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Oracle® Fusion Applications Product Information Management Implementation Guide
11g Release 1 (11.1.1.5.0)
Part Number E20387-01
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1 Overview

This chapter contains the following:

Product Management Offering: Overview

Manage Application Implementation

Product Management Offering: Overview

By implementing the Product Management offering, your enterprise can configure how to create and manage items, catalogs, and related processes, as well as the structures to support receipt accounting for purchased items, cost accounting for financial reporting, and product profitability management. The Oracle Fusion Applications Product Information Management Implementation Guide covers implementation of item, catalog, and product management processes, while the Oracle Fusion Applications Cost Accounting and Receipt Accounting Implementation Guide covers implementation of cost management and receipt accounting processes.

Before you begin, use the Getting Started page in the Setup and Maintenance work area to access reports for each offering, including full lists of setup tasks, descriptions of the options and features that you can select when you configure the offering, and lists of business objects and enterprise applications that are associated with the offering.

The first implementation step is to configure the offerings in the Setup and Maintenance work area by selecting the offerings and options that you want to make available to implement. For the Product Management offering, you can select the following options:

Next, create one or more implementation projects for the offerings and options that you want to implement first, which generates task lists for each project. The application implementation manager can customize the task list and assign and track each task.

If you select all of the options, then the generated task list for this offering contains the following groups of tasks:

Define Common Applications Configuration for Product Management

Use this task list to manage definitions that are used across offerings, which typically apply to multiple products and product families. These definitions include enterprise structures, workforce profiles, security, and approval rules, among others.

You can find other information that supports the common implementation tasks in the Oracle Fusion Applications Concepts Guide.

Define Product Information Management Configuration

Use this task list to configure items, product structures, catalogs, change orders, rules, new item requests, product source systems, and data quality.

Define Cost Management Configuration

Use this task list to configure cost accounting and receipt accounting processes, which enable organizations to calculate inventory item costs, maintain inventory valuation, generate accounting distributions for inventory transactions, and generate accounting distributions for receipt accruals.

Setting up cost accounting processes involves defining cost organization and cost accounting structures, cost books and policies, overhead absorption rules, analysis groups for reporting, and subledger and accounting rules that are used to post distributions to the general ledger for costing of inventory transactions.

Setting up receipt accounting processes involves defining subledger and accounting rules that are used to post distributions to the general ledger for receipt accruals.

Define Transactional Business Intelligence Configuration

Use this task list to configure Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence for ad hoc reporting, including managing the repository, connections, presentation catalog, and currency type display.

Define Extensions for Product Management

Use this task list to define extensions such as custom Oracle Enterprise Scheduler jobs.

You can also customize and extend applications using other tools. For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide.

Manage Application Implementation

Manage Application Implementation: Overview

The Manage Applications Implementation business process enables rapid and efficient planning, configuration, implementation, deployment, and ongoing maintenance of Oracle Fusion applications through self-service administration.

The Setup and Maintenance work area offers you the following benefits:

With Oracle Fusion Functional Setup Manager you can:

Implementation Projects: Explained

An implementation project is the list of setup tasks you need to complete to implement selected offerings and options. You create a project by selecting the offerings and options you want to implement together. You manage the project as a unit throughout the implementation lifecycle. You can assign these tasks to users and track their completion using the included project management tools.

Maintaining Setup Data

You can also create an implementation project to maintain the setup of specific business processes and activities. In this case, you select specific setup task lists and tasks

Exporting and Importing

Implementation projects are also the foundation for setup export and import. You use them to identify which business objects, and consequently setup data, you will export or import and in which order.

Selecting Offerings

When creating an implementation project you see the list of offerings and options that are configured for implementation. Implementation managers specify which of those offerings and options to include in an implementation project. There are no hard and fast rules for how many offerings you should include in one implementation project. The implementation manager should decide based on how they plan to manage their implementations. For example, if you will implement and deploy different offerings at different times, then having separate implementation projects will make it easier to manage the implementation life cycles. Furthermore, the more offerings you included in an implementation project, the bigger the generated task list will be. This is because the implementation task list includes all setup tasks needed to implement all included offerings. Alternatively, segmenting into multiple implementation projects makes the process easier to manage.

Offerings: Explained

Offerings are application solution sets representing one or more business processes and activities that you typically provision and implement as a unit. They are, therefore, the primary drivers of functional setup of Oracle Fusion applications. Some of the examples of offerings are Financials, Procurement, Sales, Marketing, Order Orchestration, and Workforce Deployment. An offering may have one or more options or feature choices.

Implementation Task Lists

The configuration of the offerings will determine how the list of setup tasks is generated during the implementation phase. Only the setup tasks needed to implement the selected offerings, options and features will be included in the task list, giving you a targeted, clutter-free task list necessary to meet your implementation requirements.

Enabling Offerings

Offerings and their options are presented in an expandable and collapsible hierarchy to facilitate progressive decision making when specifying whether or not an enterprise plans to implement them. An offering or its options can either be selected or not be selected for implementation. Implementation managers decide which offerings to enable.

Provisioning Offerings

The Provisioned column on the Configure Offerings page shows whether or not an offering is provisioned. While you are not prevented from configuring offerings that have not been provisioned, ultimately the users are not able to perform the tasks needed to enter setup data for those offerings until appropriate enterprise applications (Java EE applications) are provisioned and their location (end point URLs) is registered.

Options: Explained

Each offering in general includes a set of standard functionality and a set of optional modules, which are called options. For example, in addition to standard Opportunity Management, the Sales offering includes optional functionality such as Sales Catalog, Sales Forecasting, Sales Prediction Engine, and Outlook Integration. These optional functions may not be relevant to all application implementations. Because these are subprocesses within an offering, you do not always implement options that are not core to the standard transactions of the offering.

Feature Choices: Explained

Offerings include optional or alternative business rules or processes called feature choices. You make feature selections according to your business requirements to get the best fit with the offering. If the selected offerings and options have dependent features then those features are applicable when you implement the corresponding offering or option. In general, the features are set with a default configuration based on their typical usage in most implementations. However, you should always review the available feature choices for their selected offerings and options and configure them as appropriate for the implementation.

You can configure feature choices in three different ways:

Yes or No

If a feature can either be applicable or not be applicable to an implementation, a single checkbox is presented for selection. Check or uncheck to specify yes or no respectively.

Single Select

If a feature has multiple choices but only one can be applicable to an implementation, multiple choices are presented as radio buttons. You can turn on only one of those choices.

Multi-Select

If the feature has multiple choices but one or more can be applicable to an implementation then all choices are presented with a checkbox. Select all that apply by checking the appropriate choices.