This chapter covers the following topics:
Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA) is a data model that allows you to manage complex information about the parties, or customers, who belong to your commercial community, including organizations, locations, and the network of hierarchical relationships among them. Oracle Trading Community Architecture is the foundation for Supplier Management. This information is maintained in the TCA Registry, which is the single source of trading community information for Oracle E-Business Suite applications. These applications, as well as TCA itself, provide user interfaces, batch data entry functionality, and other features for you to view, create, and update Registry information. The key entities in TCA that are used by Supplier Management are:
Parties: Entities of type Person or Organization that can enter into business relationships. Parties can also be of type Relationship. For example, Joe as himself is a party of type Person, but Joe as a contact for Vision Corporation is a party of type Relationship. Every party in the TCA Registry has a unique Registry ID. TCA includes an extensive variety of information for parties, for example party name, addresses, contacts, and contact points. Joe as a person can have a personal phone number that differs from the phone number for the relationship of Joe as a contact.
Party sites: Addresses that parties use for specific purposes, or uses.
Locations: Geospatial points, usually defined by an address.
Contacts: People who have a contact or employment relationship with an organization or person.
Contact points: Means of contact, for example, phone and e-mail address. TCA also includes conceptual functionality that helps you manage and understand your trading community. For example, you can use relationships to model the roles that parties play with respect to one another, and classifications to classify entities.
Various applications in the Oracle E-Business Suite can view, create, and update the TCA Registry data. Because this information is shared, any change made in one application is reflected in all applications. TCA itself provides the Trading Community Manager responsibility, which includes these features that you can use to maintain, enrich, and cleanse the TCA Registry. The following features have also been exposed from Supplier management application, Supplier Data Librarian Administrator responsibility, under the Administration tab:
Bulk Import: Import batches of party data in bulk from external source systems into the TCA Registry. See Bulk Import Overview, Oracle Trading Community Architecture User Guide.
Batch duplicate identification: Create batches of potentially duplicate parties to merge. See Batch Duplicate Identification Overview, Oracle Trading Community Architecture User Guide.
Party Merge: Cleanse the TCA Registry by merging duplicate parties and duplicate sites within a party. See Party Merge Overview, Oracle Trading Community Architecture User Guide.
Third Party Data Integration: Enrich the data for organizations and persons with D&B information. See Third Party Data Integration Overview in Oracle Trading Community Architecture User Guide.
Relationship Manager: Create and manage relationships among existing parties in the TCA Registry. See Relationship Manager Overview in Oracle Trading Community Architecture User Guide.
Phones: Generate time zones for phones. See Generate Time Zone for Phone Numbers in Oracle Trading Community Architecture User Guide.
Since TCA forms the foundation of Oracle Supplier Management, many TCA features are enabled in Supplier Management. See the following list to set up these features and to know how they may affect Supplier Management:
Setting up Third Party Data Integration: Third Party Data Integration allows for acquiring information from D&B for the TCA Registry. To enable purchase of D&B data, you must integrate with D&B. See Setting Up Third Party Data Integration in Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide.
Setting up Party Merge: Party Merge involves merging parties that are confirmed as duplicates, either from a duplicate identification batch or a manually created merge batch. This is a key feature of Supplier Hub. See Setting Up Party Merge in Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide.
Setting up Business Events: Business events signal the creation or update of information in the TCA Registry. You can attach your own callout subscriptions to the events to perform additional business logic without modifying TCA. This infrastructure is based on the Oracle Workflow Business Event System. See Setting up Business Events in Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide.
Setting up Workflow Directory Synchronization: As Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA) is a source of Oracle Workflow user and role information; the information stored in the TCA tables must be synchronized with the de-normalized information in the Workflow local tables. See Setting Up Workflow Directory Synchronization in Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide.
Setting up Real-Time Address Validation: Real-time address validation validates addresses during address entry. See Setting Up Real-Time Address Validation in Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide.
Setting up Relationship Manager: Relationship Manager allows users to manage relationships among existing parties in the TCA Registry. Relationship Manager uses the relationship types that you administer. This is used to maintain supplier hierarchy in the Supplier Master. See Setting Up Relationship Manager in Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide.
Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA) administration features let you set up, control and manage functionality that affect data in the TCA Registry. You can administer these TCA tools and features to best fit your business needs. The following table illustrates TCA administration features available from Oracle Supplier Data Librarian Administrator responsibility under the Administration tab:
| TCA Setup | Description | Supplier Lifecycle Management | Supplier Hub |
|---|---|---|---|
| Relationships | Manage the relationship types that can be used to create relationships among entities in the TCA Registry. See Administering Relationships, Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide. | Extended supplier party hierarchy. | |
| Classifications | Manage the class categories and codes that can be used to classify entities in the TCA Registry. See Administering Classifications, Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide. | Supplier Profile Management (For extending supplier profiles by adding general/ industrial classifications, to associate supplier profile UDAs with suppliers of a certain classification type.) | Supplier Profile Management (For extending supplier profiles by adding general/ industrial classifications, to associate supplier profile UDAs with suppliers of a certain classification type.) |
| Data Quality Management | Set up Data Quality Management, which provides powerful search and duplicate identification functionality. See Administering Data Quality Management, Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide. | Duplicates prevention during registration. |
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| Party Data Sharing Security | Manage data sharing groups and control how specific entities in the TCA Registry can be accessed depending on user and responsibility privileges. See Administering Data Sharing and Security, Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide. | Access control for TCA parties.
Note: This does not apply to Supplier Profile UDAs. |
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| Adapters | Configure third party or custom-made adapters that are used to process data in the TCA Registry. See Administering Adapters, Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide. | D&B Enrichment | |
| Phones | Specify time zone information for phones, and define phone formats. See Administering Phones, Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide. | To create or update existing phone numbers in the TCA Registry. | |
| Certification | Define certification levels and reasons, and manage the display of levels. See Administering Certification, Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide. | To classify Organizations or Persons by custom certifications. | |
| Geography Hierarchy | To establish conceptual parent-child relationships between geographies. See Administering Geography Hierarchy, Oracle Trading Community Architecture Administration Guide. | To establish conceptual parent-child relationships between geographies. |
Note: Oracle Supplier Management does not support TCA Extensions.