BizTech Blog

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.

Having logged over 10-years of Oracle Applications development, specializing in interfaces, conversions, and extensions, I have learned a thing or two on how to successfully design, build, test, and implement custom application processes. I will be contributing to this blog to assist Oracle Application Developers with helpful tips, best practice techniques, and know-how on customizing and extending the Oracle EBS Suite. Hopefully, this blog will help to lessen the time you spend searching for meaningful development information on many of the application modules such as, Order Management, Receivables, Purchasing, Payables, HRMS, General Ledger, e-Business Tax and Projects.

All,

In a previous post, I spoke of an organization that needed to create a custom BI Publisher template to accommodate their Canadian bank’s proprietary file format for EFT files in R12. What I didn’t mention was that some of the required data was stored in descriptive flexfields within Oracle. Descriptive flexfields are not included in the Oracle Payments Funds Disbursement Payment Instruction Extract data which is the standard data definition for AP funds disbursement.

As is the case with many organizations, they were concerned that they would have to modify the standard programs to accommodate their bank’s requirements. Their minds were put at ease when they learned that Oracle provided a standard API which allows organizations to add additional fields (i.e. XML Tags) to the XML extract. This standard PL/SQL package was the IBY_FD_EXTRACT_EXT_PUB.

The standard XML file that is generated by the Payment Instruction Extract is organized into 4 hierarchical groups:

1. Payment Instruction – The payment instruction group encompasses the entire file.
2. Payment – The payment group represents a payment to a specific supplier.
3. Document Payable – The document payable group represents the individual invoices that are being paid to the supplier within the payment.
4. Document Payable Line – The document payable line group represents the lines within the invoice being paid to the supplier.

As a consultant I have seen numerous organizations conduct business with banks that do not conform to the ACH CCD Cash Concentration/ Disbursement File format. Most recently I was at an organization that sends electronic funds transfer (EFT) files to a Canadian bank that required a proprietary file format for incoming EFT files. To conform to the bank’s requirements, the organization had customized the NACHA Payment Format program in 11i.

In R12, Oracle introduced the Payments module which replaces the payments functionality within Payables. The Payments module utilizes BI Publisher templates instead of Oracle Reports to generate formatted EFT files. As a result, you have to re-implement the customizations that were made to the NACHA Payment Format program in earlier releases.

R12.1.3 has been released for some time now. BizTech has compiled a list, module by module, of the main features that have been added, amended, or removed in this latest release.

In order to understand how General Ledger may be used to provide projects based or project related reporting, we must first explain how Oracle General Ledger stores and tracks account balance information.

R12.1.3 has been released for some time now. BizTech has compiled a list of the Tax, Legal and Regulatory updates that have been added, amended, or removed in this latest release.

BizTech has analyzed the following modules, and has determined that significant functionality has been added in R12.1.3. Some of the more significant functionality has been backported to older releases, and where appropriate, BizTech has identified the necessary patches.

In 11i, the go-to tool of the financial analyst was Application Desktop Integrator (ADI) – from here, an analyst could format financial reports, drill down on the numbers produced to get journal line detail, enter and upload a journal entry or an entire budget.

With the changes in architecture in R12, ADI is no longer supported, and the functionality provided by ADI has been replaced by other modules. BI Publisher has become the primary report formatting tool, Report Manager delivers report repository functionality (as well as drill-down functionality for FSG reports),and many white-papers and presentations exist for these areas.