The Feature

Using Oracle Projects? Check Out Project Information Center

January 24, 2007 on 8:55 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

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)â„¢ 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)â„¢ 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

January 16, 2007 on 10:01 am | by Marian Crkon | In Oracle Press, Worth Noting | 4 Comments |  Print |  Email

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

January 15, 2007 on 8:00 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Oracle Press, Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

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!

January 8, 2007 on 7:15 am | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | 5 Comments |  Print |  Email

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!

Christmas Is Over – Get To Work On Daylight Savings Time

December 26, 2006 on 6:35 pm | by Floyd Teter | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

I hope everyone’s holiday was at least as wonderful as mine. Now forget those visions of dancing sugarplums and start working on an upcoming issue with Oracle products – Daylight Saving Time.

Background

Under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Daylight Saving Time begins 3 weeks earlier and ends one month later in 2007, running from March 11 to Nov. 4. The US Department of Transportation, which is responsible for administering daylight savings time, has published a reminder that can be found here. Oracle software does not support the extended periods of Daylight Saving Time.

Impact to E-Business Suite Users

>In the E-Business Suite, there are two types of date fields:

1) Dates with a time component to show a specific point in time.

2) Dates without a time component, showing date but not a specific time

The impact to E-Business customers on Daylight Saving Time will be that time values, whether recorded or displayed, will be offset by one hour from the actual time. Incorrect time values will appear in all date fields with a time component. In addition, there is a possibility of incorrect dates (for example, in the event that a transaction takes actually takes place at 12:55 a.m. but the system time lags the actual time by one hour) . Under certain circumstances, incorrect dates could appear in either type of date field.

The E-Business Suite customers impacted will fall into one or more of the following scenarios:

1) an EBS database running in an affected time zone (in other words, all EBS customers in the U.S. and Canada)

2) an EBS user with the “Client Timezone” profile option set to an affected time zone

3) Communications or data transfers between time zones, at least one of which falls into Daylight Saving Time.

At this point, Oracle has not heard much feedback from EBS customers so they’ve assessed this issue as a “minor inconvenience”. Nevertheless, they are working the issue.

Oracle Research

Although I’ve only discussed the impact on E-Business users, this issue also impacts the Oracle database and middleware. Although this is a developing issue, there are several sources of information available:

Oracle Metalink

• Notes 403311.1 and 399375.1 discusses the implications for Oracle E-Business Suite users.
• Notes 397281.1 and 359145.1 discuss the impact on and the patches for the Oracle database, Oracle middleware, and various supporting operating systems – many patches called for between these two notes. The latter note will also lead the reader to Metalink Note 396387.1, which covers workarounds when DST-related database patches are not available for a particular configuration.

Other Sources

• Oracle’s Director of E-Business Technology, Steven Chan, has written articles on this subject that can be found on the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog. The articles can be found here and here.

OAUG is also tracking this issue. Their progress can be followed here.

Next Steps

I suggest that every Oracle user in the U.S. and Canada should at least give some brief consideration to this Daylight Saving Time issue. Maybe it doesn’t impact your organization or perhaps you can live with the glitch. On the other hand, you may have a problem to resolve before March. If you fall in the latter category, you’ll want to start planning now.

Gee, don’t you wish it was still Christmas!

A Politically Correct Holiday Wish

December 21, 2006 on 1:24 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Let me wish you Merry Christmas with this politically correct holiday wish from an anonymous source…

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced with the most enjoyable traditions of religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.

I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted Gregorian calendar year 2007, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make our country great and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms: This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

Demystifying Fusion – OAUG’s Three-Step Fusion Program

November 16, 2006 on 7:32 pm | by Floyd Teter | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

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!

R12 and Mod-plsql…Not!

November 6, 2006 on 2:54 pm | by Floyd Teter | In Worth Noting | 5 Comments |  Print |  Email

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.

OpenWorld Presentation Slides Available For Download

October 31, 2006 on 2:35 pm | by Floyd Teter | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

The PowerPoint slides for presentations from Oracle OpenWorld 2006 are now available for download here. Use the search engine to search for presentations by track, day, presenter name or keyword. It’s the next best thing to being there!

Thoughts on Unbreakable Linux

October 30, 2006 on 6:31 am | by Floyd Teter | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Oracle OpenWorld 2006 is all wrapped up. While the laser lights, hip-hop dancers, Elton John, and lunch under the big top were all noteworthy elements of the conference, most of the buzz from OpenWorld surrounds the announcement of Unbreakable Linux.

Just to update those of you who were too wrapped up in watching the World Series thrashing of the Tigers by the world champion St. Louis Cardinals to notice anything else, Oracle announced an offering of enterprise-level support for the Red Hat Linux operating system (minus the Red Hat branding) for about half the price of Red Hat’s current support offerings. It’s a pretty creative way for Oracle to finally execute its long-rumored entry into the Linux OS space: rather than build their own distribution, they’ll compete for support of the leading distro (and support is where the money is in the current Linux OS business model for most providers). Oracle has branded this offering as “Unbreakable Linux”.

After Larry Ellison made the announcement, replete with armor-clad penguin logos, Red Hat’s stock dropped by 25% in overnight trading. The buzz on the street is that, once Red Hat’s stock drops to a bargain price, Oracle will acquire the company and thus be able to offer an Oracle OS. Although I’m not privy to Larry’s strategic plans, the idea seems plausible. If so, there may also be another long-term Oracle target in play. Let’s talk about Sun.

Part of Sun’s plan to regain its former glory (and stock price) was to tout Solaris on x86, differentiating Solaris from Linux by contending that the companies offering and supporting Linux are too young to be trustworthy for support of enterprise-critical operations. As of Oracle’s announcement, that reasoning is toast. In fact, doesn’t Unbreakable Linux make Oracle and Sun competitors for the enterprise OS? So to those still holding Sun stock hoping for a rally: My grandmother held onto her Confederate dollars until her dying day, insisting the South would rise again…I felt bad for her too. Sun stock has been cheap for quite some time, and now it’s likely going to stay that way, which makes it a great acquisition target for somebody who understands the business and has the financial chops to make the purchase.

So let’s really go out on the speculation limb. Consider a scenario where Oracle eventually acquires both Red Hat and Sun. Oracle can then offer a full stack of products, including Oracle Linux (Red Hat Linux with the best features of Solaris) on Sun…uh, I mean Oracle…hardware (not just servers but storage arrays too!), all optimized for Oracle’s database, middleware, and applications products. As an additional plus, guess who would be the new custodian of Java as a result of acquiring Sun?

Now keep in mind that I’m just speculating and having fun with recent developments. I have no secret information, inside track, or scoop. And acquiring both Red Hat and Sun does seem like quite a bit for Oracle to digest. Then again, I never thought they would successfully absorb PeopleSoft…

LATE NOTE: Neil McAllister has also written a strong article on this scenario that popped up at InfoWorld a few hours after I posted this piece. No collaboration here – just two minds thinking alike. You can read Neil’s article here.