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2 Gathering Your Implementation Requirements

This chapter contains the following:

Offerings: Explained

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

Implementation Task Lists

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

Enabling Offerings

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

Provisioning Offerings

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

Options: Explained

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

Feature Choices: Explained

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

You can configure feature choices in three different ways:

Yes or No

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

Single Select

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

Multi-Select

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

FAQs for Gathering Your Implementation Requirements

What's a business process?

A business process is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks performed to achieve a particular business goal such as fulfilling orders, procuring raw material, or closing an accounting period. Enterprise applications are a means to achieve the end goal of optimizing a business process. Oracle Fusion Applications use business processes as a platform, or framework, to deliver enterprise application functions in context.

What's an offering?

An offering is the highest level grouping of Oracle Fusion Applications functionality. Offerings are typically the starting points for configuration decisions. As the core drivers of provisioning and implementing Oracle Fusion Applications, offerings are groups of application functions representing one or more typical business processes and activities that are usually implemented as a unit. They often include optional business processes and alternative business rules known as options and features respectively.

What's an option?

An option is a piece of specific functionality that you may want to implement as part of an offering. Options can be included or excluded from their parent offering. Options may be hierarchical, and therefore may be subordinate to another option.

What's a feature?

Features are alternative business methods or rules used to fine tune business processes and activities supported by an offering or an option.

How can I configure only licensed offerings and options?

All offerings and options display on the Configure Offerings page and are available for configuration. However, the Provisioned column will indicate if an offering or option is installed and provisioned. If you attempt to enable an offering or option for implementation that is not provisioned, a warning message appears.

What happens if Enable for Implementation is selected for an offering?

Dependent options that represent optional features and functionality of an offering may or may not be relevant to an implementation, and are not automatically enabled when you select Enable for Implementation. You select Enable for Implementation and configure the dependent options and features that match what you need for your business. This is why the dependent options are not automatically enabled.