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 )Be aware of R12 Data Model changes to properly assess R12 upgrade rework
Any entity upgrading to R12 should sufficiently understand the data model changes between 11i and R12. Based on an entities’ dependence on the existing 11i data models that change, there can be a significant level of rework required to ensure that existing custom RDF/BI Pubisher Reports, Discoverer Reports, outbound interfaces, custom views, custom SQL & PL/SQL, etc. will function properly in the R12 environment. Analysis of custom objects relative to the data model changes can’t just be limited to whether objects will compile or run in R12, but should also include analysis of whether the proper data is returned from both upgraded 11i transactions and new transactions generated in R12. To properly plan and allocate resources to an R12 upgrade project, the impact of these changes to an entity should be thoroughly analyzed.
For example, in my years working in the Federal Financials space, I’ve seen a fairly heavy reliance on the gl_je_lines.referenceX (journal import references) columns for creating custom reports that provide subsidiary information (e.g. PO Number, Vendor, etc.) and gl information together. I’ve seen reports/interfaces often built from gl_je_lines up to best ensure the detail reports balance with trial balance amounts. In R12, the gl_je_lines.referenceX columns are no longer populated or are populated in a different manner. Thus any custom report, interface, etc. that leverages these fields will likely have to be reworked (or overall approach addressed) to continue to meet end-user requirements. The R12 GL -> Subsidiary drilldown path now runs through gl_import_references and a new suite of XLA tables as shown in this diagram.
An additional problem that confronts Federal Financials customers with this change is (more…)
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )New Oracle Page talks to Solutions for Addressing American Recovery Act BI and Other Needs
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.
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.
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Oracle Federal Applications 