BizTech Blog

Recently I received a request to develop a custom interface to update the salaries of approximately 1000 employees. My response was, “why re-invent the wheel”? Several Web ADI Integrators are delivered out of the box including the HR Update Salary Proposals Integrator.

The HRMS Web ADI Integrators are extremely powerful as long as you know how to use them. They can be tricky to setup since they are dependent on the settings of the browser and the security settings within Excel, however within 10 minutes I was able to get the users up and running and updating salaries for their end of year merit increases. Within a few hours, they had entered and updated the salaries for all of their employees.

Here is a quick summary of the required setups and steps to utilize the HR Update Salary Proposals Integrator:

Communicating Purchase Orders to suppliers as PDF documents via email has been around for quite some time but there are some features that I find are under-utilized and are often not presented to customers. For example, did you know that you can have every PO copied to a generic email address? What about attaching documents to the email such as Terms and Conditions or any other files?

While SSO remains a crucial part of our daily multiple application access, we need to decide which type of SSO Implementation is best suited for our company. Depending on whether your Organization is a Call Center (where agents need to pull all Customer Information including last bill payment, government information to authorize the party, maintain conversation history), Finance Industry (Enterprise Business Suite, Quotes need to be integrated yet loosely coupled with CRM On Demand) to get the forecasts, accurate and timely opportunity details, leads and contacts, we can implement SSO using different Implementation strategies. SSO can be implemented for various industries including medical for concurrent access of critical applications.

This is a continuation of my earlier post, ‘You have been tasked with developing an interface to AR and you’ve never used Oracle’s Auto Invoice before. What do you do?’. This time, the idea is to show some of the scenarios one would face while trying to import the invoices.

As most of you would agree, most of the time, the code never works the first time you run it. When you try to run Auto Invoice, after developing the code to interface the invoices into AR, you are naturally going to see some rejections.

Recently, I received a call from a customer requesting my assistance with troubleshooting Purchase Order Import errors in R12. The customer was trying to import 1000 purchase orders that were related to projects. They were encountering the following error and were having difficulty finding the root cause as the message was vague:

Project information on the distribution is not valid. &PJM_ERROR_MSG

Here are some tips on places to look to resolve such issues:

There are many ways to implement SSO in your organization and have critical business applications with various authentication mechanisms integrate using a single nuclei. Authentication, Authorization, Entitlement and Federation activities are carried out by SSO software developed by keeping in mind the transparency, disparate identity repositories, varied platforms, web applications and servers and yet a strong security component to keep organization in loop securely.

Security Component which enables Single-Sign On typically utilized Active Directory (Microsoft Active Directory/ LDAP/ repositories/Oracle UCM or a Databases in some scenarios) where credentials can be centralized and stored in a single place from where it can be fetched to authenticate various applications. When external applications are identified as being within Circle of Trust using various authentication mechanisms, they are entrusted to access information from CRM On Demand and vice-versa.

In my previous blog entry, I talked about the overall picture of developing a custom Oracle Projects interfacing process. In this entry, I’ll review the steps for creating the initial Project record and associated components. For the Projects Interface Application used as my reference, the main Project record requirements are: Customer; Project Manager; Tasks; Budget (Cost/Revenue)

For those familiar with developing API based interfaces, calling the Create-Project API functions in the same way. For those unfamiliar with API development, prior to the actual API call, inbound data from the third-party application should be assigned to the available API record-fields, for creating the Oracle Project (much like populating the fields of an Interface table). Some fields are required and will cause the Create Project API to fail, returning and error if missing or invalid.

Recently I had a call from a customer that had a requirement to mass update their supplier site payment method defaults in R12. They were updating the PAYMENT_METHOD_LOOKUP_CODE on the AP_SUPPLIER_SITES_ALL table and it was not reflecting the change in the applications.

You have been tasked with developing an interface to AR and you’ve never used Oracle’s Auto Invoice before. What do you do? Unfortunately, at one time I was in this situation. Though I knew the concepts of the process, the real time implementation involved a lot of challenges. The following is for those who have never interfaced invoices through Auto Invoice. My goal is to provide an overall understanding of the process and pitfalls that one should be aware of.

What is Auto Invoice?

Throughout my many years of Application Interface development, I have grown to love designing and implementing custom Oracle interface processes. No matter how many times you develop an Order Management Interface or Suppliers conversion, no two are alike. One particular module that has landed on my favorite’s list is Oracle Projects. What a cross-combination of items: customers, employees, assignments, locations, accounting and of course the Projects module objects themselves. With Projects you have Templates, tasks, budgets, expenditures, costing and billing, just to name some of the key aspects. Developing conversion and interface processes for this module has become a specialty of mine.

This will be the first in a series of blogs on Oracle Projects, as I pass on the major features for developing custom interface processes into Projects. The first interface I will detail, utilizes standard Oracle Project API’s, to create and update Project records. In subsequent blog entries, I will describe how to interface expenditure data to projects using Oracle’s standard Projects Interface table.