Preface

Intended Audience

Welcome to Release 12.1 of the Oracle Service Contracts Implementation Guide.

See Related Information Sources for more Oracle E-Business Suite product information.

Deaf/Hard of Hearing Access to Oracle Support Services

To reach Oracle Support Services, use a telecommunications relay service (TRS) to call Oracle Support at 1.800.223.1711. An Oracle Support Services engineer will handle technical issues and provide customer support according to the Oracle service request process. Information about TRS is available at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/trs.html, and a list of phone numbers is available at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/dro/trsphonebk.html.

Documentation Accessibility

Our goal is to make Oracle products, services, and supporting documentation accessible to all users, including users that are disabled. To that end, our documentation includes features that make information available to users of assistive technology. This documentation is available in HTML format, and contains markup to facilitate access by the disabled community. Accessibility standards will continue to evolve over time, and Oracle is actively engaged with other market-leading technology vendors to address technical obstacles so that our documentation can be accessible to all of our customers. For more information, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program Web site at http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/.

Accessibility of Code Examples in Documentation

Screen readers may not always correctly read the code examples in this document. The conventions for writing code require that closing braces should appear on an otherwise empty line; however, some screen readers may not always read a line of text that consists solely of a bracket or brace.

Accessibility of Links to External Web Sites in Documentation

This documentation may contain links to Web sites of other companies or organizations that Oracle does not own or control. Oracle neither evaluates nor makes any representations regarding the accessibility of these Web sites.

Structure

1  Overview of Implementing Oracle Service Contracts
2  Setting Up Oracle Service Contracts
3  Setting Up Service Pricing and Billing
4  Setting Up Contract Events
5  Setting Up Automatic Renewals
6  Enabling Integrations within the Oracle E-Business Suite
A  System Profiles
B  Lookups
C  Concurrent Programs

Related Information Sources

Integration Repository

The Oracle Integration Repository is a compilation of information about the service endpoints exposed by the Oracle E-Business Suite of applications. It provides a complete catalog of Oracle E-Business Suite's business service interfaces. The tool lets users easily discover and deploy the appropriate business service interface for integration with any system, application, or business partner.

The Oracle Integration Repository is shipped as part of the E-Business Suite. As your instance is patched, the repository is automatically updated with content appropriate for the precise revisions of interfaces in your environment.

Online Documentation

All Oracle E-Business Suite documentation is available online (HTML or PDF).

Guides Related to All Products

Oracle E-Business Suite User's Guide

This guide explains how to navigate, enter data, query, and run reports using the user interface (UI) of Oracle E-Business Suite. This guide also includes information on setting user profiles, as well as running and reviewing concurrent programs.

You can access this guide online by choosing "Getting Started with Oracle Applications" from any Oracle E-Business Suite product help file.

Guides Related to This Product

Oracle Advanced Pricing User's Guide

Oracle Advanced Pricing calculates prices including promotional prices for Oracle Order Management and other Oracle Applications based on pricing rules, pricing relationships, item hierarchies, usage brackets, and deals and promotions.

Oracle Bills of Material User’s Guide

Oracle Manufacturing and Oracle Order Management use bills of material to store lists of items that are associated with a parent item and information about how each item is related to its parent. Oracle Manufacturing supports standard, model, option class, and planning bills of material.

Oracle Contracts Implementation and Administration Guide

Oracle Contracts enable organizations to define the terms and conditions of a contract between the parties that are buying and selling products or services. These can be terms for pricing, shipment, payment, quality, and other business and legal obligations. Oracle Contracts provides the common infrastructure components for other contracts modules such as Oracle Sales Contracts, Oracle Procurement Contracts, Oracle Service Contracts, and Oracle Project Contracts.

Oracle Depot Repair Implementation Guide

For Oracle Depot Repair, you must first implement Oracle Contracts, Oracle HRMS, and the main modules of Oracle Financials, Supply Chain Management, and Service for Marketing and Sales. Then, use this guide to set up service activities for a replacement order of spares or a return for repair, service activity billing and install base transaction types, business processes, and labor schedules. This guide also describes how to set up customer profiles, repair types, repair type statuses, service request types, and codes for repair reasons, diagnostics, message actions, and service,

Oracle Installed Base User Guide

Oracle Installed Base is an item instance life cycle tracking application that facilitates enterprise-wide life cycle item management and tracking capability. Several Oracle Order Management transactions interact with Oracle Inventory and Oracle Installed Base.

Oracle Inventory User's Guide

This guide enables you to configure the Oracle Inventory structure to best represent your company's inventory sites and business units after you have defined your required ledger and key flexfields. You can also learn about centralized and decentralized inventory structures, and controls and reference options for using and maintaining inventory items such as categories, commodity codes, attributes, statuses, relationships, and picking rules.

Oracle Knowledge Management Implementation and Administration Guide

This guide describes how to create and manage mobile users, implement the wireless option, and set up the interapplication bar to conveniently navigate between applications to perform diagnostic testing. This enables mobile users to periodically synchronize their mobile computer devices with the enterprise system in order to download new Oracle Mobile Field Service data and upload changes that they have made in their applications. For example, the technician can access and update the material debrief at a customer site for materials installed and returned in the task. When out of wireless coverage, technicians can continue to perform tasks using the voice interface or phone. Oracle Knowledge Management is an information management system that enables you to create information solutions, submit the solution to an authoring flow for review and edit, and create solution groups for browse and search convenience. This guide describes how you can set up knowledge repositories for a service provider or service requester and control access levels of users to categories, solutions, and to statements within a solution.

Oracle Order Management User’s Guide

This guide provides information on how to use Oracle Order Management. Use this guide to learn how to enter and update sales orders, maintain sales agreements, combine sales orders with procurement orders, and process orders. In addition, this guide describes how you can authorize and manage returns, schedule across orders, apply charges and discounts, enter shipping information for orders, raise order invoices and process invoices and payments.

Oracle Service Contracts User Guide

Oracle Service Contracts enables you to sell multiple types of services each with its own coverage, service and usage lines, price lists and billing schedules, and payment methods and warranties. You create contracts for these services, approve them, and manage the entire contract cycle to ensure timely service entitlement checks and minimize service revenue leakage. You can create a contract manually or automatically through Oracle Order Management or by creating a product that has a warranty in Oracle Installed Base.

Oracle TeleService Implementation and User Guide

This guide provides information on how to use Oracle TeleService. Oracle TeleService automates the call center and the resolution process from the time a customer calls in, sends an email, or enters a service request on the Web. Agents can use Oracle TeleService to update customer records, validate product ownership and contract coverage, provide proactive and personalized customer service, and resolve problems that arise from the initial contact using a knowledge base.

Oracle Territory Manager Implementation Guide

With Oracle Territory Manager, you can create geographic territories, account territories, and sales territories using predefined matching attributes to identify territories such as the geographic matching attribute of country. You can also create territory hierarchies to make the territory assignments and searches more efficient. Before you implement Oracle Territory Manager, you must define the purpose of defining territories for your business, the level of usage that the resources assigned to territories may require, and the requirement for overlays.

Installation and System Administration

Maintaining Oracle E-Business Suite Documentation Set

This documentation set provides maintenance and patching information for the Oracle E-Business Suite DBA. Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance Procedures provides a description of the strategies, related tasks, and troubleshooting activities that will help ensure the continued smooth running of an Oracle E-Business Suite system. Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance Utilities describes the Oracle E-Business Suite utilities that are supplied with Oracle E-Business Suite and used to maintain the application file system and database. It also provides a detailed description of the numerous options available to meet specific operational requirements. Oracle E-Business Suite Patching Procedures explains how to patch an Oracle E-Business Suite system, covering the key concepts and strategies. Also included are recommendations for optimizing typical patching operations and reducing downtime.

Oracle Alert User's Guide

This guide explains how to define periodic and event alerts to monitor the status of your Oracle E-Business Suite data.

Oracle E-Business Suite Concepts

This book is intended for all those planning to deploy Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, or contemplating significant changes to a configuration. After describing the Oracle E-Business Suite architecture and technology stack, it focuses on strategic topics, giving a broad outline of the actions needed to achieve a particular goal, plus the installation and configuration choices that may be available.

Oracle E-Business Suite CRM System Administrator’s Guide

This manual describes how to implement the CRM Technology Foundation (JTT) and use its System Administrator Console.

Oracle E-Business Suite Developer's Guide

This guide contains the coding standards followed by the Oracle E-Business Suite development staff. It describes the Oracle Application Object Library components needed to implement the Oracle E-Business Suite user interface described in the Oracle E-Business Suite User Interface Standards for Forms-Based Products. It also provides information to help you build your custom Oracle Forms Developer forms so that they integrate with Oracle E-Business Suite. In addition, this guide has information for customizations in features such as concurrent programs, flexfields, messages, and logging.

Oracle E-Business Suite Installation Guide: Using Rapid Install

This book is intended for use by anyone who is responsible for installing or upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite. It provides instructions for running Rapid Install either to carry out a fresh installation of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, or as part of an upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12. The book also describes the steps needed to install the technology stack components only, for the special situations where this is applicable.

Oracle E-Business Suite System Administrator's Guide Documentation Set

This documentation set provides planning and reference information for the Oracle E-Business Suite System Administrator. Oracle E-Business Suite System Administrator's Guide - Configuration contains information on system configuration steps, including defining concurrent programs and managers, enabling Oracle Applications Manager features, and setting up printers and online help. Oracle E-Business Suite System Administrator's Guide - Maintenance provides information for frequent tasks such as monitoring your system with Oracle Applications Manager, administering Oracle E-Business Suite Secure Enterprise Search, managing concurrent managers and reports, using diagnostic utilities including logging, managing profile options, and using alerts. Oracle E-Business Suite System Administrator's Guide - Security describes User Management, data security, function security, auditing, and security configurations.

Oracle E-Business Suite User Interface Standards for Forms-Based Products

This guide contains the user interface (UI) standards followed by the Oracle E-Business Suite development staff. It describes the UI for the Oracle E-Business Suite products and tells you how to apply this UI to the design of an application built by using Oracle Forms.

Other Implementation Documentation

Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics User's Guide

This guide contains information on implementing, administering, and developing diagnostics tests in the Oracle E-Business Diagnostics framework.

Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway User's Guide

This guide describes how users can browse and view the integration interface definitions and services that reside in Oracle Integration Repository.

Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway Implementation Guide

This guide explains the details of how integration repository administrators can manage and administer the entire service enablement process based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) for both native packaged public integration interfaces and composite services - BPEL type. It also describes how to invoke Web services from Oracle E-Business Suite by working with Oracle Workflow Business Event System, manage Web service security, and monitor SOAP messages.

Training and Support

Training

Oracle offers a complete set of training courses to help you master your product and reach full productivity quickly. These courses are organized into functional learning paths, so you take only those courses appropriate to your job or area of responsibility.

You have a choice of educational environments. You can attend courses offered by Oracle University at any of our many Education Centers, you can arrange for our trainers to teach at your facility, or you can use Oracle Learning Network (OLN), Oracle University’s online education utility. In addition, Oracle training professionals can tailor standard courses or develop custom courses to meet your needs. For example, you may want to use your organization structure, terminology, and data as examples in a customized training session delivered at your own facility.

Support

From on-site support to central support, our team of experienced professionals provides the help and information you need to keep your product working for you. This team includes your Technical Representative, Account Manager, and Oracle’s large staff of consultants and support specialists with expertise in your business area, managing an Oracle server, and your hardware and software environment.

Do Not Use Database Tools to Modify Oracle E-Business Suite Data

Oracle STRONGLY RECOMMENDS that you never use SQL*Plus, Oracle Data Browser, database triggers, or any other tool to modify Oracle E-Business Suite data unless otherwise instructed.

Oracle provides powerful tools you can use to create, store, change, retrieve, and maintain information in an Oracle database. But if you use Oracle tools such as SQL*Plus to modify Oracle E-Business Suite data, you risk destroying the integrity of your data and you lose the ability to audit changes to your data.

Because Oracle E-Business Suite tables are interrelated, any change you make using an Oracle E-Business Suite form can update many tables at once. But when you modify Oracle E-Business Suite data using anything other than Oracle E-Business Suite, you may change a row in one table without making corresponding changes in related tables. If your tables get out of synchronization with each other, you risk retrieving erroneous information and you risk unpredictable results throughout Oracle E-Business Suite.

When you use Oracle E-Business Suite to modify your data, Oracle E-Business Suite automatically checks that your changes are valid. Oracle E-Business Suite also keeps track of who changes information. If you enter information into database tables using database tools, you may store invalid information. You also lose the ability to track who has changed your information because SQL*Plus and other database tools do not keep a record of changes.