The Feature

How To Capitalize Legacy CIP Costs in Oracle Projects

August 10, 2010 on 8:55 pm | by Marian Crkon | In How To Guides, Ideas and Opinions | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Here is a quick summary of steps to convert legacy CIP costs on capital projects and capitalize them into assets. The instructions are applicable to both: Oracle EBS 11i and R12. This article assumes that you have already configured all prerequisites in your Oracle Project Costing and Fixed Assets. You will need Project Costing Super User and Fixed Assets Manager responsibilities, or the customized versions there of.

Define Capital Projects

Let’s start with defining the project template. This is where you can leverage a lot of good Oracle functionality to your benefit.  The details will vary in every instance, but in general, you need to complete the following steps:

PA1: Define Capital Project Template – Header

Navigate to Setup > Project > Project Templates to create a new template. Define the header-level information including the Number, Name, Project Type (make sure it is a Capital  project type class – you won’t be able to change it later), Organization, and Description.  If you want project created from this template to have a fixed duration (e.g. 12 months), define the Trans Duration. The system will populate the Project Finish dates based on the Project Start date and this duration for new projects.

PA2: Define Capital Project Template – Quick Entry Fields

Click on Setup Quick Entry. Define the fields for quick entry of projects. These are the “bare minimum fields” to enter when you copy a template into a project.

PA3: Define Capital Project Template – Tasks

Click on the blue box next to the Tasks option (I know, it not very intuitive), or click on Detail (while the cursor is on Tasks). Define your tasks, or work breakdown structure (WBS). Also determine which tasks should be capitalizable or not, i.e. can collect CIP costs to become fixed assets.

PA4: Define Capital Project Template – Define Project Assets

In this step, you can pre-define fixed assets you anticipate to complete as part of projects created from this template. Basically, you do here what you’d normally do in FA Mass Additions. You can use the Create Project Assets DataLoad to upload a higher volume of assets…

PA5: Define Capital Project Template – Assign Project Assets

Depending on your implementation approach, you assign default assets at project or task level. This functionality determines how the capitalizable expenditures will be assigned to future assets. In order to automate this, you probably want to assign assets at the task level so that you have one-to-one relationship between the costs and the assets in your tasks. The other options would be the costs in multiple tasks to be summarized into one asset at the project level… Refer to the Asset Summary and Detail Grouping Options in the Oracle Project Costing User Guide. You can use the Create Task Level Asset Assignments.

PA6: Define Capital Project Template – Create Task Transaction Controls

Following the example of the task-level asset assignment we defined in step PA5 above, it is critical, that the right CIP costs get collected in the right tasks. In other words, we want building-related costs be collected in building-specific task to capitalize them into a building asset assigned to the same task. To prevent invalid entries, you can create Transaction Controls. These are, basically, conditions that determine what expenditure types or categories are allowed in what projects or tasks. Again, use this sample Create Task Transaction Controls DataLoad to prepare and execute your upload. The trick will be finding the right tasks based on their WBS level. And one note about the Transaction Controls: make sure the Control Start Date and End Date are consistent with your Task Start Date and Finish Date.

PA6: Define Capital Project Template – Set Task-Level Capitalizable Flag

This is an optional step, and this should be taken care of by your Transaction Controls. However, you can make all expense tasks non-capitalizable by setting the Capitalizable flag to null… You can use this Update Expense Task Capitalizable Flag DataLoad.

PA7: Create Projects

Using the template created in steps PA1-6, create your capital projects. The quick entry fields will vary depending on your template, but as always, you can use the Create Projects DataLoad.

PA8: Upload Legacy CIP Costs

Depending on your conversion strategy, you can use a custom conversion program, or WebADI spreadsheet to upload your legacy CIP costs. Check this article for detail on how to convert legacy costs and how to resolve a couple of “features” during the Transaction Import.

PA9: Update the Project Status Inquiry Amounts

As Project Costing Super User, run the PRC: Update Project Summary Amounts

PA10: Complete Asset Definitions

Based on your implementation strategy and business process, you might be required to complete asset definitions in Projects before asset lines can be generated and interfaced to Oracle Assets. As Project Costing Super User, navigate to Capitalization > Capital Projects. Query up your project(s), click on Assets > Asset Details. Complete the asset definitions, just like you would in the Prepare Mass Additions.

PA11: Generate Asset Lines

As Project Costing Super User, run the PRC: Generate Asset Lines for a Range of Projects process. Watch the Date In Service parameter and PA Date parameter to make sure you select the right lines to generate.

PA12: Interface Asset Lines to Assets

As Project Costing Super User, run the PRC: Interface Assets to Oracle Assets process. It will create mass additions in FA MASS ADDITIONS table.

FA13: Post Mass Additions

If you required complete asset definition in Projects, your mass additions are ready to be posted. If asset lines are incomplete, you need to complete them in Prepare Mass Additions. In any case, once ready, log in as Fixed Assets Manager and navigate to Mass Additions > Post Mass Additions to create assets.

At this point, your legacy CIP costs were capitalized into fixed assets. Obviously, this summary is  simplified; refer to the Oracle Project Costing User Guide and Oracle Assets User Guide for more details.

OTL Timecard Needs a Makeover

October 16, 2006 on 7:46 am | by Marian Crkon | In Ideas and Opinions, Reviews | 18 Comments |  Print |  Email

Here is some unsolicited feedback for you, Oracle Time and Labor (OTL) developers. Implementing Financials and Projects (11.i.10) I spent a good deal of last month with a group of Oracle users whose primary interaction with Oracle Applications was entering time and expenses against the projects they worked on. Being new Oracle users, they reminded me how “different” Oracle was and how it took some time to “get used to Oracle’s nuances”. I documented some their comments and observations below:

Usability

• Users are having tough time remembering to hit the “Go” button when they change time periods or templates; as a result, many timecards get entered into wrong periods.

• It is not very obvious one has to hit TAB to navigate across fields to “commit” values in each field (this is a general Framework issue). If you, for instance, entered a project number without hitting TAB and hit Search for tasks (Flashlight), the form generates an unintuitive error message or starts an infinite search that freezes the page

• It would really help the time entry process if users could see additional fields including project name, task name, or customer on their timecard lines. This would be particularly useful when, due to business requirements, you cannot limit the list of available project values based on people’s assignments.

Error Messages

Many existing OTL messages are not user friendly and explanatory. Error messages should explain to users what they did wrong. The existing OTL messages quite often tell the users what they don’t need to know and don’t not tell what they do.

OTL and OIE Inconsistencies

There are several differences between the OTL and iExpenses (OIE) look and feel that let you know you are using two separate applications developed by separate teams. For instance:

• Time Entry responsibility (sub-menu) lists the OTL functions in the Navigator window; OIE has a consolidated Expenses Home link with functions as Tabs.

• OTL lets you restrict a list of project-related values (project, task, expenditure type), OIE does not.

• OIE lets you search for projects by Project Number, Project Name, Start Date, End Date and Organization, OTL does not. In OTL, you can only search by Project Number and Project Name.

No Save at Timeout

If you walked away from your desk before saving your timecard – too bad for you. Typically, there is a 10 minute “inactivity” timeout that terminates your Oracle session after 10 minutes of no activity. This is a general Framework feature, not just OTL. Make sure you save your work every time!

Offline Timecard

This feature may look good on the OTL data sheet, but in reality, it is a joke (it generates laughs and sarcastic remarks every time we show it to end users, so we no longer do so). I’d really like to know if anyone is actually using it.

Project Timecard Approval and Import

There are, essentially, no parameters to control which timecards get approved and imported into Projects when the background approval method is used. It would be very useful to restrict approval and import by time period, organization, project type, or range of projects.

OTL and iExpenses are often the only two Oracle applications that many users will see. When they do not provide user experience people expect, they give the applications a reputation they do not deserve.

What is your experience with using OTL timecards and expense reports? Share your thoughts and experiences as comments below!

Consulting at Far End of the Long Tail

June 23, 2006 on 8:13 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Ideas and Opinions, Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Let me join the Long Tail bandwagon and apply its concept to ERP consulting. The Long Tail idea was first popularized by Chris Anderson in his article in Wired in October of 2004 and grew into a blog devoted to the subject. The essence of the Long Tail is defined by the following chart:

The red areas in the chart represent the most commonly sought after markets, products and services. Think of them as the “bestsellers”. The yellow area represents the niche markets that only appeal to a small subset of people, and due to the lack of economies of scale, these markets tend to be under-served.

The concept of the Long Tail is that successful on-line businesses have thrived by providing adequate services to the people under the yellow area of the curve. You can go to Amazon to find the latest best sellers (red area), but you can also go to Amazon to find hundreds of thousands of titles that you won’t find at your local bookshop (yellow area). The internet is best situated to serve otherwise “hard-to-serve” people.

Let’s look at the Long Tail of ERP consulting. There used to be a lot of “blockbuster” implementation projects back in the 90s when companies migrated to new software packages and technologies. Action today seems to be in smaller engagements (upgrades, mergers and acquisitions, SOX compliance, etc.). As vendors provide more complex and comprehensive packages, the need for niche and specialized skills increases.

From service providers’ perspective, how do we service the clients profitably on short engagements? From the clients’ point of view, how can they find the IT talent that they don’t have in house for short periods of time when they need it? The ERP vendors are finding answers in providing modular, on-demand applications. Service providers and consultants need to do the same – become more flexible in providing niche knowledge when is needed and service the Long Tail of systems implementation work in the marketplace.

Favorite Fusion Features – General Ledger

June 14, 2006 on 10:06 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Ideas and Opinions | 1 Comment |  Print |  Email

By now you probably know what this is about. The time has come to think about what you want in Oracle Fusion. If you are an expert user with real-life, hands-on experience and have ideas on how to improve the applications; if you had to customize a module to get the features you need, or additional functionality would save you time and money, submit your strategic requests via the OAUG Enhancement Request System (ERS) today! As an Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) member and/or Oracle Applications user, Oracle wants your feedback on strategic improvements to current Oracle E-Business Suite functionality for their initial Fusion releases.

Alternatively, if the option above does not work for you, then let’s also try something different. Let’s keep a weblog of improvement tips, enhancement requests and your best features in Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications you want to have in Oracle Fusion. Let’s have discussions about what enhancements and features make most sense, and then log Fusion Requests before the Oracle’s June deadline. There won’t be any wrong questions or bad ideas (or at least, we’ll let the “group intelligence” decide). Your involvement can be as easy as providing comments with your ideas to this post.

Boy, what can you fundamentally change in GL? By now we know that 4Cs are coming in Release 12. And a couple of people had few more ideas. Below is a list of improvement tips and enhancement ideas based on Oracle General Ledger 11i.10 as submitted by Oracle users at the OAUG Enhancement Requests portal. Use the portal to provide you own enhancement requests, or submit comments to this post to do the same.

Note: I believe the idea of Fusion Requests is to submit enhancement requests on top of the existing releases, not to request the existing features. Somebody correct me if I am wrong. I suppose it never hurts to reiterate what your “best features” are.

• Allow Separate Sequential Numbering by Balancing Segment. Submitted by Gerard Fuller. In several European countries (example Germany) the law requires us to maintain separate sequential numbering sequences by Legal Entity. Most organizations model legal entities by the Balancing Segment in General Ledger. We therefore need to be able to maintain and assign separate sequential number sequences by Balancing Segment. Currently this is only possible by Set of Book and Journal Category. Set of Books is too high level and prevents distinguishing between entities (i.e. Balancing Segments). Using Category requires us to create as many categories as we have legal entities, and assign them. This is quickly unworkable once we have more than a few entities per set of books.

• Data Integrity between Submodules and GL. Submitted by Cyndie Winrow. Each individual transaction is posted only once, eliminating data redundancy and the need to reconcile multiple ledgers.

• Carry Forward Encumbrances at Year End. Submitted by Cyndie Winrow. In Oracle, the carry forward process does not create journals, and not at period activity, but rather creates a view for inquiry and reporting with designated amounts as beginning balances. I believe that this functionality eliminates the need for “period zero” as currently used in PeopleSoft, unless there are other uses for it of which we are unaware.

• Interfund Balancing Capability. Submited by Cyndie Winrow. Allows set up for assignment of default natural account (nacct) segment values for fund balancing that can be specified to balance multiple journal sources and categories.

• Financial Statement Generator (FSG). Submitted by Cyndie Winrow. Used to generate financial reports based on data in general ledger. FSG is an integral part of the general ledger application. Many standard reports are provided in the general ledger application, such as trial balance reports, account analysis reports, and budget to actual reports. FSG gives great flexibility in allowing for the creation of customized reports. It is an easy-to-use tool and can be utilized and maintained without substantial technical resources. Define your reports with reusable report objects, making it easy to create new reports from components already defined. Design custom reports. Schedule reports to run automatically. Produce ad hoc reports. Print reports to tab-delimited files for easy import into client-based spreadsheet programs.

• Reporting Segments (Attributes) Off the Accounting Flexfield. Submitted by Cyndie Winrow. Used for required reporting to regulatory and appropriations agencies.

Which features would you like to become your favorite features in Oracle Fusion? Granted, it may take two years before you get them, if ever, but this is your opportunity to provide your own improvement ideas and enhancement requests. The voting to determine “best features” starts in July 2006.

Favorite Fusion Features – Internet Expenses

June 11, 2006 on 7:51 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Ideas and Opinions | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Which features would you like to become your favorite features in Oracle Fusion? If you are an expert user with real-life, hands-on experience and have ideas on how to improve the applications; if you had to customize a module to get the features you need, or additional functionality would save you time and money, submit your strategic requests via the OAUG Enhancement Request System (ERS) today! As an Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) member and/or Oracle Applications user, Oracle is requesting your feedback on strategic improvements to current Oracle E-Business Suite functionality for their initial Fusion releases.

Alternatively, if you want to get involved but don’t know how, if you are not an OAUG member, or none of the available options works for you, then let’s also try something different. Let’s keep a weblog of improvement tips, enhancement requests and your best features in Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications you want to have in Oracle Fusion. Let’s have discussions about what enhancements and features make most sense, and then log Fusion Requests before the Oracle’s June deadline. There won’t be any wrong questions or bad ideas (or at least, we’ll let the “group intelligence” decide). Your involvement can be as easy as providing comments with your ideas to this post.

Below is a list of improvement tips and enhancement ideas based on Oracle Internet Expenses 11i.10 as submitted by Oracle users at the OAUG Enhancement Requests portal. Use the portal to provide you own enhancement requests, or submit comments to this post to do the same.

• Offline Expense Report Upload. (OAUG Login required). Improve the Offline Spreadsheet Upload process. The existing functionality (OIE 11i.10) is clunky, prone to errors, and unintuitive. And you cannot upload expense item details if you require them for specific expenses types. An upload from an offline spreadheet is a great idea, for the reasons above, most users stay away from it. Provide a WebADI like upload, which would validate cost centers, employees, expense report templates, projects, tasks and expense types against the database? Clients also ask for ways to customize the offline spreadsheet so that they could input company logo, expense policy, etc.

• List of Alternative Approvers. Provide a valid list of expense report approvers. The current list shows everybody in the HR employee-supervisor hierarchy. Employees can choose Alternative Approvers who are not defined as approvers in Payables, and their expense report submissions fail. This can be avoided by simply limiting the list of employees in the Alternative Approver field to valid approvers in Payables.

• Usability Improvement in the Create Expense Report: Cash and Other Expenses View. Provide an option to switch the default Create Expense Report: Cash and Other Expenses view between Summary and Detail. Also, provide an option to let users resolve their expense report line errors in a separate window without scrolling through all expense report lines to find the ones, which failed.

• List of Override Cost Center Values. Users can currently enter only valid cost centers, but they are unable to choose them from the list of values.

• Expense Report Printing. Printing expense reports does not fit on any standard paper size (e.g. 8.5 x 11). Since most people are required to provide a printed copy of their expense report with their receipts, this is a major pain in a butt.

• Project Online Validation Views. Provide customizable views to limit lists of projects, tasks and expenditure types (similar to OTL views).

• Improved Approval Management. Provide a better tool to define different approval rules including line-level approvals, project manager approvals, or other types of approvals, which would not require HR supervisors. The current AME tool (11i.10) is far from being the “robust tool for line-based and cost center-based approvals” as the data sheet boasts.

• CEO Approvals. Provide a better solution for CEO expense report approval. The default approval workflow uses the supervisor hierarchy to approve expense reports, i.e. everybody needs a supervisor in order to approver expense reports. Assigning a dummy employee to be CEO’s supervisor is not a good solution.

• Allow Cross-Charge. Allow cross-charge between multiple business units even if the initial combination of employee’s default company and override cost center is invalid with an override cost center.

• Project-Related Expense Allocations. Enable an option to review and adjust distribution lines for project-related expense reports BEFORE they get submitted.

• Better Way to Manage Expense Report Attachments. Provide a better way for iExpenses auditors to manage (view, save, export or print) expense report attachments. Currently, administrators do not see whether expense reports have line-level attachments until they actually open each expense report.

• Project-Related Expense Report Adjustments. Provide a way for expense auditors to change project-related information for submitted expense reports before they get imported to Payables.

• Expense Auditor Veto. Provide a way for expense report auditors to reverse approver’s approval and return the expense report into a ‘Rejected’ status.

• Direct Deposit Integration with 3rd Party Vendors. Provide direct deposit integration with 3rd party payroll vendors. Not as much iExpenses feature, but a requirement for better integration with Oracle Payroll, or other Payroll providers like ADP and PeopleSoft. Companies need to be able to reimburse expense reports via direct deposit without replicating bank and bank account information in Oracle Payables. Most employees now have their paychecks deposited directly, and expense reports should be paid the same way.

• Expense Reort Payment Remittance E-Mail Notification. Provide email notification when expense reports get paid (same as currently available for credit card payments).

Which features would you like to become your favorite features in Oracle Fusion? Granted, it may take two years before you get them, if ever, but this is your opportunity to provide your own improvement ideas and enhancement requests. The voting to determine “best features” starts in July 2006.

Favorite Fusion Features – Project Billing

June 10, 2006 on 11:05 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Ideas and Opinions | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Which features would you like to become your Favorite Features in Oracle Fusion? If you are an expert user with real-life, hands-on experience and have ideas on how to improve the applications; if you had to customize a module to get the features you need, or additional functionality would save you time and money, submit your strategic requests via the OAUG Enhancement Request System (ERS) today! As an Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) member and/or Oracle Applications user, Oracle is requesting your feedback on strategic improvements to current Oracle E-Business Suite functionality for their initial Fusion releases.

Alternatively, if you want to get involved but don’t know how, if you are not an OAUG member, or none of the available options works for you, then let’s also try something different. Let’s keep a weblog of improvement tips, enhancement requests and your best features in Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications you want to have in Oracle Fusion. Let’s have discussions about what enhancements and features make most sense, and then log Fusion Requests before the Oracle’s June deadline. There won’t be any wrong questions or bad ideas (or at least, we’ll let the “group intelligence” decide). Your involvement can be as easy as providing comments with your ideas to this post.
Below is a list of improvement tips and enhancement ideas based on Oracle Project Billing 11i.10 as provided by the Feature authors and readers. Items with a link have an existing OAUG Fusion Request already created. You will need an OAUG login to see the details.

• Agreements Upload. Provide a Web ADI interface using the existing Agreements APIs to upload and baseline project agreements and funding.

• Events Upload. Provide a Web ADI interface using the existing Events APIs to upload bill and revenue events. Same as above, the new API is great, but a WebADI upload integrator is still needed.

• Find Agreements Function. The Agreements form (PAXINEAG) needs a Find window with Customer, Agreement Number, Agreement Type, and Project Number as parameters.

• Validation of AutoAccounting Lookup Sets. We use them as mapping tables between project attributes and chart of accounts values. Having no validation in lookup sets gives you great flexibility to map anything you want, however, it also creates a maintenance nightmare. Why not build parameters into lookup sets, similar to AutoAccounting Rule parameters? You could store lookup values based on IDs, not values. That way, if for instance, HR organizations change in HR, so would their representations in the lookup sets in Projects.

• Revenue and Receivable AutoAccounting Functions. The Revenue and Receivable Account functions in AutoAccounting could use more parameters in order to create more robust and flexible rules for the revenue and receivable accounts.

• More Details in AutoAccounting Errors. Error Reporting during the revenue and invoice generation processes could be use more details. The “Invalid AutoAccounting” error doesn’t explain it.

• Billing Rates Upload and Maintenance. Bill Rate Schedules could use a new API and WebADI upload integrator. You maintain hundreds of rates in a typical rate schedule (e.g. by job title), and maintaining them can be a challenge.

• Billing Rates Schedule as Project Quick Entry Field. Add Bill Rate Schedule as an available Quick Entry field in project templates.

• Revenue Reporting. There are no revenue reports (similar to the Expenditure Detail and Expenditure Summary in Project Costing) that would show revenue details. New reports by revenue type, revenue category, etc. would be cool.

• Unbilled Expenses Reporting. It would be useful to have a report that would show unbilled billable expenses, which are yet to be billed (similar to Potential Labor Revenue report).

• Recurring Revenue and Billing Events. Many billing contracts specify recurring monthly billing amounts, which need to be billed on a specific date. It would be nice to be able to submit a recurring billing events, which would become invoices when you generate draft invoices (similar to recurring AP Invoices).

• Inactive Project Manager Notification. Project Billing Accountants need a better way to be notified about Project Manager becoming an invalid employee. Currently, they find it out the “hard way” by not being able to print MGT: Invoice Review report, or when interfacing project invoices to AR.

• Better Handling of Terminated Employees. Project Billing, just like other Oracle Applications except of Human Resources, does not support date-tracking of employee record changes. This is causing challenges in Projects when you need to retroactively make someone a Key Member, define employee bill rates overrides, or search for inactive employees in the inquiry forms after they were terminated in HR. Similar to the HR forms, it would be great to change the effective date in selected Projects forms.

• Project Type Changes. It would be very beneficial if users could change the project type (e.g. from Fixed Price to T&M) even after there are expenditures and revenue generated in a project. People make mistakes, contracts change, and having to close and re-create projects is not always a feasible solution.

• Percent Complete Upload. Provide a Web ADI interface using the existing Events APIs to upload bill and revenue events. Same as above, the new API is great, but a WebADI upload integrator is still needed.

Which features would you like to become your favorite features in Oracle Fusion? Granted, it may take two years before you can get them, but this is your time to provide your improvement ideas and enhancement requests. The voting to determine “best features” starts in July.

Favorite Fusion Features – Project Costing

June 9, 2006 on 9:18 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Ideas and Opinions | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Which features would you like to become your Favorite Features in Oracle Fusion? If you are an expert user with real-life, hands-on experience and have ideas on how to improve the applications; if you had to customize a module to get the features you need, or additional functionality would save you time and money, submit your strategic requests via the OAUG Enhancement Request System (ERS) today! As an Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) member and/or Oracle Applications user, Oracle is requesting your feedback on strategic improvements to current Oracle E-Business Suite functionality for their initial Fusion releases.

Alternatively, if you want to get involved but don’t know how, if you are not an OAUG member, or none of the available options works for you, then let’s also try something different. Let’s keep a weblog of improvement tips, enhancement requests and your best features in Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications you want to have in Oracle Fusion. Let’s have discussions about what enhancements and features make most sense, and then log Fusion Requests before the Oracle’s June deadline. There won’t be any wrong questions or bad ideas (or at least, we’ll let the “group intelligence” decide). Your involvement can be as easy as providing comments with your ideas to this post.
Below is a list of improvement tips and enhancement ideas based on Oracle Project Costing 11i.10 as provided by the Feature authors and readers:

• Project and Task WebADI Upload Integrator. Provide Excel integration (WebADI Integrator) for uploading projects and tasks using the existing project and task APIs.

• Project Maintenance. Maintaining projects and their options could be a drag. Yes, there are APIs to create and update projects, tasks and budgets, but in order to use them you have to create your own custom code. Many companies rely on manual project maintenance by their users. Similar to Quick Project Entry function, which is used to quickly set up projects, why not create a Quick Project Update function, which would update them? It would be great, for instance, for updating project dates, task dates and transaction controls dates when the project duration changes. You may also need to change burden schedules, price rule schedules, or any other project or task-level attributes. You get the idea…

• Expanded Project Administration. This one is similar to the one above, but it is more related to the changes to you need to make across several projects. The Project Administration functionality currently allows you to change only Project Owning Organization. It would be great to have better selection criteria like project type, customer, project manager, project classification, etc.to choose what projects need to be transferred from one organization to another. Also, it would be fantastic to be able to change additional projectattributes like Key Members, Customers, or Project Classifications using the Project Administration.

• Improved Project Allocations Rules. Project Allocations is a great feature but it could use a little more flexibility in defining rules on how to create new transactions. Being able to define only one Expenditure Organization and one Expenditure Type per rule makes it very difficult to define flexible accounting rules for allocation transactions. Having a separate AutoAccounting Function for allocations would also help.

• Validated AutoAccounting Lookup Sets. We all use them as mapping tables between project attributes and chart of accounts values. Having no validation in lookup sets gives you great flexibility to map anything you want. However, no validation also creates a maintenance nightmare. Why not build parameters into lookup sets, similar to AutoAccounting Rule parameters? You could store lookup values based on IDs, not values. That way, if or instance, HR organizations change in HR, so would their representations in the lookup sets in Projects.

• Expanded AutoAccounting Functions for Cost Clearing Accounts. The clearing account functions in AutoAccounting could use more parameters in order to create more robust and flexible rules for the cost clearing accounts. Add additional parameters like expenditure type, expenditure category, service type, project classification, etc.

• Better Error Handling for AutoAccounting Errors during Cost Processing. Many of us spend endless hours trying to figure out why costing processes fail due to “Invalid AutoAccounting” errors. Provide more detail AutoAccounting errors in the cost distribution processes.

• Expenditure Item Adjustments. Provide a way to “transfer” expenditures between Expenditure Organizations, and between Expenditure Types (similar to the existing transfer between projects and tasks). It is a major headache, especially with transactions imported into Projects (timecards, expense reports, supplier invoices) to not to be able to change these two parameters.

• Find Expenditure Types Function. It would be great to have a search function in the Expenditure Types form with Expenditure Type, Expenditure Category, Revenue Category, UOM and Expenditure Type Class as search parameters would be very helpful. Also, provide a folder/export function so that we can easily export expenditure types and their attributes. The IMP: Expenditure Type Listing is pretty useless.

• Rate Schedule Upload. Provide Excel integration (Web ADI Upload Integrator) for creating and updating Rate Schedules. It would also be nice to be able to end-date the schedules you no longer need.

Which features would you like to become your favorite features in Oracle Fusion? Granted, it may take two years before you get them, if ever, but this is your opportunity to provide your own improvement ideas and enhancement requests. The voting to determine “best features” starts in July 2006.

Favorite Fusion Features – Payables

June 7, 2006 on 9:50 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Ideas and Opinions | 3 Comments |  Print |  Email

Which features would you like to become your Favorite Features in Oracle Fusion? If you are an expert user with real-life, hands-on experience and have ideas on how to improve the applications; if you had to customize a module to get the features you need, or additional functionality would save you time and money, submit your strategic requests via the OAUG Enhancement Request System (ERS) today! As an Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) member and/or Oracle Applications user, Oracle is requesting your feedback on strategic improvements to current Oracle E-Business Suite functionality for their initial Fusion releases.

Alternatively, if you want to get involved but don’t know how, if you are not an OAUG member, or none of the available options works for you, then let’s also try something different. Let’s keep a weblog of improvement tips, enhancement requests and your best features in Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications you want to have in Oracle Fusion. Let’s have discussions about what enhancements and features make most sense, and then log Fusion Requests before the Oracle’s June deadline. There won’t be any wrong questions or bad ideas (or at least, we’ll let the “group intelligence” decide). Your involvement can be as easy as providing comments with your ideas to this post.
Below is a list of enhancement requests based on Oracle Payables 11i.10 as submitted by Oracle users at the OAUG Enhancement Requests portal. Use the portal to provide you own enhancement requests, or submit comments to this post to do the same.

• Invoice Price Instead of PO Price on RTS Debit Memos. (OAUG login required) Submitted by Eric Guether. A Debit Memo is automatically created when a Return to Supplier (RTS) is made against a PO that has already been invoiced in the Payables module. The automated Debit Memo created by RTS is desirable (it’s a good thing). However, Debit Memos for PO returns to PCL are valued using the PO Unit Price. We would expect the Debit Memos to be valued using the Invoice Price.

• Supplier Name has no translation (TL) table column in EBS. Submitted by Eric Guether. Our single global EBS 11i instance is American English with Japanese NLS. We are unable to maintain English translations of supplier names, addresses, contacts, etc. because EBS lacks translation tables for vendors.

• New Suffix for Intercompany Payables Invoices. Submitted by Eric Guether. Starting in EBS 11.5.10, intercompany A/P invoices are auto-assigned the same number as its corresponding intercompany A/R invoice plus a new suffix, which is the ship-from org ID (seen only by IT people in SQL queries). Users prefer if the suffix were the org code that they are used to seeing through the EBS forms.

• Vary the Accounting on Intercompany Payable Debit Entries. Submitted by Eric Guether. When an intercompany A/P invoice is created, the G/L account used for the debit entry is very limited — just one G/L account per inter-org relationship. Functionality should be added to allow the G/L used to vary by product, perhaps using the default Cost of Goods account for the invoiced item.

• Combined batch processing to net Customer/Suppliers Payables and Receiveables invoices similar to the Contra Charging form. Should include ACH and Notification processes. Submitted by Carl Mealha. Combined batch processing to net Customer/Suppliers Payables and Receiveables invoices similar to the Contra Charging form. Should include ACH and Notification processes.

• Integrate employee bank account information with Oracle Payroll and/or 3rd part payroll vendors. Submitted by Marian Crkon. Provide an interface to integrate employee direct deposit information (banks, bank accounts, addresses, etc.) with Oracle Payroll and/or 3rd part payroll vendors. Currently, customizations are required to keep the employee bank information in sync between Payables and Payroll.
• Supplier Certification. Submitted by Howard McKinney. Provide addtional fields on the supplier record to track any necessary certification requirements that might be required, for example, a supplier may be required to carry insurance as a 3rd party provider of shipping services in the event of accident caused by the driver. Being able to track the insurance certificate information as well as entering an expiration date of the certificate would be helpful. Also have a form trigger or concurrent program that will place the supplier on hold if the certificate expiration date is met and no renewed certificate has been received.

Which features would you like to become your favorite features in Oracle Fusion? Granted, it may take two years before you can get them, but this is your time to provide your own improvement ideas and enhancement requests. The voting The voting to determine “best features” starts in July 2006.

A Smart Move by SAP

May 16, 2006 on 8:59 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Ideas and Opinions, Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Congratulations to Jeff Nolan who runs the Apollo group at SAP for inviting several enterprise application bloggers to go to Orlando and cover the SAPPHIRE 06 conference. It’s great to see a big software company like SAP recognizing blogs as new way to communicate with its clients and users and giving a forum to independent bloggers to write about the conference. What a great way to reach out to those who cannot be there in person. SAP can only gain from this experiment. Any positive stories will be a great advertising and any negative comments a great feedback.

My 12,140 Reasons Why I Won’t COLLABORATE

April 3, 2006 on 6:30 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Ideas and Opinions | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

I’ve always assumed that vendor events would be a great way to see what is going on in my industry, meet up with my clients and buddies, or simply get away from work. I would not know since, except for a couple of local events, I always seem to be in the middle of some client engagement and I can’t go away to hang out with a cool crowd. I will not be at the Oracle mega conference COLLABORATE 06 in Nashville either. Apart from the reason above, my decision making came down to simple dollars and sense. Taking cues from a famous commercial, you could summarize the five day event as follows:

When you consider similar costs for 5,000 expected conference attendees, plus time and expenses invested by vendors and conference coordinators, that’s a lot of money spent to look at … software. One of the most frequently spoken phrases at the conference will be the “Return on Investment” (ROI). Personally, that return would be very low for me. I feel like these events are designed for users who buy the applications, not necessarily those who use them.

How about you? Are you planning on being in Nashville? What is your experience with user conferences in general? Do they work? Do they meet your expectations and provide you with information you need? Do you have any suggestions to make them better?