Oracle Business Accelerators for Oracle E-Business Suite

Oracle Business Accelerators for Oracle E-Business Suite

Oracle Business Accelerators for Oracle E-Business Suite are powerful, easy to use and rapid implementation solutions for new E-Business Suite customers. They make initial configuration of E-Business Suite simple, fast, and predictable. Oracle Business Accelerators for Oracle E-Business Suite feature an automated setup tool that configures end-to-end business flows with customer setups and data. With Oracle Business Accelerators for Oracle E-Business Suite , you can begin testing business transactions using your own data in hours.
Oracle Business Accelerators are available for the enterprise and SMB markets. Many solutions are available including industry specific and country versions that are designed to meet specific market and country business requirements. Oracle Business Accelerators for E-Business Suite are available from Oracle Consulting or our approved partner channel.
Accelerators help you:

* Decrease the cost, risk, and time of an implementation while improving ROI

* Deliver predictable, high quality and reliable results

* Built-in integration and best practices within standardized business processes

The solution includes:

* Business Flows—These enable you to relate your business requirements to the E-Business Suite functionality. Flow models, videos, demo scripts and other material are provided to increase end-user awareness and understanding.

* Setup Tool—This tool captures responses to simple questions about your business requirements. The Setup Tool automatically applies your business information into the E-Business Suite rapidly and accurately, thereby significantly increasing the productivity of implementation teams.

All data from : http://www.oracle.com/

Business Intelligence - What is it?

Business Intelligence (BI) gives you the ability to gain insight into your business or organization by understanding your company's information assets. These assets can include customer databases, supply chain information, personnel data, manufacturing, and sales and marketing activity as well as any other source of information critical to your operation. Business intelligence software allows you to integrate these disparate data sources into a single coherent framework for real-time reporting and detailed analysis by anyone in your extended enterprise – customers, partners, employees, managers, and executives.

In today's fiercely competitive market, companies must be adept at analyzing data in order to spot sales trends and do product analysis. Companies need to ask key questions, such as: How many seconds did an online shopper spend looking at a particular item? What does a five-year history of that customer's purchases look like? What are the characteristics of the most profitable 10 percent of the company's customers?
But gathering countless factoids won't give any company a competitive advantage. In fact, the more information a company pours into typical business-intelligence packages, the more difficult, time-consuming, and expensive it becomes to do benchmarking and market study analysis.
To see a real payoff, organizations need to consolidate business intelligence data that is often segregated between divisions. That's the only way to get a single view of business operations.

from netsuite.com/portal/products/crm_plus/business.shtml

Eight Quality Management Principles (8th QMS)

1) Customer Focus
2) Leadership
3) Involvement of People
4) Process Approach
5) System approach to management
6) Continual improvement
7) Factual approach to decision making
8) Mutually beneficial supplier relationship

Here is the interesting part of this article. The author like to share with readers how some of the companies he worked with interpret these principles and applied them. By no means these companies are wrongly applied the Eight Quality Management Principles. As a matter of fact, these companies has their valid reasons for doing so. This articulation of the principles is written in 3 parts, namely; principles supposed to meant; how it is applied as a case; and author's view to expand its application

Principle 1) Customer Focus "Organizations depend on their customers and therefore should understand current and future customer needs, should meet customer requirements and strive to exceed customer expectations".

Case 1) Many companies viewed customer needs are obtained from a survey. And as ISO auditor come around to conduct surveillance audit once or twice a year, they get the survey done right before the auditor come around.

Author's view 1) Conducting a survey is a form of documentation. In fact, customer needs can be obtained in many forms (most company knows that). Other than a formal survey, customer needs obtained in other forms such as during customer visits, customers complaints, customer feedback etc. These data should be taken officially as an input into the ISO system

Principle 2) Leadership "Leaders establish unity of purpose and direction of the organization. They should create and maintain the internal environment in which people can become fully involved in achieving the organization's objectives".

Case 2) Most leaders set direction in the Quality Policy and Quality Objectives. Management reviews were conducted to ensure its fulfillment. However, most leaders are not involved in creating an internal environment in achieving the organization's objectives. Most often than not, they delicate to the Quality manager.

Author's view 2) Delegating to the Quality manager seems to be the most logical role to a Quality Manager. However, in some smaller company, Quality manager does not have enough influencing power to his/her peers hence cannot command radical improvement to the Quality System.

Principle 3) Involvement of People : "People at all levels are the essence of an organization and their full involvement enables their abilities to be used for the organization's benefit".

Case 3) While most company involve their employee in the ISO compliance effort, some involves them in other aspect of the business especially in production and process improvements as well.

Author's view 3) This is the principle which is well implemented by most companies I came across. While it is perfect to involve employee in ISO compliance aspect. Some involve too much with the employee in selecting improvement projects. It is only logical that employee select projects that they are familiar and easy to do. But this selection often miss the key alignment to the company critical issues.

Principle 4) Process Approach "A desired result is achieved more efficiently when activities and related resources are managed as a process".

Case 4) All if not most ISO certified companies are very good in production processes. Their ISO documentation for these process are well kept. However, their process approach seem to limit within the production and related supporting departments.

Author's view 4) In the aspect of business process such as decision making, there is lack usage of a process approach in decision making. Often than not, quick decision are expected hence attention is not given to go through a logical steps.

Principle 5) System Approach to Management "Identifying, understanding and managing interrelated processes as a system contributes to the organization's effectiveness and efficiency in achieving its objectives".

Case 5) This area seem to show a loose link between production and the rest of the departments especially the supporting group. In some case, Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are established for each department but they are not interdependent.

Principle 6) Continual Improvement "Continual improvement of the organization's overall performance should be a permanent objective of the organization".

Case 6) In general, most companies work on continuous improvement as oppose to continual Improvement. some of the companies take "fire-fighting" as a way to continual improvement. VEry few realize the objective of this principle.

Author's view 6) it is my opinion companies need to understand that source of information to trigger a continual improvement effort. And to establish it in order to clearly identify whether it is a "fire Fighting" or continual improvement.

Principle 7) Factual approach to decision making "Effective decisions are based on the analysis of data and information".

Case 7) This is probably the weakness principle in terms of its application. To a large extent, Management make decision based on past experience, statement past around and so on. Often minimum data are sough after when a decision is made. Perhaps it is due to time factor. However, this phenomenon is so in the Quality Department.

Author's View 7) This is an important principle management staffs need to develop. Past right decision made may not be repeated due to changes in the business environment.

Principle 8) Mutually beneficial supplier relationship "An organization and its suppliers are interdependent and a mutually beneficial relationship enhances the ability of both to create value"

Case 8) Most smaller company practice to some extent this principle quite well. perhaps it is due to smaller outfit that cannot command better service from the supplier, person in charge seems to have close relationship with supplier. On the other hand, bigger companies are bound by internal policies that requires 2-3 quotes from different supplier for the same items. Relation ship with supplier does not help to some extent.

Author's View 8) This principle is difficult to master due to the fact that integrity is involved. Unless the company has big volume of purchase and strong vendor development program, it is understandable company pay less attention to this principle.
In summary, while ISO certified companies tried to comply to ISO requirements, they should extent the objectives of these Eight Quality Management Principles to enhance their business such that it become part of their business system.
As a side note, these quality management principles has many similarity to the TQM principles. So, it is of the interest of leaders in ISO certified companies understand it and put an effort to extent the objective of ISO certification beyond certification purpose.

Disclaimer The "Author's View" section provided are merely the author's personal point of view and has no binding to any implication thereof. The author take no responsibility to the use of this article by anyone in any way.

from Ezine Article.com

Enterprise resource planning (ERP)

Enterprise resource planning
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This article uses jargon that may be inappropriate for a general audiencePlease discuss this issue on the talk page, and/or remove or explain jargon terms used in the article. Editing help is available.This article has been tagged since December 2006.
Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) integrate (or attempt to integrate) all data and processes of an organization into a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the integration. A key ingredient of most ERP systems is the use of a unified database to store data for the various system modules.
The term ERP originally implied systems designed to plan the utilization of enterprise-wide resources. Although the acronym ERP originated in the manufacturing environment, today's use of the term ERP systems has much broader scope. ERP systems typically attempt to cover all basic functions of an organization, regardless of the organization's business or charter. Business, non-profit organizations, non governmental organizations, governments, and other large entities utilize ERP systems.
Additionally, it may be noted that to be considered an ERP system, a software package generally would only need to provide functionality in a single package that would normally be covered by two or more systems. Technically, a software package that provides both payroll and accounting functions (such as QuickBooks) would be considered an ERP software package.
However, the term is typically reserved for larger, more broadly based applications. The introduction of an ERP system to replace two or more independent applications eliminates the need for external interfaces previously required between systems, and provides additional benefits that range from standardization and lower maintenance (one system instead of two or more) to easier and/or greater reporting capabilities (as all data is typically kept in one database).
Examples of modules in an ERP which formerly would have been stand-alone applications include: Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Financials, CRM, Human Resources, and Warehouse Management.

[edit] Overview
Looking more closely at ERP systems, a key factor is the integration of data from all aspects of an organization. To accomplish this, an ERP system typically runs on a single database instance with multiple software modules providing the various business functions of an organization.
Some organizations - typically those with sufficient in-house IT skills to integrate multiple software products - choose to only implement portions of an ERP system and develop an external interface to other ERP or stand-alone systems for their other application needs. For instance, the PeopleSoft HRMS and Financials systems may be perceived to be better than SAP's HRMS solution. And likewise, some may perceive SAP's manufacturing and CRM systems as better than PeopleSoft's equivalents. In this case these organizations may justify the purchase of an ERP system, but choose to purchase the PeopleSoft HRMS and Financials modules from Oracle, and their remaining applications from SAP.
This is very common in the retail sector, where even a mid-sized retailer will have a discrete Point-of-Sale (POS) product and financials application, then a series of specialised applications to handle business requirements such as warehouse management, staff rostering, merchandising and logistics.
Ideally, ERP delivers a single database that contains all data for the software modules, which would include:
Manufacturing
Engineering, Bills of Material, Scheduling, Capacity, Workflow Management, Quality Control, Cost Management, Manufacturing Process, Manufacturing Projects, Manufacturing Flow
Supply Chain Management
Inventory, Order Entry, Purchasing, Product Configurator, Supply Chain Planning, Supplier Scheduling, Inspection of goods, Claim Processing, Commission Calculation
Financials
General Ledger, Cash Management, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets
Projects
Costing, Billing, Time and Expense, Activity Management
Human Resources
Human Resources, Payroll, Training, Time & Attendance, Benefits
Customer Relationship Management
Sales and Marketing, Commissions, Service, Customer Contact and Call Center support
Data Warehouse
and various Self-Service interfaces for Customers, Suppliers, and Employees
Enterprise Resource Planning is a term originally derived from manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) that followed material requirements planning (MRP). MRP evolved into ERP when "routings" became major part of the software architecture and a company's capacity planning activity also became a part of the standard software activity. ERP systems typically handle the manufacturing, logistics, distribution, inventory, shipping, invoicing, and accounting for a company. Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP software can aid in the control of many business activities, like sales, marketing, delivery, billing, production, inventory management, quality management, and human resources management.
ERPs are often incorrectly called back office systems indicating that customers and the general public are not directly involved. This is contrasted with front office systems like customer relationship management (CRM) systems that deal directly with the customers, or the eBusiness systems such as eCommerce, eGovernment, eTelecom, and eFinance, or supplier relationship management (SRM) systems.
ERPs are cross-functional and enterprise wide. All functional departments that are involved in operations or production are integrated in one system. In addition to manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, and Information Technology, this would include accounting, human resources, marketing, and strategic management.
ERP II means open ERP architecture of components. The older, monolithic ERP systems became component oriented.
EAS - Enterprise Application Suite is a new name for formerly developed ERP systems which include (almost) all segments of business, using ordinary Internet browsers as thin clients.

[edit] Before
Prior to the concept of ERP systems, departments within an organization would have their own computer systems. For example, the Human Resources (HR) department, the Payroll (PR) department, and the Financials department. The HR computer system (Often called HRMS or HRIS) would typically contain information on the department, reporting structure, and personal details of employees. The PR department would typically calculate and store paycheck information. The Financials department would typically store financial transactions for the organization. Each system would have to rely on a set of common data to communicate with each other. For the HRIS to send salary information to the PR system, an employee number would need to be assigned and remain static between the two systems to accurately identify an employee. The Financials system was not interested in the employee level data, but only the payouts made by the PR systems, such as the Tax payments to various authorities, payments for employee benefits to providers, and so on. This provided complications. For instance, a person could not be paid in the Payroll system without an employee number.

[edit] After
ERP software, among other things, combined the data of formerly disparate applications. This made the worry of keeping employee numbers in synchronization across multiple systems disappear. It standardised and reduced the number of software specialities required within larger organizations.

[edit] Best Practices
Best Practices were also a benefit of implementing an ERP system. When implementing an ERP system, organizations essentially had to choose between customizing the software or modifying their business processes to the "Best Practice" functionality delivered in the vanilla version of the software.
Typically, the delivery of best practice applies more usefully to large organizations and especially where there is a compliance requirement such as IFRS, Sarbanes-Oxley or Basel II, or where the process is a commodity such as electronic funds transfer. This is because the procedure of capturing and reporting legislative or commodity content can be readily codified within the ERP software, and then replicated with confidence across multiple businesses who have the same business requirement.
Where such a compliance or commodity requirement does not underpin the business process, it can be argued that determining and applying a best practice actually erodes competitive advantage by homogenizing the business compared to everyone else in their industry sector.
Evidence for this can be seen within EDI, where the concept of best practice, even with decades of effort remains elusive. A large retailer, for example, wants EDI plus some minor tweak that they perceive puts them ahead of their competition. Mid-market companies adopting ERP often take the vanilla version and spend half as much as the license cost doing customisations that deliver their competitive edge. In this way they actively work against best practice because they perceive that the way they operate is best practice, irrespective of what anyone else is doing.

[edit] Implementation
Because of their wide scope of application within a business, ERP software systems are typically complex and usually impose significant changes on staff work practices (if they did not, there would be little need to implement them). Implementing ERP software is typically not an "in-house" skill, so even smaller projects are more cost effective if specialist ERP implementation consultants are employed. The length of time to implement an ERP system depends on the size of the business, the scope of the change and willingness of the customer to take ownership for the project. A small project (eg, a company of less than 100 staff) may be planned and delivered within 3 months; however, a large, multi-site or multi-country implementation may take years.
The most important aspect of any ERP implementation is that the company who has purchased the ERP product takes ownership of the project.
To implement ERP systems, companies often seek the help of an ERP vendor or of third-party consulting companies. These firms typically provide three areas of professional services: Consulting, Customisation and Support.
Consulting Services
The Consulting team is typically responsible for your initial ERP implementation and subsequent delivery of work to tailor the system beyond "go live". Typically such tailoring includes additional product training; creation of process triggers and workflow; specialist advice to improve how the ERP is used in the business; system optimisation; and assistance writing reports, complex data extracts or implementing Business Intelligence.
The consulting team are also responsible for planning and jointly testing the implementation. This is a critical part of the project, and one that is often overlooked.
Consulting for a large ERP project involves three levels: systems architecture, business process consulting (primarily re-engineering) and technical consulting (primarily programming and tool configuration activity). A systems architect designs the overall dataflow for the enterprise including the future dataflow plan. A business consultant studies an organization's current business processes and matches them to the corresponding processes in the ERP system, thus 'configuring' the ERP system to the organization's needs. Technical consulting often involves programming. Most ERP vendors allow modification of their software to suit the business needs of their customer.
For most mid-sized companies, the cost of the implementation will range from around the list price of the ERP user licenses to up to twice this amount (depending on the level of customisation required). Large companies, and especially those with multiple sites or countries, will often spend considerably more on the implementation than the cost of the user licenses -- three to five times as more is not uncommon for a multi-site implementation.
Customisation Services
Customisation is the process of extending or changing how the system works by writing new user interfaces and underlying application code. Such customisations typically reflect local work practices that which are not currently in the core routines of the ERP system software.
Examples of such code include early adopter features (e.g., mobility interfaces were uncommon a few years ago and were typically customised) or interfacing to third party applications (this is 'bread and butter' customisation for larger implementations as there are typically dozens of ancillary systems that the core ERP software has to interact with). The Professional Services team is also involved during ERP upgrades to ensure that customisations are compatible with the new release. In some cases the functionality delivered via previous a customisation may have been subsequently incorporated into the core routines of the ERP software, allowing customers to revert back to standard product and retire the customisation completely.
Customizing an ERP package can be very expensive and complicated, because many ERP packages are not designed to support customization, so most businesses implement the best practices embedded in the acquired ERP system. Some ERP packages are very generic in their reports and inquiries, such that customization is expected in every implementation. It is important to recognize that for these packages it often makes sense to buy third party plug-ins that interface well with your ERP software rather than reinventing the wheel.
Customisation work is usually undertaken as bespoke software development on a time and materials basis. Because of the specialist nature of the customisation and the 'one off' aspect of the work, it is common to pay in the order of $200 per hour for this work. Also, in many cases the work delivered as customisation is not covered by the ERP vendors Maintenance Agreement, so while there is typically a 90-day warranty against software faults in the custom code, there is no obligation on the ERP vendor to warrant that the code works with the next upgrade or point release of the core product.
One often neglected aspect of customisation is the associated documentation. While it can seem like a considerable -- and expensive -- overhead to the customisation project, it is critical that someone is responsible for the creation and user testing of the documentation. Without the description on how to use the customisation, the effort is largely wasted as it becomes difficult to train new staff in the work practice that the customisation delivers.
Maintenance and Support Services
Once your system has been implemented, the consulting company will typically enter into a Support Agreement to assist your staff keep the ERP software running in an optimal way. A Maintenance Agreement typically provides you rights to all current version patches, and both minor and major releases, and will most likely allow your staff to raise support calls. While there is no standard cost for this type of agreement, they are typically between 15% and 20% of the list price of the ERP user licenses.

[edit] Advantages
In the absence of an ERP system, a large manufacturer may find itself with many software applications that do not talk to each other and do not effectively interface. Tasks that need to interface with one another may involve:
design engineering (how best to make the product)
order tracking from acceptance through fulfillment
the revenue cycle from invoice through cash receipt
managing interdependencies of complex Bill of Materials
tracking the 3-way match between Purchase orders (what was ordered), Inventory receipts (what arrived), and Costing (what the vendor invoiced)
the Accounting for all of these tasks, tracking the Revenue, Cost and Profit on a granular level.
Change how a product is made, in the engineering details, and that is how it will now be made. Effective dates can be used to control when the switch over will occur from an old version to the next one, both the date that some ingredients go into effect, and date that some are discontinued. Part of the change can include labeling to identify version numbers.
Computer security is included within an ERP to protect against both outsider crime, such as industrial espionage, and insider crime, such as embezzlement. A data tampering scenario might involve a terrorist altering a Bill of Materials so as to put poison in food products, or other sabotage. ERP security helps to prevent abuse as well.

[edit] Disadvantages
Many problems organizations have with ERP systems are due to inadequate investment in ongoing training for involved personnel, including those implementing and testing changes, as well as a lack of corporate policy protecting the integrity of the data in the ERP systems and how it is used.
Limitations of ERP include:
Success depends on the skill and experience of the workforce, including training about how to make the system work correctly. Many companies cut costs by cutting training budgets. Privately owned small enterprises are often undercapitalized, meaning their ERP system is often operated by personnel with inadequate education in ERP in general, such as APICS foundations, and in the particular ERP vendor package being used.
Personnel turnover; companies can employ new managers lacking education in the company's ERP system, proposing changes in business practices that are out of synchronization with the best utilization of the company's selected ERP.
Customization of the ERP software is limited. Some customization may involve changing of the ERP software structure which is usually not allowed.
Re-engineering of business processes to fit the "industry standard" prescribed by the ERP system may lead to a loss of competitive advantage.
ERP systems can be very expensive to install.
ERP vendors can charge sums of money for annual license renewal that is unrelated to the size of the company using the ERP or its profitability.
Technical support personnel often give replies to callers that are inappropriate for the caller's corporate structure. Computer security concerns arise, for example when telling a non-programmer how to change a database on the fly, at a company that requires an audit trail of changes so as to meet some regulatory standards.
ERPs are often seen as too rigid and too difficult to adapt to the specific workflow and business process of some companies—this is cited as one of the main causes of their failure.
Systems can be difficult to use.
The system can suffer from the "weakest link" problem—an inefficiency in one department or at one of the partners may affect other participants.
Many of the integrated links need high accuracy in other applications to work effectively. A company can achieve minimum standards, then over time "dirty data" will reduce the reliability of some applications.
Once a system is established, switching costs are very high for any one of the partners (reducing flexibility and strategic control at the corporate level).
The blurring of company boundaries can cause problems in accountability, lines of responsibility, and employee morale.
Resistance in sharing sensitive internal information between departments can reduce the effectiveness of the software.
There are frequent compatibility problems with the various legacy systems of the partners.
The system may be over-engineered relative to the actual needs of the customer.