Welcome to Release 12.1 of the Oracle Customers Online Implementation Guide.
This guide assumes you have a working knowledge of the following:
The principles and customary practices of your business area.
Computer desktop application usage and terminology.
If you have never used Oracle E-Business Suite, we suggest you attend one or more of the Oracle E-Business Suite training classes available through Oracle University.
See Related Information Sources for more Oracle E-Business Suite product information.
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This chapter describes the licensing information for Oracle Customer Hub B2B and Oracle Customer Hub B2C.
This chapter describes general implementation of Oracle Customers Online.
This chapter describes implementation of specific features in Oracle Customers Online.
This section lists the reports and processes that are seeded in Standard Request Submission for these responsibilities: Oracle Customers Online Superuser, Oracle Customer Data Librarian Superuser, and Oracle Customers Online Forms Access.
This appendix describes the profile options that affect the operation of Oracle Customer Online.
You can choose from many sources of information, including online documentation, training, and support services, to increase your knowledge and understanding of Oracle Customers Online.
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.
All Oracle E-Business Suite documentation is available online (HTML or PDF).
PDF - See the Oracle E-Business Suite Documentation Library for current PDF documentation for your product with each release. The Oracle E-Business Suite Documentation Library is also available on My Oracle Support and is updated frequently
Online Help - Online help patches (HTML) are available on My Oracle Support.
Release Notes - For information about changes in this release, including new features, known issues, and other details, see the release notes for the relevant product, available on My Oracle Support.
Oracle Electronic Technical Reference Manual - The Oracle Electronic Technical Reference Manual (eTRM) contains database diagrams and a detailed description of database tables, forms, reports, and programs for each Oracle E-Business Suite product. This information helps you convert data from your existing applications and integrate Oracle E-Business Suite data with non-Oracle applications, and write custom reports for Oracle E-Business Suite products. The Oracle eTRM is available on My Oracle Support.
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.
This guide describes how to define tasks and note types, set up task statuses and status transition rules, define task priorities, set up data security, and map notes and references to source objects such as a sales lead to Task Manager. In addition, it describes how to create users and run concurrent programs to retrieve new and updated tasks.
Oracle Common Application Calendar enables you to manage daily tasks and appointments, create and maintain notes, and schedule resources. It provides a central place to store and view resource schedules, utilization, and availability. It also enables you to synchronize your calendar with external calendars such as Microsoft Outlook or handheld devices.
Oracle Customer Data Librarian includes all of the functionality of Oracle Customers Online with the additional features of maintaining the quality of customer data. Therefore, you must first implement Oracle Customers Online fully. Then, use this guide to assign responsibilities and access to users and set the necessary profile options for data librarian deployment, data import, mapping, search and duplication removal, and data security.
Oracle Customer Data Librarian enables you to import customer information from external systems into the Oracle Trading Community Architecture Registry and manage the quality of this information. Quality includes data consolidation and completeness and the removal or merge of duplicate and unnecessary information. In addition, Oracle Customer Data Librarian contains all of the features in Oracle Customers Online, including purchasing information from D&B to enrich your customer data and mapping customer records to their source systems.
Oracle Customers Online enables you to view, create, and maintain customer or party information, create customer relationships and hierarchies, manage tasks and employees for your organization, and use reports to view customer profile trends and data quality information. You can import customer data from external sources, and administer and control the usage of this data across the Oracle E-Business Suite.
This guide discusses the conceptual architecture of Oracle Financials. It introduces you to the financial concepts used in the application, and helps you compare real world business, organization, and processes to those used in the applications. Understanding the concepts enables you to exploit the features of the Oracle Financials suite of applications for better financial performance, reporting, control, compliance, and security.
This guide describes how to implement the Oracle Financials E-Business Suite. It takes you through the steps of setting up your organizations, including legal entities, and their accounting, using the Accounting Setup Manager. You can find information on intercompany accounting and sequencing of accounting entries with relevant examples.
This guide provides information on how to implement Oracle General Ledger. Use this guide to understand the implementation steps required for application use, including how to set up Accounting Flexfields, Accounts, and Calendars.
This set of guides explains how to define your employees, so you can give them operating unit and job assignments. It also explains how to set up an organization (operating unit). Even if you do not install Oracle HRMS, you can set up employees and organizations using Oracle HRMS windows. Specifically, the following manuals will help you set up employees and operating units:
Oracle HRMS Enterprise and Workforce Management Guide
This user guide explains how to set up and use enterprise modeling, organization management, and cost analysis.
Oracle HRMS Workforce Sourcing, Deployment, and Talent Management Guide
Use this guide to find out about setting up employees and managing your people resources.
This guide enables you to define entities in the TCA Registry, create relationships, search, prevent duplication, and control access. In addtion, you can use this guide to define time zones and phone formats, configure adapters for the processing of data in the TCA Registry, define sources that provide data for specific entities, and create user-defined attributes to extend the registry. You can administer these TCA tools and features from the Administration tab using the Trading Community Manager responsibility. This tab is also available in Oracle Customers Online and Oracle Customer Data Librarian.
This guide provides information including a comprehensive glossary to supplement the documentation for Oracle Trading Community Architecture and to help you understand products in the Oracle Customer Data Management family. It describes customer interface tables and the interface tables used for bulk import of data from external sources, and D&B data elements. In addition, you can learn about available relationship types, available replacement words and attributes for Data Quality Management data, available matching rules for various TCA administration tasks, and the results and impact of the party and account merge processes initiated in Oracle E-Business suites applications.
This guide provides technical information on the various integration features such as APIs and business events that you can avail to connect into external systems and transact data between these systems through a data hub using the Trading Community Architecture data model. This means that you can create or update in one system and ensure that the change is reflected in the other systems. You can manipulate data at the granular Oracle Trading Community Architecture entity level such as party site or party relationship or at the higher business object level such as person. Use this guide to learn about available APIs, their functions, parameters, and validations and how to use them. You can also find details on the business events and how to subscribe to them.
Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA) maintains information including relationships about parties, customers, organizations, and locations that belong to your commercial community in the TCA Registry. This guide enables you to use the features and user interfaces provided by TCA and by other Oracle E-Business Suite applications to view, create, and update Registry information. For example, you can import batches of party data in bulk from external source systems into the TCA Registry, merge duplicate parties, sites, and customer accounts, generate time zones for phones and locations, and run various customer reports.
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.
This guide explains how to define periodic and event alerts to monitor the status of your Oracle E-Business Suite data.
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.
This manual describes how to implement the CRM Technology Foundation (JTT) and use its System Administrator Console.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This guide describes how to set up multiple organizations and the relationships among them in a single installation of an Oracle E-Business Suite product such that transactions flow smoothly through and among organizations that can be ledgers, business groups, legal entities, operating units, or inventory organizations. You can use this guide to assign operating units to a security profile and assign this profile to responsibilities such that a user can access data for multiple operation units from a single responsibility. In addition, this guide describes how to set up reporting to generate reports at different levels and for different contexts. Reporting levels can be ledger or operating unit while reporting context is a named entity in the selected reporting level.
This guide describes transaction attributes, conditions, actions, and approver groups that you can use to define approval rules for your business. These rules govern the process for approving transactions in an integrated Oracle application. You can define approvals by job, supervisor hierarchy, positions, or by lists of individuals created either at the time you set up the approval rule or generated dynamically when the rule is invoked. You can learn how to link different approval methods together and how to run approval processes in parallel to shorten transaction approval process time.
This guide contains information on implementing, administering, and developing diagnostics tests for Oracle E-Business Suite using the Oracle Diagnostics Framework.
This guide provides flexfields planning, setup and reference information for the Oracle E-Business Suite implementation team, as well as for users responsible for the ongoing maintenance of Oracle E-Business Suite product data. This guide also provides information on creating custom reports on flexfields data.
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.
This guide describes how users can browse and view the integration interface definitions and services that reside in Oracle Integration Repository.
This guide describes implementation details, highlighting additional setup steps needed for trading partners, code conversion, and Oracle E-Business Suite. It also provides architecture guidelines for transaction interface files, troubleshooting information, and a description of how to customize EDI transactions.
This guide describes the functionality of Oracle e-Commerce Gateway and the necessary setup steps in order for Oracle E-Business Suite to conduct business with trading partners through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). It also describes how to run extract programs for outbound transactions, import programs for inbound transactions, and the relevant reports.
This guide describes how to use Oracle iSetup to migrate data between different instances of the Oracle E-Business Suite and generate reports. It also includes configuration information, instance mapping, and seeded templates used for data migration.
This guide describes how you can define hierarchies of items using structure types, catalogs, and catalog categories, and define change categories and configure them for revised items or request lines. Oracle Product Lifecycle Management provides several predefined catalogs such as the Product Catalog, Asset Catalog, and the Service Catalog and predefined change categories such as change orders and ideas. Use this guide to learn how to define additional catalogs for browsing and reporting purposes and new change categories specific to your business needs. You can then learn how to set up users and responsibilities that provide or restrict access to these catalogs, catalog items, and change management objects.
This guide describes how to create and manage catalogs, create and maintain product attributes and attribute values, and manage item statuses and lifecycle phases. You can learn how to create change categories, create task templates for change orders, and create change management reports. In addition, you can use this guide to create roles, map roles to privileges, and maintain these roles.
Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator brings Oracle E-Business Suite functionality to a spreadsheet, where familiar data entry and modeling techniques can be used to complete Oracle E-Business Suite tasks. You can create formatted spreadsheets on your desktop that allow you to download, view, edit, and create Oracle E-Business Suite data, which you can then upload. This guide describes how to implement Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator and how to define mappings, layouts, style sheets, and other setup options.
This guide explains how to complete the setup steps necessary for any Oracle E-Business Suite product that includes workflow-enabled processes. It also describes how to manage workflow processes and business events using Oracle Applications Manager, how to monitor the progress of runtime workflow processes, and how to administer notifications sent to workflow users.
This guide explains how to define new workflow business processes and customize existing workflow processes embedded in Oracle E-Business Suite. It also describes how to define and customize business events and event subscriptions.
This guide describes how Oracle E-Business Suite users can view and respond to workflow notifications and monitor the progress of their workflow processes.
This guide describes Oracle XML Gateway functionality and each component of the Oracle XML Gateway architecture, including Message Designer, Oracle XML Gateway Setup, Execution Engine, Message Queues, and Oracle Transport Agent. It also explains how to use Collaboration History that records all business transactions and messages exchanged with trading partners.
The integrations with Oracle Workflow Business Event System, and the Business-to-Business transactions are also addressed in this guide.
Oracle XML Publisher is a template-based reporting solution that merges XML data with templates in RTF or PDF format to produce outputs to meet a variety of business needs. Outputs include: PDF, HTML, Excel, RTF, and eText (for EDI and EFT transactions). Oracle XML Publisher can be used to generate reports based on existing Oracle E-Business Suite report data, or you can use Oracle XML Publisher's data extraction engine to build your own queries. Oracle XML Publisher also provides a robust set of APIs to manage delivery of your reports via e-mail, fax, secure FTP, printer, WebDav, and more. This guide describes how to set up and administer Oracle XML Publisher as well as how to use the Application Programming Interface to build custom solutions. This guide is available through the Oracle E-Business Suite online help.
Oracle XML Publisher is a template-based reporting solution that merges XML data with templates in RTF or PDF format to produce a variety of outputs to meet a variety of business needs. Using Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat as the design tool, you can create pixel-perfect reports from the Oracle E-Business Suite. Use this guide to design your report layouts. This guide is available through the Oracle E-Business Suite online help.
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.
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.
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.