Oracle Customer Hub an Overview

Oracle Customer Data Hub provides a comprehensive set of  services, utilities and applications to create and maintain a trusted  master customer identity across the enterprise

It consolidates customer data from heterogeneous  systems into a central location and establishing enterprise-wide data quality and integrity at the lowest possible cost. Utilizing  comprehensive integration services, the master customer identity created and maintained within the Hub is shared in real-time with operational and analytical systems so that all channels and lines of business operate in a consistent, well-informed manner, thereby improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Customer Hub also known as Siebel Universal Customer Master or Siebel UCM) is Oracle’s lead Customer Data integration (CDI) solution.

The Oracle Customer Hub(OCH) data model is an enhanced version of the Siebel Party model (as used in Siebel CRM).

OCH comprehensive functionality enables an enterprise to manage customer data over the full customer lifecycle.

1. Capturing Customer Data
2. Standardization
3. Correction of name and Addresses
4. Identification and merging of duplicate records
5. Enrichment if customer profile
6. Enforcement of compliance and risk policies
7. Distribution of Single Source of Truth.
   

1. Trusted Customer Data is held in a central MDM schema
2. Consolidation services manage the movement of master data into the central store.
3. Cleansing services deduplicate, standardize and augment the master data.
4. Governance services control access, retrieval, privacy, audit  and Change management rules.
5. Sharing services include integration, web services, event propagation and global standards based synchronization.

These pillars utilize generic services from the MDM Foundation layer them with business entity specific services and vertical extensions.

Oracle has provided Web Services Interface to access the customer hub , as well as provide few Pre-build Integration with operation application using AIA(Application Integration Architecture).

Transaction flexfields for AutoInvoice in Oracle Receivables

Transaction flexfields


Transaction flexfields are descriptive flexfields that AutoInvoice uses to uniquely identify transaction lines.The definition of these flexfields is seeded and we should not modified
these, any change in the seeded definition of Transaction flexfields result in AutoInvoice fail.

Every Application Module that interact with Oracle receivable has it's own definition  Transaction flexfields , based on what information it is passing to AR.

like In Service Contracts R12i there are ten transaction flexfield segments defined ( as you can see in the screen shot) .These identify values that are passed to AR by the Service Contracts Main Billing program.
For Order Management there are 11 Segments and for Claims there are 7 etc.

In case we are integrating any 3rd party or legacy system to AR , best practice is to define a New definition of Transaction flexfields for Legacy system.
If you import transactions with AutoInvoice from a legacy system, you
can define a new context for the Line Transaction Flexfield to distinguish these
transactions from transactions that originated in Oracle applications.

How to access the definition of the Transaction flexfields -
Login to Oracle Application using the System Administrator responsibility complete the following navigation:

Application > FlexField > Descriptive > Segments.

Select "Oracle Receivables" as the Application and "Line Transaction Flexfield" for the Title and execute the find.

Once you execute the Find , System will display all the definition of the Transaction flexfields

Scroll to the Any Context like OKS CONTRACTS , ORDER MANAGEMENT ,CLAIMS etc and system will display the definition of transaction flexfields.
In my example I scroll down to Context = "OKS CONTRACTS" . You should see the following data for the ten segments:

Number   Name / Window Prompt             Column
------  -----------------------  --------------------------
  1     CONTRACT_NUMBER                   INTERFACE_LINE_ATTRIBUTE1
  2     CONTRACT_MODIFIER                 INTERFACE_LINE_ATTRIBUTE2
  3     INSTANCE_NO                               INTERFACE_LINE_ATTRIBUTE3
  4     BILLED_FROM                               INTERFACE_LINE_ATTRIBUTE4
  5     BILLED_TO                                    INTERFACE_LINE_ATTRIBUTE5
  6     AMOUNT                                        INTERFACE_LINE_ATTRIBUTE6
  7     BILLED_FROM_DATE                    INTERFACE_LINE_ATTRIBUTE7
  8     START_DATE                                  INTERFACE_LINE_ATTRIBUTE8
  9     LINE_TYPE                                     INTERFACE_LINE_ATTRIBUTE9
 10     BILL_INSTALLMENT_NUMBER   INTERFACE_LINE_ATTRIBUTE10

Key Concurrent Program tables

Below is list of Key Concurrent Program tables

FND_CONCURRENT_REQUESTS - Details of user requests , including status, start date, and completion date.

FND_CONCURRENT_PROGRAMS - Details of concurrent programs, including execution methods , whether the program is constrained , and whether it must be run alone

FND_CONCURRENT_PROCESSES - Cross - references between concurrent requests and queue , and a history of concurrent manager processes.

FND_CONCURRENT_QUEUES - Information about each of the concurrent manager Queues.

Concurrent Program Life cycle

Concurrent Program Life cycle -

Following all are stages of Concurrent Program (Oracle Applications).

Oracle E-Business Suite Architecture

The Oracle E-Business Suite Architecture is a framework for multi-tiered, distributed computing that supports Oracle E-Business Suite products. In this model, various servers or services are distributed among three levels, or tiers.

A server (or services) is a process or group of processes that runs on a single machine and provides a particular functionality. For example, Web services process HTTP requests, and Forms services process requests for activities related to Oracle Forms. The Concurrent Processing server supports data-intensive programs that run in the background.

A tier is a logical grouping of services, potentially spread across more than one physical machine. 
The three-tier architecture that comprises an Oracle E-Business Suite installation is made up of 

Oracle SalesOrder Line Stuck with Deferred Status

Many a time I have heard from my clients that Sales Order line stuck at the DEFERRED status and is not progress by the workflow background process for hours n days..

My Initial reaction is "check if these lines are in DEFERRED status because of valid reason like

1. they are part of ATO/PTO MODEL
2. they are part of FULFILLMENT set.

But if lines are not part of Set /Model then for sure workflow for these lines stuck in the DEFERRED status because of corruption of DEFERRED workflow Queue.

Oracle Support most of time advised to REBUILD the DEFERRED workflow queue , and scripts for same available at metalink.oracle.com and believe me that is the best and permanent solution ( though it is little time consuming).

In case you are looking for some quick fix to progress critical orders then you can  "RETRY" the activity that stuck at the DEFERRED status and majority of the time doing RETRY on the activity progress the workflow .

NOTE - As I have said earlier there could be a valid reason that lines stuck at the DEFERRED workflow activity in that case RETRY is not good option , so before you look for RETRY make sure that you have analyzed your data well.

High Level Overview of return with replacement flow in Oracle Order Management.

This YouTube presentation is about High Level Overview of return with replacement flow in Oracle Order Management.Here I talked about
#1.Return Flow
#2.Seeded RMA workflow in oracle Order Management
#3.How we can perform return with replacement with Seeded flow ( 2 step Process)
#4.How we can perform return with replacement with Customized RMA flow ( 1 step Process).

For technical details about how to create Outbound line ( with OR_ORDER_PUB) as soon as we received the goods in Inventorym refer my posts on OE_ORDER_PUB OR  send me email at sgupta@bizinsightinc.com or leave message here .

Oracle Optimizer - Some Interesting Insight

 This is Short Post about 

1. what is Oracle Optimizer .
2. How it works 
3. How we can manipulate optimizer for session or Individual Query 

A SQL statement can be executed in many different ways, such as

1. full table scans,
2. index scans,
3. nested loops, and
4. hash joins.

 What is Query optimizer - The query optimizer determines the most efficient way to execute a SQL statement after considering many factors related to the objects referenced and the conditions specified in the query.  

Note:The optimizer might not make the same decisions from one version of Oracle to the next. In recent versions, the optimizer might make different decisions, because better information is available.