Challenges of monitoring interface tables in Oracle E-Business Suite
Oracle E-Business Suite is a complex integrated ERP system supporting all most every area of the business across wide range of industry sectors including Finance, Manufacturing, Telco, Utilities, Logistics, Medical, Retail and many more.
Oracle E-Business Suie (EBS) provides different aspects of the business areas in seperate pockets called 'Modules' covering variety of software items including tables, programs, user interface screens, pages, etc. These modules can function independently for specific needs of a particular department or business area. Joined together these modules makes the integrated solution referred as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
Some modules are highly inter-dependant, shares configurations, master data and pumps transactional data among them. For example, General Ledger (GL) module holds key financial configurations for the entire EBS. All other operations modules depend on GL for the financial configurations like Ledgers, Chart of Accounts, Currencies, Calendars, Accounting Methods, etc.. GL works like a central grid for all other modules and receives accounting journals of business transactions.
Examples of operations modules tightly integrated with General Ledger: Purchasing (PO), Inventory (INV), Cost Managemet (CST), Work In Process (WIP), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Payroll (PAY), Accounts Receivables (AR), Accounts Payables (AP), Cash Management (CE), Fixed Assets (FA).
Open Interface Tables
Oracle modules exchange transactional data at various business events. Source module inserts data records into open interface tables of the destination module.
The open interface tables are also used in inter-system integrations. Oracle Clients build customised solutions to bring in data external systems.
Data records in open interface tables are validated and imported by various concurrent processes of respective module. Data records may fail system or business rules validation and gets rejected by the import process. Such data records remain in the interface tables with an error flag and rejection reason for User attention. At times, data records remain in the interface tables without even getting validated by the import programs because of incorrect or missing data values.
Examples of some of the open interface tables that are known for frequent errors:
Purchasing Receipts Interface
Inventory Material Transactions Interface
Order Management Sales Orders Interface
Accounts Receivables Transactions Interface
General Ledger Journals Interface
Projects Expenditue Items Interface
Fixed Assets Expenses Interface
Forms (Screens) and reports available in Oracle E-Business Suite are merely adequate to effectively monitor the interface tables.
Forms that are used for inquiring open interface tables lack user experience, adequate searching and data exporting capabilities. Oracle Users have to spend more time in analysing the data records and difficult in reaching to conclussion about what is wrong with the data.
Seeded Reports around interfaces lack the productive presentation and usability factors. Majority of the reports print very few columns and which does not help in troubleshooint the data errors.
Oracle Clients develop custom forms and reports to overcome these issues. Like any other extensions these forms and reports attract significant costs in research, design, development and deployment. As well, it is additional costs in ongoing support and maintainence. Yet, these solutions are static, need functional and technical work to change as business process needs change.
ReportsXpress is a lean and economical reporting solution for Oracle E-Business Suite. Developing and deploying interface monitoring reports is near to no cost compared to the conventional solutions within Oracle EBS. As well, changing the reports to keep up with business needs is incredibly fexible and effortless compared to any other reporting solution.
ReportsXpress assists the organisations in making most of their ERP investment, increases optimum utilisation of Functional & Technical Resources and improves business user productivity and satisfaction.
Following are some of the interface monitoring reports are pre-bundled with ReportsXpress v12.0.0 for Oracle E-Business Suite:
PO: Receipts Interface Lines
INV: Material Transactions Interface
OM: Sales Orders Interface Headers
OM: Sales Orders Interface Lines
OM: Sales Orders Interface Headers & Lines
AR: Autoinvoice Interface Lines
GL: Journals Interface Lines
PA: Expenditue Items Interface
FA: Expenses Interface Lines
Please visit ReportsXpress product information site for more details. Please contact SkySys Customer Service Team.
Looking forward to talk to you.
Thank you for sparing your valuable time in reading this post.
Jag Biradar
SkySys Consulting Australia
www.skysys.co
