The Feature

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!

Fusion Appplications User Interface Previews

October 30, 2006 on 8:25 am | by Marian Crkon | In Oracle Press | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Steven Chan posted a nice compilation of the Fusion Applications Preview Screenshots demostrated by Jeremy Ashley during John Wookey’s keynote address at Oracle OpenWorld 2006.

You can still influence what will Fusion Applications look like. The Applications User Experience team at Oracle is currently seeking participants for Oracle’s Usability Program. Participants in the usability studies will work directly with the Applications User Experience team to provide input on developing innovative user interfaces (the “look and feel”) for Fusion applications. If you are interested, please complete the online enrollment form. If you fit the profile for an upcoming usability study, Oracle will contact you directly and all information will remain confidential.

Fusion Applications – Bits and Pieces of Future Direction

October 4, 2006 on 9:47 am | by Floyd Teter | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

I’ve spent a couple days over the past two weeks at Oracle’s HQ in Redwood Shores. My role during the first trip was as a member of the IOUC’s Fusion Applications Customer Profiling committee – our team presented the profiling survey results to Oracle. During the second trip, I was part of the management team for the Jet Propulsion Lab’s annual session at Oracle’s Customer Visitor Center. Both trips provided some bits and pieces on the direction of Fusion Applications. I thought I’d share those bits and pieces here.

While I believe this information to be reliable, please insert the appropriate legal boilerplate: these thoughts are my own and do not represent those of Oracle, JPL, or Itsafeature.com; while I believe this information to be accurate, I do not present them with the intent that any person or enterprise to rely on this content to their detriment, the author accepts no personal liability, blah…blah…blah…

Now that the CYA is finished, let’s get on with sharing the news. While much of this may be old news, this info may be important to those just beginning to track the development of Fusion Applications.

Release 12

R12 of the E-Business Suite is, to a large degree, a delivery iteration on the path to Fusion Applications. Although we probably all already know that R12 will run on Fusion Middleware, I’m not sure we all understand that one of the major points of R12 is to extend the functionality of the E-Business Suite using Fusion Middleware. In other words, this might be a worthwhile release for those E-Business customers ready to dive deeper into SOA.

Fusion Applications

I noted some important points, some of which were new to me. Some “rapid fire” highlights from my notes:
- Oracle Forms will be replaced by Java Server Faces (“JSF”)
- The combination of Business Process tools and a BPEL execution environment will replace the Oracle Workflow product
- Fusion 1.0 will not eliminate PL/SQL and C++ from the apps environment, but the intent is for both to be eliminated at some point
- The Fusion development effort is still on-track to release individual applications in 2007 and the integrated Fusion Applications Suite in 2008.
- Oracle has released their flavor of an SOA maturity model, which you can read about here. This model provides substantial insight on where Fusion is headed.
- JDeveloper with ADF will continue to be the IDE and framework of choice for development work within the Fusion Applications environment.

Well, that’s all I have for now. Like I stated earlier, it’s in bits and pieces. There is not much of a unifying thread running through all this, it’s just chunks of info that seem worthy of sharing.

There are several additional bits and pieces about Fusion Applications that will come out during OpenWorld later in October, so stay tuned!

IOUG Also Wants Your Input on Oracle Fusion

July 11, 2006 on 9:42 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Oracle Press, Worth Noting | 1 Comment |  Print |  Email

The International Oracle Users Council (IOUG) also encourages you [Oracle Applications and Peoplesoft Enterprise Users] to provide your input to Oracle as they develop Oracle Fusion. Below are several examples of how Oracle is working with the Product Development Committee on a number of initiatives running where users can be involved. The research into Fusion is unprecedented and the IOUC urge anyone not already involved in User Group initiatives to take part. The current PDC Initiatives for Fusion include:

General Fusion Surveys

This survey has now closed with over 2000 users worldwide agreeing to help Oracle with their research. If you missed this opportunity and would like to join in for later research please submit your details for future surveys.

Peoplesoft Product Usage Surveys

Oracle has created an initial set of Product Usage Surveys and a SQR script to better understand how you are using various features and functions of PeopleSoft Enterprise applications.

Since Fusion is starting with E-Business Suite as the foundation, Oracle needs specific input from PeopleSoft Enterprise customers on the use of certain features/functions as they move forward in the planning for Fusion. As Oracle progresses through the planning/design process, there will be additional opportunities for the J.D. Edwards and E-Business Suite customers to provide input.

Fusion Applications Communications Profiling

With announcements of Oracle Fusion, and more recently Applications Unlimited, upgrades to current versions and Oracle Fusion continue to generate questions amongst a diverse customer base. A greater understanding of customer types (profiles) and their application roadmap planning approach needs to be addressed. Oracle desires to retain existing customers and help them better position plans along a value-driven roadmap toward the new Fusion applications platform.

The IOUC aim to gather and deliver constructive input to senior Oracle Applications and Support executives. The project focus is the customer view and experience with Oracle’s communication strategy and messaging with respect to application upgrades (to the current release/version) and Oracle Fusion.

Usability of Oracle Products

The Applications User Experience team at Oracle would like to know if you are interested in participating in Oracle’s Usability Program. Participants in the usability studies will work directly with the User Experience team to provide input on developing innovative User Interfaces, i.e. the look and feel’ for Fusion applications. If you are interested, please complete this form. If you fit the profile for an upcoming usability study, Oracle will contact you directly. All information will remain confidential.

Business Process Modeling

In conjunction with the Fusion Strategy Council the IOUC are working with Oracle looking at the high level BPM for the first Fusion releases.

Oracle Fusion Feature Request Voting Is Now Available

June 29, 2006 on 8:25 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Oracle Press | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Below is full text of the OAUG broadcast message regarding the Future Feature Request Voting process:

As you may be aware, the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) has embarked on a mission to assist Oracle in collecting and voting on feature requests for Fusion, as well as on strategic, tactical and operational improvements to current Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise and Oracle Retail application functionality.

To date, the OAUG has received more than 1,100 submissions, nearly 400 of which are feature requests for Fusion.

Now is the time to voice your opinion to Oracle! Voting for enhancement/Fusion feature requests is now open to OAUG members only through July 17, 2006. If your organization is not a member of the OAUG, but is interested in participating in the voting process, OAUG membership information is available on the OAUG Web site.

If you are an OAUG member and eligible to vote, your OAUG key contact must designate you as an enhancement contact. Talk to your key contact to ensure you have access to voting. It is important for you to vote on all requests even if you have not submitted one, but please limit your votes to the applications you use.

To learn more about how to use the OAUG ERS, please review the Users Guide (PDF file) or download and view the ERS demo (10.5MB) (Please note: this session was recorded via WebEx and requires the WebEx Player, which you may download and install from the WebEx Web site).

Again, OAUG member voting in now open, so please work with others in your organization to vote and share your requests with Oracle! All voting results will be submitted to Oracle for evaluation. Any formal response the OAUG receives from Oracle regarding the prioritized requests will be made available for viewing in the ERS.

If you have any questions, please contact the OAUG at enhancements@oaug.com or +1 404.240.0897.

Best Regards,
OAUG Technology Committee

P.S. Only OAUG Key Contacts can identify who they wish to vote on behalf of their organization. Allowing OAUG member contacts to vote is easy!

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.