News
6-digit USSGL and GTAS Implementation Postponed 1 Year, until FY14
Treasury announced on Friday, July 13th that the implementation of GTAS and the proposed 6-digit USSGL has been postponed until Dec, 2013.
Here’s a copy of the memo sent out:
Signed Memo to All CFOs and Deputy CFO GTAS 7 13 12
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )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:
Finally Cool: @OracleFedApps is on Twitter
If you haven’t visited the actual blog lately and are just keeping up via a blog reader or some other type of subscription, you might have missed that I incorporated a Twitter feed a couple months back. I admit, my tweets aren’t going to be as entertaining as @CharlieSheen and I don’t expect to have 8 million+ followers like @BarackObama, but I’m trying to share a few experiences from the R12.1.3 Federal upgrade I’m working through. Hoping the short info may benefit others going through the same. Tweets are a great quick, simple way to share thoughts, but feel free to Mention/Direct Message (DM) or email me with any questions that need further detail.
#Winning
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )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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Quick Collaborate ’10 Update
The trip was quick, but I enjoyed getting a quick taste of Collaborate ’10. Thanks to all those who attended my presentation bright and early on Monday morning. I have uploaded the slides from my presentation here for reference: Finally Federal! Exploring Projects Release 12.1.
I was able to catch the FedSig meeting where I got my first chance to see the Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) product live. The presentation included a demonstration of core R12 Advance Procurement Suite (APS) functionality with the CLM features integrated in. I thought the CLM demo team did a good job and certainly were well-versed in Federal (including DoD) Contracting business processes. For anyone interested in CLM, be sure to get up to speed on the core R12 APS functionality available, which you could start doing now. That will serve as a good baseline for understanding the additional features that the CLM product provides when available. There is a good amount of documentation on R12 APS functionality available online and feel free to check out my Collaborate ’09 Presentation on the APS functionality I thought would be most relevant to the Federal Community. CLM is said to be available “Calendar Year 2010”, when R12.1.3 is released. The 12.1 Release Content Documents have been updated to include 12.1.3 features, which makes me think 12.1.3 may not be too far off, although the Procurement RCD doesn’t include anything about CLM.
I also attended another Projects Federal Accounting features session by Neeraj Garg of Project Partners, where I picked up a few pieces of info that I hadn’t figured out yet on the R12.1 projects functionality. He did a great job.
It was evident from the Cliff Godwin Oracle Apps Strategy Session & the Financials Road Map Session, that Oracle is going to start turning up the pressure to upgrade from 11i10. Extended support for 11i10 ends in 2013 and Oracle is strongly suggesting to get moving on the R12 upgrade planning/execution.
Another quick nugget: there are a few new pieces of Federal functionality planned for 12.1.3 as documented in the updated Financials 12.1 RCD (Note: 561580.1). It looks like the Federal Year-End process is being enhanced to better support Pre-Closing Entries and some enhancements to the CCR integration functionality are included.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Dept. of Labor closing in on planned R12 go-live
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.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Collaborate ’09 Recap – A Federal Spin
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:
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Comments on Proposed CGAC Fed Admin Changes due back to Oracle May 15th
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
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6 Released: Includes Oracle Federal Financials Analytics
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.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )NoetixViews for Federal Financials Web-Seminar 4/28
I had previously posted about the release of NoetixViews for Federal Financials here. The previously scheduled web-seminar seems to have been rescheduled to 28 April. Details on the web-seminar are here.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )FedSIG CGAC call with Oracle Development – 1 Apr
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.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )New NoetixViews for Federal Financials, Web Seminar 3/24
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.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Federal Sessions at OAUG Collaborate ’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.
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FSIO Certification of R12 Rumor Mill is Definitely Hot
Judging by the uptick in blog hits and searches like ‘R12 FSIO’ that are referring searchers here, many are hearing the same rumors I’m hearing. No official announcement yet (nothing on FSIO, metalink or any press releases yet), but the word is out that Oracle has received a FSIO letter for R12 certification. When I see anything official, I’ll update with a link/info. Or if anyone beats me to the punch, just go ahead & post a comment.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Oracle/CACI Contract Lifecycle Event – Feb3
Well, its been almost a month since my last post, but I’ve now got the Christmas tree and all the rest of holiday decorations packed back away. So hopefully I can do a bit better job of putting content out here.
Wanted to mention that Oracle and CACI are hosting an event on Feb 3 in DC, around their collaborative enhancement of the E-Business Suite Federal Contracting capabilities. Click here to see additional details on the location, speakers and times. Suggest touching base with your agency’s friendly apps rep or partner rep on details to register.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 3 so far )December Federal CAB Info
The most recent Oracle Federal Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meeting was held on 3-December.
A few interesting points of info include:
-Both Oracle and FSIO are pointing to January 2009 as finalizing the R12 FSIO certification
-In the Oracle Development update, Oracle pointed identified R12.1 as targeted for release in calendar year 2009 (12.1 is slated to include additional out of the box integration for Projects SLA items such as the capability for creating standard journal entries for Unfilled Customer Orders when an agreement is baselined). This obviously doesn’t really give much specificity, but at least they mentioned it.
Here are the slides from the meeting as presented from Oracle and OMB FSIO.
Oracle CAB Development Update (Dec. 3, 2008 )
R12 Overview for Dec 2008 Cab_v1
FSIO Presentation at Oracle 12-3-08
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )FSIO requests a 2nd R12 presentation/demo from Oracle prior to Certification
On the monthly Oracle Federal Financials Special Interest Group (FEDSIG) call this week (held on November 18), Oracle identified that FSIO has requested a 2nd followup presentation/demo from Oracle prior to certifying R12. Oracle provided an initial R12 demo/presentation in September to FSIO in hopes of attaining a thumbs-up on gaining the R12 certification, so this 2nd request seems to be a bit of a setback in terms of finalizing the certification. Details of the rationale were not disclosed and Oracle is eager to complete the process, however a date has not yet been set for the follow-up presentation.
Hopefully, this will not delay the process significantly as a number of agencies are eagerly awaiting the go-ahead from FSIO. Of course, the irony of the situation is that R12 solves a number of issues (due to SLA and other capabilities) and I’d consider it to be more compliant with FSIO requirements than prior releases
Other news from the call:
-The next Federal Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meeting is scheduled for 12/3 in Reston. This is typically an invite-only event for Federal Financials system owners/executives.
-Next FEDSIG call tentatively scheduled for 12/16.
-The FEDSIG will be extending its time frame for collecting enhancement requests from agencies. See the template at http://fedsig.oaug.org and contact information for forwarding the enhancements.
-AP Patchset O created a number of issues for an agency on the call, suggest testing it well prior to moving into prod.
-A straw poll was taken of how year-end closing processes went. For the most part, it seems agencies are getting through year-end easier with each passing year. Numerous agencies reported needing to develop custom year-end processes.
-2 large agencies have mentioned significant performance considerations with rebuilding summary accounts. Oracle is apparently working on some performance enhancements to the summary account build process so maybe we’ll see that in the future.
-Multiple agencies indicated continuing problems with unaccounted AP invoices (due to failures of the Payables Accounting Process) and mentioned the desire for enhanced focus by Oracle to assist with mitigating these continuing issues in the future (note: due to the changes in R12 SLA, these specific issues should go away and lets hope we don’t have too many new ones)
-A few months ago, Mike Barker (Oracle Federal Development Lead) offered up the possibility of providing a web conference on new R12 capabilities aimed to help agencies comply with CGAC. This is still being considered, however the current highest priority is getting through the FSIO process for R12. The webinar won’t be until after the next R12 demo/presentation with FSIO.
-The FEDSIG chair is researching the preferred time-frame of the OAUG Collaborate ’09 FEDSIG meeting. Options are somewhere between 1 hr & a half-day.
If anyone reading this is unsure on how to join the FEDSIG or is interested in getting on the distribution list for the monthly calls, see http://fedsig.oaug.org.
SBA Awards Work to Support OFF Environment and Pilot Oracle Loans
This news is a little old (its been a rough past 2 months with year-ends, ongoing implementation work & some part-time work on another new effort), but I thought I’d post it anyway. Small Business Administration looks to be moving their Oracle Fed Financials environment under a new contract to SRA International for support and will also begin a pilot of the Oracle Loans platform in concert with Fed Financials. If you haven’t heard, R12 SLA enables Oracle Loans to comply with the required budgetary entries, so this pilot may involve moving to R12. Oracle is listed as one of the teaming partners and I’m interested in learning more about who’s actually going to be hosting the environment (maybe OnDemand). Anyway, here’s a link to the story & I know there’s additional stories available online as well.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The Federal Desktop Core Configuration, huh??
I wasn’t aware of this until I saw it today on Steven Chan’s blog, but he mentions that “11i is certified with the US Federal Desktop Core Configuration for Windows XP and Vista desktop clients”. Here’s the link to his post, which gives background on the requirement from OMB and also includes a link to a Statement of Direction doc that Oracle has published on the configuration.
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