The Feature

Using Oracle Projects? Check Out Project Information Center

If you are an Oracle Projects customer, check out a couple of interesting products from Projects Partners branded as Project Information Center. There are some great features for Project Billing and general project reporting, and it makes you wonder why this functionality hasn’t yet become part of the standard Oracle Projects functionality…

Project Information Center (PIC) is an easy-to-use, web-based composite application for project-centric businesses. PIC extends the functionality of Oracle E-Business Suite Applications. As a server-based product with a browser interface, enterprise-wide roll-out of PIC is simple and total cost of ownership is low.

• PIC Invoicing delivers custom invoice formats integrated with Oracle Project Billing, Oracle Receivables and Oracle XML Publisher, to enable you to bill your customers in their preferred form.

• PIC Reporting provides complex reporting that spans multiple projects and operating units, and detailed project and task reporting. More significantly, PIC’s Financial Statement Generator easily creates complex financial reports, like Profit and Loss Statements, at various levels of flexible hierarchies, across heterogeneous systems.

Project Information Center (PIC)™ Invoicing

Project Information Center Invoicing (PIC Invoicing) is a wizard-driven invoice formatting solution for project-centric businesses. This add-on solution is fully integrated with Oracle Project Billing, Oracle Receivables and Oracle XML Publisher, and provides a new approach for creating invoice formats for Oracle Project Billing users. Business Users can use desktop word processing tools to create invoice layout and formats. The PIC wizard provides predefined data sources that retrieve summary and detailed information from the database - users don’t need to understand Oracle Projects, Receivables and HR tables.

Using PIC Invoicing, you can define multiple groups like labor, non-labor and vendor invoices within an invoice with separate grouping and sorting criteria for each group. You can use one or more fields like expenditure category, revenue category, tasks, or user defined elements like flexfields for grouping and sorting each section. Invoice lines can be displayed in a user-defined order, e.g. display all labor, followed by burden amounts applied to labor type only, then non-labor items and their burden amounts, and then common burden amounts. You can override certain fields or add free-format text. This flexibility is balanced by controls to specify which fields can be overridden.

You can consolidate multiple invoices by master project, customer, ACRN or user defined parameter. You can create industry, or customer-specific invoice formats like AIA billing formats for E&C, T&M and fixed price contracts for PSA, government forms such as SF1034, SF1035 and DD250 formats. PIC Invoicing provides pre-built templates for several standard forms. You can also create invoice packages that include a summary form, detailed forms and itemized back-ups such as labor and other direct costs. PIC Invoicing will produce the final invoices for presentation to your customer in PDF, Excel, text and HTML formats, and invoices can be emailed based upon business rules.

Project Information Center (PIC)™ Reporting

Project Information Center Reporting (PIC Reporting) is an easy-to-use, tailorable reporting and information delivery solution for project-centric businesses. PIC Reporting provides complex reporting that spans multiple projects and operating units and detailed project and task reporting. More significantly, PIC’s Financial Statement Generator easily creates complex financial reports, like Profit and Loss Statements, at various levels of flexible hierarchies. PIC seamlessly integrates with Oracle Applications and this high-performance web-based solution is very intuitive to use. With minimal training, users can access all the information necessary to support their business role, including financial, project status, aging, bookings and backlog. These high-resolution reports can be saved in whole or in part, and are presented in XML, PDF, text or Excel format.

A single PIC report can integrate and present information from multiple sources, including packaged applications like Oracle, legacy apps, data warehouses, XML and ODBC data sources, desktop applications and flat files. PIC provides native connectivity to popular databases like Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and Progress, in addition to ODBC/JDBC connectivity. The PIC server also supports access to Enterprise Java Bean, CORBA, COM or C++ objects. PIC has a generic reporting infrastructure based on pl/sql procedures, views, and the PIC metadata model. PIC’s middleware insulates end user reports from underlying data model changes in the Oracle Applications.

For more information about Project Information Center products, refer to the PIC Invoicing Fact Sheet and PIC Reporting Fact Sheet.

Source: Project Partners website.

Oracle Published Release Content Documents for eBusiness Suite Release 12

Hooray, the wait is finally over all users and implementors waiting to see what is new in Oracle eBusiness Suite Release 12. Read about the new R12 features in the the content documents available in the Metalink Note 404152.1 [Click on the note link and login to Metalink first to access these links]:

• Advanced Planning

• Apps Technology

• Customer Data Management

• Customer Relationship Management

• Customer Service

• Discrete Manufacturing

• E-Business Suite

• Financials

• HRMS

• Intelligence
  

• Logistics

• Maintenance Management

• Marketing and Sales

• Order Management

• Process Manufacturing

• Procurement

• Product Lifecycle Management

• Projects

• Property Manager

• Service Execution

• Supply Chain Management

• Student Systems

Oracle Applications Unlimited Events

In case you missed it, here is an invitation to the launch five new releases of Oracle applications products.

Join Oracle representatives for an “unprecedented event in the history of business software”. On January 31 and February 1, 2007, Oracle will launch five new releases of our applications products around the world. You’ll learn how to take advantage of your current investments while preparing for the next generation of business.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007
9:00 a.m. Registration and Breakfast
10:00 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. EventHudson Theater
145 West 44th Street
New York, NY

Hosted by Charles Phillips, Oracle President, and John Wookey, Oracle Senior Vice President, Applications Development. These events aim to highlight how Oracle applications can help you work globally, think globally, and manage your business globally—so you can make better business decisions, based on better information, with better results. You can get more information here.

The Feature is One Year Old!

This week we celebrate this blog’s first birthday. What started as an “extra-curriculum” activity to a small consulting business slowly grew into an obsession and a community of several like-minded individuals. I would like to take this opportunity and express my gratitude to the authors Floyd Teter, Garet Keller and Nancy Chung for their valuable contributions and their continuous support. I would also like to thank the readers for following the blog and getting involved with its activities.

It has been our intention to keep this site as professional as possible while maintaining the contributors’ personalities and opinions. We believe there is a lot of room for good information in general, and Oracle Applications in particular. Posting tips, advice, opinions and news relevant to niche group of people proved to be quite easy and enjoyable. I am surprised more people have not discovered it out yet. Hoping to fill few information gaps as we encounter them in the official resources, we wish you find this “open source” approach interesting and useful.

You can see the most recent and most popular articles and comments in the sidebar. Let me mention some of my personal 2006 favorites I am fond and proud of:

• Interview with Steven Chan
• Interview with Luke Kowalski
• What Do You Want in Fusion?
• Zero Faith in Zero Defects
• How To Use Oracle Personalization Framework to Customize Fields and Messages
• How to Set Up Oracle iExpenses

In addition to many returning visitors, referrals from Google searches and other Oracle sites contribute to ever growing number of readers. For those interested in numbers, the Feature now averages over 17,500 visits, 80,000 visited pages and 150,000 hits a month. While interesting, the numbers are not what motivates us to keep blogging. It is the idea that the information posted today can be found useful by others (including ourselves) tomorrow and the next day, what keeps it exciting.

What would you change about this blog, if you could? Let us know what works and does not on the Feature. Which topic or type of articles do you enjoy the most? What would you like to see in the future? It is the two-way dialogue what makes this medium fun and unique. Be part of it by contributing your own ideas or providing your feedback to the ideas of others.

Happy 2007!

How to Customize Oracle iExpenses Workflows

Here is a couple of examples of how to customize Oracle Internet Expenses workflows. You may need to change the seeded expense report notification routing or expense report approval method.

Changing Receivers of Certain Notifications

We wanted to re-route some notifications from the seeded performers (users, responsibilities, people) to a new performer (group of users). We created a new Oracle user with a new email distribution list as follows:

• Define a new OIEADMIN Role. As System Administrator, complete the following steps, create a new Oracle user
• Assign desired responsibilities to user OIEADMIN
• Run the Synchronize Local WF tables process every time you make changes to user setup.

Define Workflow Notification Performers

Perform these steps in Oracle Workflow Builder to set up/change expense report performers. These steps include recommendations for which item attribute to use for each notification.

• Load OIEADMIN Role. From the Files menu, select Load Roles from Database.
• In the Role Selection window, query the OIEADMIN role.
• From the Query Results region, select the required roles and click the Add button to add the role to the Loaded Roles region. Click OK to save the loaded role to the database. Save your work.
• Assign Role to the attribute: From the Navigator window, open the attribute. In the Navigator Control Properties, under the Attribute tab the Type in the main region should be set to Role. In the Default region, select the proper Value (role) and click Apply. Save your work. Assign a role for each of the attributes listed in the Performer Definitions table below.

Define Notification Performers. For each notification outlined in the Performer Definitions table below:

• Open the appropriate workflow process.
• In the workflow process, open the notification.
• In the Navigator Control Properties window, click the Node tab.
• Set Performer Type as Constant instead of Attribute.
• Choose OIEADMIN as Value.
• Click Apply and save your work.

Note: To directly link a role to a notification, Set Performer Type as Constant instead of Attribute. Then, select the role OIEADMIN. By using the Constant type, you have more flexibility. The table below lists the notifications, the seeded performer for each workflow process, and new performer

Change the Find Approver Method

Perform these steps in Oracle Workflow Builder to change the Find Approver method.

• Open the ‘Expenses’ item type from the database
• In the Navigator window, expend Expenses and Processes folders.
• Open (double-click) the manager (Spending) Approval Process
• Open the Find Approver function
• In the Navigator Control Properties window, click the Node Attributes tab.
• In the Value field, select your approval method (e.g. One Stop Then Go Directly)
• Click Apply and save your work. Click OK to save the workflow file to the database.