First of all, sorry for the void of posts for the last few months, unfortunately I’ve just been severely swamped with project-work as we try to close in our USAF DEAMS go-live later this year. But I happened to notice an article where it looks like Dept. of Labor is targeting an Oct. 1st go-live for R12 Fed Financials, so I thought I’d post a link to that info here. I also know that SSA was targeting a R12 go-live a bit earlier this summer, but haven’t been able to stay much in the loop on how that’s going. It is definitely good to see more agencies getting further along with their R12 plans.
Dept. of Labor closing in on planned R12 go-live
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 12-Sep-09
Posted in News, R12 | Tagged: News, R12 | Leave a Comment »
Circuit: A new 3-day Oracle User Group event in the Mid-Atlantic Region
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 14-Jun-09
The DC Oracle Apps Users Group (EBS, etc.) and the Mid Atlantic Regional Users Group (Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, etc.) are hosting a new 3-day Quest/OAUG event in DC, Nov 18-20. The conference is at the Gaylord National Hotel and Convention Center. Read the info on the conference here.
The organizers are currently looking for presentations and proposals are being accepted through June 18. Presentation proposal info is available at the conference site link. The event is not specific to Federal, although due to its DC home, Ed Willey (Oracle FedSig chair) has worked to get a Federal track at the conference. He is asking for as many Federal-related papers as possible to fill-out the track and also working with Oracle-Federal to get some potential content from them. Exhibit Space and Sponsorships are available for vendors.
I’ll have to check & see if I could make it out there for the conference. Currently, the conference dates correspond with our major go-live on my USAF DEAMS project, so it might be tough, but we’ll see.
Posted in Events | Tagged: Circuit, Events, FEDSIG, OAUG, Quest | Leave a Comment »
Would you like to upload Budget Execution Entries via WebADI?? I would.
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 9-Jun-09
The Oracle EBS Technology Blog (aka Steven Chan’s blog) put out a post on WebADI yesterday where it looks like they’re asking for input on new ideas for Web ADI integrations to develop in a new Web ADI Framework. I’ve long thought that it would be slick to have a WebADI upload capability for Fed Admin Budget Execution documents, so I’m definitely going to submit that idea. If anyone else thinks the same way, submit it also (instructions in the post). Maybe if we get enough of a volume, they’ll look at it hard. Honestly, I know there are ways to extend the WebADI integrator capability, but I just have never dug much into it yet. I’m definitely a Web ADI fan as it is a very easy way to get data into the App from Excel (every accountant’s favorite desktop tool), so the more out of the box integrators, the better. I’ll try to think of any other types of integrators that could be beneficial to the Federal Space and post any updates. If anyone else has any ideas, please also comment & I’ll send in a note for those also.
Posted in Budget Execution | Tagged: Web ADI | Leave a Comment »
gl_je_lines import references for Treasury Confirmation journals
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 22-May-09
The other day I was dealing with needing to get some additional subsidiary detail for some Payables – Treasury Confirmation journal lines and since the relationships aren’t well documented, I’ll post them here.
For journal source = ‘Payables, journal category = ‘Treasury Confirmation’, the following are what the gl.gl_je_lines reference columns include:
reference_1 = fv.fv_treasury_confirmations.treasury_confirmation_id
reference_3 = ap.ap_checks_all.check_id
reference_4 = ap.invoices_all.invoice_id
reference_5 = hr.hr_all_organization_units.organization_id
I, along with others, have run into some situations where it would have been nice to have a link to invoice_distribution_id to support detail level gl to subsidiary module reconciliation efforts, but if I remember correctly, the confirmation journal entries aren’t necessarily at that lowest level of detail.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: journal import references, Treasury Confirmation | Leave a Comment »
Collaborate ‘09 Recap – A Federal Spin
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 12-May-09
Now that I’m back in Denver, here’s a recap from the Collaborate ‘09 conference in Orlando that I thought would be helpful to share. I definitely enjoyed seeing friends, meeting new ones and taking in as much information as I could during the conference. Being responsible for three different presentations was a bit more than I would have preferred (especially with a newborn and a 3 year-old at home, along with supporting a pretty demanding project cutting into the prep time), but it seemed that the presentations went well and were favorably accepted. Thanks to everyone who came to them and please don’t hesitate to contact me with any follow-up questions. The presentations are available here.
Here’s an attempt at sharing some of the past week’s events, announcements and information of Federal relevance (with a few other items) that I picked up. The link to the Oracle Collaborate 09 Media Kit, which provides press-releases and additional info on a number of these items is available here.
E-Business Suite 12.1 Released – 12.1 (12.1.1) was made Generally Available on Monday, May 4th. 12.1 brings a variety of new capabilities to the table, but for the Federal community, the biggest news with 12.1 is the important step forward in the long awaited “Projects Federalization“. 12.1 now provides the capability to create the required USSGL Budgetary postings from PA Agreements/Fundings, Revenue and Costs. Projects has never provided USSGL Transaction Codes or any other solution for creating these entries and this gap has been a long-time Federal Top-Ten enhancement request.
Other top 12.1 new features include:
Posted in Events, News, R12 | Tagged: Events, Federal Financials, FSIO, News, OAUG, R12 | Leave a Comment »
New Oracle Page talks to Solutions for Addressing American Recovery Act BI and Other Needs
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 11-May-09
At Collaborate, I learned about some interesting new collateral that Oracle has put together around the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that I thought I’d pass on. Oracle has compiled this at http://www.oracle.com/goto/arra. I haven’t had the chance to review it all yet, but there is a lengthy white-paper, a recorded Web-Conference and other info anyone can browse. The solutions illustrate how the OBIEE infrastructure and technology can be leveraged to provide a dashboard such as below and other BI capabilities. Other tools/solutions to help are also addressed. While this stuff is certainly not “Out of the Box” and would definitely require a good amount of work (assuming the source data is available to support this kind of analysis), I found it an interesting example of how the OBIEE infrastructure can be leveraged to provide key dashboards and info for this relevant topic to help keep senior executives, Congress and others happy. Note: this is not part of the Oracle BI Apps Federal Financials offering just announced, so if you’re an E-Business Suite customer thinking this would be a snap to implement, not exactly. But certainly a lot of E-Business Suite data could be leveraged to support this type of dashboard reporting.
Posted in BI | Tagged: Analytics, ARRA, OBIEE, Reporting | Leave a Comment »
Comments on Proposed CGAC Fed Admin Changes due back to Oracle May 15th
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 11-May-09
As was previously mentioned, Mike Barker and Oracle Federal Development provided a web-conference that gave insight into some changes to Federal Administrator being considered to comply with CGAC on the 1st of April (Sorry for the delay in getting this out, I’m definitely way behind on my blogging due to a new-born, Collaborate 09, a good 60 hrs a week of client work and the rest of things in life). There were also some other topics presented, including the auto-generation of treasury symbols and budget distributions. Oracle is interested in receiving comments in hopes of arriving at the best design possible and has extended the deadline to the 15th of May for submitting comments. Oracle has asked that we not post the slide-deck online (on the FEDSIG web-site & I’ll honor that here also), but if you are a member of the OAUG FedSig (if not currently, you start here to sign-up for free), just email me and I can shoot you the slides.
Proposed tweaks to the Fed Admin design include:
- Define Treasury Account Symbols form enhancements
- A new form for associating Public Law Numbers to Treasury Symbols (instead of to the Budget Transactions)
- Define Fund Attributes form enhancments (formally known as Appropriation Parameters)
- Define Budget Codes Form enhancements (formally known as Budget Account Codes)
- New Define Business Event Type Codes (BETC) Form
- New TAS/BETC Mapping & Customer TAS/BETC Forms
- Setups to support AutoCreation of Treasury Symbols, Budget Distributions
Posted in News | Tagged: CGAC, Federal Financials | Leave a Comment »
Installing Discoverer 10.1.2.3 Client Software on Vista (32 & 64-bit)
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 2-May-09
Although not Federal specific, I thought I’d post the steps I came up with a ways back to install the latest Discoverer client tools (Desktop and Administrator) on Vista as there’s a bit more to the approach than a couple clicks. I know of a number of users who fought with the process for a few days, so just follow this if you need to install and you should be good to go. A co-worker recently confirmed this approach also works for Vista 64-bit. Here is the doc I put together.
-Update 1June09: I did successfully install on Vista 64-bit using the doc. I added two items to the doc: 1) Be sure to always execute the install processes as Adminstrator (right click on the setup.exe and select ‘Run as Adminstrator), and 2) I suggest using a short path name for where you unzip the files (e.g. c:\oraclesoftware\BI Tools 10g), as the installer seems to fail when executing from a directory with a long path name.
Posted in BI | Tagged: 10g, BI, Discoverer, Installation, Vista | Leave a Comment »
Federal Financials SIG OAUG Collaborate ‘09 meeting
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 1-May-09
The Oracle Federal Financials Special Interest Group (FED SIG) is meeting in Orlando. However the meeting details are not appearing on the Collaborate ‘09 schedule, since it seems to be a late addition to the agenda.
Here are the details and agenda:
When: Tuesday, May 5 from 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Where: Peabody, room Bayhill 1 (Mezzanine Level) (THANK YOU! to Susan Logan of Oracle for making arrangements on the room for FED SIG to meet)
This will be an informal meeting. We will use this opportunity for networking and discuss the following Items:
1) Oracle design on CGAC in R12: Oracle provided the web conference to FED SIG last April 1, 2009. Oracle has indicated FED SIG can provide feedback to them on the design until May 15, 2009.
2) Handling of Withholding Tax in Oracle
a)30% for Foreign vendors effective immediately
b) 3% effective 2012 for all vendors who received payments from Fed Agencies for goods and services which are tax reportable.
c)28% if vendor did not match IRS TIN
3) iSupplier: Best practice and Federal rules about modification of the vendors intent as imported on the invoice
4) Other items relevant to Federal Agencies as time permits.
Posted in Events | Tagged: FEDSIG | Leave a Comment »
Webinar on NoetixViews for Oracle U.S. Federal Financials Available for Replay
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 1-May-09
If you were interested in attending the webinar on the new NoetixViews for Federal Financials, but weren’t able to sit in on it this week, Noetix has made it available for download here. The webinar includes live demos. I sat in on the call and I thought it was a good presentation. Noetix has developed and is now offering 35 Federal-specific views (of course, some provide a lot more value than others) in addition to their many other standard Oracle E-Business Suite views. The views are based on both 11i and R12 accounting architectures, so R12 Federal customers can benefit from the increased capabilities that SLA brings to the table, while 11i customers can still get value from the offering. Any real-solid Federal Financials consultant could develop most of what they’ve got so far, but I think they’ve put together a good starting baseline of views that an agency can simply purchase instead of needing to develop in-house and maintain. Potentially, the offering could also be expanded/extended in the future to include even more views. The status of funds views provides real-time capability, which shows that Noetix has done their homework to understand what’s going on underneath the covers of Oracle Fed Financials (e.g. merging funds available balances from gl_balances and gl_bc_packets together to give a real-time picture).
Noetix’s web-page on the Federal Financials offering is here.
I was impressed by the work that went into putting the help documentation together on these views and fields. While help documentation is often an afterthought, Noetix, seemed to put a decent amount of time into explaining each view and each field within the view. So then users who are working to create reports on the views (whether in Discoverer, OBIEE, or other BI tool) can get a good understanding of what the view and data elements are going to provide them in the report. Noetix’s goal is to make life easier for query users and thus the reason for the focus on providing good documentation, as obviously that is key in helping the users better understand the fields they need to complete their report objectives (versus having like 2 people in the organization who can really build reports, because no-one else understands the data good enough).
I’ve also got a copy of the static PowerPoint presentation here if you’d be interested in looking at that also.
Posted in BI, Events | Tagged: Discoverer, Federal Financials, Noetix | Leave a Comment »
Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6 Released: Includes Oracle Federal Financials Analytics
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 1-May-09
We’ve been hearing about the canned Federal Financials OBIEE analytics capability for some time, and now it has been released. From an initial look, it looks like this initial Federal-specific batch of canned offerings includes 2 Dashboards, one focused on various Federal Balance Sheet metrics and the other focused on Federal Budget & Spending. Of course there are plenty of dashboards, metrics and reports in the standard Financial Analytics offering that are useful in Federal Financial management as well. At a first glance, it looks like these new Federal pieces are just using an 11i10 adapter and not R12, so we’ll have to look further into that.
A good initial summary of this latest release is available in this Oracle BI Blog Post. A bit more detail can be extracted from the BI Apps 7.9.6 Licensing and Packaging Guide here. Note, a bunch of the documentation links for this new release aren’t working yet, but I’m sure they’ll get that straightened out before too long.
Posted in BI, News | Tagged: Analytics, BI, Federal Financials, OBIEE | Leave a Comment »
NoetixViews for Federal Financials Web-Seminar 4/28
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 21-Apr-09
Posted in Events, News | Tagged: Discoverer, Events, Noetix | Leave a Comment »
FedSIG CGAC call with Oracle Development – 1 Apr
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 31-Mar-09
FYI:
“The CGAC call for the FedSIG with Mike Barker, Director of Public Sector Development, will be a concall / web conference. Here are the logistics:
Participants should use Internet Explorer for the web conference. Participants should, at their earliest convenience, go to https://conference.oracle.com and click on “New User” to ensure that their system is compatible to the Oracle web conference system. To ensure success, please make sure that your pop-up blockers are turned off. You might need to turn the blocker off, exit Explorer and then start it back up again.
If a user does not have admin rights to accept the downloaded applet to initialize the web conference, they will not be able to view the slides and, if possible, should join other participants in a conference room to view the slides.
Date: Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Time: 1:00 pm ET
Duration: 90 Minutes
Call In: XXXXXXXXX
ID and Passcode: XXXXX
Web Conference ID: XXXXXX
Please encourage all participants to call in about 10 minutes before the start of the call at 1:00 pm ET, so we can start on time.
The intended audience for this call is existing Oracle customers, who are subject to the non disclosure in their Oracle License Service Agreement.”
Posted in News, R12 | Tagged: CGAC, FEDSIG, R12 | Leave a Comment »
Improving SQL Developer Performance and Eliminating Screen Redraw Issues on Vista
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 28-Mar-09
This isn’t anything Federal-specific, but I just wanted to share it since it has definitely made my day. I’ve been dealing with some SQL Developer performance issues for a while and due to heavy use lately in looking at a lot of conversion data and program code, the issues been getting more and more annoying. If you’re not familiar with the tool, SQL Developer is Oracle’s free DB query tool similar to TOAD, SQL Navigator, PL/SQL Developer, etc. Click here to goto Oracle’s SQL Dev page for more info and to download. I’ve been using SQL Dev since it first came out and have been pretty happy with it, especially since its free. However when I upgraded to Vista a while back, I started noticing that the SQL editor window would frequently garble the code when scrolling quickly such as:
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: SQLDeveloper, Tools | Leave a Comment »
Modifying Default Treasury Symbol Cancellation Date Behavior
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 26-Mar-09
Recently I’ve been doing a little work with converting a large number of Treasury Symbols on my current project into Fed Admin. I came up with a quick form personalization to change the default cancellation date logic from ‘01-OCT-20XX’ to ‘30-Sep-20XX’ and I thought I’d share in case it was helpful to anyone else.
Oracle defaults the ‘01-Oct’ as the cancellation date out of the box when creating new treasury symbols. However, in order for the standard year-end processes to execute properly for cancelled funds (& apply the Cancelled Fund closing logic), the treasury symbols need to have a cancellation date in the same fiscal year that the closing process is being run for. Thus the need for the date to be 30-September.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Form Personalization, Treasury Symbols | Leave a Comment »
Oracle Federal Development CGAC/R12 Web Conference 4/1
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 12-Mar-09
It seems that Oracle development is offering up a web conference to the Federal Financials Special Interest Group (FED SIG) on how Oracle is addressing CGAC in R12. This is scheduled for April 1 from 1-2:30 Eastern. Oracle is asking how many different callers will be calling in to determine if they need to support a large audience, so if you want to post info on the poll about how many separate callers would be calling in, I can relay the info. It looks like they’re looking for a count by 3/19.
CGAC is the Common Government-Wide Accounting Classification Structure as published not too long ago by OMB FSIO. I’ve heard that Oracle has been making some changes in some of the table structures to better accomodate the definitions of some of the CGAC elements. More info on CGAC is available at http://www.fsio.gov.
Posted in R12 | Tagged: CGAC, R12 | Leave a Comment »
R12 FSIO Certification Press Release
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 12-Mar-09
I finally ran across an official press release from Oracle on the R12 FSIO certification. Here’s the link.
Posted in R12 | Tagged: FSIO, R12 | Leave a Comment »
Recap on adding items for the new American Recovery Act Symbols
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 12-Mar-09
Getting new Federal Account Symbols assigned to an agency isn’t exactly an every day occurrence, but I’m seeing a lot of that with the new funding being distributed as part of the recent American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (which was of course signed right here in Denver). As a quick refresh, the following steps are necessary to start using these new accounts:
1) Setup the new Funds in the Accounting Flexfield value-set (Setup > Flexfields > Key > Values) . If any parent hierarchies are being used, be sure to make sure they are properly updated.
2) Setup the new Treasury Account Codes (Fed Admin: Setup > Appropriation > Treasury Account Codes) which includes setting up the new 4-digit main account, the main account description, and the Fund Type.
3) Setup the new Treasury Symbols (Fed Admin: Setup >Appropriation > Federal Account Symbols) and then click the Parameters button to complete the Treasury Symbol setup including associating the Fund Parameters record with the AFF Fund value. The Fund must be linked to a Treasury Symbol to support Budget Execution, FACTS and other Fed Admin functionality.
4) Setup the Budget Accounts (Fed Admin: Setup >Appropriation > Budget Accounts) to link these additional attributes to the Treasury Symbols.
5) Setup the Budget Distributions (Fed Admin: Budget > Define > Budget Distributions) to support entering Appropriations and distributing the money for the new funds.
6) If using Projects, its likely that new Projects may need to be setup for the new funds depending on how Projects is implemented and how account generator is driving the fund value.
Treasury Symbols data is stored in a few tables:
fv.fv_fund_groups,fv.fv_treasury_symbols, fv.fv_fund_parameters & fv.fv_facts_federal_accounts
If you’re a Discoverer customer……
Posted in Budget Execution | Tagged: FAST, Treasury Symbols | 1 Comment »
New NoetixViews for Federal Financials, Web Seminar 3/24
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 7-Mar-09
Noetix just announced a package of 35 views for Federal Financials and will be hosting a web seminar on 3/24 to introduce them. Click here for the link to the Noetix page discussing the offering and here to view details on the Web Seminar and sign up.
For those not familiar with Noetix views, they have historically been used as a supplement to Discoverer. The views are marketed as a mechanism to access E-Business Suite data easier through simpler data element naming and other functionality. Any BI tool could use the views into the E-Business Suite data though, it doesn’t have to be Discoverer. Personally, I don’t have any intimate experience using Noetix views, but I have heard positive reports in the past. Oracle doesn’t provide any Federal-specific views as part of the Discoverer Apps views (Discoverer users utilize a standard Federal Administrator Business Area that simply mirrors the FV schema and users can leverage the standard Apps views for other modules, but no specific Federal views), so this can fill a bit of void there.
We’re probably all aware of the strong push from Oracle to move toward the OBIEE architecture for BI and with new Federal OBIEE content soon to be released, there’s some competition here. Although, these two architectures are definitely different.
Posted in News | Tagged: BI, Discoverer, Noetix, Reporting | Leave a Comment »
Federal Sessions at OAUG Collaborate ‘09
Posted by Larry.Baugh on 27-Feb-09
Looking for a good excuse to get to Orlando in May? Well it looks like we’re going to have a pretty good selection of Federal-related Sessions at this year’s conference with at least 12 sessions touching federal content or agencies. This is more than I can ever remember at one conference and with all the other non-Federal session options, of course there’s plenty to take away from the conference. Per the Collaborate website, here’s what’s in store (sorted in order of session id, not trying to self-posture, mine just happen to sort to the top!):
1579 – Larry Baugh, Capital City Technologies
Moving Forward with Integrated Federal Procurement and Eliminating 3rd Party Contracting Software
This session provides a review of recent E-Business Suite Procurement Suite enhancements including Procurement Contracts, Sourcing and Purchasing aligned with fulfilling various Federal Acquisition requirements and integrating with required systems. Federal E-Business Suite customers will learn how R12 Procurement modules, paired with XML Publisher, enable a compliant, fully integrated Financials/Procurement solution that provides real-time updates to status of funds balances based on contract actions.
1581 – Larry Baugh, Capital City Technologies
What’s in it for my Agency? R12 Federal Features and Value-Added Benefits of Upgrading.
This session provides an overview of R12 enhancements and features with a focus on relevant topics to Federal E-Business Suite customers. Session focuses on Federal financials, projects and procurement modules. Attendees will learn how to derive additional value through leveraging new R12 features and the business case for upgrading. The level of effort for implementing various new functionality will be discussed to identify “quick-hits” for investment return.
Posted in News | Tagged: Collaborate, OAUG | Leave a Comment »
