The Feature

Demystifying Fusion - OAUG’s Three-Step Fusion Program

The Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) has just announced a new educational series under the “Community Thursdays” eLearning program: “Demystifying Fusion - OAUG’s Three-Step Fusion Program”. I can promise you that this will be a good series, because I’m a co-host…so you can complain directly to me if the series is missing the mark and we’ll get it fixed (how I got involved in this is another story, but if you check OAUG’s Fusion Council site and scroll down to the announcement about the new Fusion Council Co-Chair, you’ll get a flavor for how it happened and who to blame).

The idea of the Demystifying Fusion sessions is to “lift the curtains and show how the magic tricks are performed”. What that means is that we’ll be doing more than just running through PowerPoint decks (although there will be some of that too); we’ll be running demos with various components of Fusion Technology relevant to Fusion Applications. In addition, we’ll be providing some guidelines for helping you build your organization’s road map to Fusion Applications. The first session (given at noon EST and again at 8 p.m. EST on Nov. 30th) will lay out the program and some basic concepts regarding Fusion Technology and building your roadmap.

If you are an OAUG member, you can sign up for the first session here. If you’re not an OAUG member yet, you must join in order to attend these sessions: send an email to membership@oaug.com to get more information. You’ll get the value of the nearly negligible membership fee back just from the information in these sessions, so don’t hesitate to join up.

I hope you’re there when we lift the curtains!

Foresee Those Future-Dated Expense Report Items

You can encounter this feature when using Oracle iExpenses, Payables and Projects 11i.10.

The Feature

Oracle iExpenses 11i.10 lets you enter, approve and pay expense report items with incorrect dates in the future. I was asked by my client today to look into expense report items rejected in the Payables to Projects interface and to my surprise, there were several project-related items in Payables with item dates in the future. The item date is entered by employees when entering their expense report line items. I believe the dates were in most, if not all cases entered in error [and against the expense reimbursement policy].

The Interface Expense Reports from Payables to Projects process checks for, among other things, the following conditions:

• Expenditure Item Date is within an active employee assignment

• Expenditure Item Date is within an active project (and task) date range

• Expenditure Item Date is within an open or future PA Period in Projects

• Expenditure Item is charged to a project in an active status.

Now, this validation happens online during expense report entry and approval, but it happens again several days, or weeks, later during the Payables to Projects interface process. This is after the expense report had already been entered, approved, imported into Payables, validated and accounted for in Payables, and in many cases, already paid, and after some of the original conditions may have changed. Since these are the invoice line item dates, not invoice dates, it is very difficult for Expense Reports Auditors, or Payables, to catch these. Furthermore, once invoices are validated and accounted for, they cannot be updated.

The Workaround

As of OIE.H or higher, you can use the Future-dated expenses feature. You can use the setup utility to define whether future-dated expenses should be treated as warnings or errors during expenses entry. This ensures that expenses are not entered into inappropriate accounting periods, which causes reimbursements billing to be delayed and accounting to be incorrect.

To set the future-dated tolerances, log in with Internet Expenses Setup and Administration responsibility > Expenses Setup > General > Options. On this page you can define future-date tolerances for each operating unit. Individuals can submit future-dated expenses according to the values you specify.

If you did not set these tolerance limits and want to see whether any future-dated items exist in your system, use the ad-hoc query below.

Future-Dated Expense Report Items

R12 and Mod-plsql…Not!

Two quick questions for you:

1) Are you considering a move to E-Business Suite Release 12?

2) Are you planning to migrate to R12 custom or 3rd-party “bolt on” applications from your current E-Business environment that utilize the mod_plsql cartridge?

If your answer to both these questions is “yes”, you have some important planning to do before moving to R12. Mod_plsql has been eliminated from the E-Business middleware as of R12. Running pl_sql on the middle tier will now take come creative advance planning.

I know that I have some serious planning to do on this issue. How about you?

LATE UPDATE: I’ve started to share this news with some developer-types where I work. The responses are generally unbelief and denial, even after I show written backup from OOW.

EVEN LATER UPDATE: On his own blog (and as Marion noted in a comment to this article), Steven Chan has reinforced the message: There will be no support for the use of mod_plsql in R12. You can read Steven’s thoughts and recommendations here.