Business Process Acceleration within Oracle E-Business Suite

Business Process Acceleration within Oracle E-Business Suite For more information about UC4 products please visit www.uc4.com Content Executive Summary ................................................................................................................3 Solutions Overview .................................................................................................................4 Script-less Development Environment....................................................................................6 Application Process Integration ..............................................................................................7 Oracle E-Business Suite Extension (OAE) .............................................................................8 Business Process Acceleration for Oracle E-Business Suite .................................................9 Business Process Acceleration for Oracle Financials ............................................................9 Process Optimization and Load Balancing ...........................................................................13 Intelligent Process and Work-Load Balancing......................................................................13 Use of a Reporting Instance .................................................................................................14 The UC4 platform: Application Process Integration..............................................................14 Intelligent Service Automation Within, Around, and Beyond ................................................14 Executive Summary The Oracle E-Business Suite is an extensive set of business applications for managing important business processes across your organization. This suite of complex business applications requires extensive business and application process integration. Oracle Applications are designed to empower the business user to take accountability of the business process and resulting data. As a result, employees using Oracle E-Business applications must perform a dual role of understanding the business process and the underlying supporting application tasks. Many times these application tasks are critical to the business process but are usually cumbersome and manual in nature. Manual tasks lend themselves to risk: data entry errors, errors in processing, and delays in processing. Additionally, when organizations change business processes or acquire new operating units, they are faced with complex change management issues from a business and IT perspective. Figure a. Oracle E-Business Suite relationship to the enterprise. UC4 Software provides an advanced solution for the Oracle E-Business Suite that streamlines business processes, reduces implementation time, and provides true enterprise process management within, around, and beyond the Oracle E-Business Suite. This white paper will examine how to significantly increase your Oracle Applications ROI and describes how the UC4 platform enhances processing within the Oracle E-Business Suite. Improve your ROI for the Oracle E-Business Suite by: • Simplifying complex IT infrastructure. • Providing visibility, management, and control of business processes. • Mitigating risk by controlling your most mission critical business processes. • Providing business with the agility to respond to a dynamic market. This white paper details the UC4 Software solutions that can be applied to the challenges businesses face in an Oracle E-Business Suite environment and shows why UC4 Software is the best solution. There are many common Oracle E-Business Suite challenges addressed by the UC4 platform: • The Care and Feeding of Critical Processes - Finance Period Close - Payroll - Invoicing - Project Accounting - Manufacturing • AR Web Lock Box • Multi Org Environments • Oracle Multi Currency Environments • Mass Allocations • MRP Processing • Financial Statement Generation (FSG) • Reporting Instance • Payroll Processing • Project Accounting • Concurrent Request Load Balancing Solutions Overview Business departments often rely on multiple applications that can require multiple operating system platforms and databases. This heterogeneous environment creates a cumbersome challenge for the IT department and business users. To optimize business processing, your applications should operate according to the current business conditions and with as little manual intervention as possible. As a true enterprise process management solution, the UC4 platform can manage these applications in a cohesive and controlled manner to deliver further efficiency gains and increased effectiveness. • The goals for the optimized organizations are: • Automate applications in real time • Reduce the amount of manual input • Eliminate avoidable delays • Reduce customized coding • Ensure accurate processing • Maximize the investment in IT infrastructure and applications Figure b. Oracle E-Business Suite Financial Period Close. Each stop sign represents a manual touch point. UC4 Software offers expertise and software to: • Automate application business processes • Coordinate processing across: - Departments - Applications - Databases - Servers • Feed data into the process • React to business and data events • Prevent and control errors • Resolve workload issues • Enhance output delivery The UC4 platform automates processing at all layers of the Oracle E-Business application to assist in accomplishing your goals. It can execute processes at the operating system, database, application API, and web service layer across disparate operating systems and databases. When applied to the Oracle E-Business Suite it can execute Concurrent Requests, non-standard Current Requests, provided API's, custom SQL that can eliminate manual form entry, and delivered or custom BPEL processing. In Oracle E-Business Suite processes, manual input is the most common point of failure and the biggest culprit for delays. Oracle users commonly enter incorrect values in Concurrent Program parameters, resulting in incorrect processing or report outputs. The UC4 platform can create dynamic parameter inputs based on business rules defined by your organization. This streamlines IT business processes that require no manual intervention and improves competitive advantage. The dynamic parameters can come from the Oracle E-Business Suite, non-Oracle applications, or flat data files. These features contribute to the ability of the UC4 platform to automate the decision making process. The UC4 platform is unique in its methodology providing: • “Script-Less” approach to defining steps. • Application Connectors for over 100 applications and tools managing the necessary cross application communication. • Event driven conditional logic for business rules. • Dynamic parameter definition. The UC4 Consulting Services team has unique expertise and experience in automating business processes. They can take applications, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, and automate tasks that were once assumed to require manual input. This removes the end user from low value, error prone tasks and creates automated background process. The UC4 platform focuses on automating: • Within ERP applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, or SAP. • Around ERP applications including Hyperion, Oracle Data Warehouse, Siebel, reporting, IT utilities, and housekeeping tools. • Beyond ERP Applications to control vertical solutions such as Oracle Retail, Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing, and other industry specific applications. The result is a single application automation policy and ultimately accelerated business processes. Script-less Development Environment The UC4 platform greatly reduces and many times eliminates the need for developers to write shell, bat, or PERL scripts to implement automation, enabling you to deliver new projects more quickly. Module and chain building provides an online point-and-click interface to run your programs and automations, similar to Visio diagramming. We have taken existing coded automations and reduced the original scripts by more than 90%, which results in lower IT development and maintenance costs. Figure c. Oracle E-Business Suite Financial Period Close. Each green sign represents the automation of a manual step In fact, this functionality can be extended to the entire development environment to reduce scripting in all projects. The UC4 platform manages dependencies, thread logic, parameter passing and validation, and abort and restart logic, leaving the development team to concentrate on business function improvements, react to business changes, and align IT with business goals. All standard output is captured and all log files generated are tracked. A simple mouse click is all that is required to view the results of your applications, without having to log into Oracle E-Business Suite. The UC4 platform export and import facility further reduces coding changes for environmental variables such as database logins, printers, and libraries. These and many other objects can be remapped when moving modules and chains into a new environment, eliminating potentially erroneous code changes and reducing the time to deliver new applications. Future maintenance or changes to processes are easy to manage. New modules can be inserted and old ones switched off or deleted. The environment enables a self-documenting approach that provides the insights required to remediate issues rapidly. Processing management and alteration can take place much more efficiently.