Best Practices for Designing Accounting Flexfield

on Saturday, December 25, 2010

Common Segments used across Enterprises

Given below are some of the common segment titles that many organizations define with separate account segments:
Company  A segment that indicates legal entities for commercial, for–profit organizations.
Fund   A segment that indicates a fiscal and accounting entity with a self–balancing set of accounts for governmental or not–for–profit organizations.
Cost Center or Department   A segment that indicates functional areas of your business or agency, such as Accounting, Facilities, Shipping, and so on.
Account   A segment that indicates traditional “Natural Account”, such as Cash, Current Asset, Accounts Payable, or Salary Expense.
Product   A segment that indicates products, such as disk drives, printer cables or magnetic tapes manufactured by a commercial, for–profit organization.
Program   A segment that indicates programs, such as, for a university, scholarship program, endowment program, or annual giving program.
Project   A segment that indicates projects such as work orders, contracts, grants, or other entities for which you want to track revenues and expenses.
State/District/Geography   A segment that indicates geographical locations, such as Northern California, Central Florida or Western New York.
Distribution Channel   A segment that indicates the method by which your product reaches your customer, such as Wholesale, Retail, OEM, and so on.
Intercompany   A segment that indicates intercompany entities. If your subsidiaries share the same set of books, you can use an intercompany segment to identify subsidiaries involved in intercompany-transactions. This segment usually mirrors your company segment (balancing legal entity segment).

Best Practices for defining Segments

*   Determine the segment that captures the natural account, such as assets, liabilities, expenses, and validate whether you need sub-accounts. Use child-parent relationships to define your account hierarchy.
*   Define a separate Accounting Flexfield segment for each dimension of your organization on which you want detailed reporting, such as regions, products, services, programs, and projects. For example, you may want to record and report on expenses by project. To do this, your account must categorize expenses by project. Define your account to include a “Project” segment. By doing this, you automatically categorize all your accounting information by project as you enter it, and you can easily report on project information.
*   Group similar business dimensions into one segment. This allows a more simplified and flexible accounting structure. For example, you only need one segment to record and report on both districts and regions, as illustrated below. Because regions are simply groups of districts, you can easily create regions within your district segment by defining a parent for each region with the relevant districts as children. Use these parents when defining summary accounts to maintain account balances and reporting hierarchies to perform regional reporting.
*   Consider information you track in other accounting information systems. You may not need to capture certain organizational dimensions if another system already records and reports on this information. For example, if you need to report on sales by product and your sales tracking system already provides this information, General Ledger account structure does not need to categorize information by product. If you are a government or not–for–profit agency using a labor costing system which captures work breakdown structure for reimbursable billing, you may not need to capture this in your account structure.
*   Identify segments that you might need in the future. Consider future expansion and possible changes in your organization and reporting needs. For example, you may not need a region segment now, but eventually you plan to expand you organization to cover multiple regions. Determine the length of each segment. Consider the structure of values you plan to maintain within the segment. For example, you might use a 3 character segment to capture project information, and classify your projects so that all administrative projects are in the 100 to 199 range, all the facilities projects are in the 200 to 299 range, and so on. If you develop more than 10 classifications of projects, you would run out of values within this segment. You might want to add an extra character to the size of each segment to anticipate future needs.
*   If you want to perform multi–company or fund accounting within a set of books, choose a balancing segment. You must define one and only one balancing segment in your account. General Ledger automatically balances all journal entries for each value of this balancing segment and performs any necessary intercompany or interfund posting to the intercompany or interfund account you specify when you define your set of books.
*   If you plan to maintain and consolidate multiple set of books, think of common elements among your separate account structures. Consider which segments can share value sets, or where opportunities for rolling up segments from a subsidiary set of books into a parent set of books exist.
Plan your value sets. To reduce maintenance and to maintain consistency between sets of books, you can use value sets when defining multiple charts of accounts. Using the same value sets allow two different sets of books to reference the same segment values and descriptions for a specified segment.
*   For example, the values in your natural account segment, such as Cash, Accounts Payable, and so on, may be equally applicable to each of your sets of books. Ideally, when you set up a new set of books you should consider how you would map your new Accounting Flexfield segments for consolidation. When a common natural account segment is used between sets of books, it is easier to map account balances from your subsidiary sets of books to a consolidating entity.

Oracle AIM and ABF Methodology

on Saturday, December 18, 2010

Traditional AIM methodology is known as Ask and Do as it is requirements driven and solution is derived based on the requirements during the project. It is more or less based on the traditional Waterfall Approach, prescribes a way to do the fit gap analysis and assists you to define customizations where standard Oracle functionality does not meet the business requirements. The approach is taken on a modular basis.

AIM For Business Flows (ABF) also called as Show and Tell is solution driven and Solution Flow is defined before the start of project. It is based on iterative approach based where multiple runs of CRPs are done. In the essence it aims at avoiding customizations and prioritizes all changes. There is a strong emphasis on integrated view and focus is on cross module process flows. Some of the advantages of ABF are:
  1. ABF is most recommended approach for green-field projects where there are no legacy systems in place and the customer is willing adopt to the standard processes prescribed by the Oracle ERP.
  2. More rigor to use the standard business processes defined by Oracle
  3. Minimize numbers of Customizations (extensions)
  4. Reduced cycle time

 

CRP’s in ABF

 

CRP in terms of ABF is a series of workshops where “Flow Teams” assigned to the implementation project go through the business flows iteratively during the project. The flows in a Flow Family are grouped into logical “Flow Batches” that can be refined and tested in a series of workshops conducted during a given CRP cycle. The Flow Families being implemented are also tested in parallel by separate Flow Teams during the CRP. Composition of a Flow Team will generally include at-least one consultant, Business Process Owner, and some super or key users or SME’s. The main objectives of the CRP are Familiarization, Initial mapping, Refine Mapping, Validate COA, Multi-Org and TCA, Scope Freezing, and Business System Test.

Key Deliverables in ABF 

 

BT.070                         Project Management Framework
BF.015                         Future Process Model
BF.040                         Change Catalog
BF.045                         High Level Solution document
BF.016                         Application Setup Documents
BF.080                         Reporting Requirements Listing
BF.170                         Security Profiles
BF.100                         Phase end review
BF.035                         CRP1 Strategy Plan
TE.065                         CRP2 Strategy Plan
MD.050                        Application Extensions Functional Design
MD.070                        Application Extension Technical Design
TE.040                         System Test Script
DO.070                        User Guide
CV.040                         Conversion Data Mapping
MD.120                        Installation Instructions
TA.030                         Preliminary Conceptual Architecture
TA.150                         System Management Procedures

Oracle has announced retirement dates for AIM and ABF of January 2011 and all of Oracle’s existing methods are being replaced by the Oracle Unified Method (OUM) aligning to their long term strategy post- acquisition of PeopleSoft, Siebel, BEA and other solutions.

EBS 11i extended support starts from December 2010

on Saturday, December 11, 2010


Premier Support for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i ends on November 30, 2010 and Extended Support for EBS 11i begins from December 1st, 2010.

Extended Support comes at an additional cost, but these are waived for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i through November 2011.  Contact your Oracle account manager with questions about Extended Support costs. 

Here is a comparison of the different support levels:


A new set of minimum technical requirements for Apps 11i goes into effect when Extended Support begins in December 2010.  These new minimum baseline patch requirements are listed in:
What are the impacts of this new baseline?

As always, Oracle Support will assist with diagnosis, triage, and debugging of any issues that you report for your E-Business Suite environment.  You will continue to have access to any existing online support tools, knowledge base documentation, and pre-existing fixes.

If you report a new issue that requires a new bug fix, you should be aware that new patches will be released only for the new baseline patches listed in the Minimum Baseline Patch Requirements Note.  You should plan to apply the baseline patches (at minimum) listed in Note 883202.1 by November 2010 in order to receive any new bug fixes.

Minimum Baseline Patch Requirements
  • Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11.5.10 Consolidated Update 2 plus additional patches listed in Note 883202.1
  • ATG Rollup Patchset 6 (11i.ATG_PF.H.delta.6, Patch 5903765)
  • 10.2.0.4 Database or 11.1.0.7 Database
  • Forms6i Patchset 19 (version 6.0.8.28, Patch 6194129)
  • Oracle HTTP Server MLR Patchset 4393827
  • Sun Java Runtime Engine (JRE) 1.6.0_03 or higher
The baseline versions listed here (and in the Note) are current as of the document's release date but may change in the future.  Any changes will be communicated via Note 883202.1.  If you've found this article as the result of a web search, I would strongly encourage you to check the latest version of the Note for the current information.

What EBS 11i products are affected by this new baseline?

In addition to the major technology stack components shown above, Note 883202.1 contains additional minimum baseline requirements for:
  • Applications Technology
    • Common Applications Calendar
  • Contracts
    • Core Contracts
    • Procurement Contracts
    • Project Contracts
    • Sales Contracts
    • Service Contracts
  • Customer Data Management
    • Customers Online
    • Trading Community
  • Financials
    • Assets
    • iAssets
    • Advanced Collections
    • Bill Presentment Architecture
    • Cash Management
    • E-Business Tax
    • Financials for the Americas
    • Financials for Asia/Pacific
    • Financials Common Country
    • Financials for EMEA
    • Financials for India
    • Internet Expenses
    • Lease Management
    • Loans
    • Payables
    • Payments
    • Property Manager
    • Public Sector Budgeting
    • Public Sector Financials
    • Public Sector Financials (International)
    • Receivables
    • iReceivables
    • Treasury
    • U.S. Federal Financials
  • Human Resources
    • Advanced Benefits
    • Approvals Management
    • HR Intelligence
    • Human Resources
    • Labor Distribution
    • Learning Management
    • Payroll (All Localizations)
    • Payroll (International/Custom)
    • iRecruitment
    • Self-Service Human Resources
    • Time and Labor
    • US Federal Human Resources
  • Intelligence
    • Balanced Scorecard
    • E-Business Intelligence
  • Interaction Center
    • Customer Interaction History
  • Logistics
    • Inventory Management
    • Warehouse Management
  • Manufacturing
    • Cost Management
    • Quality
    • Supply Chain Globalization
    • Work in Process
  • Marketing and Sales
    • Incentive Compensation
    • Marketing
    • Partner Management
    • Quoting
    • Sales
    • Sales for Handheld
    • Sales Offline
    • Territory Management
    • Trade Management
  • Order Management
    • Advanced Pricing
    • Configurator
    • Order Capture
    • Order Management
  • Procurement
    • iProcurement
    • Purchasing
    • Sourcing
    • iSupplier Portal
    • Supplier Scheduling
  • Product Lifecycle Management
    • Advanced Product Catalog
    • Bills of Material
    • Document Management and Collaboration
    • Engineering
    • Item Master
  • Projects
    • Grants Accounting
    • Project Billing
    • Project Collaboration
    • Project Costing
    • Project Portfolio Analysis
    • Project Foundation
    • Project Resource Management
    • Projects
  • Service
    • Advanced Scheduler
    • Complex Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul
    • Customer Care
    • Depot Repair
    • Field Service
    • iSupport
    • Teleservice
  • Supply Chain Planning
    • Demand Planning
    • Production Scheduling
    • Strategic Network Optimization

Publishing Modes of UPK

on Thursday, December 2, 2010


Enables a user to learn by watching an animated demonstration of the steps for a task being performed in a simulated environment. All the required activities, such as moving the mouse and entering data, are completed automatically.


Enables a user to learn interactively in a simulated environment. The user is prompted for mouse clicks and/or keystrokes to complete the task.



Enables a user to learn interactively using live data. In Do It! – Manual Advance mode, a user is presented with a small window on top of the live target application that displays each step for a particular task. As the user completes each step, he/she can click a button or use a hot-key combination to display the next step in the process. Within the Do It! – Manual Advance window, a thumbnail graphic of the screen is available with a highlight indicating the area where the action should take place. Do It! – Manual Advance is the default mode for custom applications. It is the only Do It! mode available in browser-based Player deployment.

An assessment-type playback mode in which users are instructed to complete a particular task. Users do not receive step-by-step instructions for completing a task. Instead, they complete the steps on their own in a simulated environment, and they are scored on how accurately they complete them.