06/08/2009 by Simon Tomey.

If you get a chance to hear Croydon Council’s presentation on Re-Implementing R12, then take it. It left me thinking “this is how it should be done”.

Kathryn and Christian make a great double act as they share their experience with re-implementing R12 at Croydon Council. While I can’t vouch for the actual result, the presentation left me thinking that “this is how an implementation should be done”. Apart from some potentially disturbing images (of escalators and bricks through windows) here are some of the points I took away:

• Involve all stakeholders early. Get high level support, but also work from the bottom up
• Make a Vision instance widely available and encourage users to get to know R12.
• Ensure that the users own their processes, drive the requirements early on and take their responsibility seriously
• When requirements gathering, find the users who actually understand the process, not just those perform the segmented actions.
• Upgrading means you bring through all the legacy processes and customisations. Re-implementation allows you to take advantage of the R12 processes.
• Data migration and cleansing is a large and time consuming issue
• There is a problem with dunning letters, but Croydon have sorted it. (see http://blog.belife.co.uk/2009/07/15/staged-dunning-letters-and-upgrading-to-r12/)

Get a copy of the slides here http://www.ukoug.org/assets/uploads/library/intherealworldChristianAsante.ppt (slide 12 is a useful grid of lessons learnt/dos and don’ts)

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06/08/2009 by Simon Tomey.

Some upgrading to R12 have mentioned what a benefit the enhanced reporting is. Guess what? This enhanced reporting comes from BI Publisher and you can get all this from 11i. Moreover there are a couple of surprises with reporting when you upgrade to R12.

It’s wonderful to hear of R12 users sharing my enthusiasm about BI Publisher. Those who have heard me speak on it will know how and eager I am for others to experience the benefits. However, you should be aware that you can get pretty well all of the Financials reporting functionality in 11i just by installing the correct patch.

• See metalink note Note:422508.1 May-2007 for comprehensive information on Oracle XML Publisher Release 5.6.3 (which I think equates roughly to standalone 10.1.3.3!). This includes the patch path for 11i and the patches for XML publisher desktop add-in.

There are a couple of points to note if you are thinking about upgrading to R12:

1. Many “standard” reports in R12 are wholly replaced by BIP reports.
   Ironically this means that if you aren’t familiar with BIP and you experience problems, you won’t be able to revert to the old text based output. (A common problem is not enough processors and threads assigned to the OPP).
2. ADI client/desktop doesn’t work with R12.
   You’ll have to use Web ADI or Reports Manager (which doesn’t seem to be very well liked) or for FSG’s convert them to produce in BIP (but then you won’t get the spreadsheet tabs for each page).

My conclusions are:

• R12 is coming to us all eventually, so get up to speed on BIP now so you’re not wrong footed.
• If you’re not planning on upgrading soon, install the patch and get yourself some clean attractively formatted, impressive and versatile reporting functionality.
  (…but of course I would say that, especially since we’ve just starting running some great one day training courses).

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03/08/2009 by Simon Tomey.

Most EBS BI Publisher users limit themselves to the data in existing concurrent requests. Data templates open the world to you by enabling you to report on anything in the EBS database. This article explains what data templates are compared with “presentation templates”

Presentation Templates

I recently coined the phrase “presentation” templates to refer to the RTF files created to transform the output from the standard Oracle reports (i.e. the presentation layer). It’s what most people will use to transform their existing 11i reports and what R12 users will recognise as the new way to produce standard Oracle reports output. Presentation templates merely reformat the data which is created from a standard concurrent request. Although when I say “merely reformat” – that’s an understatement. Presentation templates are very powerful because you can do almost anything with data which is generated from the original concurrent request (e.g. sorting, summing, providing graphs, charts, tables, conditional formatting). Here’s an example of what could be done straight off the back of a bog standard concurrent request).

However, have you ever wondered why there’s another tab on the XML publisher administrator, which doesn’t seem to do much at all except tell BI Publisher which concurrent request we are getting the data from?

Data Templates

The data definition tab is there to allow us to create our own data extraction query (or data layer), as a data template. You can also emulate all the Oracle Reports functionality, including parameters and triggers). This shouldn’t be a surprise to us, because of course, BI Publisher was designed to replace Oracle Reports, so there has to be a way of creating our own data layer.

The best way to create a data template is to copy the elements from an existing (Oracle Reports 6i or 10g) report. Moreover one of the most popular applications of the data template is to combine the data layer from several existing reports into one concurrent request. For example, we created at CIS letter by combining the SQL for the CIS statement with suppliers address (how cool is that?).

The data template consists of:

• A <parameters> section in which parameters are declared in child <parameter> elements
• A <dataQuery> section in which the SQL queries are defined in child <sqlStatement> elements
• A <dataStructure> section in which the output XML structure is defined

This blog post concentrates on the “what” not on the “how”. If you want more detail on the how, drop me a line.

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