Workload Automation Within, Around, and Beyond Oracle E-Business Suite

Automation Within, Around, and Beyond Oracle E-Business Suite For more information about UC4 products please visit www.uc4.com Content Executive Summary ................................................................................................................3 Opportunities for Enhancement: Automation Within, Around, and Beyond............................4 Visibility Over the Entire Business Process ............................................................................5 The Care and Feeding of Critical Processes..........................................................................5 Sending Accurate Information to Partners..............................................................................5 Potential Performance Bottlenecks.........................................................................................6 Failure to Detect Errors...........................................................................................................6 Delayed Error Notification .......................................................................................................6 Integration of Applications ......................................................................................................7 Data Corruption.......................................................................................................................7 Number of Steps Required to Complete Task........................................................................7 Benefits of Early UC4 Implementation....................................................................................8 The UC4 platform Auditing .....................................................................................................9 Executive Summary The Oracle E-Business Suite is an extensive set of business applications for managing important business processes across your organization. UC4 Software provides an advanced solution for the Oracle E-Business Suite that reduces implementation time, accelerates business processes, and provides true enterprise process management within, around, and beyond the Oracle E-Business Suite. This white paper will examine how to significantly improve your ROI and describe how the UC4 platform enhances and extends the Oracle E-Business Suite. • It is possible to significantly 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. Figure a. Oracle E-Business Suite relationship to the UC4 Software is a leading provider of innovative Intelligent Service Automation products that have automated application business processes, improved efficiency, and significantly reduced IT operating expenses for over 1,600 companies worldwide. When applied to the Oracle E-Business Suite, the UC4 platform eliminates many of the challenges faced by organizations both large and small. This white paper details the challenges businesses face in an Oracle E-Business Suite environment and shows why UC4 Software is the best choice for remediation. If you have not yet purchased the Oracle E-Business Suite, or are just starting an implementation, we discuss at the end of this paper the significant benefits of adopting UC4 Software solutions as early as possible in the implementation cycle. There are many common challenges addressed by the UC4 platform: • Visibility Over Entire Business Process • The Care & Feeding of Critical Processes - Finance Period Close - Payroll - Invoicing - Project Accounting - Manufacturing • Sending Accurate Information to Partners • Potential Performance Bottleneck • Failure to Detect Errors • Delayed Error Notification • Integration of Applications • Data Corruption • Number of Steps Required to Complete Task • Lack of Control • Business/IT Alignment • Control of Ad Hoc submission • Coordination of Requests Beyond Core Application • Missing Service Level agreements Opportunities for Enhancement: Automation Within, Around, and Beyond When you purchased Oracle E-Business Suite, most likely your goal was to improve recurring business processes. You probably purchased one or more of the following E- Business solutions: • Financial Management • Human Capital Management • Project Management • Manufacturing • Supply Chain Management • Customer Relation Management • Procurement • Asset Lifecycle Management The level of improvement provided by these solutions justified the cost, and was a great improvement over the previous procedures they replaced. However, if you are like many other organizations that implemented Oracle E- Business Suite, you soon became aware of areas that could be enhanced. There are many common challenges that face Oracle E-Business customers. The UC4 platform has assisted many organizations like yours in Figure B. Oracle E-Business solving these complex problems. process spanning multiple people, departments, applications and By gaining visibility, management, and control of all servers. processing within, around, and beyond Oracle E- Business Suite with the UC4 platform parallel processing, automated parameter entry, advanced error checking, enhanced conditional logic, and notifications, you will eliminate data entry errors, shorten the batch processing cycle, and free staff to work on other projects. Now it's time to take the next step and further improve your ROI by improving the efficiency of your business processing and centralizing automation across all applications in your enterprise. If you are just beginning an Oracle E-Business Suite implementation, you want to streamline the implementation process. The UC4 platform is the clear choice. It is a true enterprise automation platform that is fully integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite, enhancing Oracle E-Business Suite in the critical areas. It also provides a development environment that can significantly shorten implementation time. Visibility over the Entire Business Process A business process spans multiple people, departments, applications, and servers. The fundamental issue is providing visibility, management, and control across these layers. Coordination of the process between people and departments can result in delays, errors, and inaccuracies. A delayed response between departments could cause unacceptable delays in the entire process. Penalties may be incurred by your organization if processing is not completed in a timely manner. Several business software applications or disparate Oracle E-Business Suite modules may be required to complete the business process. Many business processes extend out of the traditional Oracle E-Business Suite environment. These applications may reside on multiple servers, and a complex and heterogeneous IT landscape can be difficult to manage. When a failure occurs, it can be difficult to identify where the issue occurred. The UC4 platform adds visibility over the entire process. It provides a platform that allows for the creation and management of the process. The UC4 platform provides a single console to manage these processes across these layers. UC4 solutions provide the visibility, management, and control that allow you to recognize and remediate errors, take control of your business processes, and enable reliability. The Care and Feeding of Critical Processes The processes running in Oracle E-Business Suite are the core processes your business relies on. Below is a sample list of the processes you may be managing: • Financial Period Close • Payroll Processing • Customer Invoicing • Project Accounting • Manufacturing Replenishments These processes are often extended outside of the Oracle E-Business Suite environment. For example, system utilities such as file transfers may need to occur to deliver information to an internal or external business partner, data warehouse feeds may need to be initiated after these core processes, external business intelligence processes may need to be refreshed after the core processing is completed. UC4 Software brings the expertise and the tools to assist you in bridging IT processes and business requirements effectively, without error prone human interaction. This alignment of your business processes to your IT infrastructure provides an incredible amount of flexibility. The elimination of human intervention allows for consistent and reliable straight through processing. The process becomes more predictable and auditable. Sending Accurate Information to Partners Inside of your business units and your IT departments, data is shared between internal and external partners on a daily basis. These can be as simple as file transfers or as complex as published WSDL web services. The processes that create the information must be highly reliable and timely. By using calendar, event, or manual initiation, the UC4 platform can ensure the appropriate delivery or availability of the information required by your partners. Potential Performance Bottlenecks Like many ERP applications, Oracle E-Business Suite permits individuals to submit jobs. These are typically reports that provide the user with needed information on an ad hoc basis. This is a valuable feature, but ad hoc jobs can consume scarce computing resources and often prevent regularly scheduled jobs from running on time. The UC4 platform ad hoc request capture facility along with an advanced queuing mechanism that controls the number of tasks executed at any given time can manage the load placed on computing resources.