more information about it? I never heard of Intec.

It’s specific to the Intec software. It is based on their output file from their billing software. I am sure there is some information about it on the Intec website www.intec-telecom-systems.com. Otherwise you can ask them directly for more info.

Can you see what is happening? You are advertising other people! Do you have a website? How do clients find YOU?

I do not have a website. Clients usually find me through word of mouth. South Africa is not a big market.

Oh, come on! It’s 2006! You have to have a website! Would you be interested in writing about the work you’ve done at this blog? (Now we are getting somewhere!)

I could, I wouldn’t be overly keen on it, but I could. I did set up something the other day on myspace.com - but mainly was thinking of it for family photos, etc.

I would love to look at your family pictures sometimes. But I was talking about your business-related site. Soundslike you are mostly involved in custom work for clients. How much are you involved with implementing and using the standard Oracle Applications?

I do occasional custom work for other clients. I have only been doing this on and off for 9 months now. My main line of work is implementing and using standard Oracle Apps. That’s what I have done before this (Intec interface) project.

You have seen the applications mature from Release 9 to the current day. How would you summarize what Oracle did well, and what they could have done differently? In other words, what is your favorite feature?

My first version was MPL5! What they did well was the Key Flexfield design plus making the applications web-based. What they could have done differently was spending more time testing major new releases like GUI and 11i before they released them.

What do you mean? What we were all doing that testing! Yeah, Release 11i was a bloodshed. I am worried the same thing is going to happen with the Fusion project. Let’s switch gears. Speaking about working with Oracle. Are you, or have you ever been a member of the communist party, I mean OAUG?

No.

You mean the first, or the latter? Why not?

I couldn’t be bothered with OAUG. I see it as Oracle’s marketing tool. More likely to have been in the Communist Party.

No need to disclose your political preferences here. But I hear you. I also see OAUG as just another Oracle sales channel. I guess there are multiple definitions of Oracle users. Obviously, attending OAUG events would not be the best way to network for people who are paid by the hour. It’d cost you thousands of dollars (membership, entrance fee, lost revenue) to attend a conference. That’s a shame, because you have a lot to provide. Did you know that OAUG just started a new online pilot program for clients to submit their enhancement requests? It only took them 15 years!

I thought they had that before. Maybe it was another forum that had it.

Do not get me wrong. I think the OAUG is great, and Metalink is great. And they both got better over time. It’s just so hard to effectively provide feedback to what is being developed and sold. So how do you get help in the EMEA region? Is it still called that?

Mostly from Metalink. And contacting people I know.

How is that working for you?

Fine. The Metalink has always been helpful in the past. I think it is an OK system. Sometimes I feel the people on the other end are not brilliant (often due to language barrier and the fact they are first line people, but if you have a serious problem then you always find someone who knows how to solve the problem. A lot of the people that work there are very dedicated.

I agree. In general, I don’t think that Oracle has ever found a good way to utilize the knowledge of their user base. At least in the applications business. It maybe better on the database side (just look at a number of DBA blogs out there). But it is poor on the applications side. I feel like the applications have always been Oracle’s lesser-loved sibling…

I think for a long time Oracle (and Larry) had one foot in, one foot out on the Apps side. I remember there was talk many years ago of selling the Apps business completely.

What a turn-around, huh? How do you feel about the recent Oracle acquisitions? Is that a way to go with software? Are you excited, or worried? I guess it means more work for consultants like you and I!

I haven’t really thought of how it affects me too much. I think it’s a lot to take on. I think some of the acquisitions, like Retek for instance, made a lot of sense. I think companies are more comfortable purchasing software if there is a big name behind it. But I am not sure buying Peoplesoft made a lot of sense. Why buy something that gives you just a little more than you already have?

10,000 additional clients…

The integration is going to be a nightmare (Project Fusion). How do you choose how to mesh two software packages together? Why not just invest in that without buying Peoplesoft?

10,000 additional clients…

10,000 additional clients that you are spending a lot of money to get. Some of which will leave no doubt. The winner in this is SAP.

That’s what SAP wants us all to believe. I guess we do no understand these things. See, this is why we have to make our living as consultants, instead playing golf or sailing whole day… Are you going to watch the Super Bowl?

No, the NFL games were not on during the season so I can’t suddenly watch the final. I don’t even know who is playing. But I did follow the NFL when I was living in the US.

Seattle is in it for the first time in their franchise history! That’s the only reason why I know. And there is also some team called the Stealers from Pittsburg?

Are they still the Seahawks?

Marian: Yep. And they are still owned by Mr. Allen. I thought it was funny they called him that on TV. I guess you get a lot of respect when you own a football club. All right, I realize it is getting very late for you. Can I use your real name, or shall I use a pseudonym?

You can use my real name. That was pretty easy. I am not sure if anyone will be interested, but who cares.

We were interested, and that’s all that matters. All I wanted to do was pick your brain about what you do, and let you know about It’s a Feature!. It was fun to catch up and talk to you! Let’s do this again sometimes. And write a story or provide comments when you feel like it. I am always looking for contributors who have something interesting to say. That is what will make this site work. Thank you for your time. Good night and take care mate!

No worries. I wish you and the Seahawks good luck. I look forward to reading this.

See ya!

Is Blogging Changing Your Business?

There is an interesting BusinessWeek article on this topic: Blogs Will Change Your Business. I personally enjoyed this part:

“…How big are blogs? Try Johannes Gutenberg out for size. His printing press, unveiled in 1440, sparked a publishing boom and an information revolution. Some say it led to the Protestant Reformation and Western democracy. Along the way, societies established the rights and rules of the game for the privileged few who could afford to buy printing presses and grind forests into paper.

The printing press set the model for mass media. A lucky handful owns the publishing machinery and controls the information. Whether at newspapers or global manufacturing giants, they decide what the masses will learn. This elite still holds sway at most companies. You know them. They generally park in sheltered spaces, have longer rides on elevators, and avoid the cafeteria. They keep the secrets safe and coif the company’s message. Then they distribute it — usually on a need-to-know basis — to customers, employees, investors, and the press.

That’s the world of mass media, and the blogs are turning it on its head. Set up a free account at Blogger or other blog services, and you see right away that the cost of publishing has fallen practically to zero. Any dolt with a working computer and an Internet connection can become a blog publisher in the 10 minutes it takes to sign up.

Sure, most blogs are painfully primitive. That’s not the point. They represent power. Look at it this way: In the age of mass media, publications like BusinessWeek print the news. Sources try to get quoted, but the decision is ours. Ditto with letters to the editor. Now instead of just speaking through us, they can blog. And if they master the ins and outs of this new art — like how to get other bloggers to link to them — they reach a huge audience.

This is just the beginning. Many of the same folks who developed blogs are busy adding features so that bloggers can start up music and video channels and team up on editorial projects. The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses…”

Do You Want to Delegate or Transfer That Oracle Notification?

Overview

The WF: Notification Reassign Mode profile option determines the forwarding functionality that is available to employees. If you set the WF: Notification Reassign Mode profile option to Reassign, employees see the Reassign button on the notification.

How This Profile Works with Oracle Internet Expenses

When the expense report notification is delegated to another employees, the original recipient of the notification remains the owner, i.e. remains the approver, and must have sufficient signing authority.

When the expense report notification is transferred, the notification is forwarded and the new recipient becomes the owner of the notification. Now the new approver must have sufficient privileges to approve the expense report.

How This Profile Works with Oracle Purchasing

According to Metalink Note Unable To Reassign A Notification Using The Transfer Option (Metalink login required), transferring the ownership of the notification is not allowed in Purchasing approval notifications! This is documented in the Viewing and Responding to Notifications in the Oracle Purchasing User’s Guide.

The reason why Transfer is not allowed is that it affects only the notification itself and not the document associated with the notification, so the document notification when transferred only transfers the notification ownership and not the document. Delegation of the document delegates the document ownership and thus allows auditing history to occur and to correctly record activity performed against the document in the document’s action history. A transfer action of the notification would miss this auditing capability.

Continue reading Do You Want to Delegate or Transfer That Oracle Notification?…

CEO Reports to A Dummy?

Let me start the Feature of the Week column by describing a feature in Oracle Internet Expenses.

The Feature

Employee expense reports must be approved by their supervisors before they can be paid. And the way Oracle Internet Expenses approvals work is by using an employee-supervisor hierarchy. In other words, everyone must have a supervisor to be in a hierarchy, and be able to approve other people’s expense reports. Now, the CEO, or other employee at the top of the food chain, does not typically have a supervisor, right? Hence, any expense reports he tries to approve fail, because he is not in the supervisor hierarchy.

The Workaround

Oracle resources available on Metalink recommend setting up a dummy employee, which in fact we did. Let me tell you that it was a very embarrassing discussion with the client and their HR Management.

It is not a bug, and there is a workaround to make it work. But for the reasons above, CEO Approval of Expense Reports is my first (Fake) Feature of The Week.

Contact me at marian.crkon@itsafeature.com if you have any questions.

Take Your Time, Oracle Fusion, Take Your Time

On the eve of the first anniversary of Oracle’s acquisition of Peoplesoft, Business Week published not one, but three articles on the subject. If you missed them, here are few excerpts. Start with the Oracle Lays Out Its Game Plan story published on January 19, 2005.

“…The Oracle CEO acknowledged that many people are worried he’s trying to make two very different corporate cultures work together - his own, known for it’s pit-bull aggressiveness, and Peoplesoft’s, best known for having a soft touch with customers. It’s a nice story for the press, Ellison says, but it’s not entirely true. “Trust me, Peoplesoft was a very, very aggressive company, or they wouldn’t have lasted in the [corporate software] business as long as they did,” he says.

He reiterated Oracle’s plans to support Peoplesoft’s products until 2013 and said his company will make no effort to nudge Peoplesoft customers toward other Oracle products, such as its database and so-called middleware software that helps big companies use their business systems over the Internet. Many Peoplesoft customers run their business software with other programs made by companies like IBM (IBM ) and BEA Systems (BEAS ). “Unless IBM should go out of business between now and then, that’s just something we can’t control,” Ellison deadpanned.

In the meantime, Oracle engineers are starting work on something dubbed “Project Fusion,” which will merge all three companies’ product lines. Customers, of course, don’t have to buy it. But Ellison believes it will offer strong technological incentive because it will be built entirely on computer programming standards such as Java and hypertext markup language (HTML). That would make the new software easier to manage and easier to connect to other, standards-based programs…”

I believe Oracle deserves benefit of a doubt, and a chance to execute their vision. I also believe they will need to change their behavior to improve their bad reputation of poor customer relationships. As for the rest of us, however, we deserve to be pessimistic. Can you remember roll-outs of Oracle Financials 11i, Oracle CRM or Oracle Order Management? Memories of those releases are still too fresh and painful to be ignored.

According to Oracle, Project Fusion is “Halfway Home”. See the Is Oracle’s Fusion Coming Together? story published on January 20.

… Oracle is not actually merging code of all of the disparate applications; rather, it’s taking the best features and ideas and rewriting the code, based heavily on Oracle’s eBusiness Suite…”…

…Oracle counters the pessimists that it’s giving customers an opportunity to ease into Fusion, by implementing certain features of the new application set in new versions of J.D. Edwards, Peoplesoft, and Oracle applications coming out this year…

…Meantime, SAP is planning to release a whole new application suite about a year before Fusion is complete, giving would-be clients yet another option. As for Wall Street, many still have the same impression they had a year earlier: It’s a compelling vision that could very well knock SAP on its heels, but it will be tough to pull off….”

I would love to be a fly on the wall during discussions where “best features” get selected from all different Oracle brands and products. If I were an Oracle, Peoplesoft or JD Edwards customer, I would want to make damn sure that my best people are present and heard in all strategy councils, customer advisory boards, and user groups out there.

Anyone who has ever been involved in any ERP implementation before knows how hard it is to make decisions about what and how gets implemented. It is all about making compromises. I am hopeful that Oracle has the right guy to make all interested parties reach consensus. I do not envy John Wookey one bit. I do agree he may have The Hardest Job In Silicon Valley.

… Typical of Wookey’s style was a four-hour meeting with his top staff on Jan. 4. Looking around the conference room, it was hard to tell who was in charge. Wookey didn’t sit at the head of the table, and he let others do most of the talking. As developers argued over arcane technical matters, Wookey weighed in to resolve debates — often by reminding them what customers had asked for…

There is no doubt in my mind there is any confusion at Oracle as to who is in charge. I am sure everybody is aware of who acquired whom. However, the devil is in details. Oracle will be under a lot of pressure to show results quickly. Let’s all hope they take the time to do it right and come up with better products when it’s all over.

Please provide comments or contact me at marian.crkon@itsafeature.com if you have any questions.

Introduction to Worth Noting

I actually stole this category name from my friend Dustin at the RainCityGuide.

I intend to save here all references to other articles, media stories, blogs, etc. related to the business of implementing and using Oracle Applications that I find interesting.

Introduction to Reviews

All right, this a call to all Oracle Applications experts!

It’s a Feature! is here to provide a forum to express your opinion and share your knowledge by creating independent, in-depth product reviews of Oracle Applications. Have you noticed that nobody else is writing them? People write reviews about shows, cars, ipods, so why not ERP applications? Companies spend millions on them. I assume that everyone who knows enough about the applications to write an in-depth review is too busy developing, selling, implementing or using them. I will only write reviews about applications I personally tested and implemented.

This is a great opportunity for all you Super Users and Consultants to let people know what you know. Pick your favorite application or feature, and write a review about! Let people know about what you liked and didn’t like, what worked and what didn’t. Let other users know how you made it work. This is a great a way to provide feedback to people who create the applications. For consultants, this is a great way to reach clients and create leads. Let them come to you!

And as always at It’s a Feature!, make sure to do your homework and know what you talk about before you hit that Post. Other experts will read and scrutinize your opinions.

Introduction to Feature of the Week

The Feature of the Week is expected to be the most popular category of all.

If you know an Oracle Applications feature that you think is great, fake, or plain stupid, post it on It’s a Feature! Where else can you do that?

If you sometimes go thinking, “Why the heck did they do that?”, or “That’s great, I am so glad they finally did it!”, write a post about it and assign it a category Feature of The Week.

Remember to do your homework and know what you talk. It’s a Feature! intends to be fun and useful to other Oracle Applications users, as well its creators.

What’s your favorite feature?