Understanding Upgrade Impact and Changes

This chapter covers the following topics:

Understanding Technical Impact and Changes

The upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 introduces a number of technical changes to the architecture and technology stack. The method by which Oracle E-Business Suite is patched has also changed with Release 12.2. This section will provide an overview of the key technical impact and changes introduced with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.

Release 12.2 Architecture

The upgrade process introduces changes to the system architecture and the way you administer and patch the system after the upgrade. This section provides an overview of key technical changes introduced with the upgrade.

Additional Resources: Oracle E-Business Suite Concepts contains a complete discussion of the architecture in this release, including information about the Oracle E-Business Suite multi-tiered architecture, enhancements, language support, file system structure, and the basic data model.

Release 12.2 Dual File Systems

Two complete file systems are always present in an Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 environment. It is important to distinguish between the file system (fs1 or fs2) ) itself and its current role, which alternates between 'patch' and 'run' with every patching cycle.

The 'run' file system is the current system in use by the running application, while the 'patch' file system is the other system being patched or awaiting the start of the next online patching cycle.

The dual file system approach caters to application code, but applications also use the file system to read and write business data. In Release 12.2, application data files are stored in a third area, the non-editioned file system (fs_ne), which is used to store data that is needed across all file systems. Non-editioned files are not copied or moved during patching. Their location remains constant across online patching cycles.

Oracle E-Business Suite Architecture: The Application Tier

The application tier has a dual role: hosting the various servers and service groups that process the business logic, and managing communication between the desktop tier and the database tier. The architecture of this tier (unlike that of the database and desktop tiers) has changed significantly in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.

Three servers or service groups comprise the basic application tier for Oracle E-Business Suite:

In Release 12.2, Web and Forms services are provided by Oracle Application Server. They are no longer servers in the sense of being a single process.

Web Services

The Web services component of Oracle Application Server processes requests received over the network from the desktop clients, and includes the following major components:

The Web listener component of the Oracle HTTP server accepts incoming HTTP requests (for particular URLs) from client browsers, and routes the requests to WLS. When possible, the Web server services the requests itself. For example, returning the HTML to construct a simple Web page. If the page referenced by the URL requires advanced processing, then the listener passes the request on to the servlet engine which contacts the database server as needed.

An important change in Release 12.2 is the employment of the Oracle WebLogic Server for many system management and configuration tasks. Configuration using the Oracle WLS Console in Release 12.2 supplements, but does not replace the traditional use of the AutoConfig tool. Together, these tools provide comprehensive management capabilities for a Release 12.2 system. It is important to understand the role of each and how they complement one another.

Additional Resources: See the Oracle E-Business Suite Concepts Guide Release 12.2 and the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 Setup Guide for additional information regarding WebLogic Server and AutoConfig.

Application Tier ORACLE_HOMEs in Release 12.2

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 uses two application tier ORACLE_HOMEs. The first is the OracleAS ORACLE_HOME, and the second is the Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW) ORACLE_HOME.. This combination enables Oracle E-Business Suite to take advantage of the latest Oracle technologies.

Notable features of this architecture include:

Key changes from earlier releases include:

Technology Stack Components

On the database tier, the technology stack includes:

On the application tier, the technology stack includes:

Online Patching

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 introduces Online Patching, a new feature that greatly reduces the downtime that was needed in previous releases for application of Release Update Packs (RUPs), Critical Patch Updates (CPUs), and other patches and bug fixes of various kinds.

Key Features

Note: The classic patching model is designed to minimize downtime by running as fast as possible, using whatever resources are needed. In contrast, the online patching model is designed to minimize downtime by allowing patching operations to be performed while users remain on the system.

Principles

In essence, online patching is performed as follows:

  1. A copy is made of the running system.

  2. Patches are applied to the copy while users continue to access the running system.

  3. Transparently to users, the copy becomes the new running system.

  4. What was the original running system (now obsolete) is deleted.

This introduces the concept of a patching cycle that consists of several phases, in contrast to the model used in previous releases. These phases are denoted prepare, apply, finalize, cutover, and cleanup.

Note: For more information about online patching principles, see Oracle E-Business Suite Concepts.

Implementation

Any mechanism that uses a copy of the running application must take into account that an Oracle E-Business Suite application comprises both code and data, stored in the file system and database.

The file system is the easier of the two to cater for, simply requiring an additional copy to be created and maintained. The resulting dual file system consists of one file system that is used by the running system and another one that is either currently being patched, or (as will be the case for most of the time) standing ready to be patched. The two file systems swap roles at the end of each patching cycle, with the transition between them being managed by AutoConfig.

Creating a copy of the database portion of the running applications system is more complex. It has been accomplished by taking advantage of the Oracle Database 11g R2 Edition-Based Redefinition (EBR) feature. This allows an application to efficiently store multiple copies (editions) of its application definition in the same database, and thereby enables online upgrade of the database tier.

The database patch edition only comes into existence during a patching cycle, and becomes the new run edition at end of the cycle. The former database run edition (the old edition) and the obsolete objects it contains are discarded at the end of a patching cycle, and the space reclaimed during the cleanup phase.

Tools

Patching is performed by running the new adop (AD online patching) tool. This tool invokes the adpatch utility that was run directly in previous releases of Oracle E-Business Suite.

Warning: Running adpatch directly is not supported in an online patching environment, except under explicit instruction from Oracle.

The adop tool orchestrates the entire patching cycle, and can be used to run individual phases as required.

Note: For full details of adop features and options, refer to the Patching section of Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance Guide.

There are also implications for general (non-patching) maintenance activities.

Additional Resources: For information on choosing the appropriate file system to run AD tools from, refer to: Choosing the Correct File System For Maintenance Tasks in Chapter 7 of the Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance Guide, Release 12.2.

Additional Information: For additional information, refer to: Online Patching, Oracle E-Business Suite Concepts, Release 12.2.

Customizations

Customized environments require additional attention during an upgrade. The instructions in this guide assume that you have followed the standards for customizing Oracle E-Business Suite.

Suggested Reading: See the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 Developer's Guide and the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 User Interface Standards guide for additional information regarding customization standards.

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 introduces a new set of compliance, code, and patching standards that customizations must adhere to. The Online Patching Readiness Reports provide a set of utilities that report any compliance issues.

Suggested Reading: Refer to Using the Online Patching Readiness Report in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 (Doc ID: 1531121.1) to run the Online Patching Readiness Reports.

Tip: Detailed information on preparing your customizations is covered in Chapter 3, Planning and Performing Pre-Upgrade Tasks, Preparing Customizations.

There are two levels of compliance that can be targeted:

To preserve customizations and minimize the impact during the upgrade:

Understanding Business Impact and Functional Changes

An Applications upgrade alters both the technical and functional aspects of your Oracle E-Business Suite system. In addition to the technology stack and file system, an upgrade also initiates changes that may affect the functionality and/or look and feel of existing products. These functionality (business-related) changes may have an impact on the way that these products are used as you conduct your daily business.

Action: This section describes a few ways that the upgrade changes your existing products. If you have not done so, Oracle recommends that you review the new features and products delivered in this release. Refer to the product-specific Release Content Documents (RCDs) and TOI, on My Oracle Support for new features and product details.

The upgrade also introduces a common data model that improves the quality of your data, simplifies its management, and makes it easier for shared service centers to work across worldwide operations and provide information about your business to decision makers.

Coupled with the common data model are enhanced integrations between Oracle Financials and Oracle Procurement products and other applications. Integrated applications enable pre-defined best practices and empower you to standardize your business processes across organizations and geographic regions. Benefits of standardization include common process methodologies and economies of scale.

Functional topics in this guide that pertain to a Release 12.2 upgrade include:

Upgrade By Request

For some Oracle E-Business Suite products, upgrade planning includes choosing the most active set of data for upgrade processing. Then, you can upgrade historical data that was omitted from the upgrade at a later date, or when it is needed. For example, you might include only the last fiscal year in the upgrade to Release 12.2, and then upgrade the remaining data outside the Release 12.2 downtime window.

Additional Information: See Appendix A, Upgrade by Request in this guide for additional information.

Obsolete Products in Release 12.2

This section lists obsolete products in Release 12.2.

Product Name
*** Oracle Balanced Scorecard
* Oracle CAD-View 3D
* Oracle Contracts Intelligence
*** Daily Business Intelligence
Demand-Side Product Data Synchronization for GDSN
Document Management and Collaboration
***Embedded Data Warehouse
Global Accounting Engine
Information Technology Audit
Supply-Side Product Data Synchronization for GDSN
Oracle Customer Intelligence
* Oracle Demand Planning (obsolete in release 12.2.5)
* Oracle E-Business Intelligence
* Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting
* Oracle Enterprise Performance Foundation
Oracle Financial Aid
* Oracle Financial Consolidation Hub
* Oracle Financials and Sales Analyzers
* Oracle Financials Intelligence
Oracle Funds Pricing
* Oracle Grants Proposal
* Oracle HR Intelligence
* Oracle Install Base Intelligence
* Oracle Interaction Center Intelligence
* Oracle Internal Controls Manager
* Oracle Manufacturing Scheduling (obsolete in release 12.2.5)
* Oracle Marketing Intelligence
* Oracle Operational Intelligence
Oracle Personal Portfolio
* Oracle Process Manufacturing Intelligence
* Oracle Procurement Intelligence
* Oracle Product Intelligence
* Oracle Product Lifecycle Management
* Oracle Profitability Manager
* Oracle Projects Intelligence
* Oracle Public Sector Budgeting
* Oracle Sales Intelligence
* Oracle Service Intelligence
** Oracle Student Recruiting
** Oracle Student Systems
* Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Intelligence
* Oracle Transportation Execution
* Oracle Transportation Planning
Web Analytics Daily Business Intelligence for iStore

* A migration plan exists for customers who have purchased these products in earlier releases. Contact your Sales Representative or Account Manager for more information.

** Customers continuing to use Oracle Student Recruiting and Oracle Student Systems should not upgrade to this release.

Support will be provided to existing customers on earlier releases, in accordance with the Oracle Lifetime Support Policy.

*** Oracle's Daily Business Intelligence (DBI), Balanced Scorecard (BSC), and Embedded Data Warehouse (EDW) are not offered with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2. Support will be provided to existing customers on Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.x, 12.0.x and older versions of DBI, BSC, and EDW according to Oracle's published lifetime support policies. For additional information, refer to My Oracle Support Knowledge <Document 1351505.1> DBI: Announcing the Desupport of Daily Business Intelligence (DBI), Balanced Scorecard (BSC), and Embedded Data Warehouse (EDW).

Product-Specific Considerations

The information in this section applies to specific applications products in this release.

Action: Review the Release Content Documents for information regarding other products that are active in your system. Refer to the Product Documentation List appendix in this guide for product-specific documentation.

Cross-Product Functionality

Changes to the products described in this section affect many Oracle Applications products. Before you begin the upgrade, your application specialists should have made plans to accommodate the relevant changes.

Legal Entity Configurator

The Oracle Legal Entity Configurator is a new module that was introduced in Release 12. It is populated with data that is migrated from a number of Release 11i sources. Its purpose is to provide a consistent definition of the legal structure of your enterprise and relate it to other structures within Oracle E-Business Suite.

With the Oracle Legal Entity Configurator, you can manage your legal corporate structure and track data from the legal perspective. This enables detailed reporting at the legal entity, establishment, and registration level.

The concept of Legal Entity has an impact on all customers who use the Human Resources model to define legal entities. Legal entities exist as Trading Community Architecture parties with legal information stored in the Legal Entity (XLE) data model. Subsidiaries of the legal entities are defined as establishments, which are also defined as parties with legal information stored in the Legal Entity data model.

Additional Information: See Oracle Financials Concepts for more information. See also Oracle Financials Implementation Guide.

GRE/Legal Entity Migration to Legal Entities in Trading Community Architecture

HRMS organizations with a classification of GRE/Legal Entity and with accounting information (for example, Set of Books) assigned are migrated to the new Legal Entity in this release. For each Legal Entity migrated, an Establishment of type (Main Establishment) is created using the same data.

Upgrade Assumptions for Operating Units and Inventory Organizations

HRMS organizations with an operating unit or inventory organization classification are migrated to Establishments in the new Legal Entity model. No other classification of organization other than operating unit or inventory organization classification is migrated as establishment.

Country-specific Information

For some countries (such as Argentina, Greece, Korea, Chile, Italy, Colombia, and Taiwan), VAT Registration Number was entered in Release 11i through the Human Resources Define Organization form, or a registration number was entered in country specific setup fields. These values are migrated to the Legal Entity Identifying Jurisdiction Registration Number. If no valid registration numbers exist, a dummy value of Sys + <Sequence number> is upgraded as the registration number and associated with the seeded Identifying Jurisdiction.

Legal Associations

To enable tax calculation based on existing parameters, the association between a GRE/Legal Entity and an operating unit, inventory organization, ship to location, bill to location are migrated. After the upgrade, you must maintain these associations through the Legal Entity Configurator.

Multiple Organizations (Multi-Org)

In this release, Multiple Organizations Access Control (MOAC) has made significant enhancements to the Multiple Organizations architecture that was used in Release 11i. If your company has implemented a Shared Services operating model, Multi-Org Access Control allows you to process business transactions more efficiently. You can access, process, and report on data across multiple operating units from a single responsibility without compromising data security or system performance.

Multi-Org Security Profile

The Multi-Org Security Profile allows you to access, process, and report on data for an unlimited number of operating units from a single applications responsibility. To take advantage of Multi-Org Access Control, you should set the following profile options:

The Release 11i MO: Operating Unit profile option setting is preserved, and applies if MO: Security Profile is not set.

Enhanced Cross-Organization Reporting

Cross-organization reporting has been enhanced to be more consistent with the new Multi-Org Access Control. You can run reports across multiple operating units that belong to a user's security profile that share the same ledger.  You can also run reports for any operating unit that belongs to a user's security profile.

Setting Up Operating Units

Setting up operating units is more streamlined with the integration with Accounting Setup Manager, a new feature in General Ledger that centralizes the setup and maintenance of common financial components, such as legal entities, operating units, and ledgers within an accounting setup.

All Release 11i HR Organizations classified as Operating Units are preserved during the upgrade. If operating units are assigned to a set of books, they are associated to a primary ledger in an accounting setup. You can now view all operating units assigned to an upgraded primary ledger using Accounting Setup Manager.

Student System and Student Recruiting

Important: Oracle Student System (IGS) and Oracle Student Recruiting (IGR) are not functional in this release. Customers using IGS and IGR should not upgrade to this release. There are no plans to provide an upgrade from Release 11i to Release 12 for IGS and IGR.

Multiple Organizations

Multiple Organizations architecture supports performance improvements across the E-Business Suite, as well as Multiple Organizations Access Control, which enables an Applications responsibility to access multiple operating units if desired. An upgrade requires the conversion of all Single Organization architecture systems to Multiple Organizations. You must define at least one operating unit and assign it to the MO:Operating Unit profile option.

Converting to Multiple Organizations does not require you to use multiple operating units or sets of books, but it does enable you to use these features if you desire. Converting to Multiple Organizations does not produce any noticeable change in behavior - if you do not define multiple operating units and/or sets of books, the conversion is transparent to users.

Additional Information: See Oracle E-Business Suite Multiple Organizations Implementation Guide. See also Use of Multiple Organizations (Multi-Org) in Release 11i (Doc ID: 210193.1)

Financials Upgrade Impact

The functional aspects of the upgrade described in this section are arranged by products within the Financials and Procurement product family.

Action: Review the product-specific Release Content Documents (RCDs) and TOI on My Oracle Support for additional information.

Subledger Accounting Model

Oracle Subledger Accounting provides a common accounting engine that replaces the existing accounting processes in the different subledgers. Consequently, the Subledger Accounting (SLA) upgrade consists of migrating the existing accounting data to ensure a continuous business operation between the two releases.

Depending on the business and the specific requirements, "existing accounting data" may have different implications for different customers. Additional information regarding the impact of the SLA upgrade on other products is provided in this section.

Multiple Reporting Currencies

Multiple reporting currency functionality has migrated to Reporting Currency functionality in the Oracle Subledger Accounting model. Oracle Subledger Accounting provides a single repository where you can view amounts in reporting currencies. Additional information is provided under General Ledger and SubLedger Accounting in this section.

About Business Impact and Functional Changes

An Applications upgrade alters both the technical and functional aspects of your Oracle E-Business Suite system. In addition to changes to the technology stack and file system, an upgrade also initiates specific changes that affect the way your existing products work after the upgrade and the way they look and feel.

Note: This section describes some of the ways in which the upgrade changes your existing products. Oracle assumes that you have read about the new features and products delivered in this release that are included in the product-specific Release Content Documents (RCDs) and TOI, on My Oracle Support.

The discussions of the functional aspects of the upgrade in this section are arranged by products within the Financials and Procurement product family.

Additional Information: See Oracle Financials and Oracle Procurement Functional Upgrade Guide: Release 11i to Release 12 for more information about upgrading your Financials and Procurement products.

Financials and Procurement Products

Changes to the products in this section affect Financials and Procurement products. Before you begin the upgrade, your Financials and Procurement application specialists should have made plans to accommodate the relevant changes.

Advanced Collections

Changes to Oracle Advanced Collections in the upgrade are described in this section.

Additional Information: See Oracle Advanced Collections Implementation Guide for more information.

Administrator UI Redesign

This release introduces a new user interface for entering and maintaining Advanced Collections setup data.

Territory Management Collection Usage

This release introduces a collection usage in the Territory Management application specifically for Advanced Collections. A manual territory migration script has been created to move collection "sales usage" territories to collection "collection usage" territories. This migration is mandatory if you want to assign collection agents/groups to customers using Territory Management.

The IEX: Territory Assignment concurrent program has been rewritten to accommodate the new collection usage. See the Oracle Territory Management User Guide and the Oracle Advanced Collections Implementation Guide for further details.

Collector Migration

This release displays Advanced Collection menus in the Receivables navigator. An automated script runs during the upgrade to create resources from collectors. In some cases, where the script cannot determine an appropriate resource, it does not create one. If you find that the Collector Navigator menu pages do not work after the upgrade, create the resource manually.

Multiple Level Strategy Support

Advanced Collections allows you to define different strategy levels by Operating Unit separate from the System level. The strategy levels can also be overridden at the Party level. Advanced Collections supports the setting for certain Operating Units by Dunning and certain Operating Units by Strategy.

Stage Dunning Support

Advanced Collections supports the Staged Dunning method separate from the Days Overdue method. In addition, while creating Overdue Dunning Plans, you can specify the Include Current, Include Disputed Items, Include Unapplied Receipts, and Use Grace Days options.

Collections Manager Functionality

Collections Manager functionality has been rewritten using OA Framework which allows sorting and filtering for a particular account.

New Scoring Engines

A new scoring engine is seeded with Pre-delinquency status at Invoice level. In addition, a Quick scoring engine has been added that only processes invoices closed in the last 60 days rather than all invoices. You can test the Scoring Engine for a particular account from the Collections Scoring Admin window rather than running the batch program to verify the score engine setup.

Strategy Improvements

Advanced Collections allows editing of 'To be created' work items. The 'To be created' work items in the current strategy can be overwritten with new Pre-wait/Post-waits and Collector without creating new work items.

Assets

Changes to Oracle Assets in the upgrade are described in this section.

Subledger Accounting

The new Subledger Accounting Architecture upgrade changes Oracle Assets in the following way.

Additional Information: See Oracle Subledger Accounting Implementation Guide and Oracle Financials Implementation Guide.

Invoice Distributions from Oracle Payables

Invoice distributions from Oracle Payables that interface to Assets are upgraded to display the Invoice Line Number.

Global Descriptive Flexfield Migration for Greece

Information stored in descriptive flexfields for Greece that are commitment and investment law is upgraded to named fields in the Asset Workbench.

Cash Management

Cash Management changes in the upgrade are described in this section. See Legal Entity Configurator under Cross-Product Functionality in Chapter 1 for more information.

Centralized Banks and Accounts

The new centralized bank account model provides a single point for defining and managing internal bank accounts for Oracle Payables, Oracle Receivables, Oracle Payroll, Oracle Cash Management, and Oracle Treasury. A single legal entity is granted ownership of each internal bank account, and one or more organizations are granted usage rights. In addition, banks and branches are migrated to the Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA) and defined as parties.

Bank Branches are merged if the following attributes are the same:

During the upgrade, Cash Management grants ownership of each internal bank account to one legal entity. The owning legal entity is derived from the organization that owns it in Release 11i.

Internal Bank Account Security

In Release 11i, bank accounts were used by a single operating unit, and operating unit security was used to control the maintenance of these accounts. In the new model, bank accounts can be accessed by multiple operating units, but are owned by a single legal entity. Therefore, the bank account maintenance security, which secures the create and update of bank accounts, was moved to the legal entity level. Using the new security wizard, you can grant each responsibility access to create and modify bank accounts owned by one or more legal entities.

During the upgrade, Cash Management sets the Bank Account Maintenance security for each responsibility that had access to the bank account forms in Release 11i. For each of these responsibilities, a legal entity is derived from the organization that the responsibility had access to in Release 11i. The responsibility is then granted bank account maintenance security for this legal entity.

System Parameters

In order to provide more flexibility and control over the reconciliation process, many of the options that used to be defined as system parameters at the system level (operating unit) have been moved to the bank account level. By placing these controls at the bank account level, both the manual and automatic reconciliation processes can be configured depending on the bank account and its uses. In addition, the remaining system parameter options and controls from Release 11i are defined at the legal entity level in this release.

Contract Lifecycle Management

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is a new product in this release for federal government customers. Customers using the traditional Federal Purchasing can upgrade to CLM in Release 12.2.

Oracle E-Business Suite Tax

Oracle E-Business Suite Tax covers “standard” procure to pay and order to cash transaction taxes, with the exception of withholding taxes, India taxes, and those taxes handled by the Latin Tax Engine solution. It is based on a single-point solution for managing transaction-based tax, which uniformly delivers tax services to all E-Business Suite business flows through one application interface.

Oracle E-Business Suite Tax replaces the following Oracle Release 11i tax solutions:

This fully automated upgrade ensures that your current investment in Release 11i Tax Setup is not lost, and you can implement new features at a pace that best suits your business. Additional data is automatically created using a predefined naming strategy.

Additional Information: See Oracle Financials and Oracle Procurement Functional Upgrade Guide: Release 11i to Release 12.

In current applications, tax functions are typically executed by the operational application, for example, the Accounts Payable clerks perform the definition of tax rules in Payables. In this release, the responsibility of tax setup should be shifted to the tax manager. All transactions and events where a respective tax rule is relevant are serviced by Oracle E-Business Tax.

See the following product sections for more information on product-specific impact on E-Business Tax upgrade:

Financials for the Americas

Changes to Oracle Financials for the Americas are included in this section.

Receivables Bank Transfer

The Latin American Receivables Bank Transfer feature stores amounts for additional accounting entries over standard Oracle Receivables accounting. These amounts are stored at the time the documents are sent to a bank for collection and when the bank sends information about the collection from the customers. Subledger Accounting, bank consolidation and legal entity key initiatives also impact this feature.

Several forms have been modified to include the Operating Unit field. The global descriptive flexfields on the Bank Branches and Bank Accounts forms are available as standard fields on the Global Receipt Method Accounts form.

In this release, to create account data in Subledger Accounting, you execute a concurrent program (Create Accounting) from the Standard Request Submission (SRS) request screen using the Receivables responsibility. It creates subledger accounting for all Receivables transactions, including the Bank Transfer collection documents. You can view and transfer data to General Ledger from the Receivables responsibility.

Latin Tax Engine

E-Business Tax in this release does not replace the Latin Tax Engine. However, the Release 11i Latin Tax Engine is upgraded to use some of the E-Business Tax and Trading Community Architecture setup.

These options are upgraded to E-Business Tax under the Product Options page flow: Tax System Options in the Receivables System Options window (Tax Method, Tax Code, Inclusive Tax Used flag), and Tax System Options / Rounding Options (Reporting Currency, Precision, Minimum Accountable Unit, Allow Override, and Rounding Rule).

In Release 11i, a default Tax Code and Tax Rounding Rule can be assigned to customers, customer accounts, and customer account site uses in Trading Community Architecture. The setup at the customer level has been moved to Oracle E-Business Tax's Party Tax Profile page flow, which is linked to the Customers page flow. The setup at customer accounts and account site uses levels have been preserved for backward compatibility purposes.

The Latin Tax engine setup forms for Latin Locations, Tax Exceptions by Fiscal Classification, and Tax Exceptions by Items now use the new Trading Community Architecture geography model for picking and showing the location elements instead of the lookup codes.

An Item Category set (FISCAL CLASSIFICATION) is created in Inventory and the values of the Global Descriptive Flexfield (GDF) attribute Fiscal Classification on inventory items are upgraded as a category assignment to the items.

The GDF attribute (Fiscal Classification Code) on the Memo Lines form is disabled and the value is migrated to the Product Category attribute on the same form.

Tax Regime Code, Tax, and Tax Status code fields are added in the Tax Codes form. The Latin Tax Engine's Tax Category attribute value is now the value of the Tax attribute on the Tax Codes form.

Withholding Agent

The Latin American Extended Withholding has a setup step called Company Withholding Applicability, where existing legal entity (or entities) can be selected and defined as the withholding agent for one or more withholding types. In Release 11i, HR Locations were displayed for selection. In this release, legal entities upgraded and/or defined in the new legal entity flow are displayed for selection on the Latin American Company Applicability form. This change has very little impact on setting up Company Withholding.

Brazilian Receivables Interest

Multiple Organizations Access Control requires the Latin American profile option JLBR_PAYMENT_ACTION to be upgraded to a named column, which has an impact on the Oracle Receivables interest solution for Brazil. This profile option value has moved to the Payment Action GDF attribute on the System Options form in Receivables.

Colombian NIT

The GDF attribute Third Party ID value on the Enter Journals form is upgraded to the attribute Third Party on the same form.

Chilean Reporting

The GDF Document Type attribute value on the Payables Invoice Workbench form is upgraded to the attribute Intended Use on the same form.

Obsolete Features

The following features are obsolete:

Financials for Asia/Pacific

Changes to Oracle Financials for the Asia/Pacific are included in this section.

Legal Entity for Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan

Legal entity information such as name and tax registration number that are defined as Human Resources (HR) locations associated to HR organizations in Release 11i are created in the centralized legal entity model in this release using the same legal entity definition. To define new legal entity information, or to modify definitions created after the upgrade, you must use the new Legal Entity Configurator.

Tax Setup for Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (non-withholding)

Non-withholding tax codes setup (for example, Value Added Tax (VAT), Goods and Services Tax (GST), Input and Output taxes) defined in Payables Tax Codes and/or Receivables VAT Taxes windows, are upgraded to the Oracle E-Business Tax model. To define new taxes or modify the upgraded ones, you must use the new Regime to Rates.

Korean Withholding Taxes

Business locations and respective tax registration numbers that are not legal addresses can still be defined as HR locations for tax reporting purposes. Withholding tax codes continue to be defined through the Tax Codes window in Oracle Payables.

Taiwanese Government Uniform Invoices

Government Uniform Invoice Type is upgraded to the Document Subtype classification model in Oracle E-Business Tax. Document Subtype can be entered through the Payables Invoice Workbench and Receivables Transaction Workbench using the Tax window. The Source and Types Relationships window is obsolete.

China Accounting Software Data Interface Standard (CNAO)

The following changes apply to the China Accounting Software Date Interface Standard solution for Release 12.1.1.

Financials Common Country Features

Changes to Oracle Financials Common Country Features are described in this section.

Contra Charges

The Contra charges feature is obsolete in this release. It is being replaced by the new Netting solution introduced in the Oracle Financials Common Modules product. The upgrade migrates the setup, but not the transactions to the new solution.

Additional Information: See Financials Common Modules in this chapter for more information.

Interest Invoices

The Interest Invoices feature is obsolete in this release. The new Late Charges feature introduced in the Oracle Receivables product replaces it.

Additional Information: See Receivables in this chapter for more information.

Financials Common Modules

Advanced Global Intercompany System

Oracle Advanced Global Intercompany System (AGIS) is a new module that allows companies to streamline intercompany processing and facilitates the reconciliation of intercompany transactions. It replaces the Global Intercompany System (GIS) feature provided by General Ledger in Release 11i.

All setup and transaction data is moved to a new data model, and all Oracle forms in the Global Intercompany System are replaced by browser-based user interface pages.

Changes include:

Payables and Receivables Netting

In Release 11i Oracle Financials had three netting solutions: Single Third Party in Oracle Public Sector Financials International Contra Charging in Oracle Financials for Europe, and Receivables and Payables Netting in Oracle U.S. Federal Financials. These are all replaced in this release with the Netting functionality of the Oracle Financials Common Modules.

Setup related to Contra Charging and Receivables and Payables Netting features in Release 11i is migrated in the following way:

Financials for Europe

Changes to Oracle Financials for Europe are included in this section.

EMEA VAT Reporting

The EMEA Value Added Tax (VAT) Reporting feature migrates VAT reporting solutions for EMEA in Release 11i to this release. This migration eliminates any existing country specific restriction with improvement wherever possible.

Consolidation of Country-specific Reports

There are many country-specific reports in Release 11i that are very similar in their data requirements. EMEA VAT reporting consolidates such reports to retrieve the required data from a single extract implementing XML Publisher technology. All reports are converted into templates and, therefore, allow more flexibility for specific formatting requirements.

E-Business Tax-based Reporting

The basics of tax definition change from Release 11i with the introduction of Oracle E-Business Tax. EMEA VAT reporting now includes E-Business Tax for the reporting requirements.

The attribute Tax Registration Number (TRN) for legal establishment becomes very significant for tax reporting with E-Business Tax. A central reporting configuration by TRN consolidates definition of allocation rules, VAT register, and other configuration attributes into a single setup, referred to as the legal reporting entities.

This release also provides the option of reporting by ledger or balancing segment to support proper reporting of historical transactions. To use this reporting by accounting entities option, you must map the entities to a TRN in order to derive VAT related setups that may apply.

Architecture Changes

As a result of the upgrade, you can move from an accounting setup that includes only one GRE/legal entity to an accounting setup with multiple GRE/legal entities by assigning additional legal entities at any time. If you add additional legal entities to an upgraded accounting setup during a reporting period (for example, calendar year for tax report), reports run by a legal entity parameter do not return complete history for legal entities. Reporting by legal entities helps report the set of transactions in these scenarios.

This release introduces a single Financials Common Country (JG) table for storing tax-related data retrieved from the Tax Reporting Ledger (TRL) and other core tables. This entity gets its data through the selection process, which is the only process to access TRL. Extracts retrieve their data from this JG entity. This enhances the performance of each extract and encapsulates all business logic around TRL only in the selection process.

There are a few extracts that report non-tax details of transactions along with the tax details. They are based directly on the Payables and Receivables core application tables, as TRL processes only tax details. However, these non-JG (non-TRL) extracts are still based on the setup configuration to derive the right data.

Reporting Process Changes

Allocation is an independent process. It encapsulates the Release 11i business logic around Belgium and Portugal allocation.

Final reporting is also an independent process. After final reporting, data in the single JG table cannot be modified. This has an interface with E-Business Tax, through which transactions are updated as finally reported in the E-Business Tax repository. This process along with the JG tax entity provides the framework for preliminary and final reporting. This process encompasses the declaration functionality of Release 11i.

Financials for India

The following descriptive flexfields have been replaced with alternate approaches:

General Ledger

Oracle General Ledger has made significant enhancements to support multi-national companies and shared service centers. These changes allow companies to maximize processing efficiencies while maintaining a high level of information and setup security.

You can perform simultaneous accounting for multiple reporting requirements. Companies can also gain processing efficiencies by being able to set up, access, and process data across multiple ledgers and legal entities from a single responsibility. In addition, General Ledger definitions and setup definitions, such as MassAllocations and Financial Statement Generator (FSG) reports, can be more easily shared and secured across your organization by allowing you to restrict certain users from viewing or updating those definitions or using them in processes.

Many global features that were only available in localized versions have been included in General Ledger to allow more customers to take advantage of these features.

Terminology Changes

Note the following changes in the terminology related to General Ledger.

Centralized Accounting Setup

The new Accounting Setup Manager simplifies and centralizes accounting-related setup for common financial components that are shared across financial applications. From a central location, you can define your legal entities and their accounting context, such as the ledgers and reporting currencies that perform the accounting for your legal entities.

Accounting Setup Manager allows global companies that operate in different localities to meet multiple reporting requirements through the use of multiple ledgers and reporting currencies.

Sets of Books

Multiple Reporting Currency

Some Release 11i options for reporting sets of books have been moved to the reporting currency definition. For example, many MRC profile options have been moved to the reporting currency definition.

Many options for a set of books that were independently defined for the primary and reporting sets of books have been streamlined. In addition, many of the ledger options for the reporting currency default from the primary ledger. The upgrade for MRC sets of books varies depending on the current configuration and conversion options you specify.

Global Accounting Engine

Single posting sets of books with multiple main sets of books upgrade to multiple primary ledgers that share the same secondary ledger.

Period Rates Replaced by Daily Rates

Period rates are replaced with daily rates.

Revaluation

General Ledger modifies revaluation templates to use corresponding daily rates for those that used period rates prior to the upgrade. No user interaction is required.

Revaluation sets are now usable across ledgers that share a common chart of accounts. In some cases, you may need to enter the secondary tracking segment for revaluation sets involving a secondary tracking segment before running revaluations with upgraded templates.

STAT Report-level Currency for Financial Statement Generator Reports

The report-level and runtime currencies for Financial Statement Generator reports now need to represent the ledger currency. If you need to report on statistical balances, modify report definitions to use the STAT currency at the row-level or column-level or use currency control values for the STAT currency.

Global Accounting Engine

In this release, Oracle Global Accounting Engine functionality is obsolete. Both the existing setup options and all the accounting data of Global Accounting is migrated to Oracle Subledger Accounting.

Internet Expenses

Changes to Oracle Internet Expenses are described in this section.

Itemization

Internet Expenses can represent the parent-child relationship of an itemized expense line by creating a new parent line with a unique parent identifier.

Integration with Payments

Integration with Oracle Payments takes advantage of encryption capabilities. Credit card transaction data has been moved to Payment's secure data payment central repository. See Payments in this chapter for more information.

Per Diem and Mileage

Per diem and mileage transaction data is not migrated. However, data that existed before the upgrade remains intact. Mileage and per diem setup data is automatically upgraded.

Expense reports that were created prior to the upgrade display information in a pre-Oracle Internet Expenses minipack (11i.OIE.K) format. Newly created expense reports use the new user interface.

Integration with E-Business Tax

The integration with Oracle E-Business Tax has no direct tax upgrade impact. Tax lines run through Oracle Payables. See Oracle Payments documentation for details.

iPayment

Oracle iPayment is obsolete In this release, and is replaced by Oracle Payments. See Payments in this chapter for more information.

iProcurement

Changes to Oracle iProcurement are described in this section.

Catalog Management

Oracle iProcurement provides catalog administrators online authoring capability for content stored in global blanket agreements (GBPA). The existing batch upload process continues to be optimized for handling large catalog data file uploads. It is also available for buyers (from the new Buyer's Work Center) and for suppliers (from the iSupplier Portal).

Bulk-loaded items in iProcurement are migrated to newly created GBPAs. The extractor is obsolete, and the catalog content is updated in real time.

Note: Oracle recommends that you complete the approval process for any agreement pending approval before you begin the catalog upgrade. The content of the approved agreements is available on the iProcurement search page after the upgrade.

Content Security

Release 11i functionality for Realms, Stores, and Catalogs has been combined and is collectively referred to as enhancements in Content Security. In this release, Content Zones have replaced Catalogs.

Catalog administrators can partition local catalog content into Local Content Zones based on items' supplier, supplier site, item category, and browsing category information. Once defined, Content Zones may be made accessible to users with specific responsibilities or operating units. Content Zones may be assigned to multiple stores, and stores may contain multiple Content Zones.

iSupplier Portal

In Releases 11.5.10, iSupplier Portal used Trading Community Architecture to store pending change requests in supplier address and supplier contacts. In this release, these pending change requests are moved into a set of iSupplier Portal tables.

See the iSupplier Portal section in Oracle Financials and Oracle Procurement Functional Upgrade Guide: Release 11i to Release 12 for the assumptions made during the upgrade.

Lease and Finance Management

Improved Legal Entity Definition

Derivation of Legal Entity from Operating Unit

This release introduces Legal Entity to be defined and used in the transactions. Legal entity is associated with the Operating Unit. During the transaction entry, Legal entity is derived based on the operating unit. However, you are provided with the option to change as needed.

During the upgrade:

Simplify Statutory Compliance for Taxes

This release introduces changes to the Lease and Finance Management tax engine, setup, and its integration to eBTax.

Upgrade Tax Setup

User-defined Fiscal Classification and Tax Basis Override setup steps are upgraded to use the 'Sales Quote' transaction type in place of the 'Quoting' transaction type.

Upgrade tax source to include tax attributes. Upgrade tax lines - additional attributes are added to tax lines such as TAX_LINE_NUMBER, TAX_REGIME_CODE, TAX, TAX_JURISDICTION_TYPE, TAX_JURISDICTION set the values for these columns.

Migrate Transaction Business Category definitions setup data to new entity OKL_TAX_ATTRIBUTE_DEFINITIONS.

Upgrade Contracts and Transactions

Upgrade existing contracts to assign default value for 'Tax Schedule Applies' Flag. The value is defaulted from system options setup defined for contract's Operating Unit.

Cancel all Rebook transactions that have not been completed. Cancel all termination quotes in draft, rejected, and submitted status.

Set TAX_INVOICE_YN flag on the transaction types table to 'Y' for the following transaction types:

Upgrade existing pre-booking transactions for contracts that have not been booked. Try_id for such transactions is changed to try_id of 'Booking' transaction.

Upgrade status of existing Asset Location Change transactions from 'Entered' to 'Processed'.

Upgrade Asset Location Change transactions Lines table. Tal_type for Asset Location Change transactions is upgraded from 'CFA' to 'AGL' and dnz_cle_id of okl_txl_inst_items is upgraded to appropriate value for relevant Asset Location Change transactions.

Upgrade Asset Location Change Transaction header table. Transaction type of header table is updated from 'CFA' to 'ALG' and truncates date transaction occurred for relevant Asset Location Change transactions.

For each Asset Location Change transaction, a request is created in the transaction requests table and Asset Location Change transaction is updated with the corresponding request id.

Integration with eBTax

Include existing values of 'Usage of Equipment' field under Sales and Authoring to eBTax Source for 'Intended Use'. Upgrade 'Intended Use for Tax” field in Sales, with existing value of 'Usage of Equipment'.

Migrate the following upfront tax lines to eBTax:

Enhanced Accounting

Integration with Subledger Accounting (SLA)

This release introduces Oracle Subledger Accounting (SLA) to manage accounting across subledger transactions. Lease and Finance Management no longer creates accounting entries. Existing Lease and Finance Management accounting options and setup remains, and affects the generation of accounting distributions in the Lease and Finance Management data model. However, the accounting distributions are now simply one of many sources for the generation of final accounting in the Subledger Accounting module.

During the upgrade:

Consistent Accounting Transaction Status

In order to achieve consistency and ensure data integrity between accounting events and accounting transactions, the specific loss provision, general loss provision, miscellaneous and accrual accounting transactions are upgraded with the transaction status of Processed from Entered.

In this release, Lease and Finance Management introduces separation between the termination accounting transaction status and the termination process status. During the upgrade, the termination process status is set to Processed if accounting entries have been generated for the termination transaction. If accounting entries are not generated, then the termination process status is migrated and set with the appropriate intermediate existing status.

Centralized Accounting Transaction Repository

In this release, all Asset Disposition accounting transactions are automatically migrated to the central accounting transactions entity.

Account Derivation Accounting System Option

This release introduces the Account Derivation accounting system option which is used by Lease and Finance Management to determine if General Ledger account codes must be defined on the accounting template lines. The Account Derivation accounting system option governs whether the account codes, if defined in Lease and Finance Management on the accounting template lines, are supplied as additional accounting sources for generation of final accounting in the Subledger Accounting module.

During the upgrade, Lease and Finance Management sets the value of the Account Derivation accounting system option as Accounting Template Set.

Improved Disbursements and Payables

Lease and Finance Management Disbursement transaction tables must be upgraded - if amounts were negative, invoice type would be Credit Memo.

This release introduces new consolidation tables which need to be populated with consolidation data based on existing data in transaction tables and Oracle Payables invoice header and lines. The link between transaction tables and Oracle Payables invoice header and line tables must also be upgraded. Additionally, Oracle Payables internal transaction tables are upgraded to maintain a new link between transaction tables and AR invoice.

oklupdpassthrupaydate.sql:

This script updates the contracts having NULL pass-through pay start date. It updates the pass-through pay start date with the Effective from date of Fee/Service.

oklcrctptpaygrouppmntterm.sql:

This script identifies contracts having NULL pay group or payment term for base and evergreen pass-through terms, and updates those values based on supplier and supplier site setup. If the supplier setup does not exist, then it defaults the pay group and payment term appropriately.

Manage Shared Services Efficiently

Multiple Organization Access Control (MOAC)

This release allows multiple operating units for a responsibility. This is achieved by attaching allowed operating units to a security policy and further attach to a responsibility. New synonyms were created and secured by the security policy. This has resulted in changes to many objects.

During the upgrade, the following scripts are used to achieve this:

View Leasing Information on Payable Invoices and Vendor Disbursement Details and Support Supplier Merge into TCA

Upgrade of Payable Bank Accounts

In this release, payable maintained bank accounts are obsolete. Bank accounts are distributed between Cash Management (CE) and Oracle Payments (IBY). Cash Management maintains Internal Bank Accounts. Oracle Payments maintains External Bank Accounts, Contract Party, T&C, VPA, IA, and Billing Setup for Asset. Same Rule reference is used LABACC, IBY upgrade instance.

Leasing uses external bank accounts (maintained by Oracle Payables) only. Queries to retrieve bank account information must be modified to join with IBY tables to retrieve correct information.

Improved Document Creation with XML Publisher

In this release, XML publisher is used for sending documents. The process template associations already created by the customer for one-to-one fulfillment must be upgraded to be used by XML Publisher. This is achieved by upgrading the Process Templates table. Upgrade the value of the XML_TMPLT_CODE to the corresponding seeded Template Code of the process. RECIPIENT_TYPE will be updated to LESSEE for every record.

Improved Customer Billing

Invoices created in Oracle Receivables through Lease and Finance Management must be upgraded to the new architecture by stamping the Leasing Transaction ID on the invoices. With the Lease and Finance Management Advance Receipts made obsolete, the existing and unutilized stream allocations in Lease and Finance Management will be migrated as on-account applications for the corresponding receipt in Oracle Receivables.

Transaction tables will be upgraded to add additional columns, currently hosted in the consolidation and external tables. The data for these additional columns in the transaction tables will be populated from the equivalent records in the Lease and Finance Management consolidation and external tables. Two level billing transactions are upgraded to three level billing transactions by creating an entry in details table for all records in the lines table.

oklupdinvfrmtid.sql:

This script upgrades the contract billing invoice format rules and replaces the invoice format information from name to id.

Automatic Multi-GAAP

Secondary Representation Method Accounting System Option

This release introduces the Secondary Representation Method accounting system option which is used by Lease and Finance Management to determine whether to generate secondary representation accounting transactions and accounting distributions, or not.

During the upgrade, Lease and Finance Management sets the value of the Secondary Representation Method accounting system option, if not already set to Automated Accounting during the 11i pre-upgrade step, as follows:

Representation Type Transaction Attribute

In this release, Lease and Finance Management introduces the Representation Type attribute on the accounting transactions entity. Lease and Finance Management uses the Representation Type attribute while displaying accounting transactions on the Accounting Transactions user interface to identify the accounting transactions belonging to the selected representation.

During the upgrade, Lease and Finance Management sets the value of the Representation Type attribute to Primary for all accounting transaction headers.

Accrued Stream Elements Indicator

During the upgrade, Lease and Finance Management sets the value of the Accrued Yes/No stream element indicator on the stream element entity to Yes, up to the date until which the contract's local product stream elements are accrued. The stream elements which are upgraded, are those:

Loans

During the upgrade, Oracle Loans accounting functionality is migrated automatically to Subledger Accounting, and other common data model components.

Integration with Payables and Payments for Loan Disbursement

This release introduces Oracle Payments. It is used by Oracle Payables and Oracle Loans for processing loan payments. Loans creates a payment request in Payables, which, in turn, disburses funds through Oracle Payments.

Integration with Subledger Accounting

This release introduces Subledger Accounting for managing accounting across subledger transactions. Oracle Loans no longer creates any accounting entries. During the upgrade, accounting options and their settings, and the existing accounting entries in the loans data model, are moved to the new accounting data model to ensure a continuous business operation between the two releases. All Loans accounting lines related to the transactions are also migrated.

In Release 11i, accounting entries were created in the General Ledger Interface when a loan was approved. The process remains the same, except that the accounting events are created for Subledger Accounting to process. You must run the Create Accounting concurrent program manually or on a scheduled basis to generate journal entries and to transfer them to Oracle General Ledger. Accounting on individual loans can also be created real time from the Loan Accounting Tab.

Loan Types and Products

The Release 11i Loan Type lookup is obsolete. In this release, you can use Loan Types, along with loan products, to streamline the loan agents' application process while enforcing company policy across agents and applicants.

Some of the defaulting parameters are:

In the upgrade, seeded loan types are migrated to the loan types entity. You must set up product(s) as per the deploying company's organization with the upgraded loan types, based on your company requirements.

The Loan Type lookup is obsolete. For verification, query loan types in the loan types user interface from the loan administration responsibility.

Payables

This release introduces Oracle Subledger Accounting, E-Business Tax, Ledgers, Banks, and other common data model components that are used by Oracle Payables.

Suppliers in Trading Community Architecture

Suppliers are now defined as TCA Parties. During the upgrade, TCA Party records are created/updated for all suppliers, they are linked to their records in the existing supplier entities, and the payment and banking details are migrated into the Oracle Payments data model. Although the underlying data model has changed, you still enter and manage suppliers in the Suppliers windows.

Invoice Lines

Oracle Payables introduces invoice lines as an entity between the invoice header and invoice distributions. With the new model, the invoice header remains unchanged, and continues to store information about the supplier who sent the invoice, the invoice attributes, and remittance information.

Invoice lines represent the goods (direct or indirect materials), service(s), and/or associated tax/freight/miscellaneous charges invoiced. Invoice distributions store the accounting, allocation and other detail information that makes up the invoice line. The charge allocation table used in prior releases to manage accounting allocations is obsolete.

During the upgrade, Oracle Payables creates invoice lines for all existing invoices, creating one line for every distribution available in the Release 11i distributions table, except in the case of reversal pairs. In those cases, Payables creates one line with a zero amount.

Centralized Banks and Bank Accounts Definitions

All internal banks and bank accounts that you had defined in Release 11i are automatically migrated to the central Cash Management entities. The bank accounts and their payment documents are owned by a legal entity rather than by an operating unit. See Cash Management in this chapter for more information.

Also, the banks and bank branches are centralized in Cash Management entities as described in the preceding paragraph. However, the bank accounts you had defined for your suppliers are migrated from the Payables entities to the central Payments entities. Payments centralizes and secures all payment instrument data, including external bank accounts, credit cards, and debit cards. See Payments in this chapter for more information.

Payment Document Sequencing

If you used document sequencing for payment documents in Release 11i, then your document sequence category is migrated from the payment document, which is associated with a bank account and, hence a legal entity, to the bank account uses entity. This change preserves the option of having document sequence categories vary across operating units.

Integration with Payments for Funds Disbursements

Oracle Payments can be used by Oracle Payables for processing invoice payments. See Payments in this chapter for more information.

Payment Features Controlled by Global Descriptive Flexfields

Many European payment features that were implemented using global descriptive flexfields in Release 11i are migrated to the Oracle Payables, Oracle Payments, and Oracle Cash Management data models.

Integration with Subledger Accounting (SLA)

This release introduces Oracle Subledger Accounting (SLA) to manage accounting across subledger transactions. Payables no longer creates any accounting entries. During the upgrade, accounting options and their settings, and the existing accounting entries in the Payables data model, are moved to the new SLA accounting data model to ensure a continuous business operation between the two releases.

During the upgrade, all accounting events, headers, and lines from the Release 11i data model are upgraded to the new Subledger Accounting events, headers, and lines data model, regardless of the period range you set for the upgrade.

Integration with E-Business Tax

Oracle E-Business Tax manages tax across the E-Business Suite. In prior releases, the setup, defaulting, and calculation of tax for Payables was managed within Payables using tax codes, their associated rates, and a hierarchy of defaulting options. This method is still available in this release. During the upgrade, E-Business Tax migrates the tax codes as appropriate within E-Business Tax so that your tax processing can work the same way after the upgrade as it did before.

New fields are added to the supplier, invoice, and invoice lines entities to track tax attributes used by E-Business Tax. Many of these attributes were implemented with global descriptive flexfields in prior releases and are upgraded to regular fields on these entities.

Payments

In this release, the Oracle E-Business Suite introduces Oracle Payments, a highly configurable and robust engine to disburse and receive payments. In addition to new features, Oracle Payments offers functionality previously released as Oracle iPayment, which is now obsolete.

Configurable Formatting and Validations Framework

Oracle Payments provides a new formatting solution based on standard XML technology. In previous releases, payment formats required creation in proprietary Oracle reports technology. In this release, formats are created as templates in Oracle XML Publisher, and applied to an XML data file produced by Oracle Payments.

The upgrade transforms each payment format that Oracle Payments supports into two entities: an XML Publisher template and a Payments seeded format. The seeded format is linked to the template. Logic to validate the formatted data has been separated from the format programs, and is upgraded to a prepackaged library of validations. These validations are linked to the seeded Payments format, and are executed during the payment process.

Secure Payment Data Repository

Oracle Payments serves as a payment data repository on top of the Trading Community Architecture data model. This common repository for payment data provides improved data security by allowing central encryption management and masking control of payment instrument information.

The upgrade moves party information into Oracle Trading Community Architecture. The party's payment information and all payment instruments (such as credit cards and bank accounts) are moved into Oracle Payments. Party payment information moves from entities such as customers, students, and Global Descriptive Flexfields and is created as a payer record in Oracle Payments and linked to the party. Party payment information moves from entities such as suppliers and Global Descriptive Flexfields and is created as a payee record in Oracle Payments, again linked to the party. Third-party (customer and supplier) bank accounts held in the Oracle Payables bank account model are migrated to Oracle Payments and linked to the owning payer or payee. Third-party credit card detail is migrated from the Payables data model and applications such as Order Management into Oracle Payments' data repository.

Credit card data held in the following products in Release 11i is migrated to Oracle Payments:

Improved Electronic Transmission Capability

Oracle Payments provides secured electronic payment file and payment message transmission and transmission result processing, replacing previously existing electronic transmission features in Oracle iPayment, Oracle Payables, and globalizations. The transmission feature in Oracle Payables was simply a framework to support a customization, so the automatic upgrade cannot migrate this information. If you are using the Payables transmission architecture, you should review Oracle Payments' electronic transmission capability and plan on replacing your customization.

Payables Impact

The process to issue payments from Oracle Payables changes in this release to use the new Oracle Payments funds disbursement process. The changes impact other versions of Payables such as U.S. Federal Financials and country-specific globalizations.

Some of the key areas of impact are:

The upgrade uses various data from Oracle Payables to create the new Payment Process Profiles. Since this entity is so central to the funds disbursement process, an overview of the upgrade process is provided here.

For each Payables payment program that is linked to a format definition, one Oracle XML Publisher template is created and linked to one Oracle Payments format. In Oracle Payables, you can create different format definitions linked to the same payment program. So for each Payables format definition, the upgrade creates one Payment Process Profile linked to the Oracle Payments format.

A key part of the payment process profile is the usage rules. Values set here control when a profile can be assigned to a document for routing through the payment process. There are four categories of usage rules:

Another important part of the payment process profile is its link to a payment system and its setup. This information is upgraded based on values set in globalizations and should be understood for payment processing in those countries.

Receivables Impact

Oracle Receivables integrates with Oracle Payments for funds capture processing to electronically receive money owed by debtors, such as customers. Oracle Payments works with Receivables to authorize and capture funds against credit cards, process refunds to credit cards, perform electronic funds transfers from bank accounts, and to format bills receivable. Note that Oracle Receivables retains its existing features for lockbox processing and the electronic upload of remittance messages. Globalization formats and features in this payments area also move to Oracle Payments.

Some of the key areas of impact are:

The upgrade uses various data from Oracle Receivables to create these entities. Since these entities are so central to the funds capture process, an overview of the upgrade process is provided here.

For each of the formats that are upgraded from Receivables or globalizations to Oracle Payments, one Oracle XML Publisher template is created and linked to one Oracle Payments format. A Funds Capture Process Profile is created and the format is linked to the profile.

Other entities are created by the upgrade: 1) one payee to hold master settings for the funds capture payment process; 2) one payment system; and 3) one payment system account.

The upgrade creates new routing rules from Receivables setup. Routing rules are created from each receipt class that has an automatic creation method. For each of these receipt classes, the upgrade creates a routing rule for each combination of the receipt class remittance method, its internal bank account, and the organization derived from the bank account.

iPayment Impact

Oracle iPayment is obsolete In this release, and is replaced by the Oracle Payments architecture. Some of the key entities described in the previous section are used in the funds capture process. They existed in iPayment with the exception of the Funds Capture Process Profile. It holds the processing rules for transactions.

For each iPayment-supported format, the upgrade creates one Oracle XML Publisher template and links it to one Oracle Payments format. A Funds Capture Process Profile is created and the format is linked to the profile. The settings on the process profile are based on various settings in configuration and servlet files.

New seed data is created for the transmission protocols supported by Oracle Payments and the protocols are specified on the payment system setup. This data is also set based on configuration files. The upgrade creates transmission configurations that use the protocols. These transmission configurations are specified on the funds capture process profiles. New payment system accounts are created that hold settings previously held in configuration files. The payment system accounts are also specified on the process profiles.

Moving setup data from technical configuration files to the new setup entities has a benefit of allowing easier review and updates by a business user.

Profitability Manager

Remove (Import) From Migrated Condition Component Display Names

Each time you migrated a Mapping Rule in previous releases, the value; (Import) was prefixed to the version display name of the rule. This occurred for the following rule types:

As a result, (Import) was prefixed multiple times in the display name of the rule (e.g. "(Import)(Import)(Import)").

The Rule Migration feature limits the number of (Import) values prefixed to a Mapping Rule name to one value, and eliminates the (Import) values from the dimension component names.

Applying this release runs a script to clean up the version display names for Mapping Rules, Conditions, Dimension Components, and Data Components that were imported and contained multiple "(Import)" prefixes. For Mapping Rules and Conditions, the new display names will include one "(Import)" substring prefix. For Dimension Components and Data Components, the display names will not contain the "(Import)" substring.

Note: The display names will not be updated for rule versions where the shortened version display name results in a duplicate name. In such cases, users will need to manually update the version display names via the user interface.

Local Conditions Replaced with Global Conditions

In Release 12.0.3, the concept of a local condition in a mapping rule has been eliminated. The patch installation process upgrades all local conditions to global conditions. The resulting global conditions are created in the same folder as the parent mapping rule.

The resulting condition name will be: LOCAL MAPPING 99999:<Parent Rule Name>.

Profitability Analytics are also impacted. Prior to the release of Profitability Manager 12.0.3, mapping rules allowed for local conditions. The Where Used dashboard provides several answers to help users identify where these local conditions are used.

Post Profitability Manager 12.0.3 no longer has the option to create a local condition. All conditions are considered global to rules. Therefore, the local condition answers do not display any data and should be removed from the dashboard.

Public Sector Financials

Changes to Oracle Public Sector Financials are described in this section.

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)

In release 12.1.3 and higher Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is available as an alternative version with improved features and latest technology for Public Sector area.

Integration with Subledger Accounting

This release introduces Subledger Accounting for managing accounting across subledger transactions. The subledger's accounting entries are generated and stored in a centralized repository. In Release 11i they were created separately by subledgers and General Ledger

Subledger Accounting is delivered with seeded Subledger Accounting Methods and Account Derivation Rules that generate the accounting entries from subledger transactions. The seeded Subledger Accounting Methods for Public Sector customers include Encumbrance Accrual and Encumbrance Cash. These rules derive the appropriate accounting entries specific for Public Sector customers. For example, Oracle Receivables generates Multi Fund Accounting entries and the seeded Subledger Accounting Methods contain Journal Line Definitions and the Account Derivation Rules to generate Multi Fund Accounting Entries.

During the upgrade, the subledger accounting method is determined based on the encumbrance settings in your subledger applications, such as Receivables and Payables. Public Sector sets the correct subledger accounting method for each Primary and Secondary Ledger in General Ledger. Reporting Currencies inherit the same subledger accounting method as their source ledger.

Purchasing

Changes to Oracle Purchasing are described in this section.

Local Contract Purchase Agreements upgrade to Global Contract Purchase Agreements

In this release, the distinction between Global and Local distinction for Contract Purchase Agreements no longer exists. All Contract Purchase Agreements can now be enabled for use across multiple operating units. All existing Contract Purchase Agreements are upgraded to have a single organization assignment. In this assignment, the values of Requesting and Purchasing operating units are that of the operating unit that owned the Local Contract Purchase Agreement, and the value of the Purchasing Site is the Supplier Site on the Local Contract Purchase Agreement.

Unified Catalog for Purchasing and iProcurement

Prior to this release, iProcurement and Purchasing maintained separate catalogs. In this release, these catalogs are combined together in Purchasing. During the upgrade, the items that were bulk-loaded into iProcurement are migrated to Global Blanket Agreements in Purchasing. If you have implemented iProcurement, you may notice new Global Blanket Agreements in Purchasing. See iProcurement in this chapter for more details.

Integration with E-Business Tax

A fully automated E-Business Tax upgrade migrates setups related to Oracle Purchasing. This ensures that tax-related functions in Purchasing continue to work as before. With the new tax solution, you have the option to centrally manage tax rules and configure them to support local requirements.

All common tax setups are performed through the E-Business Tax module. Tax Defaulting Hierarchy in Purchasing Options is migrated to E-Business Tax.

The Tax Details and Tax Code Summary forms are obsolete. This information is now displayed on the Manage Tax page (accessible through menu options). In addition, the Tax Code field on the Enter Purchase Order, Release, and Requisition forms is obsolete. Tax Code is now referred to as Tax Classification, which you can specify on the Additional Tax Information page (from the Manage Tax page).

The profile options Tax: Allow Override of Tax Code and Tax: Allow Override of Tax Recovery Rate are migrated to eBTax: Allow Override of Tax Classification Code and eBTax: Allow Override of Tax Recovery Rate, respectively.

Receivables

Changes to Oracle Receivables are described in this section.

Integration with E-Business Tax

This release introduces Oracle E-Business Tax to manage tax across the E-Business Suite. During the upgrade, system and customer options used to control tax calculation and tax code defaulting are migrated from Oracle Receivables into Oracle E-Business Tax entities. See E-Business Tax in this chapter for further details.

Integration with Subledger Accounting

This release introduces Subledger Accounting for managing accounting across subledger transactions. Receivables no longer creates any accounting entries. Existing Receivables accounting options and setups remain and affect the generation of accounting distributions in the Receivables data model. However, the accounting distributions are now simply one of many sources for generation of final accounting in the Subledger Accounting module.

Release 11i customizations to Receivables accounting tables still work after the upgrade, provided you do not use any of the new features of Subledger Accounting. Once you use Subledger Accounting to update an accounting rule, or any other aspect of accounting, you must transition your customizations to reference the Subledger Accounting data model.

Transactional data is upgraded for a user-specified number of fiscal years. If you need to run reports or query transactions that are outside the specified upgrade period, you have to launch the upgrade of additional periods. See Subledger Accounting in this chapter for further details.

Centralized Banks and Bank Accounts Definitions

In this release, all internal banks and bank accounts you had defined for your operations are automatically migrated to the central Cash Management entities. Remittance bank accounts are owned by a legal entity rather than by an operating unit.

Banks and bank branches are centralized in Oracle Cash Management entities, as described in the preceding paragraph. However, bank accounts you had defined for your customers are migrated from the Payables entities to the central Payments entities. Oracle Payments centralizes and secures all payment instrument data, including external bank accounts, credit cards, and debit cards. See Cash Management in this chapter for further details.

Integration with Payments for Funds Capture

This release introduces Oracle Payments, which is used by Oracle Receivables for processing funds capture. See Payments in this chapter for further details.

Balance Forward Billing

The Release 11i Consolidated Billing Invoices functionality has been enhanced to include more flexible billing cycles, to consolidate invoices at site or account level, and to present Balance Forward Bills using the user-configurable Bill Presentment Architecture. If you are using Consolidated Billing Invoices in Release 11i, your setup is automatically migrated to Balance Forward Billing enabled at the customer site level.

Late Charges Enhancements

The Receivables Late Charges feature has been enhanced to incorporate the Global Interest Invoice setups, charge calculation logic, and charge generation processes. Charges for delinquent payments can now be generated as adjustments, debit memos, or interest invoices. The Interest Invoice Global Descriptive Flexfield is obsolete. Release 11i finance charge setup attributes are automatically upgraded to late charge setups at the account and account site levels.

Customer UI Redesign

This release introduces a new HTML user interface for entering and maintaining customer data. See the Oracle Receivables User Guide for further details.

Process Changes

The following features are obsolete:

Sourcing

Changes to Oracle Sourcing are described in this section.

Price Factors Upgrade to Cost Factors

In this release, Price Factors is renamed to Cost Factors. Additionally, Cost Factors can now be a Supplier or Buyer type. Depending on the type, buyers or suppliers provide a value for the Cost Factor.

If you are upgrading from base Release 11i.10 or previous version of Oracle Sourcing, then all cost factors are marked as supplier cost factors. If you are upgrading from Oracle Sourcing Rollup J (also known as Oracle Sourcing minipack 11i.PON.J) or a later version of the product, there should be no effect. Price elements, available in Oracle Sourcing Release 11.5.10 and earlier, are now called Supplier Price Factors.

Negotiation Header Attributes Upgrade to Negotiation Requirements

Oracle Sourcing has significantly improved negotiation header attributes. Buyers can now automatically score the supplier responses and designate teams of scorers to evaluate the bids. The feature has also been renamed to better represent its meaning. Header Attributes is now called Requirements. Header attribute group is now called Section.

The lookup code to create reusable sections is now called Sourcing Requirement Sections. Changes to the predefined section names are not reflected on old documents. For negotiations created before the upgrade, the old header attributes are represented in a hierarchical view grouped by sections.

Auction AutoExtend

Buyers can now specify the lowest bid rank that can trigger AutoExtend. As part of the upgrade process, all existing negotiations are modified to set this rank to first, in order to replicate the previous behavior.

In addition, this release gives buyers increased flexibility to specify the maximum number of automatic extensions by entering any number between 1 and 9999, or choosing unlimited extensions. Auctions created before the upgrade keep the value for the number of extensions after the upgrade.

Online Discussion

Collaboration team members can now exchange messages through online discussions. Additionally, team members with full access can exchange messages with suppliers. In previous releases, only negotiation creators could send messages to external parties.

Collaboration team member access privilege remains the same after the upgrade - team members who have the "View only" check box selected continue to have view-only access, and team members who do not have view-only access have full access.

For supplier messages sent before the upgrade, the supplier company name and user's name are displayed. Suppliers see the buyer enterprise name instead of the individual buyer's name (from the buying organization) on buyer messages sent before the upgrade.

Template Migration

Each template has an owning Operating Unit associated with it. When creating a template, you must specify which operating unit it belongs to. The template is applied to negotiations created within the owning operating unit. It can also be marked as a global template, which can be applied to any negotiation of any operating unit.

There is a new field for Operating Unit on the template creation page. All existing templates created before the upgrade have the default value for this field from profile option “MO:Operating Unit” at the site level. There is also a new check box for Global Template. Existing templates have this check box selected after the upgrade, allowing you to use the template on negotiations created within any operating unit.

Two Stage Evaluation of RFP

Buyers can now create Two Stage RFQ's. The Two-Stage RFQ process is used by organizations in the public sector or by government enterprises and the negotiation process typically follows submission of quotes by suppliers in two parts - the technical quote and the commercial quote. All draft RFQ's after upgrade will have a checkbox and Two-Stage RFQ displayed on the header page. This check box enables 2 stage bidding process. All RFQ's that were published before upgrade will display an unchecked read only check box with Two-Stage RFQ displayed on the View RFQ page.

Quantity Based Price Tiers

Suppliers have flexibility to offer different unit prices depending on the volume of business that the buyer is willing to commit for a given product or service. Typically, a supplier will provide preferential pricing for a larger volume purchase. Quantity based price tiers allow buyers to specify different price points for each quantity range on negotiations with standard purchase order, blanket or contract purchase agreement outcomes. Suppliers can respond to the tier structure defined by the buyer, or they can provide their own price tiers.

For negotiations and templates with Blanket Purchase Agreement or Contract Purchase Agreement outcome prior to the upgrade, the Price Tiers field will be marked as Price Breaks. For negotiations and templates with Standard Purchase Order outcome prior to the upgrade, the Price Tiers field will be marked as None. (This change is applicable for customers who have not applied Oracle Sourcing J Rollup 2 before upgrading to Release 12)

Cost Factor Enhancements

For negotiations that have fixed amount cost factors prior to the upgrade, the new Award Price column will be shown on the Award Summary page with the award price set to the bid/quote price for all the awarded lines. (This change is applicable for customers who have not applied Oracle Sourcing J Rollup 2 before upgrading to Release 12)

Cost factors allow buyers to model the total cost of a product or service. Cost factors operate under one of these three pricing basis: (1) per unit cost (2) percentage of the unit price (3) fixed amount for the line.

This enhancement improves the calculation of the per unit total cost when fixed amount cost factors are used and the buyer awards a supplier a quantity that is either lower or higher than the response quantity. Whereas before Oracle Sourcing used the response quantity to calculate the per unit total cost, the new formula utilizes the award quantity to distribute the fixed amount cost factor resulting in a more accurate award amount calculation.

Sourcing Optimization Enhancements

Sourcing Optimization has several enhancements to assist buyers in making optimal award decisions. Buyers can now determine a constraint priority for award optimization by indicating the importance of a given constraint. All existing constraints before upgrade will display a priority list beside them with a priority of 1 indicating Mandatory.

Subledger Accounting

Oracle Subledger Accounting provides a common accounting engine that replaces the existing accounting processes in the different subledgers. Consequently, the Subledger Accounting upgrade consists of migrating the existing accounting data to ensure a continuous business operation between the two releases. Depending on the business and the specific requirements, "existing accounting data" may have different implications for each customer.

In this sense, and for the purposes of the present documentation, accounting data is defined as:

As part of the continuous business operation, the Subledger Accounting upgrade also takes into account the reports and inquiries that are necessary for the daily user activities. In this sense, some other pieces of information must be upgraded to the new instance:

Supplier Data HUB

Oracle Supplier Data Hub is part of a full suite of Master Data Management (MDM) tools that allows organizations to manage supplier records across heterogeneous environments. Oracle Supplier Data Hub requires a separate license.

Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM)

Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM) is a new application that lets organizations execute proper qualification and performance assessment of prospective and existing suppliers. Key features include:

Trading Community Architecture

Changes to Oracle Trading Community Architecture are described in this section.

New Trading Community Members

New data appears in user interfaces. It reflects changes related to Trading Community Architecture organization and person parties and contacts.

Address Validation

Trading Community Architecture validates address information based on data stored in the Trading Community Architecture Geography Model. This model replaces the validation previously performed by Release 11i. Upgrading does not affect address entry and maintenance in Trading Community Architecture. User-defined rules determine how to respond when an invalid address is entered.

Additional Information: See E-Business Tax in Oracle Financials and Oracle Procurement Functional Upgrade Guide: Release 11i to Release 12 for more information.

DQM Enhancements

The Data Quality Management (DQM) tool delivers enhanced administration interfaces providing a new level of audit detail and maximized out-of-the box performance. A new overview page provides relevant and timely information about the status of important DQM processes and setups, while more consistent attributes and transformations naming conventions improve the user's experience.

D&B passwords are now managed under the Adapters section of the Administration tab and not by profile options. Current D&B passwords migrate during upgrade.

Forms to HTML User Interface Changes

New HTML pages are added for managing roles in Resource Manager. These pages do not replace the existing Forms for the same functionality, but are offered as an alternative to Forms.

Resources, Groups, and Roles JTT pages are obsolete and replaced with equivalent HTML pages. No setup is required, as the HTML pages use the same profile options to render pages. Additional functionality is available, including a small menu change on the Oracle Customers Online Employees tab.

Merge Dictionary and Attributes and Transformations, Word Replacements, and Match Rules setup is managed in the HTML pages of the Administration Tab, and have been removed for DQM setup. The Customer Standard form has been replaced with a streamlined HTML.

Additional Information: See Oracle Receivables User's Guide for details.

Treasury

Changes to Oracle Treasury are described in this section.

Bank Account Migration to Cash Management

Prior to this release, you had to define an internal bank account separately in each application that used it (such as Treasury and Payables), even if the account was the same. This created fragmented data and made bank account maintenance complicated and labor-intensive.

In this release, Cash Management provides a common data model and common user interface for creation and maintenance of banks, bank branches, and internal bank accounts. An internal bank account intended for use by different applications can be created just once - in the centralized Cash Management function - and then used in any application or a select group of applications (that you specify).

To accommodate these changes, all existing company and subsidiary bank account information is upgraded as follows:

Bank Account Balance Migration to Cash Management

Prior to this release, bank account balance maintenance and interest calculation was only available to Treasury bank accounts. In this release, this feature is available to all bank accounts defined in Cash Management.

Existing bank account balance information is managed as follows during the upgrade:

U.S. Federal Financials

Oracle U.S. Federal Financials interacts with several products within the Oracle Financials product family (Oracle Payables, Oracle Payments, Oracle General Ledger, Oracle Subledger Accounting, Oracle Receivables, Oracle Purchasing, and Oracle Cash Management). Refer to the appropriate sections of this chapter to understand the high-level impact for these products on U.S. Federal Financials users.

Integration with Subledger Accounting

This release introduces Subledger Accounting for managing accounting across subledger transactions. You no longer need to enter transaction codes for a transaction to create the desired accounting. Instead, Subledger Accounting seeds account derivation rules that use attributes from transactions to determine the correct accounting.

In Release 11i, journals in General Ledger were kept in detail, so no transaction code journals are moved into Subledger Accounting. All accounting reports show combined General Ledger and Subledger Accounting data. During normal processing, the Subledger Accounting code detects whether the journal exists in Subledger Accounting or General Ledger (upgrade case or not) and uses the appropriate Subledger Accounting rule to create the accounting.

Integration with General Ledger

All U.S. Federal Financials sets of books are upgraded to ledgers in an accounting setup. Upgraded ledgers can be viewed using General Ledger's Accounting Setup Manager. The upgrade creates data access sets for each upgraded ledger that are assigned to the U.S. Federal Financials user responsibilities, which ensures only the appropriate users gain access to ledger-based setup windows within U.S. Federal Financials.

Implementation of Payables and Receivables Netting

In Release 11i, Oracle Financials had three netting solutions – Single Third Party in Oracle Public Sector Financials International, Contra Charging in Oracle Financials for Europe, and AR/AP Netting in U.S. Federal Financials. While these solutions provided netting functionality, each addressed a different specific need.

The new Payables and Receivables Netting solution in Oracle Financials Common Modules provides one total netting solution built into the standard applications. Therefore, the U.S. Federal Financial AR/AP Netting solution is obsolete. The setup data used by the AR/AP Netting solution in U.S. Federal Financials is migrated to the new Payables and Receivables Netting solution.

Summary Schedules and Consolidated Files

With the introduction of Oracle Payments, consolidated payment files for U.S. Federal Financials are now generated directly in Oracle Payments.

Summary Schedules still exist in U.S. Federal Financials after the upgrade. Any Release 11i payment batch that is associated with a summary schedule, or a consolidated payment file that has not been generated, must be voided and recreated through Oracle Payments. You can avoid this situation by generating these payment files in Release 11i in the Summary Schedule and Consolidated Files window in U.S. Federal Financials.

Customer Relationship Management Upgrade Impact

This section describes how the upgrade affects your existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products, and highlights the impact of these functional changes on your day-to-day business. It is arranged alphabetically by products in the Customer Relationship Management product family.

Action: Review the product-specific Release Content Documents (RCDs) and TOI on My Oracle Support for additional information.

About Business Impact and Functional Changes

An Applications upgrade alters both the technical and functional aspects of your Oracle E-Business Suite system. Functional changes have an impact on the way you use the products as you conduct your daily business.

Note: this chapter describes some of the ways the upgrade changes your existing products. We assume that you have read about the new features and products delivered in this release, which is included in the product-specific Release Content Documents (RCDs) and Transfer of Information documents (TOIs) on My Oracle Support.

The discussions of the functional aspects of the upgrade in this chapter are arranged by products within the Customer Relationship Management product family.

Advanced Inbound

This section outlines changes made to Oracle Advanced Inbound.

Customer Lookup

The customer lookup feature has changed as follows:

Basic Telephony

The Basic Telephony feature has changed as follows:

No other changes have been made to profile options used by Basic Telephony.

Active Mode Routing

In this release, Oracle Advanced Inbound does not support active mode routing for inbound calls. If you are currently using this feature, you must use either Enhanced Passive Mode or Passive Mode.

Additional Information: See Oracle Advanced Inbound Implementation Guide for more information on setting up your call center to run either of these modes.

You may continue to use active mode routing for web callbacks.

Install Changes

In this release, the install process is changed as follows:

If you are not using the APPL_TOP installation for running your ICSM server, then download ieoicsm.class and ieoall.zip using secure FTP from the location $INST_TOP/appl/download/ieo/ to the same directory.

Advanced Scheduler

Changes for Oracle Advanced Scheduler are described in this section.

Schedule Task Window

The Schedule Task window Preferences tab Assistance Level region offers three Interactive Scheduling options: Intelligent, Window to Promise, and Assisted. The Unassisted option available in prior releases is obsolete.

Location Time Zone Support

Advanced Scheduler supports customer incident and technician time zones. See Field Service (Core) for more information.

Task Durations Longer Than One Shift

Advanced Scheduler can plan and schedule service tasks that take longer than one work shift to complete. See Field Service (Core) in this chapter for more information.

Customer Confirmation Requirement

See Field Service (Core) in this chapter.

Site Access Hours Restrictions

You can define the times of day and days of the week when access to a customer, customer site, or customer site location is available. These access hours are automatically added to field service tasks generated by the Field Service Preventive Maintenance module, or they can be manually added in the Dispatch Center.

Advanced Scheduler treats task access hours as hard constraints, meaning that task arrival time must occur within one of the specified access time windows. Dispatchers have the ability to relax this constraint if Advanced Scheduler does not identify an acceptable schedule option.

Customer Relationship Management

Your Customer Relationship Management applications specialists should be completely familiar with the information in this section and should have made appropriate plans to accommodate the associated changes before you begin your upgrade.

Email Center

The following topics describe changes to Email Center and suggest where you can find additional information on specific feature-specific changes or what additional steps you may need to take to accommodate the changed functionality.

Oracle Email Server Independence

Email Center can connect to any IMAP4-compliant mail server, download messages into the Email Center schema, and process those messages. New setup and administration screens are associated with this change.

Email Account Administration: Administrators can directly define email account parameters using the new account administration screens available in the Email Center Administrator console. For example

Scenario 1: Email messages are redirected from the corporate mail server as part of Email Center implementation in the current release as follows:

Download Processor: The Email Center Download Processor is a mid-tier service that runs at intervals you configure to connect and download email into the Email Center schema. Using configuration data defined in Email Center for an email account, it can connect to the email account and download email messages for further processing.

When an email account is defined in Email Center, the system creates Oracle Processed and Oracle Retry folders in that account. Once a message is downloaded, both the metadata and the content of the email remain in the Email Center schema until an administrator purges it.

Data Migration Tools

The new backend server architecture for Email Center introduces new configuration and transactional tables. Because all prior Email Center releases must have a migration path to the new architecture, this release ships a set of data migration tools. They consist of the following components:

Custom Workflow Process

As a part of the shift from a message stored based on Oracle Email Server to one based on a local message store, the out-of-the-box workflow included has bee modified to remove from the keys all references to data based on the Email Server. If an implementation has any customer workflow hooks that were used to implement specific flows not available out-of-the-box, you must re-validate, test, and where necessary update the code to reflect these changes.

Live Message Migration

Email messages with actions before the upgrade are known as live messages. After the migration, Email Center agents can access live messages in a pre-migration state and take appropriate action. The messages are generally in a queue waiting to be acquired by the agents or are already acquired by an agent and waiting in the agent's Inbox. The percentage of data in this state in a live Email Center implementation depends on the email volume at the site.

Do not use the Email Center until the live message migration is complete. The downtime is fairly small and depends on the number of emails in a live state.

Historical Message Migration

Email messages processed in Email Center are retained in the Oracle Email Server message store and accessed for auditing and for tracking customer interactions. The percentage of data in this state could be fairly high in an implementation that has been in production for some time.

The Email Center Migration concurrent program provides the Cut-off Date for Historical Emails parameter, which defaults to 30 days. You can decide how much of the historical data is to be migrated. Historical data that is not migrated is no longer available for viewing from the Email Center application. However, large amounts of historical data may result in a lengthy migration process.

Note: The number of email messages that qualify for migration affects the duration of the migration process. To reduce the duration, decide on a cut-off date for historical email data. Once the live message migration is complete, you can use the Email Center while the historical data migration runs in the background. Reduced number search results could result, but they will be accurate after the process is complete.

Field Sales

Release 11.5.10 was the terminal release of Oracle Field Sales (Sales Online). In this release, Field Sales is obsolete. If you are using this product, you must upgrade to the Oracle Sales application. This change results in a functional impact for all users. Oracle recommends that you complete a functional analysis before you migrate Field Sales (Sales Online) data to Oracle Sales.

Additional Information: See Migrate Sales Credits in this chapter for more information.

Field Service (Core)

Changes for Oracle Field Service (Core) are described in this section.

Location Time Zone Support

Oracle Field Service core and related products within the Field Service Suite support customer incident and technician time zones. User interfaces provide, where appropriate, fields for specifying the time zone at the technician's location, as well as at the field service incident site. With this capability, call center agents, dispatchers, managers and administrators can communicate with customers and field technicians without having to make mental time zone conversions.

Task Durations Longer Than One Shift

Oracle Field Service core and related products can plan and schedule service tasks that take longer than one work shift to complete. Advanced Scheduler searches for contiguous slots of scheduling options where a technician can perform the task on consecutive workdays. For example, Thursday, Friday, and Monday for a task having a planned effort of 24 hours duration, and the standard shift duration is 8 hours. When this criterion is met, Advanced Scheduler propagates a separate child task for each work shift required.

Subsequently, the dispatcher can use the Dispatch Center user interface to reschedule or reassign individual child tasks if, for example, an unplanned event causes the technician to be unable fulfill the tasks as scheduled, or cancel a child task if it is no longer needed due the technician completing the service early.

Customer Confirmation Requirement

Service Request and Dispatch Center user interfaces make customer confirmation constraint information visible. A dynamic button label indicates whether customer confirmation of a task is required, not needed, or received. Click the Customer Confirmation button to open the Customer Confirmation window, and then update the status of the confirmation, if necessary. Controls are in place to prevent the commit or release of tasks to field technicians when confirmation is required but not received.

Usability

The following features enhance usability:

Service for Assets

To support service on owned assets as well as customer products, a variety of enhancements have been made to Oracle Teleservice, Mobile Field Service, and Install Base:

Incentive Compensation

This section outlines changes made to Incentive Compensation.

Out-of-the-Box

Out-of-the-box, Incentive Compensation delivers a set of responsibilities, each with the appropriate business flow permissions. Consequently, menus and responsibilities that existed or were created in Release 11i are end-dated. You must assign the new responsibilities to existing users after you complete the upgrade.

The new responsibilities are described in the following table:

Responsibility Description
Incentive Compensation Administrator Responsible for configuring and maintaining OIC application setups, and administering and scheduling OIC concurrent programs.
A configuration workbench provides a checklist of tasks as a guide for the process of implementing or administering OIC.
Plan Administrator Responsible for building compensation plans and plan components, maintaining compensation plans, and maintaining product hierarchies and rule definitions that are used across compensation plans.
Can access a single page that provides a comprehensive view of a plan. It contains a Design section (plan components and links), an Eligibility section (roles and resources), and a Notes section (history of plan changes).
In addition, the plan creation flow supports top-down creation, making it possible to create a plan, and add and create components as needed. The plan elements creation checklist provides simple, discrete steps that can be checked off as the plan elements are completed and validated. The plan administrator also has access to a component library workbench.
Compensation Manager/Analyst Responsible for managing resource compensation plans, reviewing and handling disputes, and administering the compensation process.
Can access a single page that provides a comprehensive view of a resource. It contains a Roles/Group section (resource maintenance), a Plans section (customization maintenance or payment plan/paygroup assignments), a Compensation section (historical compensation reports), and a Notes section (history of resource changes).
The Analyst can run a validation process to flag any incomplete compensation plan setups, and can use the transaction detail and status details page to aid in dispute resolution.
Incentive Compensation User (Manager Self Service) Responsible for monitoring resource performance and distributing quotas and contracts to resources. Has access to compensation reports for any resources rolling up to him. The Year-to-Date Summary and Earnings Statement reports have been re-written using the new technology stack.
Incentive Compensation User (Self Service) Views incentive statements and reconciles payments with expected compensation. Information in reports can be exported to a CSV file. Compensation information can be published as a PDF document.

Global Administration: Multi-Org Access Control

Multi-Org Access Control (MOAC) allows a single responsibility to access multiple operating units. An Incentive Compensation Administrator can configure system setups for multiple operating units without having to log in using a separate responsibility for each operating unit. OIC Compensation Managers can query and modify transactions and resources for multiple operating units without having to log in using a separate responsibility for each operating unit.

Integration with Oracle Territory Manager

In Release 11i, you had to set up mapping for territory qualifiers in order to use the Territory Assignment Engine (TAE) in Sales Crediting and Allocation. In this release, OIC automatically provides the mapping and populates the table with data using one of two mapping options as a part of the post-collection process.

Option 1: Use the seeded OIC attribute/territory qualifier mapping provided in this release.

Option 2: Continue to use the existing OIC attribute/territory qualifier mapping

To schedule collections using the new concurrent program:

Territory Manager allows you to run the concurrent program “Synchronize Territory Assignment Rules” (STAR), which replaces the existing GTP concurrent program. You can run it in total, incremental, and date-effective mode. Total and Incremental mode behave in the same manner as in 11i for all consumer applications. Date effective mode is only applicable to OIC.

The “Synchronize Territory Assignment Rules” (STAR) concurrent program accepts the following parameters:

The pre-processing APIs (dynamic packages) created by the “Synchronized Territory Assignment Rules” concurrent program has been decommissioned.

Multi-level Marketing Industry Support

Additional setup parameters support multi-level marketing requirements. For example, it is possible to track the level of rollup for each OIC transaction.

The plan element setup includes a rollup calculation option. When a plan element is configured, you can choose whether to calculate commissions for rolled-up transactions. You can choose to calculate for all resources or only for managers.

Profile Option Changes

Some common system-level profile options are now defined as parameters that can be changed in the OIC Administrator Configuration Workbench. The OIC Administrator will need to use the Configuration Workbench to manually set these parameters.

Release 11i Profile Option Workbench Task Release 12 Parameter Name
OSC: Default Custom Flag Application Parameters Customize Compensation Plans
OSC: Default Conversion Type Application Parameters Currency Conversion Type
OSC: Reporting Hierarchy Application Parameters Reporting Hierarchy for Manager Access to Resources Reports
Display Draw Application Parameters Display Draw in Year To Date Summary Report?
OSC: Apply Non-Revenue Split to Quantity Collection Collect Quantity for Non Revenue Credit Receivers
OSC: Negate during Revenue Adjustments Collection Collection Negate Original Transactions during Revenue Adjustments Collections
OSC: Reset Error Transactions Collection Re-load Errored Transactions
OSC: Collect on Acct Credits Collection Collect Credit Memos from Oracle Receivables
OSC: Customized Summarization Calculation Aggregate Transactions Based on Custom Criteria during Rollup
OSC: Prior Adjustment Calculation Allow Prior Period Adjustments
OSC: Roll Summarized Transactions Calculation Aggregate Transactions during Rollup
OSC: Commission Rate Precision Calculation Numeric Precision for Rate Tables
OSC: Income Planner Disclaimer Collation Display Projected Compensation Disclaimer?

The following profile options from 11i have changed.

Release 11i Profile Option Release 12 Profile Option Default
OSC: Validate Payment Worksheet Statuses OIC: Enforce Payment Worksheet Approval Y
OSC: Payroll Action If Entry Exists OIC: Approve or Reject Duplicate Payment Transactions Rejected
OSC: Sleep Time in Seconds OIC: Frequency of Batch Runners Status Check 30 seconds
Total Rev % is Not 100 OIC: Allow split % less than 100% Custom
OSC: Number of Batch Workers OIC: Number of Batch Workers for Credit Allocation 1
OSC: Debug Mode OIC: Enable Debug Mode NO/N
OSC: Invoice Split Upgrade Start Date OIC: Invoice Split Upgrade Start Date Null
OSC: Invoice Split Upgrade End Date OIC: Invoice Split Upgrade End Date Null
OSC: LOV Input Validation OIC: LOV Input Validation  

*If you want to change this option to Pay By Transaction = Y during the upgrade, you must make sure all Payruns/Worksheets are Paid. If you do not, the resources will no longer be usable as the data will become corrupted.

Terminology Changes

The following table lists changes in terminology:

Release 11i Term New Term
Accelerator Multiplier
Direct Resource Direct Credit Receiver
Employee Number Salesperson Number
Functional Currency Ledger Currency (Terminology change from GL)
Incentive Type Calculation Type
Payment Factor Earnings Factor
Pay Periods Compensation Periods
Payrun Payment Batch
Quota Factor Multiplier
Rate Schedule Rate Table
Revenue Class Product or Eligible Product
Sales Credit Credit Amount
Salesperson Resource
Set of Books Ledger (Terminology change from GL)
Worksheet Paysheet

Decommissioned Features

The Quota Performance report is replaced by the Attainment Summary report, and the Sales Force Planning Module and Income Planner have been decommissioned. See My Oracle Support (Doc ID: 338866.1).

Note: The Income Planner projected compensation calculator does not incorporate many of the settings provided in OIC-implemented compensation plans. Consequently, the sales pipeline projections may be inaccurate.

iSupport

Your iSupport applications specialists should be completely familiar with the information in this section and should make plans to accommodate the associated changes before you begin your upgrade

Registration

If you have defined custom user types prior to this release, and you wish to continue to leverage those types during iSupport registration, then you must manually associate the user type keys with the relevant iStore lookup types in the AOL lookups table after the upgrade. If you do not complete this task, then iStore cannot determine the user types, and they will not be available on the registration pages by the registering user. The lookup types include:

For example, the seeded iSupport user type IBU_INDIVIDUAL is mapped to the iStore lookup type IBE_UM_INDIVIDUAL_USER_TYPES. You must use the Lookups form to perform the same action for all customized user types.

Multi-Party Setup

  1. Profile Setup:

    • User Profile Name: Oracle iSupport: Enable Multi Party Access

    • Description: Profile to check if Multi Party is, or is not enabled

    • Profile Values: Yes or No

    • Default Value: No

      Note: The profile option must be set to 'Yes' to enable Multi-Party feature.

  2. Responsibility:

    To make the Party Access menu visible to the administrator and the primary user, you must navigate as follows to open Oracle forms:

    (N) System Administrator > Responsibilites

    • Administrator:

      Search for the iSupport Administrator - JTF Administration responsibility. From the Menu Exclusions tab, remove the function IBU_PARTY_ACCESS_FN and save it.

    • Primary User:

      Search for the iSupport Primary User responsibility. From the Menu Exclusions tab, remove the function IBU_PARTY_ACCESS_FN and IBU_SWITCH_PARTY_FN and save it.

    • Business User:

      Search for the iSupport Business User responsibility. From the Menu Exclusions tab, remove the function IBU_SWITCH_PARTY_FN and save it.

  3. Assigning permissions:

    • iSupport Administrator:

      Select the IBU_SYSTEM_ADMIN role and assign the following permissions:

      • IBU_PARTY_USERS

      • IBU_SEARCH_PARTY

      • IBU_PARTY_ACCESS

      • IBU_ASSOCIATE_PARTY

      • IBU_PARTY_ACCOUNT_ACCESS

      • IBU_PARTY_ACCOUNTS_VIEW

      • IBU_PARTY_ACCESS_VIEW

      • IBU_PARTY_REMOVE_VIEW

      • IBU_DEFAULT_PARTY_VIEW

        Note: Ensure that the role IBU_SYSTEM_ADMIN is assigned to the iSupport Administrator. If it is not, then assign it to the iSupport Administrator.

    • iSupport Primary User:

      Select the IBU_PRIMARY_USER role and assign it the following permissions:

      • IBU_PARTY_USERS

      • IBU_SEARCH_PARTY

      • IBU_PARTY_ACCESS

      • IBU_ASSOCIATE_PARTY

      • IBU_PARTY_ACCOUNT_ACCESS

      The following permissions may or may not be assigned to the primary user. These permissions are for viewing the Accounts, Party Access, and Remove and Default Party column in the Party Access page. For Example, if IBU_PARTY_ACCOUNTS_VIEW permission is not given to the primary user, then the primary user cannot view the accounts column.

      • IBU_PARTY_ACCOUNTS_VIEW

      • IBU_PARTY_ACCESS_VIEW

      • IBU_PARTY_REMOVE_VIEW

      • IBU_DEFAULT_PARTY_VIEW

        Note: Ensure that the role IBU_PRIMARY_USER is assigned to the iSupport Primary User. If it is not, then assign it to the iSupport Primary User.

    • For iSupport Business User:

      Select the IBU_Business_USER role and assign it the following permission:

    • IBU_SWITCH_PARTY

      Note: Assign the IBU_SWITCH_PARTY permission to the Business User only.

Multi Party Search Setup

In addition to the above setup, you must enable the following region attributes:

Region Name Attribute ID Attribute Code Label Data Type Node Display
IBU_CF_SR_VW_FILTER IBU_CF_SR_PARTY IBU_CF_SR_PARTY Party Varchar2 No
IBU_CF_SR_VW_DSPL_OPTS_VALUES IBU_CF_SR_PARTY IBU_CF_SR_PARTY Party Varchar2 No

If you want to view the party attribute in the selected options by default, then you must enable the following region attribute.

Region Name Attribute ID Attribute Code Label Data Type Node Display
IBU_CF_SR_VW_SLTD_DSPL_OPTS IBU_CF_SR_PARTY IBU_CF_SR_PARTY Party Varchar2 Yes

Knowledge Management

Changes for Oracle Knowledge Management are described in this section.

Search Operators

You can perform exact phrase searches by using double-quotes (“ ”) operator. The Exact Phrase search option has been removed from the search option drop down menu. The default search operator has been changed to “All of the keywords.” This change is limited to simple search only. The default search option for advanced search remains "Any of the Keywords," and is no longer defined by the profile option "Knowledge: Default Searching Method."

Statements Creation from Service Request Notes

Before this release, only the first 500 characters of note data were captured in the statement summary when trying to create a new solution from a service request. Now, complete note data is transferred over to the statement detail, and the first 2000 characters are kept inside the statement summary. An author can arrange the information between the statement summary and details. There is no impact on the existing solutions and statements created in the system.

Search Administration

New administration pages allow you to manage repositories available for simple search for a service provider. You can define custom repositories and associate the repositories with the appropriate contexts from the setup. Existing data defined in the system are upgraded accordingly.

In particular, the profile option “Knowledge: Simple search repository key” is now obsolete, and data defined in this profile (including the JTF advanced properties data) are migrated to different context mappings and custom repositories, if they exist. Data modified in the JTF properties is no longer honored by KM after the upgrade.

Autolink Administration

Autolinks have replaced the Note Token Rules. For any implementation that has already defined Note Token Rules for objects “Knowledge Base Solution” or “Knowledge: OA Solution,” and is being upgraded, no additional setup steps are required to use the existing rules, as they are upgraded as autolinks and autolink usage automatically.

The only change is that you should now use the Oracle Knowledge Management administration pages to view and update the setup. As a result, the administrator must have access to the Knowledge Base System Administration responsibility. Access to the Oracle Quality Online (OQO) administrator (DEMS Administrator) responsibility is no longer required. Data modified in OQO is no longer be honored by KM, and the setup screens for token rule are obsolete.

Concurrent Request Access

The KM administrator can submit and monitor concurrent requests directly from the KM menu, using a new request group that has been set up and assigned to the KM administrator.

Setup Menu

The KM setup menu has changed due to the introduction of new setup screens and concurrent request ability. If you have customized the KM setup menu, you must incorporate these changes manually.

Marketing

Campaigns from the previous release are migrated to Release 12. This migration is necessary to ensure that the product reports are accurate. However, the underlying data from the existing campaigns do not change, but data from the following campaign attributes would be affected with the migration:

Campaign Name: If the Campaign has a specific version identified, then the Campaign name is shown as - [Campaign Name]_[Campaign version]. The campaign version is now obsolete, and there might be more than one campaign with an identical name. To keep every campaign unique, the corresponding version needs to be migrated to a Campaign where the name is derived using the Campaign Name and the Version. Campaigns without multiple versions will not change.

Campaign - Product Category Associations: Ensure that the Product categories have already been migrated or upgraded to Single Product catalogs. Product categories associated with an existing campaign will not change due to migration. Hence, the primary flag for these categories remains intact.

Campaign - Product Associations: Ensure that all the Products associated with existing Campaigns belong to a Single Product Catalog. Identify all such products that are associated with the Campaigns, but are not part of the Single Product Catalog. If any, manually include these products into the Single Product Catalog. Subsequently, update these products in the Campaign-Product association schema.

Campaign - Product association (Primary flag) : If the campaigns have associated product categories or product, there might be no product association set as primary. Hence, if there is at least one product category or product associated with the campaign, mark it as the primary association unless the user selects another product category or product association to be set as primary.

For additional information, refer to the Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide Release 12.2.

Mobile Field Service

Changes for Oracle Mobile Field Service are described in this section.

Multiple Responsibilities

In Release 11i, Mobile Field Service users had to be associated to the Mobile Field Service/Laptop responsibility to access Mobile Field Service Laptop. In Release 12.2, the Multiple Responsibility Model allows users to have different profile settings and different user interfaces. Regardless of the responsibility to which the user is associated, they have access to the Mobile Field Service Laptop application. Multiple technicians mapped with different responsibilities can be assigned to the same operating unit.

Laptop User Interfaces

Mobile Field Service user interfaces have been redesigned using the User Interface XML (UIX) technology framework, which is based on Browser Look And Feel (BLAF) standards. Additionally, the Mobile Field Service Laptop application can be personalized at either site or responsibility level to show or hide data, reorder fields and regions, change prompts, and so on.

Self-scheduling

In Release 11i, Mobile Field Service: Wireless allowed technicians to create service request and follow-up tasks, but did not provide the ability to assign and schedule these tasks to themselves. Release 12.2 provides the ability for technicians to assign tasks to themselves from mobile devices as well as provide a window of time for the customers to choose from. Using these scheduling capabilities, the technicians can either choose to work on the tasks right away or come back at a later time.

Non-TCA Party Incident Addresses

In Release 11i, field service tasks can only be created when the service request incident address references a Trading Community Architecture (TCA) Party Site. In Release 12.2, Dispatch Center, Scheduler, Technician Portal, and Mobile Field Service user interfaces and logic support the creation of Field Service Tasks when the Incident Addresses is not associated to a TCA Party.

One-to-One Fulfillment

One-to-One Fulfillment has improved the performance for mass email request fulfillment. The server now uses multiple threads on the Java process, and new server-level flags have been added.

Order Capture/Quoting

This section describes the changes made to Oracle Order Capture/Quoting.

Integration with Trading Community Architecture

The following actions are changed in Trading Community Architecture:

Obsolete Features and Actions

Partner Management

Partners and Partner Users (optional)

When an existing customer of Oracle Partner Management upgrades to release 12.0 from a prior release, it is essential to run the PV: Partner Type Migration concurrent program as one of the post-installation steps. If you do not run this concurrent program, then existing partners will have a blank Primary Partner Type. Also, these partners will not be returned as part of any search result set.

For additional Information, refer to the Oracle Partner Management Implementation and Administration Guide Release 12.2, Partner Users.

Migrating Partner Type Values (optional)

In previous releases, you could assign multiple partner types to a single partner. In release 12.0, a partner can be assigned one partner type only. If you are upgrading from an earlier Oracle Partner Management release, then you need to perform some administrative functions to successfully migrate your partner type data:

Populate the PV_PARTNER_TYPE_RANKING lookup table with a numerical ranking for each existing partner type. The table is seeded with some partner types and ranking data, and vendors can add to and modify the seeded values. The PV: Partner Type Migration concurrent request uses this lookup table to assign a single type to each partner by evaluating all of the partner's existing types and selecting the top-ranked type (the type with the lowest value).

For example, if a partner is currently assigned both Reseller and OEM partner types, and the value assigned to Reseller is lower than that assigned to OEM, then the partner's new type will be Reseller. Vendors must provide a ranking for each partner type except for the VAD type. The VAD is always considered the top-ranked partner type, regardless of the ranking specified by the vendor.

After establishing the partner type rankings, run the PV: Partner Type Migration concurrent program to assign the new rankings to existing partners. The program can be run in either of the following modes:

You can also choose to Overwrite the existing partner type: There are two possible values:

No: If set to No (default value), the program will not overwrite the existing partner type on a partner record. This value is useful if the concurrent program failed (for whatever reason) to complete and you are rerunning it. The rerun will not update those Partner records that have already been processed the first time and will only update those Partner records that have not yet been processed. Setting the value to No also allows the program to run more efficiently.

The concurrent program generates a log file that provides information about the migration, including the original partner types and the new partner type for each partner.

For additional Information, refer to the Oracle Partner Management Implementation and Administration Guide Release 12.2, Migrating Partner Type Values.

Migrating External Sales Team Data (optional)

Earlier implementations of Oracle Partner Management allowed a partner contact to exist on an opportunity, a lead, and a customer sales team after the partner organization was removed from the opportunity, lead, or sales team. As of Release 12, a partner contact is accessed through the partner organization, and thus a contact cannot be accessed if the partner organization has been removed.

The concurrent program PV - External Sales Team migration should be run to make sure that partner organizations are reassociated with opportunities, leads, and customer sales teams if the partner contacts are still associated with the objects after the partner organization has been removed. The concurrent program should be run during the upgrade process to R12 and as part of the Oracle Sales and Oracle Partner Management integration process, and then periodically afterwards.

Additional Information in Oracle Partner Management Implementation and Administration Guide Release 12.2, Migrating External Sales Team Data.

Sales

This section describes the changes made to Oracle Sales.

Upgrade Users from Oracle Sales Online to Oracle Sales

In this release, all Sales Online users are migrated and assigned an Oracle Sales responsibility as follows:

All profile options used by Sales Online (including MO: Operating Unit) are migrated to a corresponding profile option in Oracle Sales.

This Sales Online profile option... is replaced with this Sales profile option...
OS: Forecast Calendar ASN: Forecast Calendar
OSO: Forecast Calendar Month ASN: Forecast Calendar Month
OSO: Default Forecast Period Type ASN: Default Forecast Period Type
OSO: Default Forecast Category ASN: Default Forecast Category
OS: Forecast Sales Credit Type ANS: Forecast Sales Credit Type
OS: Default Opportunity Win Probability ASN: Default Opportunity Win Probability
OS: Default Sales Channel ASN: Default Opportunity Sales Channel
OS: Default Opportunity Status ASN: Default Opportunity Sta
OS: Default Close Date Days ASN: Default Close Date Days
OSO: Forecast Pipeline Calculation ASN: Forecast Defaulting Type Basis
OS: Default Win/Loss Status ASN: Default Win/Loss Status
OS: Default Status For Leads ASN: Default Lead Status
OS: Manager Update Access ASN: Manager Update Access
OS: Opportunity Access Privilege ASN: Opportunity Access Privilege
OS: Customer Access Privilege ASN: Customer Access Privilege
OS: Sales Lead Access Privilege ASN: Lead Access Privilege
MO: Operating Unit MO: Operating Unit
OS: Sales Admin Update Access ASN: Sales Admin Update Access
OSO: Default Country HZ: Reference Territory
OS: Sales Team Creator Keep Flag ASN: Default value for sales team Do Not Reassign flag

All FND lookup types used by Sales Online are migrated to a corresponding lookup type in Oracle Sales.

This Sales Online lookup type... is replaced with this Sales lookup type...
LEAD_CONTACT_ROLE ASN_CONTACT_ROLE
CONTACT_RANK_ON_OPPORTUNITY ASN_CONTACT_ROLE
CLOSE_REASON ASN_LEAD_CLOSE_REASON
CLOSE_REASON ASN_OPPTY_CLOSE_REASON
VEHICLE_RESPONSE_CODE ASN_VEHICLE_RESPONSE_CODE

Sales and Telesales

This section describes changes that are common to both Oracle Sales and Oracle Telesales.

Migrate Sales Credits

In Oracle Sales, an opportunity can have multiple opportunity lines, and for each line, there can be a different sales person receiving revenue credits. However, there can be only one sales person who receives all revenue credits for an opportunity line.

This release upgrades opportunities that have multiple sales people receiving revenue credits for the same opportunity line and ensures that there is only one sales person receiving revenue credits for the line. Opportunities having multiple sales people on a single opportunity line are upgraded.

Similar to Oracle Sales, Oracle Telesales also supports only one sales person receiving revenue credits for each opportunity line.

Service and Infrastructure

This section describes the enhancements to Oracle Service and Infrastructure in this release.

TeleService

Oracle TeleService has improved the processing of services requests, added functionality and configurability options for Contact Center, and added new capabilities for Customer Support.

Contact Center

This section describes enhancements to Oracle Contact Center.

Customer Support

The Oracle Customer Support Flexible Layout Regions provide added benefits for implementations, including:

Territory Manager

This release implements changes to Territory Administration and Role-based Access Control (RBAC).

Territory Administration

The use of Forms to administer territories has been decommissioned and replaced by HTML-Excel UIs. All pre-existing Forms functionality is supported in this new model, with the exception of Resource Qualifiers and Territory Lookup. The Oracle Territory Manager Release 12 User Guide contains complete information.

In addition, the following changes have been implemented.

Concurrent Programs Decommissioned

Prior to this release, Generate Territory Packages (GTP) and Generate Self-Service Territories (GSST) were used to re-compile territory definitions. In this release, GSST has been decommissioned, and GTP has been replaced by Synchronize Territory Assignment Rules (STAR). The Oracle Territory Manager Release 12 Implementation Guide contains complete information.

Territory Types

In this release, users must create territories using territory types, which are defined by transactions (Accounts, Leads, Opportunities, Customers, Service Requests, and so on). The territory type selected restricts the transactions and matching attributes available during the create flow.

Oracle Territory Manager seeds the following types:

Access Levels

You can set up granular-level access type control for transaction types. In particular, you can grant read-only, full, or no access in Sales Usage for transaction types such as leads, opportunities, and quotes. Resources on 11.5.10 territories are granted full-access to the relevant transaction types.

Escalation Territories

Escalation territories are supported through the access flag at the resource level for Service. When adding a resource to a service territory, you can then change the access flag to Escalation for a given resource. There is no longer a need to create an additional Escalation territory.

Custom Matching Attributes

Prior to this release, Oracle Territory Manager provided custom matching attributes for some customers, as the out-of-the-box matching attributes shipped with the product did not fully satisfy their business requirements.

In this release, customers must re-implement these custom matching attributes using the public API solution.

Role-based Access Control (RBAC)

Prior to this release, Territory Administrators (CRM Administrator responsibility) could manage territories for all usages through the Forms UI. Users with Territory HTML Global Sales Administrator responsibility had access to the HTML administrator UIs (for Named Account and Geography Territory Groups), and users with the Territory HTML Sales User responsibility had access to the Territory Self-Service UIs.

In this release, Territory Manager uses the Role-based Access Control (RBAC) security model, with the following impact:

Human Resource Management Upgrade Impact

This section describes the way the upgrade affects your existing Oracle Human Resource Management System (HRMS) products, and highlights the impact of these functional changes on your day-to-day business. This section contains products in the HRMS product family, arranged alphabetically.

Action: Review the product-specific Release Content Documents (RCDs) and TOI on My Oracle Support for additional information.

About Business Impact and Functional Changes

An Applications upgrade alters both the technical and functional aspects of your Oracle E-Business Suite system. Functional changes have an impact on the way you use the products as you conduct your daily business.

Note: This section describes some of the ways the upgrade changes your existing products. Oracle assumes that you have read about the new features and products delivered in this release, which is included in the product-specific Release Content Documents (RCDs) and TOI on My Oracle Support.

The discussions of the functional aspects of the upgrade in this chapter are arranged by products within the HRMS product family.

Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS)

Your HRMS applications specialists should be completely familiar with the information in this section and should make appropriate plans to accommodate the associated changes before you begin your upgrade.

Oracle Payroll

Sparse Matrix

Sparse matrix functionality is automatically enabled in Release 12.2. This effectively prevents the creation of null run result values if all run result values are null for the given run result. There is no need to run the ENABLE_SPARSE_MATRIX upgrade program.

Review the Sparse Matrix Null Result Values Upgrade program.

It is enabled for each legislation and requires a row in the pay_upgrade_legislations table for the definition SPARSE_MATRIX. The process purges old (null) run result values that would not have been created if the Sparse Matrix functionality had been used within the Payroll processes (such as Run, QuickPay, and so on.)

Oracle Performance Management

This section outlines changes made to Oracle Performance Management.

Reference to Talent Management Replaced with Performance Management

Oracle Performance Management is licensed as a separate product as of June 18th, 2007. If you purchased a Self-Service HR license before June 18th, 2007 and have an Oracle Human Resources (HR) license, then you can use Oracle Performance Management. The purchase of a Self-Service HR license on or after June 18th, 2007 does not permit the use of Performance Management. You must purchase a separate Performance Management license in addition to an Oracle Self-Service HR license to use the Appraisals, Questionnaire Administration, and Objectives Management self-service functions. With this change, all references to Talent Management are replaced with Performance Management.

Oracle Succession Planning

UI for Succession Planning

Oracle Succession Planning is a licensable product first available for Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.1 customers. Oracle Succession Planning includes the following three functions:

  1. Succession Plans

  2. Suitability Matching

  3. Talent Profile

Note: For details, see Introducing Oracle Succession Planning Release 12.1.1 (Doc ID: 870119.1). See also Talent Profile and Succession Planning in Oracle Self-Service HR and Oracle Succession Planning – A Comparative Note. Note ID: 861499.1

Projects Upgrade Impact

This section describes the way the upgrade affects your existing Oracle Projects products, and highlights the impact of these functional changes on your day-to-day business. It is arranged alphabetically by products in the Projects product family.

Action: Review the product-specific Release Content Documents (RCDs) and TOI on My Oracle Support for additional information.

About Business Impact and Functional Changes

An Applications upgrade alters both the technical and functional aspects of your Oracle E-Business Suite system. In addition to changes to the technology stack and file system, an upgrade also initiates specific changes that affect the way your existing products work after the upgrade and the way they look and feel. These functional changes have an impact on the way you use the products as you conduct your daily business.

Note: This section describes a few ways how the upgrade changes your existing products.

The discussions of the functional aspects of the upgrade in this chapter are arranged by products within the Projects product family.

Projects

Your Projects applications specialists should be completely familiar with the information in this section and should have made appropriate plans to accommodate the associated changes before you begin your upgrade.

Grants Accounting

This section outlines changes made to Oracle Grants Accounting.

Additional Information: See Oracle Grants Accounting User Guide, Oracle Project Costing User Guide, Oracle Projects Implementation Guide, Oracle Projects Fundamentals, and Oracle Subledger Accounting Implementation Guide for more information on the changes discussed in this section.

Supplier Cost Integration

Supplier cost integration now uses new functionality introduced by Oracle Payables and Oracle Subledger Accounting. The following changes may impact your implementation.

Supplier Cost Adjustments

Supplier cost adjustment uses new functionality introduced by Oracle Payables and Oracle Subledger Accounting. The following changes may impact your implementation.

Integration with Subledger Accounting

In Release 11i, Oracle Grants Accounting accounted cost and revenue through a set of interface processes. In this release, Oracle Subledger Accounting provides a common accounting engine that replaces the existing accounting processes in the different subledgers and allows you to determine the accounts, lines, descriptions, summarization, and dates of journal entries. Oracle Grants Accounting supports the integration with Oracle Subledger Accounting.

You can also add detailed transaction information to journal headers and lines. Detailed subledger accounting journals are available for analytics, auditing, and reporting. They are summarized, transferred, imported, and posted to Oracle General Ledger.

Account Generation Rules

During the upgrade, Oracle Grants Accounting creates default accounting definitions that allow the system to continue using existing AutoAccounting rules without additional setup steps. You may choose to create your own accounting definitions using Accounting Methods Builder.

Cost Processing Flows

As part of the Oracle Subledger Accounting integration, existing interface cost processes and tieback processes have been replaced with new processes that raise Oracle Subledger Accounting events, generate accounting entries, and interface them to Oracle General Ledger.

View Accounting Details

With the integration to Oracle Subledger Accounting, you now have the option to define account derivation rules within Oracle Subledger Accounting that will replace the default accounts generated by the Oracle Projects AutoAccounting feature. This changes how you can view accounting information of transaction lines. You can view the default accounting created for specific transaction lines from the details window on Expenditure Inquiry. However, to view the actual accounting that was interfaced to Oracle General Ledger, you must either use the View Accounting option from the Tools menu on Expenditure Inquiry or by using the inquiry pages provided by Oracle Subledger Accounting.

Tax Default Hierarchy Setup

Oracle Grants Accounting is integrated with Oracle E-Business Tax. This module provides the ability to define tax setup centrally. The Projects Tax Default Hierarchy used by Oracle Grants Accounting is migrated to centralized tax setup to ensure a consistent user experience across applications.

Additional Information: See Oracle E-Business Tax Implementation Guide and Oracle E-Business Tax User Guide. See also the section on E-Business Tax for information about the Projects Tax Hierarchy migration.

Project Billing

This section outlines changes made to Oracle Project Billing.

Accounting for Revenue

In Release 11i, you generated revenue and accounted for it using this set of interface programs:

After the upgrade, the revenue generation process is unchanged. However, new concurrent programs replace the existing ones as part of the integration with Oracle Subledger Accounting. You run the following programs instead of the Interface Revenue to General Ledger process:

The Tieback Revenue to General Ledger process is now obsolete.

Additional Information: See Oracle Project Billing User Guide and Oracle Projects Fundamentals for more information.

Accounting for Intercompany Invoices

In this release, the Generate Intercompany Invoices process continues to use AutoAccounting to generate the Revenue account, and the Interface Invoices to Receivables process to generate the Receivables. The Interface Cross Charge Distributions to General Ledger process, which creates accounting events for cross charge transactions, is renamed as Generate Cross Charge Accounting Events.

Additionally, when cost reclassification is enabled, you must run the Tieback Invoices from Receivables process followed by Generate Cross Charge Accounting Events process. The tieback process creates the account events necessary to create provider cost reclassification journal entries. Subsequent submission of the Create Accounting process will create accounting entries for provider cost reclassification.

Additional Information: See Oracle Project Billing User Guide for more information.

View Accounting Details

With the integration with Oracle Subledger Accounting, you can define account derivation rules within Oracle Subledger Accounting to replace the default accounts generated by Auto Accounting in Oracle Project Billing. To view the actual accounting that was interfaced to Oracle General Ledger, you must either use the View Accounting option from the Tools menu on Revenue Review, or use the inquiry pages provided by Oracle Subledger Accounting.

Additional Information: See Oracle Project Billing User Guide for more information.

MRC Migration Impact

In Release 11i, all MRC columns could be defined as part of custom folders. As a result of the migration of MRC to the Oracle Subledger Accounting model, Oracle Projects has eliminated all MRC-related reporting columns from inquiry windows such as Events, Revenue Review, Invoice Review, and Funding Inquiry.

Tax Default Hierarchy Setup

In this release, Oracle Projects is integrated Oracle E-Business Tax, which provides you with the ability to define tax setup centrally. The Projects Tax Default Hierarchy is migrated to a centralized tax setup to ensure consistent user experience across applications.

Additional Information: See Oracle E-Business Tax Implementation Guide and Oracle E-Business Tax User Guide for more information. See also E-Business Tax for details about Projects Tax Hierarchy Migration.

Project Costing

This section describes the changes made to Oracle Project Costing.

Supplier Cost Integration

Supplier cost integration functionality in Oracle Project Costing has been modified to use new functionality introduced in this release by Oracle Payables and Oracle Subledger Accounting. The following describes changes that may impact your implementation.

Additional Information: See Oracle Project Costing User Guide for more information on these new features. See also Oracle Projects Implementation Guide and Oracle Projects Fundamentals.

Supplier Cost Adjustments

Supplier cost adjustment features now use new Oracle Payables and Oracle Subledger Accounting functionality. The following changes may impact your implementation.

Integration with Subledger Accounting

In this release, Oracle Subledger Accounting provides a common accounting engine that replaces the existing accounting processes in the different subledgers and allows you to determine the accounts, lines, descriptions, summarization, and dates of journal entries. You can also add detailed transaction information to journal headers and lines. Detailed subledger accounting journals are available for analytics, auditing, and reporting. They are summarized, transferred, imported and posted to Oracle General Ledger. Oracle Project Costing supports the integration with Oracle Subledger Accounting.

Account Generation Rules

During the upgrade, Oracle Project Costing provides Oracle Subledger Accounting with default definitions that allow the system to continue utilizing existing AutoAccounting rules without additional setup steps. You may choose to create your own accounting rules in Oracle Subledger Accounting in order to take advantage of additional flexibility provided by the application.

Cost Processing Flows

As part of the Oracle Subledger Accounting integration, existing interface cost processes and tieback processes have been replaced with new processes that raise Oracle Subledger Accounting events, generate accounting entries, and interface them to Oracle General Ledger.

View Accounting Details

With the integration to Oracle Subledger Accounting, you now have the option to define account derivation rules within Oracle Subledger Accounting that will replace the default accounts generated by Oracle Projects AutoAccounting. This changes how you can view accounting information of transaction lines. You can view the default accounting created for specific transaction lines from the details window on Expenditure Inquiry. However, to view the actual accounting that was interfaced to Oracle General Ledger, you must either use the View Accounting option from the Tools menu on Expenditure Inquiry or by using the inquiry pages provided by Oracle Subledger Accounting.

Migration of Multiple Reporting Currencies (MRC)

Oracle Project Costing multiple reporting currency functionality has migrated to reporting currency functionality in Oracle Subledger Accounting. Oracle Subledger Accounting provides a single repository where you can view amounts in reporting currencies. As a result, Oracle Project Costing no longer needs to separately support MRC functionality. This affects MRC support for costs and capital projects in the following ways:

Reporting currency accounting journals for both cost and cross charge transactions are created in Oracle Subledger Accounting by the Create Accounting program. You do not need to run separate programs for maintaining reporting currency journals.

Oracle Project Planning and Control

This section describes the changes for Oracle Project Planning and Control.

Web-based Budgeting and Forecasting

If you are using web-based budgeting and forecasting, note the following changes:

Additional Information: See Projects for more information.

Project Forecasting

The feature for forecasting based on staffing plans in Oracle Project Resource Management has been fully integrated with the enhanced Budgeting and Forecasting feature.

Work Management

Note these changes to workplan management:

Property Manager

This section describes the changes to Oracle Property Manager.

Integration with E-Business Tax

Payment and Billing terms now contain the tax-related information through the Tax Classification Code instead of the Tax Code/Tax Group values as in previous releases. Tax information is consolidated using the E-Business Tax application.

The new rule-based tax engine is designed to fully replace and substantially enhance the existing tax code-based tax calculation. Tax calculation is accomplished using the Global Tax Engine and tax codes and the defaulting hierarchy approach are migrated and supported in E-Business Tax.

Integration with Subledger Accounting

This release introduces Oracle Subledger Accounting for managing accounting across subledger transactions. During the upgrade, accounting options and their settings, and the existing accounting entries in the Oracle Property Manager data model, are moved to the new accounting data model to ensure a continuous business operation between the two releases. All accounting lines related to the transactions are also migrated. Oracle Property Manager has been enhanced to fully support Oracle Subledger Accounting.

Legal Entity in Oracle Property Manager

In order to consolidate legal-entity data into a central repository, Oracle Property Manager has incorporated Legal Entity stamping on its Payment and Billing terms. The legal entity can now be associated with the ledger when it is set up.

In an accounting setup that contains only one legal entity, a ledger represents the legal entity. The operating unit does not have a direct relationship to the legal entity, but will have a direct relationship to a ledger. Because the operating unit cannot always determine a unique legal entity, both the legal entity and the business entity are now explicitly defined on the transactions.

Projects Foundation

This section describes the changes to Oracle Projects Foundation.

Project List and Alternate Project Search Page

In Release 11i, both the Project List and Alternate Project Search pages displayed financial amounts from Project Status Inquiry. In this release, these pages display financial amounts only from project performance reporting.

New Resource Model

In Release 11i, resource lists, which could be of one or two levels, were used for budgeting and reporting. In this release, there are separate structures for budgeting and reporting:

A planning resource list consists of planning resources that are based on planning resource formats. A resource breakdown structure is a multi-level hierarchy of resources that is used for reporting the planned and actual amounts on a project.

The upgrade automatically converts all resource lists used in self-service budgets to planning resource lists and creates resource breakdown structures. The result is that self-service budgeting is now performed based on the planning resource list. The new resource breakdown structures have no impact on existing functionality. They are used only by project performance reporting.

Note: Users cannot view resources added to upgraded lists in web-based view if they add resources using forms based view nor any amounts associated to them.

Additional Information: See Oracle Projects Fundamentals for more information. See also Oracle Project Planning and Control User Guide.

Supply Chain Management Upgrade Impact

This section describes how the upgrade affects your existing Supply Chain Management products, and highlights the impact of these functional changes on your day-to-day business. It is arranged alphabetically by products in the Supply Chain Management product family.

Action: Review the product-specific Release Content Documents (RCDs) and TOI on My Oracle Support for addional information.

About Business Impact and Functional Changes

An Applications upgrade alters both the technical and functional aspects of your Oracle E-Business Suite system. In addition to changes to the technology stack and file system, an upgrade also initiates specific changes that affect how your existing products work after the upgrade and the way they look and feel.

Note: This section describes some of the ways the upgrade changes your existing products. Oracle assumes that you have reviewed the new features and products delivered in this release, which is included in the product-specific Release Content Documents (RCDs) and TOI on My Oracle Support.

The discussions of the functional aspects of the upgrade in this chapter are arranged by products within the Supply Chain Management product family.

Supply Chain Management

Your Supply Chain Management applications specialists should be completely familiar with the information in this section and should have made appropriate plans to accommodate the associated changes before you begin your upgrade.

Advanced Supply Chain Planning

Changes for Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning are described in this section.

Distribution Planning

In previous release, you planned distribution centers using master production plans (MPPs), which used material requirements planning logic. In this release, you plan distribution centers using distribution requirements planning (DRP).

You can still use MPP plans after the upgrade. However, the DRP plan uses fair share balancing stock among distribution centers (when one has too much and one not enough of a particular item). You can also use DRP plans to view and adjust material among competing resources (allocation plan), to search for material unassigned to a carrier (opportunities) and add to consolidated shipments, and view a distribution-based horizontal plan.

If you are a distribution-intensive company, you can use distribution requirements planning to plan product movement across your supply chains.

Item Attribute Simulation Sets

In previous release, you could see the effect of changes to your static and dynamic planning data - without actually making the changes in your production environment - by running simulations. Beginning with this release, you can simulate changes to key item attributes in advanced supply chain plans and distribution plans.

You can assign different values to key item attributes for item-organizations and save the assignments in an item attribute simulation set. When you reference an item attribute simulation set at plan launch, the planning and distribution planning engines use the item attribute values from the item attribute simulation set rather than those from the collected item definition.

You can specify simulated values for these item attributes to use both in manufacturing plans and in distribution plans:

Critical Component, Preprocessing Lead Time, Processing Lead Time, Postprocessing Lead Time, Fixed Lead Time, Variable Lead Time, Fixed Order Quantity, Fixed Days Supply, Shrinkage Rate, Fixed Lot Multiple, Minimum Order Quantity, Maximum Order Quantity, Service Level, Carrying Cost, Demand Time Fence Days, Forecast Control, Planning Time Fence Days, Standard Cost, Net Selling Price, PIP Flag, Selling Price, Substitution Window, Safety Stock Days, Unit Weight, Unit Volume, Safety Stock Method, Safety Stock Percent, ABC Class, Planning Method, and Minimum Remaining Shelf Life Days.

You can specify simulated values for these item attributes to use only in distribution plans: DRP Planned, Max Inventory Days of Supply, Max Inventory Window, Target Inventory Days of Supply, and Target Inventory Window.

OPM Planning Convergence

In previous releases, you planned process manufacturing facilities using the Oracle Process Manufacturing MRP module. In this release, you plan manufacturing facilities using Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP) unconstrained planning. If you have an ASCP license, you can launch multi-organization unconstrained plans. If you do not have an ASCP license, you can launch single-organization unconstrained plans.

Process manufacturing facilities can use these Advanced Supply Chain Planning features: advanced user interface, multi-level pegging, online planning and simulation capabilities, and advanced co-product planning. They cannot, however, use these Process Manufacturing MRP module features: replenishment method-specific order modifiers, multiple transfer types, and resizing suggestions.

After upgrading to Release 12, the term work order replaces the term discrete job in the user interface, including windows such as the Navigator, Supply/Demand, Horizontal Plan, Preferences, and Exceptions Summary.

Sequence-dependent Setup

In previous releases, you created rules that controlled how to schedule the sequence of discrete job and flow schedules and used Oracle Manufacturing Scheduling to sequence the discrete jobs and flow schedules. In this release, the new scheduling feature is based on sequence-dependent resource setup times.

Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning determines a preferred task sequence that minimizes the time used for changeovers. It then tries to schedule activities in accordance with this sequence. You can specify plan option values that control how Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning trades off the benefits of minimizing setup time and maximizing resource throughput against the costs of satisfying demands early and building up inventory or satisfying demands late.

Sequence-dependent setup capability is available for both discrete and process manufacturing. Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning uses the same setup transition matrix inputs that Oracle Manufacturing Scheduling uses.

Previously, Advanced Supply Chain Planning scheduled only to the resource level. Now, when it schedules resources with specified sequence-dependent setups, it schedules to the instance level for the resource.

You can view the preferred sequence of tasks for a resource in the Resource Changeover window of the Planner Workbench. You can also view the calculated setup hours for a resource in the horizontal capacity plan for the resource.

The Sequence Dependent Setups plan option controls how Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning handles sequence dependent setups. If you set this option to No for all time buckets, Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning uses resource utilization percentages to increase activity durations and account for setup times. If you set the option to Yes, Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning does not use the utilization percentage. Instead, it calculates sequence dependent setup times using the changeover matrix defined in Oracle Discrete and Process manufacturing modules.

Gantt Chart Enhancements

In previous releases, you used the Advanced Supply Chain Planning Gantt chart to graphically view the manufacturing and distribution plan and reschedule orders as needed. In this release, new paradigms have been introduced, new features have been added, and the usability of existing features has greatly improved.

Gantt chart enhancements make it easier for planners to manipulate schedule outputs and diagnose scheduling problems. With the enhanced Gantt chart, you can:

Reports

The following Advanced Supply Chain Management reports have changed.

Planning Detail Report

In previous releases, you ran the Advanced Supply Chain Planning Detail Report against manufacturing plans. In this release, you can run it against your manufacturing plans, distribution plans, and collected data. It shows material requirements planning information that you can use to understand the results of a plan, and can include a horizontal listing, a vertical listing, and detail sections showing gross requirements, scheduled receipts, planned orders, bill of material and engineering changes, expired lot, and by-product information.

This report replaces these Oracle Process Manufacturing (OPM) reports: MRP Bucketed Material Report, MRP Material Activity Report, MRP Action Messages Report, and MRP Error Messages Report.

Inventory Reorder Point Report

This report replaces the OPM Reorder Point Report used in previous releases.

OPM MRP Reports

The following OPM MRP reports have a new format: MPS Material Activity report (based on source transaction data) and MPS Bucketed Material report (based on source transaction data).

Additional Information: See Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning Implementation and User's Guide (Doc ID: 118086.1) for more information.

Asset Tracking

Changes for Oracle Asset Tracking are described in this section.

Notification from Fixed Assets

You can leverage a new concurrent program - Generate Notification - New Fixed Assets for Install Base Tracking to generate a workflow notification for new assets created in Oracle Assets. All users associated to the newly seeded Oracle Asset Tracking - Planner responsibility receive notification.

Interface to Fixed Assets

A new user interface facilitates the integration between item instances and fixed assets. You can associate an item instance to a fixed asset, either with a specified item instance or optionally with a selected fixed asset. You can associate multiple serialized item instances to the same fixed asset.

Fixed Asset Update

You can perform Fixed Asset updates for manual item instances, such as location or ownership. Fixed Asset updates are also supported for most Oracle Inventory transactions, except WIP transactions.

The Enable Auto Update flag has been added. When Enable Auto Update is set to Yes, an item instance and its associated asset are fully synchronized, subject to the validation rules existing prior to this release. If this flag is off, the association is not subject to fixed asset updates.

The Open Item interface contains Fixed Assets columns. You can create both the item instance and the associated fixed asset as part of your Oracle Installed Based item instance import process.

General Ledger Reversal Process

You can manually create reversing accounting distribution entries. These reversing entries offset entries generated by the Cost Manager, for selected inventory transactions of capitalized item instances. Prior to this release, these reversing entries were created automatically as part of the transaction costing process. In this release, you must run the Create Reversal GL Entries for Inventory FA Items concurrent program to generate reversing entries.

Field Service Capabilities for Assets

You can create service requests and tasks for an internal asset in Oracle Field Service. Oracle Asset Tracking captures an asset's complete service history, including the debrief transactions, the manual logging of In/Out of Service, and the operation status of a recovered asset.

Contracts (Core)

The following functionality for Oracle Contracts Core 11i3 and later is being discontinued and will not be supported in this release.

No data is migrated during the upgrade. If these discontinued features affect your system, you should consider implementing Release 11.5.10 (or higher) Oracle Sales Contracts, including the contract repository feature. Oracle will continue to support the previously released versions of the Contracts Core and Contracts for Sales products, although enhancements are no longer being offered.

Note: This does not apply to Oracle Sales Contracts or Oracle Procurement Contracts released as part of Release 11.5.10, nor does it apply to customers who are using only Oracle Service Contracts or Oracle Project Contracts.

Demand Planning

Changes for Oracle Demand Planning are described in this section.

Forecasting Enhancements

Statistical forecasting techniques in Oracle Demand Planning are enhanced in several areas:

Shared Objects

Demand planning managers and demand planners can now share their personal objects with other demand planning users. The sharable objects include documents (reports, graphs, and worksheets), document folders, saved selections, and custom aggregates.

Demand planning managers can create these objects centrally, and then share them with all the demand planners at any time in the demand planning cycle. This provides a consistent view of demand planning data to all the users and eliminates the need for demand planners to create the same reports and worksheets individually. Planners can save personal copies of shared documents to refine their selections and layout.

Selective Forecasting

Selective Forecasting now supports the Combination Forecast measure, which selectively forecasts discrete groups of products with product-specific forecasting rules. You can copy data for a group of products from an existing measure to the Combination Forecast measure being defined. You can also use product saved selections when creating combination forecasts.

Combination Forecast measures that you create using Selective Forecasting appear in the administrator's measure list and for managers and planners in the document tree under the Measure folder's Forecast subfolder. These measures are available in reports, worksheets, and graphs for distribution, submission, collection and upload.

Planner Productivity

In this release, Demand Planning has been enhanced to improve planner productivity:

Performance

The following Demand Planning enhancements improve performance in a number of areas:

Re-aggregate Option

Administrators can now force the re-aggregation of all measures in the Shared database, whenever a change in a hierarchy is detected, without overwriting user modifications to existing measures. The download process automatically determines which hierarchy values were modified, and then re-aggregates those values for all measures for those values, including input parameters that were not downloaded if a quick download was run. This allows a measure's values to reflect mid-cycle hierarchy changes without running a Populate process, which overwrites all existing modifications to the measures.

Do not run Populate when the Reaggregate option is checked. Populate automatically recalculates the measures and overwrites existing edits. The Reaggregate option only applies to affected hierarchies - not the entire measure. These options are generally mutually exclusive.

You can enable the Reaggregate option in the Demand Plan Administration module by checking a checkbox on the Download screen. A full distribution for planners' is required in order to receive the hierarchy changes. The Reaggregate option is examined during distribution, and if enabled all personal measures are reaggregated.

Worksheet Performance Enhancements

Performance improvements have been made to the worksheet opening, editing, and recalculation operations.

Net Change Aggregation

When performing a Full or Quick download of one or more Demand Planning input parameters using the Update refresh mode, aggregation calculations are performed for only those measures that have changed.

Prevent Even Allocation

In Release 11i, entering values into an empty worksheet cell allocated that value to lower hierarchy levels using the Even allocation method. In certain situations this creates an explosion of values in the Demand Planning workspace that can be potentially detrimental to performance.

Values that are entered into empty worksheet cells are now allocated to lower hierarchy levels using the First Level Value allocation method. Only the first child of each descendant level is allocated the entered value, which prevents the database size from unnecessarily increasing.

Reduce Forced Recalculations

In Release 11i, you were not able to edit worksheet values of different hierarchy levels without recalculating the worksheet between edits. This enforced consistency of values across hierarchy levels, but created performance issues by forcing demand planners to wait for recalculations to complete between each edit.

Administrators now control when recalculations occur. Edits can be made at any level, and the worksheet is calculated at the user's discretion. Once the worksheet is recalculated or saved, edits are enforced from the top hierarchy levels down, so it is possible for an edit at a higher hierarchy level to override an edit at a lower hierarchy level.

View-only Access for Users

A new role (Demand Plan Viewer) is available. It allows you to view all data in the shared database, create documents, and share reports. However, data cannot be changed, shared or submitted.

Administration

The following enhancements help the Demand Planning administrator more effectively manage the progress of a demand planning cycle:

Collections

The following collections enhancements help the Demand Planning Administrator more effectively manage the progress of a demand planning cycle:

Enhanced Support for Forecast Priorities

In Demand Planning, you can very flexibly specify, down to the individual entry level, the priority associated with forecasts. You can then feed this information into Advanced Supply Chain Planning to drive planning decisions. This gives you the freedom to prioritize forecasts by demand class, customer, product, location, and time.

To set up forecast priorities, define a demand plan with at least two output scenarios: the normal forecast output scenario, and a forecast priority output scenario. For each forecast output scenario, use the Scenarios tab of the demand plan definition form to specify which other output scenario that you want to associate as the forecast priority. The output levels of the forecast output scenario and the forecast priority scenario must match. When using the forecast output scenario as a demand schedule in an ASCP plan, the associated priorities from the forecast priority scenario are passed into ASCP as the forecast priorities.

Demand History for Internal Sales Orders

In Release 11i10, Demand Planning ignored demand history based on internal sales orders. In this release, Demand Planning now recognizes demand history from internal sales orders to user-selected organizations. This supports demand planning processes for divisions within a larger enterprise running on a single global E-Business Suite instance. Divisions that run their own demand plans to fulfill demands from internal organizations can now recognize demand history and create forecasts for those demands.

The new Select Internal Sales Orders For plan option field in the Demand Plan Definitions form allows you to specify which internal sales orders to consider. Demand Planning considers all internal sales orders containing one of the destination organizations that you list in the field.

Archiving Process for Demand Plans

Two new concurrent requests are available for archiving and restoring demand plans: Archive Demand Plan and Restore Demand Plan. These requests require only a demand plan name as a parameter. The archive process writes to a log named arch<plan_id>.log in ODPDIR. The Demand Planning system administrator runs a request to archive or restore a plan. Before starting the archive or restore processes, verify that there is sufficient space to write the log.

Depot Repair

In the Depot application, you can execute business flows for service, testing, calibration, exchange, upgrade, asset recovery, trade-in or recycling in addition to repair. However, many screen labels, menus, functions and title bars specifically say 'repair'. Some users dislike when the screen says 'repair' when no repair is being done.

In Release 12.2 the Depot application will replace the term “repair” with the more universal term “service”. For example, 'repair order' becomes 'service order', 'repair type' becomes 'service type', 'repair organization' becomes 'service organization', and so on.

Automotive Industry Configuration

The automotive industry has a number of unique business flows, naming conventions, and data requirements that are unique to that industry. A new option is provided in the Depot application to automatically configure the system to provide automotive industry-specific setups for automotive manufacturers, dealers and service centers.

Enterprise Asset Management (eAM)

Changes for Oracle Enterprise Asset Management are described in this section.

Important: Prior to the upgrade to 12.1.1, you must set up the Install Base Parameters and Services Profile Option in accordance with Note 884201.1. See: Supply Chain Management Tasks.

Asset Definition

Asset Definition in eAM migrates to the Installed Base data schema. This migration enables you to define and store both internal and customer assets in the same tables. The following functional changes results from this architectural change:

A new and simplified window enables you to define Asset Groups, using templates. This is an option in the Item Master window.

Asset Transactions

Unlike prior releases, you can now move an asset in and out of Inventory. You can define Assets as Transactable in the Item Master. You can receive an asset into Inventory, transfer it between organizations, and so on. When out of Inventory, you can specify the physical location of the asset.

Regardless of where an asset resides, its attributes, activity associations, meter association, and preventive maintenance schedules remain with the asset. They are not organization-specific.

Maintenance organization and Location Organization

In this release, as assets can be transactable, eAM introduces the concept of location organization. An eAM-enabled organization can see, not only assets in its own organization, but also assets residing in the organizations where it provides the maintenance services. The eAM Organization field in the Organization Parameters identifies the non-eAM organizations that an eAM-enabled organization services.

Asset Operations

With the Check In/Check Out feature, you can check an asset out to a user. A new self-service page enables you to check an asset out to a user, and check it back in.

As an asset is maintained, events are captured in the Operational Log; you can view this in a new self-service page. You can enter Asset events manually.

Work Management

In the Work Management area, extensive upgrades were added to this release.

Usability

Significant changes were made to the Work Order pages:

Workflow for Work Orders

A new Workflow process is seeded for a work order and its lifecycle. Integration with AME enables you to set up an approval process for your work orders, with preset approval hierarchy and flows.

A new window enables you to define your own work order statuses, which are associated to system statuses (for example, Draft, Released, Unreleased, and so on).

Assignment and Scheduling

You can now associate multiple time blocks for an employee assigned to your work order. Graphic representation of employee availability is provided when you perform assignment. When you make a change at a lower level, the Work Order Scheduling process adjusts the higher level dates and times, according to the "Bottom Up" hierarchy of Instance/Resource/Operation/Work Order.

Supervisor Workbench

A new workbench was added for the Supervisor role. From this workbench, a supervisor can manage the work of his departments or crews.

Mobile Solution

All the functionality needed to manage work orders is available on a connected mobile device. You can create and update work orders, request material, assign resource, enter material usage, charge time, complete operations and work orders from a mobile device.

CFR Part 11

The eAM work order process supports FDA compliance, with standardized electronic records and signatures that can be audited in accordance to CFR Part 11. At operation or work order completion, you can sign electronically. A signed record is created with a snapshot of the operation/work order information.

Meters

Meter Hierarchy is a new feature. If a Source meter is associated with a specific meter (Target), readings from the Source meter trickle down to the specified meter automatically. Readings from the Target meter are automatically created when readings from the Source meter are entered.

Mass data entry for meter readings is supported with a new self-service page.

Preventive Maintenance

Enterprise Asset Management supports organization-specific Preventive Maintenance sets. Global sets are visible to all maintenance organizations. If you define a set and specify it as Local, only your organization can see or update it.

There are two new Preventive Maintenance options:

Additional Upgrades

Other product upgrades that affect Enterprise Asset Management are described in this section.

Financial

From a new window, you can select work order costs and push them, using Mass Updates, to Oracle Assets for capitalization.

The new Maintenance Budgeting and Forecasting process enables you to generate asset maintenance cost forecasts, based on historical or planned works, and export them in Excel, HTML, or XML format.

iSupplier Portal

In the iSuppler Portal, search criteria enable you to query purchase orders specific to a work order or work order/operation. You can also drill down to view associated collection plans and enter collection results for a work order operation from the portal.

Quality Integration

To support the new asset architecture and the new eAM functionality, upgrades were made in Oracle Quality:

Flow Manufacturing

Changes for Oracle Flow Manufacturing are described in this section.

Flow Sequencing Profile Option

This release includes a new site-level Flow Manufacturing profile option (FLM: Enable Flow Sequencing). It is not required for an upgrade from a previous release - you can continue to use both Oracle Manufacturing Scheduling and Oracle Flow Manufacturing Sequencing if both components were previously installed in your Release 11i system.

The default value is No for this profile option. You can legally set this option to Yes only if you have specifically licensed Oracle Flow Sequencing.

Install Base

Changes for Oracle Install Base are described in this section.

Discontinued Profile Options

Three profile options previously used to support Field Service Location are now obsolete: CSE_ISSUE_HZ_LOC, CSE_MISC_ISSUE-HZ_LOC, and CSE_MISC_RECEIPT_HZ_LOC.

Item Instance

A new user interface based on Oracle Applications (OA) Framework makes it easier to define and maintain an item instance. Important attributes of an item instance are grouped into tabs with the remaining information accessible through links.

Item Instance Mass Update

Item Instance Mass Update is converted from a form-based user interface to an OA Framework-based user interface. You can also update, delete, or transfer contracts as part of the mass update.

Counters

The definition of counters and Enterprise Asset Management meters is consolidated, and additional features have been added to enhance functionality.

Asset Transfer to and from Field Location

The Inventory Transaction Type contains the Location Required flag, which supports Asset Transfer to/from Field Location. You can create new user-defined transaction types as follows:

Support for Other Products

The upgrade affects the way item instance works with other products.

Oracle Contracts

A new Contract page displays contracts impacted by an item instance transaction such as quantity change or ownership change. Associated changes to contracts can be initiated from this page.

Oracle TeleService (Tangible Asset for the Contact Center)

A new sub-tab allows you to search and display item instances in the Contact Center user interface. Validations for item instance creation and update, configuration update (reconnect, disconnect) are enforced.

Oracle Process Manufacturing (OPM)

The convergence of Oracle Inventory and Oracle Process Manufacturing allows Oracle Install Base to support the tracking of OPM inventory transactions.

Inventory

Changes for Oracle Inventory are described in this section.

Oracle Process Manufacturing Convergence

Oracle Process Manufacturing (OPM) Inventory has been replaced with Oracle Inventory. Oracle Inventory now supports both process manufacturing and discrete manufacturing organizations.

Before this release, OPM maintained its own inventory module. This module interacted with standard Oracle Order Management, Oracle Procurement, and Oracle Advanced Planning and Scheduling, as well as the OPM-specific manufacturing module. Oracle Inventory interacted with all discrete and flow manufacturing modules.

In this and future releases, Oracle will support only Oracle Inventory for both discrete and process manufacturing environments. Oracle still retains the organization type distinctions process and discrete because the manufacturing, costing, and quality modules are not converging for this release. Although Oracle Inventory integrates with both product suites, you must still determine the organization type in order to indicate the appropriate costing, production, and quality modules.

The Process Manufacturing convergence has the following benefits:

In order to support process organizations, the following functionality is available in Oracle Inventory.

Deferred Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) Recognition

Starting in this release, Oracle Inventory can defer the recognition of COGS until all contract contingencies are filled and Receivables has recognized the revenue. Oracle Inventory holds incurred costs in a deferred COGS account until Receivables recognizes it per the revenue recognition rules. This enables you to recognize both COGS and revenue in the same accounting period. The new accounting rules also support customer returns.

All sales order issue transactions are debited to the deferred COGS account except:

Oracle Cost Management moves incurred costs from the deferred COGS to the COGS account based on the revenue recognition events or order close events. The remaining accounting aspects remain unchanged. Set up the Deferred COGS account on the Other Accounts tab of the Organization Parameters window.

Dependencies and Interactions

This feature interacts with Oracle Cost Management to defer the cost of goods sold. Oracle Inventory stamps the account type on the material transaction, and Oracle Cost Management debits the correct account at the time of the material transaction. Oracle Cost Management also moves the costs incurred from the Deferred COGS account to the COGS account upon revenue recognition.

Additional Information: See Defining Other Account Parameters in the Oracle Inventory User's Guide.

Material Workbench

In Release 11.5.10, Oracle Inventory introduced the option to use the Material Workbench to view material that resides in receiving in addition to on-hand material. In this release, you can use the Material Workbench to view detailed information about material that resides in receiving, in-transit material, and on hand material. When you choose to view in-transit material, you can view the following document types:

Oracle Inventory calculates availability information according to the material location of the relevant material. Instead of viewing on hand material, material in receiving, and in-transit material through separate queries, you can perform one query that displays an item across different material locations. You can also perform a query that displays item information across organizations. This provides you with access to a global picture of inventory for the item, and allows you to make quick decisions regarding item sourcing and procurement.

Query Changes

In this release, the following changes were made to the Material Workbench query window:

After you execute a query, you can view the material across different material locations at the same time. You can expand the tree window to view on hand, receiving, and inbound material according to the search criteria you supply. In the results pane, when the organization node is highlighted, the summary view may include multiple organizations. The system displays material in each location simultaneously to provide a global picture for a particular item. The results pane also provides you with faster sorting, column manipulation, and exporting capabilities.

Changes to Support Process Manufacturing

The following changes were made to the Material Workbench to support Oracle Process Manufacturing convergence:

Picking Rule Enhancements

In this release, the picking rule window enables you to capture individual customer product quality and material characteristic preferences. For example, one customer may require premium grade material, while another more price-sensitive client may not have that restriction. To manage customer preferences, restrictions were added to the picking rules engine allocation logic in addition to the existing sort criteria for acceptable material. In this release, the Inventory Picking Rules window enables you to create picking rules without installing Oracle Warehouse Management.

These rules are a subset of Oracle Warehouse Management rules and have the following usage and restrictions:

After you create the picking rules, you can use the Rules Workbench page to assign picking rules in the following combinations:

When you enable a rule the system builds a rules package. After the system builds a rules package, it creates an enabled strategy with the same name and description. If you disable the rule, then the system automatically disables the strategy. You can only disable rules that are not used in any disabled strategy assignments. You can also only modify disabled rules.

Note: The Rules Workbench available in an inventory-only organization does not have the full capabilities of the Oracle Warehouse Management Rules Workbench.

Additional Information: See Defining Picking Rules in the Oracle Inventory User's Guide.

Enhanced Reservations

You can create linkages between supply and demand to guarantee material availability. These linkages are known as reservations. A reservation guarantees the availability of reserved supply to a specific demand. In previous releases, reservations supported limited supply and demand types.

In this release, Oracle Inventory introduced the following new supply and demand types:

Supply types

Demand types

Reservations supports document validation, availability checks, and change management for the new supply and demand types. In this release, reservations also supports crossdocking in the warehouse, and enables you to reserve the most appropriate inbound receipts for an outbound shipment. The crossdock attribute was added to the Item Reservations window to link supply to demand. The system creates crossdock reservations automatically. You cannot delete a crossdock reservation if the supply type is receiving.

In this release, you can reserve a specific serial number and Oracle Inventory ensures the system allocates the serial number at pick release. A new Serial Entry window was added to enable you to reserve multiple serial numbers for a reservation. If you reserve serial numbers, pick release allocates the serials irrespective of the picking rules. Pick release allocates the reserved serials first and honors the organization parameter Allocate Serial Numbers for the remaining demand. Oracle Inventory also allows you to substitute serial numbers during picking and shipping. If you choose to substitute a serial number, then the system deletes the reservation for the substituted serial number.

Note: The items Reservations window supports serial reservations only for on-hand delivery.

Additional Information: See Item Reservations in the Oracle Inventory User's Guide. See also Warehouse Management Crossdocking in the Oracle Warehouse Management User's Guide.

Inventory Optimization

This section describes the changes to Oracle Inventory Optimization.

Demand Fulfillment Lead Time

Demand fulfillment lead time is the time between order placement and order fulfillment. You usually set it either to the time allowed by the customer or based on business practice. You can express a customer service level target in terms of a demand fulfillment lead time. For example, you can set a 95% service level with a three-day demand fulfillment lead time.

In previous releases, Oracle Inventory Optimization assumed that the lead time was zero. And, service levels were specified in different places - item-specific service levels as a flex field for the item, customer-specific service levels as a flex field for the customer, and demand class-specific service levels when associating a demand class with allocation rules.

In this release, service level and demand fulfillment lead time can be specified in one place as part of a service level set at the following levels: Item - Organization - Demand class, Item - Demand class, Item - Item category - Demand class, Item - Organization, Category, Demand class, Customer site, Customer, Organization - Demand class, and Organization.

You can enter lead time in days as a fractional number. For example, a 4-hour lead time as 0.167 (4 hours / 24 hours).

Lead Time Variability

In previous releases, Inventory Optimization did not consider the variability of lead times when it calculated safety stock levels. In this release, it calculates these variability measures from lead times when it calculates safety stock levels:

Additional Information: See Oracle Inventory Optimization Implementation and User's Guide (Doc ID: 118086.1) for details.

Product Hub

Changes for Oracle Product Hub (previously known as Oracle Product Information Management or PIM) are described in this section.

Structures

In prior releases, you could only update structure attributes for common structures (also known as common bills of material) in the source bill. You can now edit five structure attributes, and can have different values from the source bill. These five attribute fields include:

You can choose to change these attributes when you create a new common structure, change an existing common structure, or add or update a common structure when using the Bill Import open interface program.

The profile EGO: Enable Oracle Collaborative Development should not be enabled from Release 12 onwards.

You can now only update structure and component attribute values using the Product Workbench. See: Editing Structure Information, Oracle Product Hub User's Guide.

Advanced Search

The advanced search function has been enhanced so that searches using the operator “contains” are now case-insensitive.

Web ADI Integration

Columns created within a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet during the information export process now match the column formats of the display format selected.

Item Organization Assignments

In prior releases, when assigning items to organizations, some of the item primary attributes were defaulted from the master item during organization assignment and could not be changed. In this release, you can now edit the following attributes during organization assignment:

Simplified Item Creation Process

The item creation process in releases prior to 12.1.1 involved multiple steps and different user interfaces. You can now create one or more items using a one-step process for entering basic item information. You can then go to the item's Overview page to provide additional details.

Ad-hoc New Item Request

As of release 12.1.1, the new item request process enables users to create items and then submit a new item request for the item or group of items at a later date. The new item request is no longer created automatically at the end of the item creation process. This enables a user to work on an item or set of items as a draft, then request further definition and approval using workflow when appropriate.

Versioning of Item Catalog Categories and Value Sets

You can now create versions for item catalog categories and certain types of value sets. Versioning is possible only if the profile option Enable PIM for Telco Features is set to Yes. For versioning pre-upgrade item catalog categories, see the post-upgrade tasks section. For versioned item catalog categories, only transaction attributes and structures can be maintained within versions.

Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN)

Both Demand-Side Product Data Synchronization for GDSN and Supply-Side Product Data Synchronization for GDSN is obsolete. Functionality related to this is not visible.

Value Set Security

When you initially install or upgrade Oracle Product Hub to Release 12.2.4 or later, users cannot view, insert or update any value set values. You must explicitly set up access for specific users by enabling appropriate grants and roles for those users. For more information about setting up access, refer to Flexfield Value Set Security, Oracle E-Business Suite Flexfields Guide.

Related Topics

For additional information, refer to the Oracle Product Hub Implementation Guide and the Oracle Product Hub User's Guide.

Order Management

Changes for Oracle Order Management are described in this section.

Obsolete Profile Options

The following profile options are obsolete. All functionality previously provided by these profile options is now controlled by Oracle Payments.

Changed Profile Options

These profile options have been converted to Oracle Order Management system parameters:

The system parameters retain the same names as the profile options without the prefixes (OM: or Tax:). The profile OM: Employee for Self-Service Orders is replaced by the system parameter called Requestor for Drop Ship Orders created by external user.

These profile options were changed to system parameters to support Multiple Organization Access Control (MOAC), which allows you to access one or more operating units using a single responsibility. Some addition benefits include:

The upgrade migrates the values of the profile options to system parameter values.

Defaulting Rules

In previous releases of Order Management, seeded defaulting rules defaulted the Order Type and Salesrep from the Customer. These defaulting rules are deleted. You can still default the Order Type and Salesrep values from other sources, such as the Customer Ship-to and Customer Bill-to.

The sources Customer.Order type and Customer.Salesrep are also disabled, so all custom defaulting rules that used these source are deleted.

Pre-Payments

In previous releases, Order Management stored credit card information locally. In this release, the integration with Oracle Payments provides a centralized data model within Oracle Payments for credit card and bank account information and services to process payments. Vital and sensitive data such as credit card numbers, credit card security codes (CVV2), and bank accounts are encrypted and stored within this centralized model.

Additional Information: See Oracle Order Management Implementation Manual for more information.

Process Manufacturing

Prior to this release, Oracle Process Manufacturing (OPM) had its own inventory control system, which maintained a central Item master, tracking inventory in two units of measure, provided grade control, status control, and lot and sub-lot numbers. With the upgrade, these features are migrated to Oracle Inventory. The OPM application now relies on this core inventory system. This model is common for both process and discrete organizations and provides for a single inventory view throughout the supply chain.

Additional Information: See Chapter 2 and Chapter 4 for pre- and post-upgrade steps.

Process Execution

OPM Process Execution leverages additional capabilities available with the core inventory system. Reservations, which are guarantees of available inventory, replace the "pending lot allocations" capabilities. However, unlike the current pending lot allocations, detailed reservations are "hard" reservations. That is, once you have reserved material to a batch, all other sources of demand are prevented from reserving or using this inventory. Move Orders can optionally be used to model, control, and document the movement of material to a staging location prior to consumption by a batch. Revision control of items is also supported in batches.

If you are using the Oracle Warehouse Management System (WMS) and Oracle Mobile Supply Chain Applications (MSCA) products, then there are two new mobile transactions are supported in OPM Process Execution. You can now create and update batch reservations via mobile devices. This reduces data entry errors and the need for reconciliations, and streamlines production-reporting processes.

The following table summarizes changes in concepts and terminology to OPM Process Execution for Release 12:

Before the Upgrade After the Upgrade
Allocation of ingredients (pending transactions) Reservation (multiple levels) - manual or rule-based
No support for movement of inventory material within the production Support for move orders
No support for WMS Integration to WMS transactions
No support for item revisions Item revision support
Organization can be either a plant or laboratory Same organization can be defined as either a plant or an organization or both
No support for subinventories Inventory organization (plant) can have multiple subinventories
Consumption and yield warehouses Supply subinventory and yield subinventory
Shop calendar Workday calendar
Profile options Profile options and organization parameters
Pick lots Select Available Inventory

Product Development

Least Cost Formulation is a new capability that enables a formulator to generate a formula based on a pre-determined product specification by optimizing on-hand ingredients usage with respect to their quality attributes and costs to generate the optimal formulation. The formulation (or batch) created from this process is typically used only one time, since it's using a snapshot of available inventory that may not exist again. However these formulas can also be saved for re-use during a certain time period.

A new field, S88 Recipe Type, is introduced as part of the recipe header that enables users to categorize each recipe as a General, Site, or Master Recipe. A new View By for Recipes is available from the Product Development Workbench with a General Recipe at the top of the list, followed by all of the Site Recipes, and each site displaying all of the Master Recipes. Also, General and Site recipe types will be defaulted when new recipes are created. Recipes created under a Master Inventory Organization will default to "General" recipe type, while recipes created under all other Inventory Organizations will default to 'Site' recipe type.

Item Substitution Lists will enable users to restrict the substitutions made, rather than allowing any item to be substituted for another. Effective dates for each substitute item will be possible, reducing the number of formulas and recipes by enabling one formula to store all the possible alternative items over a period of time. Item Substitution lists must be approved, and will therefore require an approval workflow, including status and version control.

There were also some minor changes to comply with the new organization structure and implementation of revision control of items.

The following table summarizes changes in concepts and terminology to OPM Product Development:

Before the Upgrade After the Upgrade
Lab as a type of organization Lab as a separate inventory organization
No support for item revisions Item revision support for formulas and validity rules
Experimental items Engineering items
Profile options Profile options and organization parameters

Quality Management

OPM Quality Management has been enhanced to leverage some elements of the Oracle Quality applications. The first is a new process during receiving inspection to hold delivery inventory in a receiving location until sample acceptance. This functionality provides a two-step receiving process: 1) inspection by a warehouse operator and 2) quality testing and results entry within the laboratory.

Another addition is the capability to track a nonconformance (batch irregularities such a ingredient substitutions or changes in procedures) during the production process with Oracle Manufacturing Execution System for Process Manufacturing and Oracle Quality. These nonconformance issues can be reviewed by plant quality personnel prior to yielding acceptable product from the batch.

The following table summarizes changes in concepts and terminology to OPM Quality Management:

Before the Upgrade After the Upgrade
No support for item revisions Item revision support in specifications, samples, and stability studies
Sample against a lot updates its sublots Sample against parent lot updates its lots
Miscellaneous inventory adjustment for sample quantity deduction New inventory transaction type for sample quantity issue
Sample history only for a specific lot, warehouse, and location Sample and results traceability through lot split, merge, and transfer
Quality laboratory and R&D llaboratory defined as same laboratory organization Quality laboratory and R&D laboratory defined as same or separate inventory organizations
Lot expiry/retest workflows Inventory Date Notifications
Grade and actions defined in OPM Quality Management Grade and actions defined in Oracle Inventory
Profile options Profile options and organization parameters
Hold reasons Reason codes in Oracle Inventory

Inventory Control

OPM Inventory Control has been replaced with a common inventory solution - Oracle Inventory (see Inventory in this chapter for a description of changes made to support process industries). As a result, many all of the OPM Inventory Control windows are now in Query-only access without update. Current balances are available directly from Oracle Inventory views and reports. The OPM Inventory Close functionality is now available under the OPM Financials responsibility as Period Close for Process Inventory Organizations.

The following table summarizes changes in concepts and terminology in Common Inventory:

Before the Upgrade After the Upgrade
Items Master items and organizations items
Item organizations Obsolete
Inventory calendar Inventory calendar
Warehouse Organization/subinventory
Warehouse locations Stock locators
Item lot conversions Item conversions and lot-specific conversions
Lot and sublot Parent lot and child lot
Session parameters Change organizations
Lot status Material status
Allocation parameters Picking rules
OPM category sets Default category sets
Profile options Organization parameters
Lot genealogy Genealogy workbench
Public APIs Public API signatures may have changed

Process Planning

An unconstrained version of Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP) application replaces the Oracle Process Manufacturing Material Requirements Planning (MRP) application. The Oracle ASCP unconstrained planning and scheduling engine determines material requirements and schedules supplies to satisfy dynamic demand. Additional capabilities include: advanced multilevel pegging, flexible replenishment hierarchy, and online planning.

Unconstrained planning and scheduling provides you with a platform to integrate to other Oracle Advanced Planning and Scheduling applications (APS) including Oracle Collaborative Planning (CP) to increase cooperation with suppliers and customers, Oracle Demand Planning (DP) to enhance forecast and sales and operations planning, Oracle Inventory Optimization (IO) for advanced inventory optimization, and Oracle Global Order Processing (GOP) for enhanced order promising.

The following features replace the Oracle ASCP product that existing OPM customers who are upgrading as well as new customers receive as a replacement for OPM MRP:

Licensed ASCP - New Customer

Not Licensed ASCP - Upgrade Customer

Licensed ASCP - New Customer

Licensed ASCP - Upgrade Customer

The following table summarizes changes in concepts and terminology for Planning:

Before the Upgrade After the Upgrade
Shop calendar Workday calendar
OPM MRP reports re4placed by the Oracle ASCP Supply Chain Planning Detail Report: Bucketed Material, Material Activity, Action Messages, Error Messages The Oracle ASCP Supply Chain Planning Detail Report replaces the indicated OPM MRP reports
OPM Reorder Point Report Oracle Inventory Reorder Point Report
Batches Work orders
Batch status Work order status
Firm jobs Firm work orders
Move work order to PIP functionality not available Move work orders to PIP
Profile options Profile options and organization parameters

System Administration

Changes made to the Oracle Inventory and OPM System Administration applications support process manufacturer users of Oracle Inventory. Therefore, the need for a separate OPM System Administration application is diminished. Many of the functions in the OPM System Administration are replaced by Oracle Inventory procedures and routines. For reference purposes, the OPM System Administrator windows are query-only and cannot be updated.

A new window has been added for users to set up and initiate the migration of data. The data can be validated in a new log report.

The following table summarizes changes in concepts and terminology to OPM System Administrator:

Before the Upgrade After the Upgrade
Profile options Profile options and organization parameters
Look Up window Process Manufacturing System Lookup
Session Parameters for selection of Process Organizations Change organization
Reason Codes Transaction reasons in Inventory
User Organization access using User Organizations window Achieved by creating the profile in HRMS
Document numbering done in OPM System Administration Obsolete option

Cost Management and Manufacturing Accounting Controller

Oracle Subledger Accounting replaces the Manufacturing Accounting Controller to generate journal entries in Oracle General Ledger. The Subledger Accounting product is designed to provide greater flexibility and to streamline setups. SLA is a single source for both process and discrete manufacturing organizations. For additional information, refer to the Subledger Accounting section of this document.

OPM Cost Management continues to capture costs for all transactions in a process-enabled organization are provided by OPM Cost Management. There is complete support for material transfers between process and discrete organizations.

The following table summarizes changes in concepts and terminology to OPM Cost Management and Oracle Subledger Accounting:

Before the Upgrade After the Upgrade
Company Legal entity
Cost method Cost types
Burdens Fixed overheads
Percentage burdens Percentage overheads
PM batch detail (actual cost transaction view) Production batch
PCO account COGS account
Inventory close (in OPM Inventory Control) Period Close for Process Inventory Organizations
Subsidiary Ledger Update program OPM Accounting Pre-Processor and Subledger Accounting programs
GL Export The export to GL is available as an option while running the Create Accounting program
Acquisition costs Freight and special charges
Inventory Valuation report (in OPM Inventory Control) Inventory Valuation report for process inventory organizations (in OPM Financials)

Logistics Applications

Differences in functionality resulting from separate inventory models for process and discrete applications are now removed from the Logistics product areas. Additional process logistics capabilities, formerly available only to discrete, such as vendor managed and consigned inventory, international drop shipments, shared services and global procurement are now available.

For those companies using WMS, Oracle Receiving will also have the capability to put material into LPNs, use putaway rules and create labels (if using Oracle Process MES Operations). Process industries can also use WMS functionality in MSCA since the product supports both secondary quantities and grade.

Lastly, Oracle Purchasing for OPM Receiving has a tighter integration to OPM Quality Management. A two stage inspection process provides the ability to view sample acceptability and visual inspection results directly from the receiving window. Oracle Quality is leveraged to define skip receipt parameters and sampling plan criteria based on ANSI/ASQC standards or user-defined rules.

Regulatory Management

Most of the changes in Oracle Process Manufacturing Regulatory Management enable multi-organization access to information. The Dispatch History window, Dispatch History Report, Regulatory Item Information window, and Workflow Notifications show the organization context information and now use the common inventory model. Organization context restricts record query and item validation. Inbound and outbound XML messages also incorporate organization as one of the elements.

UN Numbers and Hazard Classes are now maintained in the Oracle Purchasing product and CAS Numbers are maintained on the common item master.

The following table summarizes changes in concepts and terminology to OPM Regulatory Management:

Before the Upgrade After the Upgrade
Item Version Item Revision
Actual Hazard Actual Hazard %
Primary CAS Number CAS Number
Stand-alone formula OPM Product Development formula with regulatory validity rule type
Regulatory item Items in Oracle Inventory with Regulatory flag

Mobile Supply Chain Application

OPM MSCA now supports the following additional transactions:

E-records

Technology changes enable all e-record and e-signature features available in the Forms technology stack to be supported for the Oracle Applications Framework Forms technology stack. Also a mobile e-signature framework enables e-signatures on mobile devices. Improvements to streamline the approval setup include one-step data setup validation, role based approvals and the ability to leverage XML from multiple sources for e-record generation.

Additional capabilities to streamline the approval process include the ability to do a before and after comparison through redlining, expediting the process through parallel or simultaneous signatures and “first responder wins” functionality. The number of window that a user needs to few has also been decreased to a single step.

Obsolete Features

Prior to this release, Oracle Process Manufacturing had its own inventory control system, which maintained a central Item Master, tracked inventory in two units of measure, provided grade control, status control, and lot and sublot numbers.

The following OPM Inventory concurrent programs are disabled:

The following OPM Logistics concurrent programs are disabled:

Following are the OPM Inventory public APIs packages. Package bodies for the APIs are dropped and files stubbed. Signatures of APIs are retained. This ensures that any code which calls these APIs get successfully compiled but due to missing package body errors are raised during runtime:

Following are the obsolete features in OPM Regulatory Management:

The OPM MRP application is obsolete and the following features are not supported by Oracle ASCP:

In addition, the following features are obsolete:

Quality

Oracle Quality provides an integrated, enterprise wide, flexible quality management application designed to support diverse quality needs of discrete, repetitive, assemble-to-order, and batch process manufacturers. Oracle Quality is integrated with the Oracle E-Business Suite to provide unified quality data definition, data collection, and data management throughout the enterprise and across supply and distribution networks. Oracle Quality's flexible architecture can support a wide variety of business models and also provides reporting on all aspects of quality management.

Changes for Oracle Quality are described in this section.

Device Integration Functionality

This is new functionality introduced in this release that enables the application to communicate with devices on the shop floor and collect the Quality data. A new User Interface (UI) page has been added to enable the device setup. To support this functionality, the collection plans setup window from Release 11i has been modified to specify the elements that are device enabled. A new button on the Quality Workbench enables the entry/update page to read the data from the devices. This functionality is available only for those customers who have purchased the MES product license.

Note: See Oracle Quality User's Guide for more information.

Changes in Quality Workbench

The usability of the Quality Workbench (QWB) is improved in this release to bring a parity between forms and OA pages in terms of the functionalities that include online actions processing and online validations, deletion capability, adding rows and row duplication features for standalone plans, exporting quality results, multi-row update for parent and child plans, and additional features that serve to bridge the gap that existed between the forms application and the workbench application in Release 11i.

Note: See Oracle Quality User's Guide for more information.

OA Framework Graphics

The Oracle Quality charts that were based on the legacy Oracle Graphics in Release 11i are replaced with OA Framework charts in this release.

Note: See Oracle Quality User's Guide for more information.

ERES Support in Service Family

The ERES functionality in Release 11i has been enhanced to support deferred E-Signatures for entering and updating quality results. Quality integration with service request transactions feature ERES functionality in this release.

Note: See Oracle Quality User's Guide for more information.

Obsoleted Profiles

The following Quality profiles are obsolete in this release:

  1. QA:Action Processing Mode

  2. QA:Receive Web Supplier Notifications

  3. QA:Self-Service Transaction Notification

  4. QA:Statistics Engine

Service Contracts

Oracle Service Contracts provides a complete contract authoring and execution solution to manage warranties, extended warranties, usage and subscription based services. Service providers can leverage entitlement verification checks to accurately determine the level of service available to customers via call center support, depot repair or field service processes. Accurate pricing and flexible billing options ensure customers receive accurate invoices. An automated renewal process improves revenue by guiding customers and sales representatives through upcoming renewals, ensuring un-interrupted service for customers while minimizing service revenue leakage for service providers.

Changes for Oracle Service Contracts are described in this section.

Partial Period Definition

Businesses require flexibility for defining how pricing, billing and termination amounts are calculated for partial periods. Some businesses base partial period calculations on fixed 30-day months, 90-day quarters and 360-day years. Others prefer to calculate partial periods based on the actual number of days within a period.

To use this new feature, you need to define the way you wish the partial period to be calculated in the Global Contracts Defaults form. For example, you will need to define whether the application counts whole periods from the start date of the service, or based on the full calendar months that span the duration. Periods can be defined based on a fixed quantity, for example, 30 days per month, or based on the actual number a days in each period.

Additional Information: See Oracle Service Contracts User Guide for more information.

Service Cancellations

At time of contract renewal, customers sometimes elect to discontinue one or more services on a contract. The ability to track cancellation details for individual service lines or covered levels improves management's ability to evaluate renewal rates and cancellation rates, providing insight into the reasons behind changes in renewal rates.

To use this new feature you may need to set up additional statuses to track the reasons for cancellation. Use the Status and Operations form to define extra statuses as necessary under the Entered and Canceled status types.

Additional Information: See Oracle Service Contracts User Guide for more information.

Contract Approval Rules

The standard contract approval workflow is integrated with Oracle Approvals Management to drive the approval process. Standard Approvals Management features, such as rules-based approval routing and definition of approval groups, are supported.

To use this new feature, you need to set up the Oracle Approvals Management engine defining the approval rules, approval groups and hierarchy as necessary to support your business.

Additional Information: See Oracle Service Contracts Implementation Guide for more information.

Multi-Org Access Control

Multi-Org Access Control (MOAC) enables companies that have implemented a Shared Services operating model to access, process, and report on data for an unlimited number of operating units within a single applications responsibility. Users are no longer required to switch applications responsibilities when processing transactions for multiple operating units. Data security is maintained using security profiles that determine the data access privileges associated to responsibilities granted to a user.

To use this new feature, you may need to define or change your setup for organization hierarchies. You must define security profiles and assign operating units, and assign a security profile to each responsibility and a default operating unit to your users.

Additional Information: See Oracle Service Contracts Implementation Guide for more information.

Coverage Definition and Instantiation

Some service providers standardize their service offerings across their customer base, while others tailor complex service programs to meet the needs of specific customers. In this release, service providers who standardize their offerings can define standard coverage that can be referenced by services sold in contracts.

Updates to the standard coverage are automatically applied to all contracts that include that service coverage, making changes in coverage immediately accessible to all downstream processes that need to check entitlements. Coverage can still be tailored to suit the specific needs of customers by pressing the Customize button when adding the service to a contract.

To use this new feature, you need to:

Additional Information: See Oracle Service Contracts User Guide for more information.

XML Publisher Communication Templates

Service Contracts is integrated with XML Publisher to support user-defined layout templates for customer communication documents. The Template Setup forms are enhanced in this release.

To use this new feature, review the seeded communication templates and modify them as necessary to support your business process.

Additional Information: See Oracle Service Contracts User Guide for more information.

Shipping Execution

Changes for Oracle Shipping Execution are described in this section.

Flexible Documents

Beginning with this release, printing of reports in Shipping Execution is not limited to text output. PDF format is now available on various Shipping Execution reports through the use of report templates created in Oracle XML Publisher.

Oracle XML Publisher enables you to define your reports using broadly accepted tools such as Microsoft Word. Within Word, you choose the information you want, where you want it on the report, and any fonts, colors, or logos you prefer for the report. You can start by copying the seeded.rtf (Rich Text Format) layout provided with Shipping Execution and modifying it, or you can start from scratch and define any desired report layout you prefer.

The following Shipping Execution reports are available for PDF output:

Many new attributes have been added to the XML output of the Pick Slip, Packing Slip, and Commercial Invoice reports, including:

FOB terms and Freight terms have been added to the Bill of Lading and the Master Bill of Lading reports to provide support for the VICS Bill of Lading.

Note: This new information does not appear on the report's seeded layouts. It is part of the XML data structure available to build the templates within Oracle XML publisher.

Workflow-enabled Shipping Transactions

The Shipping Transactions form and Quick Ship window now allow you to view Workflow-enabled shipping transactions. These transactions automate business processes by routing information according to user-defined business rules. You can use them to automate specific tasks and customize output based on attributes of business objects.

Additional Information: See Oracle Shipping Execution User's Guide for more information.

Parallel Pick Submission

Pick Release runs pick release processes in parallel. Distributing the workload across multiple processors reduces the overall time required for a single pick release run. You can also specify the number of threads spawned by Pick Release. (The actual number of pick release child processes spawned by Pick Release depends on each individual pick release batch, and on the profile setting.)

The new seeded profile WSH: Number of Pick Release Child Processes is used to determine the default number of child processes. However, it does not have a default value so the Pick Selection program considers this as “1.” Change this profile to the number of child processes that you want to run in parallel, depending on the hardware efficiency and other application constraints at your location.

Because Inventory locks the organization/item combination, multiple parallel pick release processes do not process the same item in the same organization at the same time.

Shop Floor Management

Changes for Oracle Shop Floor Management are described in this section.

Option 1 Disabled

Option 1 in Oracle Shop Floor Management (OSFM) refers to the behavior of jobs where copies are not created, and individual operation data is not copied from the Bills of Material definition to job as you move to that operation.

As a part of the upgrade, this functionality is discontinued and automatically replaced with Option 2 functionality.

Option 2 enables you to create individual copies for each job by copying Bills of Material and network routings when a new lot-based job is created. You can hold, modify, and view detailed information for each operation of the job.

Using Option 2, you can make the following job-level changes:

Profile Option Changes for Option 2

The WSM: Create Job Level BOM and Routing Copies profile option is disabled and set to a value of Yes so that it uses the Option 2 functionality. In addition, The Shop Floor Parameters window contains the Create Job level BOM and Routing Copies field. It is display-only and always displays a value of Yes.

Additional Information: See the information about Defining Parameters and Profile Options in the Oracle Shop Floor Management User's Guide.

Warehouse Management

Changes for Oracle Warehouse Management are described in this section.

Advanced Catch Weight

In release 11i, navigation to the Catch Weight mobile UI from the Direct Ship function was automatic if item pricing was based on Secondary quantity.

Automatic navigation to the Catch Weight UI from Direct Ship mobile function has now been disabled. Customers upgrading to Release 12.2.2 or higher releases must set the new Direct Ship form function parameter CATCH_WEIGHT to 'Y' to enable navigation to the Catch Weight UI.

Control Board Enhancements

The Warehouse Control Board, which enables you to monitor warehouse activity and improve warehouse efficiency, has been enhanced.

Manage Groups of Tasks

You can now manage tasks as a group instead of individually. And, you no longer have to view the details of individual tasks and approve changes manually. The Manage Tasks window replaces the Update Tasks window (use the Manage button from the Find Tasks window). It retains all the capabilities of the Update Tasks window, but also enables you to:

Note: Use this feature with caution. It is not easy to undo committed actions. Managing groups of tasks works best with saved criteria for queries and actions because they are more predictable.

Planned Task Management

The Control Board-Manage Tasks concurrent program is used to schedule planned task actions. It requires you to save queries and action plans before you run the concurrent request. The system commits actions based on the action plan you select, without need for further input.

Additional Tasks Selection Criteria

The Find Tasks window contains new search criteria. that increases control over returned tasks, and supports the new crossdocking feature. The following task selection criteria is now available:

Additional Information: See Navigating the Warehouse Control Board in Oracle Warehouse Management User's Guide.

User-extensible Label Fields

In previous releases, Oracle Warehouse Management restricted the list of fields you could include on the label format to a list of predefined seeded variables. In this release, you can create an SQL statement to add your own variables to label formats without customizing the application. Using the Define Custom Labels window, you can create custom label fields for Label Formats.

Additional Information: See the sections on Defining Label Field Variables and on Setting Up Label Formats in Oracle Warehouse Management User's Guide for more information.

Multi-delivery Consolidation

In this release, you can now group deliveries that travel part of the way together, but do not travel to the same final destinations. With this feature, you can:

Oracle Warehouse Management integrates with Oracle Shipping Execution to determine if you can consolidate deliveries. In order to be consolidated, deliveries must have a common ship-from address and a common de-consolidation point.

There are five new seeded outbound operation plans for consolidation:

You can also consolidate crossdocked material. When you create a crossdock operation plan, you enter the appropriate outbound operation plan at the end of the crossdock operation.

New Transaction

Mass Consolidate enables you to perform mass moves from consolidation locators to staging lanes. During this transaction, you can also specify a consolidation locator. You can only perform this transaction on a mobile device.

Changed Transactions

You can now consolidate material in the packing workbench. You enter an existing or new consolidation LPN, and Oracle Warehouse Management performs the necessary validations. The mobile ship confirm transactions, such as LPN Ship, Dock Door Ship, and Direct Ship, now capture all delivery information and confirm it individually if you consolidate material across deliveries. The Quick Ship transaction also validates and restricts confirming a delivery if you consolidate material across deliveries.

Additional Information: See the information on Setup Operation Plans and on Explaining Consolidation in the Oracle Warehouse Management User's Guide.

Rules Engine Enhancements

In previous releases, you had to create a dummy strategy with no restrictions. In this release, you can now assign rules and values directly in the Rules Workbench, so you no longer need to create a strategy with a single rule. Other enhancements are:

With the Rules Workbench, you can assign crossdock rules and criteria to objects. The rule assignments can include both demand initiated (opportunistic) and supply initiated (planned). You can assign criteria to business objects that include organization, customer, supplier, item project, and task.

The rules engine now honors serial-level detailed reservations before it applies rules. It verifies the availability and material status of serial numbers. If a serial number fails the availability check for any reason, Oracle Warehouse Management backorders the demand line. In previous releases, the system did not perform validations between reservations and material status. The rules engine also controls the allocation of serial numbers at a locator.

Additional Information: See the information on Rules Workbench and on Crossdock Criteria in the Oracle Warehouse Management User's Guide.

Crossdocking

In previous releases, Oracle Warehouse Management provided opportunistic (supply initiated) crossdocking that was limited to back ordered sales orders. In this release, Oracle Warehouse Management introduced planned (demand initiated) crossdocking. You can use a set of crossdock criteria to plan crossdocking in your warehouse. Oracle Warehouse Management can now compare expected receipts and outbound shipments to identify planned crossdocking opportunities in the warehouse. When the system identifies a planned crossdocking opportunity, it pegs the scheduled inbound receipt to the outbound shipment. The system then identifies a specific crossdocking goal based on whether you want to maximize crossdocking or minimize wait time.

Planned crossdocking enables you to pre-allocate incoming supply to a given demand source, while opportunistic crossdocking enables you to dynamically allocate incoming supply to a demand source on receipt. The planned crossdocking eligible supply sources are:

Oracle Warehouse Management still supports opportunistic crossdocking. If enables you to assign material to a demand source until it arrives in the warehouse.

Note: If you are currently using opportunistic crossdocking, you must create a default opportunistic crossdock criterion and assign it in the Organization parameters in order for it to continue working after the upgrade.

The eligible demand sources for opportunistic crossdocking are:

Warehouse Management introduced a new crossdock criteria window. The Crossdock Criteria window enables you to:

Additional Information: See the information on Warehouse Management Crossdocking and on Setup Operations Plans in the Oracle Warehouse Management User's Guide.

Material Handling

The following features were added to Material Handling:

Flexible Response Message Formats

You can now define automated device messages in the following formats: XML, message with delimiter, or message without delimiter. You use a message template to specify the message format, and then specify the message components and characteristics. The components you can use in the messages are seeded in the system. This list is extensive and covers the components the usual business flows require.

Use the new Message Templates page added to the Warehouse Control System to create message templates. Then specify the message components in the new Message Components page. You can assign the message template to use when you define a device on the Define Devices window within Oracle Warehouse Management.

Workflow Support

When the Warehouse Control System receives an error, it initiates a workflow process linked to the reason. You can create a message based on the device response reason. You can create workflow processes based on transaction reasons you define in Oracle Inventory.

Process Manufacturing

Two business events were added to the Warehouse Control System to support Oracle Process Manufacturing: Process Dispensing and the Process Parameter. You assign these events in the Assign Devices to Business Events window in Oracle Warehouse Management.

The Warehouse Control System also added another device type called Manufacturing Equipment to support Process Manufacturing. You assign device types to equipment on the Define Devices window in Oracle Warehouse Management. Oracle Process Manufacturing uses the Warehouse Control System execution framework to invoke the necessary APIs to obtain device responses directly on an Oracle Applications framework page.

Additional Information: See information on Transaction Reasons in the Oracle Inventory User's Guide. See also Defining Devices and Assigning Devices to Business Events in the Oracle Warehouse Management User's Guide.

NLS Upgrade Considerations

This section discusses some important considerations for managing your translations, languages, and character sets during the upgrade.

Language Status

Additional space for each non-American English language will be required in the database to complete the upgrade. It is not possible to predict the amount of additional space your system will need, because the space depends on factors such as the database character set, the number of active languages other than American English, and in particular the volume of transaction data in the system.

Conditional Action: For the recommended minimum space required for each active language in the APPL_TOP, see the Oracle E-Business Suite NLS Release Notes for your release level.

You must retain your existing Applications Release status until the entire upgrade process (including the post-upgrade and finishing steps) is complete. The base language must also remain the same, and new languages cannot be activated.

After the upgrade process is complete, you can activate new languages or change the base language. Oracle does not support disabling or removing installed or enabled languages.

Conditional Action: See Adding and Maintaining NLS Languages section in Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance Guide.

Character Sets

You cannot set the APPL_TOP character set. It is automatically set to the same value you selected as the db character set.

Additional Information: Refer to License Manager in the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 Maintenance Guide and Migrating to Unicode in the Globalization Guide for Oracle Applications Release 12 (Doc ID: 393861.1)

General Information and Required Tasks

Before you prepare your system and product data, you should gather information about the upgrade process, the tools required, the number and types of tasks involved, and the way your system and products will look in Release 12.2.

Reference Information

It is very important that you read the documentation associated with this release. Appendix E, "Product Documentation List" in this guide contains a list of basic required reading. In addition, you may also find it useful to review any presentation materials on upgrade technology and white papers on Multi-org, and links to various Consulting services as well as Oracle University training courses.

Application specialists and functional users should pay special attention to the Release Content Documents (RCDs), Electronic Technical Reference Manuals (eTRMs), and Transfer of Information (TOI) documentation for the products that are active in your system. This information describes new features and functionality in Release 12.2.