The Feature

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.