Enhancements
Oracle Spring ’12 Federal Development Update
I didn’t attend, but there was an Oracle Federal Financial Briefing on 17-Apr in Reston where information was shared about some of the upcoming GTAS enhancements and target patch release dates. Personally, besides focusing on our Fed R12.1.3 stabilization efforts on my current gig, I’m working to get smart on some of the basics associated with GTAS, the upcoming 6-digit USSGL standard and new Federal Accounting/System process changes associated.
As soon as we can get our hands on these new GTAS patches, we need to jump on them to start understanding some of the impacts to our EBS environments in further detail. As the Federal E-Business Suite community, we don’t really have much time to be able digest, test and prepare for these changes. First required reporting cycle for GTAS is after Nov FY13 month-end (Calendar Nov 2012) and the fact that GTAS will only accept Bulk File feeds (i.e. no pencil whipping any numbers like with FACTS today), means we’ve got to be ready with this stuff working. If anyone is looking for more info from Treasury on GTAS, you can find it here.
For R12 Fed Financials Installs who jumped on the CGAC & FV 90000001 patches early (me and my local Denver Federal Financials Shared Service provider!), at least we have that piece behind us. But certainly there is more coming, especially for all the agencies still on 11i.
Here’s the link to the deck I scored:
Oracle Federal Financials Spring ’12 Development Update
If you’ve been following the twitter feed, you know I’m heading to Collaborate ’12 to present two Federal Financials R12 sessions and catch-up on as much news/info as I can there. The FED Sig meeting is on Monday, maybe that will help. Keep watch on the twitter feed for anything I pick up relevant to the Federal EBS community.
If anyone has any comments or knowledge to share that you feel would help spread key info, please don’t hesitate to comment.
–Larry
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Oct’11 Federal Financials Update
I was able to get a copy of the E-Business Suite Federal Financials Update slides presented at this year’s Oracle Federal Forum on October 18th. Most of the content revolves around the upcoming Federal interface changes and transition to the Governmentwide Treasury Account Symbol Adjusted Trial Balance System (GTAS) to replace FACTS I & II. I’m sure these changes are definitely going to keep us busy!!
Here is the link:
Oracle Contract Lifecycle Management Webcast – November 4th
If you’re like me and September was blur due to the Federal Year-End, you might have missed that the long-awaited Contract Lifecycle Management for Public Sector (CLM) was officially released by Oracle in early September, as part of E-Business Suite 12.1.3. Oracle and CACI have teamed up over the past few years to develop this new offering focused on finally providing an integrated, full end-to-end procurement solution in the E-Business Suite that meets Federal Contracting needs. CLM is built on top of the EBS Advanced Procurement Suite and provides a host of additional Federal-specific functionality required and/or typically desired by the Federal Contracting community.
Here are links to two Oracle/CACI Press Releases on the new CLM product. Press Release 1. Press Release 2.
Here is the link to the Oracle DataSheet on the new CLM product.
To help spread the word, Oracle & CACI are hosting a webcast on the new CLM offering on Thursday, November 4th at 2pm Eastern. Click here for the Oracle Event registration page.
When Googling for any CLM-related news, I also noticed a few YouTube videos have been posted, so I thought I’d have a little fun & embed those links as well for anyone interested.
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11i10 Patch 8448145: Allows entry of FV Budget Execution Entries for Expired Appropriations
I wanted to share an enhancement that we got Oracle to deliver a ways back for USAF DEAMS & share that the patch is available for download.
We have a requirement to enter Budget Authority increases/decreases, even after Appropriations are expired. This is because we need to move money around to cover various Expired Year adjustments necessary. I’ve seen other Federal organizations that have the same requirement, so wanted to pass this along. Until recently in 11i10, these adjustments could only be done via GL journals, since the FV Budget Execution functionality had a constraint to prevent Budget Execution entries against Expired Treasury Symbols. We had noticed this constraint had been removed from R12 Fed Financials and asked Oracle for the same capability in 11i10. They came through for us with patch 8448145 which removed the constraint and allows us to enter Funding Decreases/Increases through the standard Fed Admin Budget Execution form Functionality. To fully utilize the new capability, we then setup some new Budget Execution Transaction Types/Transaction Codes to use for Expired Funding Adjustments to drive the proper USSGL accounting for Expired Year transactions. The removal of the constraint along with the set of Expired Approp TransTypes/TransCodes provided what the Budget Users needed to allow the standardized use of Fed Admin Budget Execution functionality for both current and expired funds.
This consistent, standardized Increase/Decrease adjustment method provides a one-stop shop for adjustments and eliminates the need of the manual journals for the expired year Budget Authority adjustments. The elimination of the manual journal need is key, because it mitigates the risk of erroneous entries being created. As of now, we’ve focused on utilizing the capability via the forms. As time permits, we also want to explore if the constraint has also been removed from the FV Budget Execution Interface as well.
If your agency deals with this requirement/issue, I believe this functionality could benefit.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Would your FedAdmin Install like better traceability from gl_je_lines to source PO for FV Treasury Confirmation Journal Entries?
Yes, I know the blog has been pretty stagnant lately. We went live w/11i10 for USAF DEAMS on May 1st & lets just say I haven’t had any trouble being bored!! Conversion of the legacy USAF data was successful, but not without a good bit of hard work & since then we’ve certainly kept busy w/some post-go-live issues, as with many new system implementations.
I wanted to see if I could get some thoughts from the community via the blog on if there would be a Federal Financials Community desire for Oracle to provide a better level of detail for Fed Financials Treasury Confirmation entries posted to GL. I posted a bit of info last year on the gl_je_lines traceability for Treasury Confirmations to source transactions here. Current functionality is that the Treasury Confirmation entries are posted at the AP Invoice level of detail. This allows for drill-down from FV Treasury Confirmation journal entries to the AP Invoice via the invoice_id. However, we are struggling with the issue that we cannot uniquely drill-down to the invoice distribution line and the unique PO, Project, Task info from there. If an invoice has multiple lines against multiple POs, we can’t develop a join to identify which POs are paid/confirmed via the Treasury Confirmation process.
We need this functionality because of reporting and feeds to external data warehouses (DWs) that we have where we want to be able to specify the status of accounting that a particular PO is in. We use GL as the driving source for our information, pulling back to the subsidiary modules for add’l subsidiary detail as required. We use GL as the baseline data source to mitigate the risk of feeding data to our external DWs that could result in out of balances with our GL balances/journals. But due to the lack of ability for getting to the ap_invoice_distributions_all.distribution_line_number from the Treasury Confirmation gl_je_lines, whenever we have an invoice that is paying against multiple POs we have this issue since we can’t drill as needed.
To illustrate, say we have PO #F2010 123ABC for $1,000:
We want to be able to report:
$500 is still in Obligation (4801)
$100 is expensed – not paid (4901/2110)
$50 is is Disbursements in Transit (4901/2120) (DIT is the short time-period between when we submit the check/EFT to disbursing vs when the check is disbursed)
$350 has been disbursed/confirmed (4902/1010)
We’re trying to work w/Oracle Development, but they are giving us some push-back that 1) this is an enhancement, which no other Federal Customers have asked for and 2) implementing a lower level of detail posting, would break some other customizations deployed by Fed Customers. So what is that annual 22% in support fees for again?
My thoughts on these are:
1) Well maybe no official enhancement request has been done, but I have talked w/some other clients who have struggled with this same issue,
2) As with many configuration options, it seems Oracle could provide the functionality to use or not use the detail posting, via a profile option setting or some other config setting.
For example, create a profile option like “FV: Treasury Confirmation GL Posting Level – Options Invoice/Invoice Distribution”, then update the DIT posting package to post at the level defined in the profile option. Ship the patch with the option as ‘Invoice’ (e.g. the current method). This would allow for Fed Agencies needing to keep the functionality as-is to do that, but allow the add’l option as desired.
I’m definitely interested in any comments from others on this topic. Would your agency/Fed Install benefit from and like a capability such as this, or are we just on an island? Please comment in the post comments if you’re comfortable. You can also email me if desired – larry.baugh@gmail.com
Thanks
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Oracle Federal Applications 