The Feature

A2Z Oracle Applications Navigation Tip Sheets

February 20, 2006 on 4:08 pm | by Marian Crkon | In How To Guides | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Richard Byron’s OracleAppsBlog.com has an article with two useful navigation tip sheets: A2Z Oracle Applications Navigation Tip Sheet and Oracle ADI Navigation Tip Sheet, which I am sure many Oracle Application users (especially the novices) will find useful.

CRMBuyer.com’s Survey of SAP Customers

February 15, 2006 on 8:53 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

There is an interesting story Future Satisfaction Comes From Today’s Customer References at CRMBuyer.com. It is about what influences ERP applications buyers to go with one vendor or another. I am not sure how statistically and scientifically proven the survey findings are, but if nothing else, they make for an interesting reading.

…More than any other factor, customer references influenced buyers to choose SAP, quelling their concerns about the potential risks involved in taking that step. In fact, at this point in the survey, 80 percent of respondents said they relied on customer references during the ERP decision-making process…

Other highlights from the story:

• A majority of respondents (63 percent) were affiliated with companies that had considered Oracle but then went to SAP for their ERP system. These companies also considered JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and QAD as well.
• So far, 26 percent of the survey respondents mention some interest in Oracle’s Fusion. One respondent, however, said that Fusion “will take years to complete and roll out as a stable enterprise Powerful Yet Simple: HP ProLiant ML110 G3. Just $688 with the Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor. platform.”
• A trait that the majority of satisfied SAP customers have in common is an appreciation for the ERP vendor’s expertise in their specific industries. One respondent said, SAP “knows my business.” The high correlation with future customer satisfaction Latest News about customer satisfaction is fascinating. It indicates that many SAP users are relying more on customer references than any other source of information to set their expectation levels of what SAP will ultimately deliver to them. One wonders if there is a “halo effect” inducing prospects to overlook the negative in favor of the positive once they get solid evidence of performance in their verticals.
• When asked what they are most dissatisfied with, respondents — so far — are mentioning SAP’s services pricing most often.
• Evidence of a fascinating behavior is emerging in the responses of the participants. They either love or hate SAP; few are occupying the middle ground, based on their comments. This polarity is underscored by their willingness or unwillingness to recommend SAP. Nearly 30 percent say they definitely would, 24 percent would with reservations and caveats, and 20 percent would not. What this suggests is that the most-satisfied SAP users are responding to the survey; those in the middle level of satisfaction are less likely to participate.
• Asked what they would change about SAP, the majority of respondents to date say they would like a revamped user interface. That’s no surprise, as the majority of respondents are on an R/3 system.

• There is a higher-than-average level of interest in NetWeaver (53 percent) among the respondents at the present time. None of the them have yet said they are not interested in NetWeaver; however, a few respondents have opted out of this question. That seems to point out the need for even more education about NetWeaver overall.
• When one starts looking at what is driving SAP satisfaction levels, user references, integration expertise and knowledge of specific verticals, taken together, are cited by more than 90 percent of the most-satisfied customers. User references correlate with the highest satisfaction levels of respondents to this point in the survey.
• The ability to customize applications doesn’t contribute to over-the-top customer satisfaction — in fact, it seems to relegate customer satisfaction scores to the “somewhat satisfied” category. Perhaps SAP users get an idealized notion of what they can accomplish with application customization through demos and references. As a result, this may be where it is toughest to exceed expectations during SAP rollouts.
• Another interesting dynamic emerging from the survey results is the fact that among SAP users who considered Oracle, many felt that its integration and product customization expertise was on par, or even better, than SAP’s. Nevertheless, they chose SAP due to more perceived knowledge of specific verticals, as well as more-advantageous licensing and pricing.

Oracle Applications Day Continues in Select Cities

February 14, 2006 on 12:13 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Oracle Press, Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

The Oracle Fusion Roadshow is “half-way done”, and continues in select cities as the Oracle Applications Day. Take part in one of the sessions if possible:

• Austin, TX – Thursday, February 16, 2006
• Seattle, WA – Monday, March 13, 2006
• Iselin, NJ -  Tuesday, March 14, 2006
• Toronto, ON – Thursday, April 20, 2006
• Redwood Shores, CA – Friday, April 21, 2006

To get more information and register, visit Application Day. Get involved and find out what’s coming your way! I will see you there!

CIO Article About Fusion and SOA

February 12, 2006 on 11:21 am | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Christopher Koch, CIO’s Executive Editor, posted some interesting thoughts in his The Really, Really Hard Software Architecture Strategy story about Oracle Fusion with regard to enterprise architectural strategy SOA. Check out some interesting comments to his story too.

…In the last century, the vendor strategy pretty much lined up with thinking on architecture: standardize as much as possible to reduce integration headaches. That was great for vendors. If you owned the majority chunk of a customers enterprise software architecture, you got two big advantages: First, the suite was so big and complex that the customer had little incentive to get rid of it over the long term, which meant guaranteed streams of revenue in the form of maintenance fees, which could be raised incrementally over time; second, you got a critical advantage in selling them new software: fear of integration problems and management complexity if they bought stuff from someone else.

But today, the dominant architectural trend, SOA, is diverging from the vendor strategy. SOA says the enterprise application infrastructure is almost irrelevant. Technology is constructed according to services specified by the business, not by processes contained within an enterprise application vendors’ software box. In this scenario, enterprise applications become just a piece of the service, yet another component of a larger business process such as an insurance claims process that links a jumble of functions and data inside ERP, CRM and old mainframe legacy systems. The vendor of the applications doesn’t matter anymore; the linkages between them become the important thing. Why replace all your old mainframe systems with enterprise software suites if you can cheaply and quickly link all the old stuff together into services using web services and integration middleware?

In this sense, the vendors’ integration strategies become more important than the features of their software suites. Of course, both of the dominant enterprise software vendors, Oracle and SAP have begun offering integration middleware to go along with their big software suites. Yet both are sticking with the big, integrated software suite vision. Indeed, Oracle has pledged to meld all the best of all its different acquisitions together into something greater: Fusion.

But that begs the question: Why? Why try to integrate or build something that serves all the diverse interests of all the customers that bought Peoplesoft, Oracle and J.D. Edwards when the emerging SOA strategy is telling your customers that it’s okay to have diversity in your software portfolio?…

…Oracle doesn’t have to integrate all the acquisitions together in the technical sense. It has other options. It has an anxious herd of CIOs all paying maintenance fees on different enterprise software packages who could be coaxed into upgrading to something entirely new, or buying middleware so they can keep what they have.

But if SOA really takes over, how anxious will those CIOs be for upgraded versions of software they already own? SOA bodes for keeping old software infrastructure around longer. It seems that if SOA really takes over, the software that links applications together, rather than the applications themselves, will become the most important strategic decision that CIOs make…

Oracle To Lay Off About 2,000 Employees

February 12, 2006 on 11:04 am | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Oracle Corp. said last Thursday that it will cut about 2,000 jobs, or more than 3 percent of its work force, as it digs for bigger profits from its recent $5.85 billion takeover of Siebel Systems Inc. Oracle inherited 4,700 Siebel workers in the acquisition, but most of the cuts will be concentrated among employees on the company payroll before the deal closed last week, Chief Executive Larry Ellison told analysts during a conference call. About 90 percent of Siebel’s customer support, engineering and sales staff is being retained, Ellison said.

After the purge is completed, Oracle will employ about 55,000 workers worldwide, according to Safra Catz, Oracle’s chief financial officer. The cost cutting should lower Oracle’s expenses by at least $400 million annually, Catz said.

Read the full story Oracle To Lay Off About 2,000 Employees.

Source: BPM Today.

Oracle Has Its Eyes on Open Source Competitors

February 12, 2006 on 10:56 am | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Larry Ellison’s open source Fusion by ZDNet‘s Dan Farber — BusinessWeek reported yesterday that three core open source companies–JBoss (middleware), Zend (PHP) and Sleepcat (database) –are in Oracle’s crosshairs. The omnivorous Oracle recently made waves by acquiring InnoDB, an open source storage engine for database competitor MySQL. It’s not surprising. Larry Ellision has said the company would embrace open source (more like bear hug) and make it work [...]

Are You Eligible for Oracle Fusion Upgrade?

February 10, 2006 on 8:24 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

You may have already heard the main soundbites from the Oracle Fusion press conference at San Francisco City Hall: “Oracle Project Fusion is no longer a project”, and is “Fusion is halfway done”. ZDNet‘s Dan Farber’s article Oracle Fusion: A functional spec in search of applications provides more details about what happened at the conference:

… (Oracle president) Charles Phillips said that Oracle would make sure that 80 percent of customers would be “eligible” to upgrade to the first release of Fusion when it is released. Eligible, he said, didn’t mean customers would be forced to upgrade, but he didn’t clarify exactly what “eligible” means. I would guess that customers who have the right versions of Oracle software and have primed their infrastructure are “eligible” to make the transition. Further clarifying the meaning of Fusion, Phillips said that the term would be used in three areas” attached to applications, middleware and the platform architecture…

… He also said … that with or without the acquisitions, Oracle was going to build a new platform based on Java, SOA and other standards. The billions spent on acquisitions provide “more customers, more people to help define applications and more resources…

… John Wookey, Oracle senior vice president of applications, took the stage and offered a definition of Fusion applications:

• Based on best of what Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards have delivered

• Built on a standards-based, commercially available development platform

• Designed as a business intelligent application roles and tasks of individuals through business workflow

• Service & event enabled, model driven – component isolation and easier to integrate with existing applications and fine-grained control over business process orchestration

• Scalable and secure – take cost and risk out of deploying applications

…Wookey then went over the roadmap for Fusion. In 2005 Oracle delivered the Fusion architecture, Fusion Middleware certification and a functional assessment of the current set of applications as well as a superset of functionality (services) to be delivered for Fusion applications. This year, Oracle is slated to have the next versions of its applications: PeopleSoft Enterprise 9, JD Edwards 8.12 and Oracle EBS 12, with some integration of Fusion capabilities. PeopleSoft will include Fusion analytics and data hub technology, Oracle EBS 12 will be delivered on the latest Fusion Middleware release as well as with the Fusion data model. Some applications will begin migrating to the Fusion toolset…

…In addition, in 2006 Oracle will publish a services repository and enable business process flows that leverage Fusion Middleware… Oracle will have between 500 and 1000 major services in its repository, Wookey said… “The transition to Fusion] will be incremental and non-disruptive”he said…

…However, many customers add customer code to their applications and data models, which can make the transition difficult. Wookey said that Oracle is developing a tool that can inventory customizations where data models have been extended as a way to help manage upgrades…

…In 2007 individual Fusion applications will begin to appear, leading into 2008 when the entire suite of applications will be available. “The move to Fusion is an upgrade, not a re-implementation” Wookey said. Customers will be able to move to single instance or to segregate instances of specific applications as many customers do today, Wookey added…

It’s an upgrade as long as customers follow Wookey’s advice, which is to make sure that they adopt the latest releases (which are included in maintenance fees), retire customizations and unify operational infrastructure with Fusion Middleware and Grid. That is the hat trick for Oracle; if customers don’t continuously upgrade the transition to Fusion applications, the transition will be more laborious…

…Wookey’s key message to customers was to protect their investments by adopting the latest releases, retiring customizations and unifying their operational infrastructure with Fusion Middleware and Grid. That’s the only way for customers can evolve somewhat gracefully to Fusion and for Oracle to have a chance of ending up with a success story in December 2008…

My humble advice to Oracle customers is:

• Get involved. Find ways to influence what “Best Features” from Oracle, Peoplesoft and JD Edwards are and what that means for you.

• Go standard. Avoid customizations and adopt standard functionality and processes as much as you can. However, demand flexible tools to keep your customizations and data models if they cannot be replaced by standard functionality.

• Learn What Features Will Be Eliminated Stay on top of the feature scope and find out what applications and features will be eliminated.

Conversations with iExpenses Users from Avenue A | Razorfish

February 10, 2006 on 12:30 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Conversations | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

We sat down with a group Oracle iExpenses users from Avenue A | Razorfsh (expense auditors, administrators, project managers, expense approvers, and expense prepares) to learn about their experiences with using iExpeses. Overall, the feedback was very positive. There were things people liked and did not like. Following is a summary of our conversations.

Sue: As we are preparing to start another project to implement iExpenses for the rest of the company, we wanted to get your feedback on what works and does not work for you guys after 4 months of using it.

Steve: This may be surprising, but I do not have any complaints. iExpenses is pretty easy to use. I submit my own expense reports and approve them for other people. I like the email notifications and save them all in a separate Outlook folder. I miss a notification telling me about my expenses reimbursement check being deposited to my bank account (Editor’s Note: Employees have payments deposited to their accounts by ADP). Also, it is confusing sometimes to know what fields are required, or not, when entering expenses. Some expense types require more details, some do not. You have to manually open the Details page to find out. Printing a hard-copy expense reports is also a challenge. It does not fit on a sheet of paper.

Matt: I also enter my own expenses and approve them for other people. I am glad we now have one system and one process for entering both billable and non-billable expenses. It took some time to get used to a new process, but overall, it is working fine now. Oracle is not very intuitive. I really like email notifications. As a project manager, I need a better way to report on people’s billable expenses. We used to get an Excel report with unbilled expenses from the old system.

Sue: You should have access to Expenditure Inquiry in Projects, which should give you that information.

Marian: We also created a new Discoverer report for unbilled expenses. We need to talk about who should have access to it.

Skip: Like my colleagues before me, I also enter my expense reports and approve them for others. I think iExpense is very easy to use. I like the email notifications. It is especially great for my group because they work at different client sites, often without having a VPN access. I like things like being able to attach attachments, provide additional comments, or request additional information. I like the ability to ask for more questions. I was wondering if it was possible to request more information at the line level? I like to approve several expense reports at once from my Worklist, and it was not very apparent to me how that worked. I also wasn’t sure about where to provide comments when I reject an expense report. For phase two, I would recommend to engage actual users with real-life scenarios.

Nancy: Let’s switch gears and talk with the “back-office” users about their experiences with expense report processing.

Peter: I am what you would call an iExpenses Administrator. I review and audit all expense reports, and process them through Payables. For me, it has been great to be able to consolidate three legacy expense reporting applications to two (Concur and iExpenses). We still have one to go. I like the new Internet Expenses Auditor responsibility. It gives me a nice way to search for and manage expense reports. I noticed that sometimes Workflow does not consistently update expense report status. Approvers may say they have approved an expense report, but it does not show as approved in the system. I wonder if some approval emails do not make it back to the system. I instruct the approvers to re-approve such expense reports from their Oracle Worklist. Also, I’ve had hard times managing attachments. Users are not using this feature consistently. Attachments can be attached either at the header or the line level of the expense report. The header-level attachments are visible in the auditor report list , the line-level attachment s are not , so each report has to be opened individually to see if attachments have been added . It is a very time consuming process to find them, save the billable reports to the local folder and print them. It would be nice if the auditor windows and email notifications indicated there were attachments attached to expense reports. Recently we had a spike in a number of failed expense report submissions due to invalid accounting flexfield. From January 1, we had some chart of accounts changes that were not communicated well to the field. We are getting more invalid combinations of the company and department.

Sue: It may be a good idea to send out a monthly newsletter with current information and tips on how to use the system. We do not want people to feel like it is a black box.

Erica: This will be even more critical during the second implementation phase when we need to support expense entry across business units. Currently, project-related expense reports fail, if the initial combination of employees company and override cost center are invalid. The system does not even get to engage the Account Generator. There is a pending enhancement request with Oracle for this issue.

Do Not Forward Oracle Notifications from Outlook!

February 9, 2006 on 9:44 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Feature of the Week | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

You can encounter this feature if you are using Oracle Internet Expenses and use email notifications to approve expense reports:

The Feature

There is a vulnerability in iExpenses approval workflow. Here is a scenario:

• Employee enters his expenses report and submits to his manager
• Manager receives an email notification to approve the expense report
• Manager forwards the notification USING OUTLOOK FORWARD FUNCTION (not an Oracle link provided in the email) to the the expense report preparer requesting more information.
• Employee receives the manager’s approval email, and is able to approve his own expense report.
• Expense report in iExpenses becomes approved, and shows it was approved by the expected approver.

The Summary

Employee can approve his own expense report after his manager forwarded the approval email to him. Furthermore, in Oracle iExpenses it looks like the expense report was approved by the manager himself.

The Workaround

Configure the Workflow Mailer to not allow a user to respond by email to an email notification that has been forwarded from another user. As Oracle Applications Manager (available from the Oracle Applications Rapid Install Portal window):

• Log in as Oracle Application Manager
• Navigate to Workflow Manager page
• Under Workflow System: click on Notification Mailers
• Click on your Mailer Name, and then Edit.
• Navigate to Edit Workflow Mailer: EMail Servers page.
• Make sure to uncheck the Allow Forwarded Response flag.

Oracle Applications Security Is Changing in Project Fusion

February 8, 2006 on 7:44 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

There is an interesting story Oracle aims to tone security muscle with Fusion by the BuilderAU. It is about Oracle’s efforts to improve security features in its own applications, and applications acquired through mergers and acquisitions. Below are few key excerpts:

…(Oracle) is picking up tips from (acquired) operations and using them in a major overhaul of its business applications software, an initiative called Project Fusion. Other products and processes are benefiting, too. In return, Oracle is teaching its new employees something about security – literally.

…(Oracle) found that none of the companies it bought required security-specific training for staff. But Oracle does. So employees brought in from PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Retek and Oblix purchases, among others, are learning the ropes. All in all, Oracle hopes the security sum will be greater than its parts. “To make the merged organisation successful, we take the best of what they did and the best of what we do, and make it what the combined company does,” Mary Ann Davidson, Oracle’s chief security officer, said in an interview on Tuesday…

…Oracle isn’t saying much about security in Fusion or in any of its other products… but company representatives lifted the veil on the software maker’s endeavours to get all its security eggs into one basket. One lesson Oracle has learned from PeopleSoft is that less customisation equals fewer security risks. While Oracle has historically allowed developers to program on top of its applications, PeopleSoft took a more limited approach. Its software was mainly set up to let customers analyse their business processes, then build upon its applications…

…”What you can do from a security perspective in PeopleSoft is limited, while Oracle is more fine-grained and more customisable,” said John Heimann, director of security program management at Oracle. “Sometimes simplicity is good for security, because you can sometimes code yourself into a hole.”

… “Oracle allows developers to define security roles with a lot of flexibility, increasing the risk of mistakes and thus the introduction of flaws. For example, it is possible to restrict which user can access a specific part of an application based on very detailed rules. PeopleSoft doesn’t provide the same level of flexibility. We’re going to try and combine the simplicity and declarative nature of PeopleSoft and PeopleTools with the extensibility and flexibility of the Oracle applications framework” Heimann said.

…Another lesson partially learned from PeopleSoft is to ship products that have a high level of security out of the box, or at least provide an easy way to increase the security level – something Oracle calls the Secure Configuration Initiative. “In the past, our products have tended to be developer-friendly out of the box,” Heimann said. “There were accounts with easy-to-remember passwords like ‘Welcome1′, demo code, and things were set with permissions that were wide open”…

…”It will be there to a much greater extent in 11g, and it is a focus for Fusion,” he said. “That is the future: Security by default, and delivering it so you don’t have to be a sophisticated developer to implement security rules. For example, Oracle is thinking of allowing a system administrator to change security settings using a simple user interface or with drag-and-drop capabilities” Heimann said.