24/07/2009 by Simon Tomey.

Here’s the first in a series of Blog posts giving tips about great applications for Business Intelligence Publisher. We’re focusing on the “what to”, not so much on the “how to”. If you need more help on the “how to” drop me a line.

BI Publisher has access to a number of libraries which gives it a wide range of available functions.

• These all support my claim that “if the data is there already, you can do absolutely anything with it in a BIP presentation template”. (Moreover, if you use data templates you can also get any data out that you want too).
• One of these libraries (XDO) contains a number of SQL equivalents – check them out in the XDO user guide.

We recently used one of the functions in this library to clean up a remittance advice.

• This function is substring (which is the equivalent of mid string for MS Excel users).
• The standard remittance advice output puts a very unhelpful “GB” in one of the address fields (the UK country code) which would just confuse the postman and irritate our suppliers, so we need to eliminate it. If it was only this in the field, we could just exclude the field altogether, but unfortunately is also contains the post code.

<C_ZIP_PR>GU33 8PQ  GB</C_ZIP_PR>

Hence we used substring to suppress the last two characters of this address field.

Here’s what it looks like before using substring:

Here’s what it looks like thanks to substring and without the annoying “GB”.

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22/07/2009 by Simon Tomey.

See the link below for a useful 10 tips for a successful R12 Implementation (reproduced below). I’d add another – “get a demonstration (Vision) instance of R12 and encourage your users to get familiar with it and own the functionality”. The benefits of this were highlighted in the Croydon Council implementation

http://www.arshiyatech.com/10_things_to_consider_for_a_successfull_oracle_r12_financials_implementation.html

1. Create a realistic schedule for your R12 implementation or upgrade.
2. Conduct your implementation or upgrade on a parallel system.
3. Allow yourself sufficient time to implement and perform user acceptance testing (UAT). This will give you time to assure that your system has been designed and setup to meet your business needs.
4. Assure that as much data as possible is accounted and ALL accounting is transferred.
5. Clear up any data issues in 11i before upgrading (i.e., Run the Accounting Health Check).
6. Use the Maintenance Wizard for the upgrade.
7. Review the Oracle Financials Critical Patches Alert. Subledger Accounting, E-Business Tax, and other Financials applications. Apply the critical patches to prevent encountering issues that have already been addressed.
8. Apply the pre-upgrade patches BEFORE upgrading to R12.
9. Apply the post-upgrade patches ASAP after completing the upgrade.
10. Perform several month-end closes before considering a Go-Live date.

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20/07/2009 by Simon Tomey.

Suffolk County Council (re)implemented R12 in August 2008. Here’s some points I took from their presentation

Background

• Suffolk, Mid Suffolk and BT have formed a joint venture/shared service centre known as CSD/”Customer Service Direct”
• CSD have 2.900 active users

Reasons for re-implementing rather than upgrading:

• CSD wanted to :
  • change the chart of accounts (including number of segments)
  • remove legacy/historical data
  • decommission customisations
• CSD were also on 11.5.8, hence would have had to have upgraded via 11.5.10 to R12.

Tips:

• CSD eliminated potential backlog activity by paying suppliers to the end of the month in which they were re-implementing.
• CSD used AD patch to assess the affect of patches before applying
• Bug fixes were a big problem because many fixes would ‘break’ things in other areas. The wide functional scope of patches also meant a huge load on regression testing. (However it is thought that many of the problems they had with version 12.0.4 have been fixed in 12.0.6).

Good things about R12:

• BI publisher
  • “flexible, powerful too, relatively simple to use”. (Although that you can have all of this in 11i with the right patch – contact me for details).
  • “More complex documents require higher skill levels” (Again contact me if you’d like details of some great one day training courses I have delivered).
• Approval Management Engine – a comprehensive tool for managing transaction approval (I think this is in 11.5.10 too – Dave Bouskill presented on this in the 2007 conference).
• Workflow. (Again available in 11i and being replaced by BPEL).

Conclusions:

On hearing Carol’s presentation, many attendees were terrified at the thought of implementing R12. However, Carol pointed out that they were one of the earliest implementations (and had OPFSi) and that they succeeded. She was concerned to point out the hard work there was getting there. My take on that again, is that while later versions of R12 should be much better, preparation, engagement and resource availability is key to a successful implementation.

These are just from the notes I took (and I apologise for any errors or omissions). A great presentation and there’s more detail on the presentation slides which I recommend you download from UKOUG (they should be available here http://www.ukoug.org/calendar/show_event.jsp?id=4365 ).

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