Oracle® Fusion Applications Marketing Implementation Guide 11g Release 7 (11.1.7) Part Number E20372-07

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2 Define Common Applications Configuration for Marketing

This chapter contains the following:

Common Implementation: Overview

Define Synchronization of Users and Roles from LDAP

Define Implementation Users

Define Currencies and Currency Rates

Define Enterprise Structures for Marketing

Define Social Networking

Define Workforce Profiles

Define Security for Customer Relationship Management

Define Automated Governance, Risk, and Performance Controls

Define Approval Management for Customer Relationship Management

Define Help Configuration

Define Application Toolkit Configuration

Maintain Common Reference Objects

Common Implementation: Overview

Common implementation involves accessing tasks that are available in multiple offerings, or that apply to multiple products and product families. The Define Common Applications Configuration task list and other activities include these common setup and implementation tasks.

You can find other information in support of common implementation in the Oracle Fusion Applications Concepts Guide.

In addition, you can customize and extend applications using various tools. For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide.

Define Common Applications Configuration Task List

Use the Define Common Applications Configuration task list to set up and administer an implementation of behaviors across offerings.

Most Oracle Fusion Applications offerings include the Define Common Applications Configuration task list for implementing what is common in multiple or all Oracle Fusion applications. The task lists and tasks within Define Common Applications Configuration can be present in all offerings, some, or just a single offering.

Common implementation includes such tasks as setting up security, defining enterprise structures, configuring Oracle Fusion Applications Help, and setting options. Many of the common implementation tasks involve configuring reference objects provided by Oracle Fusion Middleware Extensions for Applications (Applications Core), such as messages, flexfields, document sequences, and profile options. Some common implementation tasks involve configuring features provided by Oracle Application Toolkit (ATK), such as the Watchlist. Other common implementation tasks involve Oracle Fusion Applications products such as the Assign Balancing Segment Values to Ledger task in Oracle Fusion General Ledger.

Other Common Setup and Maintenance Tasks

Other setup and maintenance tasks exist in multiple offerings but not in the Define Common Applications Configuration task list. Use these other task lists to define an Oracle Fusion Transactional Business Intelligence configuration, and to define extensions such as custom Oracle Enterprise Scheduler jobs.

You can access common implementation tasks and task lists by starting in the Setup and Maintenance Overview page and searching for task lists by name. Setup and Maintenance is available from the Administration menu to users provisioned with appropriate roles. The Administration menu provides access to other tasks, such as for customization.

Define Synchronization of Users and Roles from LDAP

User and Role Synchronization: Explained

Oracle Identity Management (OIM) maintains Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) user accounts for users of Oracle Fusion applications. OIM also stores the definitions of abstract, job, and data roles and holds information about roles provisioned to users. During implementation, any existing information about users, roles, and roles provisioned to users must be copied from the LDAP directory to the Oracle Fusion Applications tables. Once the Oracle Fusion Applications tables are initialized with this information, it is maintained automatically. To perform the initialization, you run the process Retrieve Latest LDAP Changes.

During initial implementation, the installation super user performs the task Run User and Role Synchronization Process to run the Retrieve Latest LDAP Changes process.

Define Implementation Users

Getting Started with an Implementation: Overview

To start an Oracle Fusion Applications implementation, you must set up one or more initial users using the super user that was created during installation and provisioning of the Oracle Fusion Applications environment, or using the initial administrator user provided by Oracle for Oracle Cloud Application Services implementations. Because Oracle Fusion Applications is secure as delivered, the process of enabling the necessary setup access for initial users requires several specialized steps when getting started with an implementation.

The following high level steps are required for starting an implementation.

1. If you are not starting an Oracle Cloud Application Services implementation, sign into Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) as the OIM Administration users and provision the IT Security Manager job role with roles for user and role management. This enables the super user account, which is provisioned with the IT Security Manager job role, to create implementation users.

2. For starting all implementations, sign in as the user with initial access: either the Oracle Fusion Applications installation super user or the initial Oracle Cloud Application Services administrator user.

3. Select an offering to implement, and generate the setup tasks needed to implement the offering.

4. Perform the following security tasks:

   1. Synchronize users and roles in the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) store with HCM user management by using the Run User and Roles Synchronization Process task.

   2. Create an IT security manager user by using the Create Implementation Users task.

   3. Provision the IT security manager with the IT Security Manager role by using the Provision Roles to Implementation Users task.

5. As the newly created IT security manager user, sign in to Oracle Fusion Applications and set up at least one implementation user for setting up enterprise structures.

   1. Create an implementation user by using the Create Implementation Users task.

   2. Provision the implementation user with the Application Implementation Manager job role or the Application Implementation Consultant job role by using the Provision Roles to Implementation Users task. The Application Implementation Consultant job role inherits from all product-specific application administrators and entitles the necessary View All access to all secured object.

   3. Optionally, create a data role for an implementation user who needs only the limited access of a product-specific Application Administrator by using the Create Data Role for Implementation Users. Then assign the resulting data role to the implementation user by using the Provision Roles to Implementation Users task.

The figure shows the task flow from provisioning the IT Security Manager job role with the user and role management entitlement to creating and provisioning implementation users for enterprise setup.

Initial Security Administration: Critical Choices

After installation and provisioning, and before setting up enterprise structures and implementing projects, you must establish required entitlement for the super user account and at least one implementation user to proceed with the implementation. Once initial enterprise structure setup is complete, additional users may be created through processes available in Human Capital Management (HCM).

Initial security administration consists of the following.

• Preparing the IT Security Manager job role

• Synchronizing users and roles from Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) with HCM

• Creating implementation users

• Optionally creating data roles for implementation users

• Provisioning implementation users with roles

Once the first implementation project begins and the enterprise work structure is set up, use standard user and security management processes such as the Manage Users task to create and manage additional users. Do not use the Create Implementation Users task after your enterprise has been set up.

Preparing the IT Security Manager Job Role

Initially the super user is not provisioned to manage users and roles.

You must add the following Oracle Identity Management (OIM) roles to the IT Security Manager job role's role hierarchy to enable the super user to create one or more initial implementation users.

• Identity User Administrators

• Role Administrators

Additionally, you must assign the Xellerate Users organization to the IT Security Manager role.

Synchronizing Users and Roles from LDAP

After configuring an offering and setting up the task lists for implementation, the Run User and Roles Synchronization Process task is available to the super user for synchronizing users and roles in the LDAP store with Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM).

Defining Initial Implementation Users

The super user is provisioned with roles that provide broad access to Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Fusion Applications administration, and is not suitable as an implementation user in most enterprises. The super user should define at least one implementation user, which consists of creating the user account and provisioning it with at least the Application Implementation Consultant and Application Implementation Manager job roles.

As a security guideline, define an IT security manager user who in turn defines one or more implementation users to set up enterprise structures. The IT security manager users can provision the implementation user with the Application Implementation Consultant role, which entitles access to all enterprise structures. Or the IT security manager can create a data role that restricts access to enterprise structures of a specific product and provisioning that role.

Depending on the size of your implementation team, you may only need a single implementation user for security administration, implementation project management, enterprise structures setup, and application implementation. That single user must then be provisioned with all indicated roles, and therefore broad access.

Creating Implementation Users

The super user creates one or more implementation users by performing the Create Implementation Users task.

Creating Data Roles for Implementation Users

As an alternative to provisioning an implementation user with the Application Implementation Consultant role to access all enterprise structures, you may need implementation users with access restricted to enterprise structures for specific products. In this case, use the Create Data Roles for Implementation Users task to create a data role based on a job role with less broad access, such as the HCM Application Administrator job role.

Provisioning Roles to Implementation Users

After creating an implementation user, you must provision the user with one or more roles by performing the Provision Roles to Implementation Users task.

For example, assign a role to the implementation user that provides the access necessary for setting up the enterprise. Depending on need, provision to the implementation user the predefined Applications Implementation Consultant role or a product family-specific administrator data role, such as a data role based on the predefined Financials Applications Administrator.

Initial Security Administration: Worked Example

This example illustrates initial security administration after having installed and provisioned an Oracle Fusion Applications environment.

In Oracle Fusion Applications, you manage users and security through Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) user management flows, which are included in each of the offering task lists. However, the HCM task flows require that enterprise structures have been set up, and yet to add users who can set up enterprise structures you need to have set up HCM. Therefore, you need to create one or more initial implementation users who are responsible for providing the following.

• Users and their applications security management

• Implementation project management

• Initial enterprise structures management

The following table summarizes key decisions for this scenario.

You create an initial implementation user by performing the following tasks.

1. The Oracle Identity Management System Administrator user provisions the IT Security Manager job role with roles for user and role management.

2. The Oracle Fusion Applications super user synchronizes LDAP users with HCM user management so that users can be provisioned with roles through HCM.

3. The Oracle Fusion Applications super user performs the Create Implementation Users task to create one or more IT security manager and administrator users provisioned with security administrative entitlement.

4. The IT Security Manager user signs in to Oracle Fusion Applications and performs the Create Implementation Users task to create implementation managers and users.

5. The IT Security Manager user provisions implementation users for enterprise structure setup.

Preparing the IT Security Manager Role

The super user that was created when installing and provisioning Oracle Fusion Applications (for example, FAADMIN), or the initial administrator user provided by Oracle for Oracle Cloud Application Services, has all necessary access for implementing Oracle Fusion Applications and administering security. This access is provided by the following roles:

• Application Implementation Consultant

• IT Security Manager

Neither of these roles provides access needed for creating and managing Oracle Fusion Applications users. Therefore, you must add the following two OIM roles to the IT Security Manager role:

• Identity User Administrators

• Role Administrators

The following procedure is prerequisite to an IT security manager or administrator creating an initial one or more implementation users.

1. While signed into Oracle Identity Manager as the OIM System Administrator user, click the Administration link in the upper right of the Oracle Identity Manager.

   This accesses the Welcome to Identity Manager Delegated Administration menu.

2. In the Roles list of tasks, click Advanced Search - Roles. Search for the Identity Users Administrators role by entering the role name in Display Name and clicking Search.

   In the Search Results, click the role's Display Name.

3. On the Hierarchy tab, select Inherits From and click Add.
4. In the Add Parent Role to: IDENTITY USER ADMINISTRATORS window, select the role category: Common - Job Roles and add the IT Security Manager.

   Click the arrow icon to show the list of available roles. Select IT Security Manager and move it to the Roles to Add list. Click Save.

5. Search for the Role Administrators role, and repeat steps 1 to 4 to add that role to the IT Security Manager role's role inheritance.
6. Assign the IT Security Manager role to the Xellerate Users organization.

   1. In the Welcome to Identity Manager Delegated Administration menu (see step 1, above), in the Organizations list of tasks, click Advanced Search - Organizations.

   2. Search for the Xellerate Users organization by entering Xellerate Users in Display Name and clicking Search.

   3. In the Search Results, click the organization's Display Name. The Xellerate Users page appears.

   4. Click the Administrative Roles link in the row of links above the Xellerate Users.

   5. In Filter By Role Name of the Details window, enter the following string:

      *IT_SECURITY_MANAGER*

      Click Find.

   6. Enable Read, Write, Delete, and Assign.

   7. Click Assign.

   8. Click Confirm.

Synchronizing Users and Roles from LDAP

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) must be synchronized with HCM user management so that users can be provisioned with roles through HCM.

1. Sign in to Oracle Fusion Applications using the super user's user name (for example FAADMIN) and password.

   If you do not know the super user name and password, check with your system administrator or the person who installed Oracle Fusion Applications. For more information about account creation in Oracle Fusion Applications provisioning, see the Oracle Fusion Applications Installation Guide.

2. Perform the Run User and Roles Synchronization Process task by clicking Submit in the Process Details page.

   The Retrieve Latest LDAP Changes process takes some time to complete the first time it is run.

3. Monitor completion of the Retrieve Latest LDAP Changes process from Navigator > Tools > Scheduled Processes before continuing with creating implementation users.

Defining an IT Security Manager User

The super user has broad access to Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Fusion Applications administration. Due to this broad access, your enterprise needs users dedicated to managing users and applications security, such as an IT security manager user.

1. While signed in as the Oracle Fusion Applications super user, access the Create Implementation Users task and create an IT security manager.

   The Oracle Identity Manager appears.

2. Click Create User.

   For details, see the Creating Users section in the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Identity Manager.

3. Provide the following attributes:
   

   Attribute	Value	Example
   Last name	<any valid string>	Smith
   Organization	Xellerate Users	N/A
   User type	Non Worker	N/A
   User login	<any valid string>	IT_SECURITY_MANAGER
   Login password	<any valid string>	SeKur1TyPa$$w0Rd

   Note

   In Oracle Fusion Applications, an implementation user is a user account created in OIM only, specifically for implementation tasks, and is not related to a real person or identity such as a user defined in HCM.

4. Click Save.
5. On the Roles tab in the IT_SECURITY_MANAGER user creation task flow, click Assign.
6. In the Add Role window, search for the IT Security Manager role and click Add.

Defining an Implementation User for Enterprise Structures Setup

1. Sign in to Oracle Fusion Applications using the IT security manager user's name and password.
2. Create and provision an implementation user using the same task flow as for creating the IT security manager user in the previous section, except provision the following roles.

   • Application Implementation Manager

   • Application Implementation Consultant

   Note

   For an implementation to begin, at least one user must be provisioned with the Application Implementation Manager role, and another or the same user must be provisioned with the Application Implementation Consultant role. The Application Implementation Consultant has broad access to set up all enterprise structures.

Define Currencies and Currency Rates

Defining Currencies: Points to Consider

When creating or editing currencies, consider these points relevant to entering the currency code, date range, or symbol for the currency.

Currency Codes

You cannot change a currency code after you enable the currency, even if you later disable that currency.

Date Ranges

Users can enter transactions denominated in the currency only for the dates within the specified range. If you do not enter a start date, then the currency is valid immediately. If you do not enter an end date, then the currency is valid indefinitely.

Symbols

Even if you enter a symbol for a currency, the symbol is not always displayed when an amount is displayed in this currency. Some applications use currency symbols when displaying amounts. Others, like Oracle Fusion General Ledger, do not.

Euro Currency Derivation: Explained

Use the Derivation Type, Derivation Factor, and Derivation Effective Date fields to define the relationship between the official currency (Euro) of the European Monetary Union (EMU) and the national currencies of EMU member states. For each EMU currency, you define its Euro-to-EMU fixed conversion rate and the effective starting date.

Derivation Type

The Euro currency derivation type is used only for the Euro, and the Euro derived derivation type identifies national currencies of EMU member states. All other currencies do not have derivation types.

Derivation Factor

The derivation factor is the fixed conversion rate by which you multiply one Euro to derive the equivalent EMU currency amount. The Euro currency itself should not have a derivation factor.

Derivation Effective Date

The derivation effective date is the date on which the relationship between the EMU currency and the Euro begins.

Creating Conversion Rate Types: Critical Choices

Maintain different conversion rates between currencies for the same period with the Oracle Fusion General Ledger conversion rate types functionality. Four predefined daily conversion rate types are seeded: Spot, Corporate, User, and Fixed, allowing you to use different rate types for different business needs. During journal entry, the conversion rate is provided automatically by the General Ledger based on the selected conversion rate type and currency, unless the rate type is user. For user rate types, you must enter the conversion rate. Define additional rate types as needed. Set your most frequently used rate type as the default. Conversion rate types cannot be deleted.

Assign conversion rate types to automatically populate the associated rate for your period average and period end rates for the ledger. For example, you can assign the predefined rate type Spot to populate your period average rates and the predefined rate type Corporate to populate your period end rates. Period average and period end rates are used in translation of account balances.

Conversion rate types are used to automatically assign a rate when you perform the following accounting functions:

• Convert foreign currency journal amounts to ledger currency equivalents

• Convert journal amounts from source ledgers to reporting currencies or secondary ledgers

• Run Revaluation or Translation processes

In creating new conversion rates, decide whether to do the following:

• Enforce inverse relationships

• Select pivot currencies

• Select contra currencies

• Enable cross rates and allow cross rate overrides

• Maintain cross rate rules

Enforce Inverse Relationships

Check the Enforce Inverse Relationship check box to specify whether or not to enforce the automatic calculation of inverse conversion rates when defining daily rates.

Select Pivot Currencies

Select a pivot currency that is commonly used in your currency conversions. A pivot currency is the central currency that interacts with contra currencies. For example, you set up a daily rate between the US dollar (USD) and the Euro currency (EUR) and another between the USD and the Canadian dollar (CAD). USD is the pivot currency in creating a rate between EUR and CAD. EUR and CAD are the contra currencies. Select the pivot currency from the list of values which contains those currencies that are enabled, effective, and not a statistical (STAT) currency. The description of the pivot currency is populated automatically based on the currency definition.

If you want the application to create cross rates against a base currency, define the base currency as the pivot currency. Selected pivot currencies can be changed in the Rate Types page.

Select Contra Currencies

Select currencies available on the list of values as contra currencies. The available currencies are those currencies which are enabled, effective, not STAT currency, and not the pivot currency selected earlier. The description of the contra currency is populated automatically based on the currency definition. Add or delete contra currencies in the Contra Currencies region of the Rate Types page.

Enable Cross Rates and Allow Cross Rate Overrides

Check the Enable Cross Rates check box to calculate conversion rates based on defined currency rate relationships. General Ledger calculates cross rates based on your defined cross rate rules. Associate your cross rate rules with a conversion rate type, pivot currency, and contra currencies. Cross rates facilitate the creation of daily rates by automatically creating the rates between contra currencies based on their relationship to a pivot currency. If the Enable Cross Rates check box is changed to unchecked after entering contra currencies, the application stops calculating cross rates going forward for that particular rate type. All the earlier calculated cross rates for that rate type remain in the database unless you manually delete them.

For example, if you have daily rates defined for the pivot currency, USD to the contra currency, EUR, and USD to another contra currency, CAD, the application will automatically create the rates between EUR to CAD and CAD to EUR. This prevents the need to manually define the EUR to CAD and CAD to EUR rates.

Check the Allow Cross Rates Override check box to permit your users to override application generated cross rates. If you accept the default of unchecked, the application generated cross rates cannot be overridden

Maintain Cross Rate Rules

Define or update your cross rate rules at any time by adding or removing contra currency assignments. Add a contra currency to a cross rate rule and run the Daily Rates Import and Calculation process to generate the new rates. If your remove a cross rate rule or a contra currency from a rule, any cross rates generated previously for that contra currency remain unless you manually delete them. Changes to the rule are not retroactive and will not affect previously stored cross rates. The Cross Rate process generates as many rates as possible and skips currencies where one component of the set is missing.

Using Rate Types: Examples

There are four seeded conversion rate types in Oracle Fusion applications:

• Spot

• Corporate

• User

• Fixed

Scenario

You are the general ledger accountant for InFusion America Inc. You are entering a journal entry to capture three transactions that were transacted in three different foreign currencies:

• Canadian dollar (CAD): A very stable currency

• Mexican Peso (MXP): A fluctuating currency

• Hong Kong dollar (HKD): An infrequently used currency

You enter two lines with accounts and amounts for each foreign currency transaction. Based on your company procedures, you select the appropriate rate type to populate the rate for Corporate and Spot rate types from your daily rates table. You manually enter the current rate for the User rate type.

Entering Daily Rates Manually: Worked Example

You are required to enter the daily rates for currency conversion from Great Britain pounds sterling (GBP) to United States dollars (USD) each day for your company InFusion America Inc.

Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Desktop Integration is an Excel add-in that must be loaded onto each client. Because ADF Desktop Integration is an add-in to Microsoft Office products, you can use this feature only if they have Microsoft Excel 2007 or above, Internet Explorer 7 or above, and Microsoft Windows 7, XP Professional SP2, or Vista. Users must download the installation files from Navigator - Tools - Download Desktop Integrator Installer.

Entering Daily Rates

1. Navigate to the Period Close work area.

   Use the Period Close work area to link to close processes and currency process.

2. Click the Manage Currency Rates link.

   Use the Currency Rates Manager page to create, edit, and review currency rate types, daily rates, and historical rates.

3. Click the Daily Rates tab.

   Use the Daily Rates tab to review and enter currency rates.

4. Click the Create in Spreadsheet button.

   Use the Create Daily Rates spreadsheet to enter daily rates in a template that you can save and reuse.

5. Click in the From Currency field. Select the GBP - Pound Sterling list item.
6. Click in the To Currency field. Select the USD - US Dollar list item.
7. Click in the Conversion Rate field. Select the Spot list item
8. Click in the From Conversion field. Enter the desired information into the From Conversion field. Enter a valid value e.g. "8/1/2011".
9. Click in the To Conversion Date field. Enter the desired information into the To Conversion Date field. Enter a valid value e.g. "8/1/2011".
10. Click in the Conversion Rate field. Enter the desired information into the Conversion Rate field. Enter a valid value e.g. "1.33225".
11. Click the Submit button. Click the OK button twice.
12. Review the Record Status column to verify that all rows were loaded successfully.
13. Save the template to use to enter daily rates frequently. You can save the spreadsheet to either a local drive or a shared network drive.

Updating Currency Rates: Worked Example

You are required to change today's daily rates that were already entered. The rates you are changing are for currency conversion from Great Britain pounds sterling (GBP) to United States dollars (USD) for your company InFusion America Inc.

Currency conversion rates were entered by an automatic load to the Daily Rates table. They can also be entered through a spreadsheet.

Updating Currency Rates

1. Navigate to the Period Close work area.

   Use the Period Close work area to link to close processes and currency process.

2. Click the Manage Currency Rates link.

   Use the Currency Rates Manager page to create, edit, and review currency rate types, daily rates, and historical rates.

3. Click the Daily Rates tab.

   Use the Daily Rates tab to review and enter currency rates.

4. Click the From Currency list. Select the GBP - Pound Sterling list item.
5. Click the To Currency list. Select the USD - US Dollar list item.
6. Enter the dates for the daily rates that you are changing. Enter today's date.
7. Click the Rate Type list. Select the Spot list item.
8. Click the Search button.
9. Click in the Rate field. Enter the new rate of 1.7 in the Rate field.
10. Click in the Inverse Rate field. Enter the new inverse rate of 0.58822 in the Inverse Rate field.
11. Click the Save button.

FAQs for Currencies and Currency Rates

When do I create or enable currencies?

Create currencies to use, for example for reporting purposes, if they are not already provided. All currencies from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 4217 standard are provided.

Enable any currency other than USD for use in Oracle Fusion Applications, for example for displaying monetary amounts, assigning to sets of books, entering transactions, and recording balances. Only USD is enabled by default.

What's the difference between precision, extended precision, and minimum accountable unit for a currency?

Precision is the number of digits to the right of the decimal point used in regular currency transactions. Extended precision is the number of digits to the right of the decimal point used in calculations for this currency, and it must be greater than or equal to the standard precision. For example, USD would have 2 for precision because amounts are transacted as such, for example $1.00. For calculations, for example adding USD amounts, you might want the application to be more precise than two decimal digits, and would enter an extended precision accordingly.

Minimum accountable unit is the smallest denomination for the currency. For example, for USD that would be .01 for the cent. This unit does not necessarily correspond to the precision for all currencies.

What's a statistical unit currency type?

The statistical unit currency type is used only for the Statistical (STAT) currency. The Statistical currency is used to record statistics such as the number of items bought and sold. Statistical balances can be used directly in financial reports, allocation formulas, and other calculations.

What's the difference between spot, corporate, user, and fixed rate types?

Spot, corporate, user, and fixed conversion rate types differ based on the fluctuations of your entered foreign currency and your company procedures for maintaining daily rates.

If you have infrequent foreign currency transactions, the user rate type can simplify your currency maintenance while providing an accurate conversion rate on the date of the transaction.

Define Enterprise Structures for Marketing

Enterprise Structures: Overview

Oracle Fusion Applications have been designed to ensure your enterprise can be modeled to meet legal and management objectives. The decisions about your implementation of Oracle Fusion Applications are affected by your:

• Industry

• Business unit requirements for autonomy

• Business and accounting policies

• Business functions performed by business units and optionally, centralized in shared service centers

• Locations of facilities

Every enterprise has three fundamental structures, legal, managerial, and functional, that are used to describe its operations and provide a basis for reporting. In Oracle Fusion, these structures are implemented using the chart of accounts and organizations. Although many alternative hierarchies can be implemented and used for reporting, you are likely to have one primary structure that organizes your business into divisions, business units, and departments aligned by your strategic objectives.

Legal Structure

The figure above shows a typical group of legal entities, operating various business and functional organizations. Your ability to buy and sell, own, and employ comes from your charter in the legal system. A corporation is a distinct legal entity from its owners and managers. The corporation is owned by its shareholders, who may be individuals or other corporations. There are many other kinds of legal entities, such as sole proprietorships, partnerships, and government agencies.

A legally recognized entity can own and trade assets and employ people in the jurisdiction in which it is registered. When granted these privileges, legal entities are also assigned responsibilities to:

• Account for themselves to the public through statutory and external reporting

• Comply with legislation and regulations

• Pay income and transaction taxes

• Process value added tax (VAT) collection on behalf of the taxing authority

Many large enterprises isolate risk and optimize taxes by incorporating subsidiaries. They create legal entities to facilitate legal compliance, segregate operations, optimize taxes, complete contractual relationships, and isolate risk. Enterprises use legal entities to establish their enterprise's identity under the laws of each country in which their enterprise operates.

In the figure above, a separate card represents a series of registered companies. Each company, including the public holding company, InFusion America, must be registered in the countries where they do business. Each company consists of various divisions created for purposes of management reporting. These are shown as vertical columns on each card. For example, a group might have a separate company for each business in the United States (US), but have their United Kingdom (UK) legal entity represent all businesses in that country. The divisions are linked across the cards so that a business can appear on some or all of the cards. For example, the air quality monitoring systems business might be operated by the US, UK, and France companies. The list of business divisions is on the Business Axis. Each company's card is also horizontally striped by functional groups, such as the sales team and the finance team. This functional list is called the Functional Axis. The overall image suggests that information might, at a minimum, be tracked by company, business, division, and function in a group environment. In Oracle Fusion Applications, the legal structure is implemented using legal entities.

Management Structure

Successfully managing multiple businesses requires that you segregate them by their strategic objectives, and measure their results. Although related to your legal structure, the business organizational hierarchies do not need to be reflected directly in the legal structure of the enterprise. The management structure can include divisions, subdivisions, lines of business, strategic business units, and cost centers. In the figure above, the management structure is shown on the Business Axis. In Oracle Fusion Applications, the management structure is implemented using divisions and business units.

Functional Structure

Straddling the legal and business organizations is a functional organization structured around people and their competencies. For example, sales, manufacturing, and service teams are functional organizations. This functional structure is represented by the Functional Axis in the figure above. You reflect the efforts and expenses of your functional organizations directly on the income statement. Organizations must manage and report revenues, cost of sales, and functional expenses such as research and development (R&D) and selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses. In Oracle Fusion Applications, the functional structure is implemented using departments and organizations, including sales, marketing, project, cost, and inventory organizations.

Enterprise Structures Business Process Model: Explained

In Oracle Fusion Applications, the Enterprise Performance and Planning Business Process Model illustrates the major implementation tasks that you perform to create your enterprise structures. This process model includes the Set Up Enterprise Structures business process, which consist of implementation activities that span many product families. Information Technology is a second Business Process Model which contains the Set Up Information Technology Management business process. Define Reference Data Sharing is one of the activities in this business process and is important in the implementation of the enterprise structures. This activity creates the mechanism to share reference data sets across multiple ledgers, business units, and warehouses, reducing the administrative burden and decreasing the time needed to implement.

The following figure and chart describes the Business Process Model structures and activities.

Global Enterprise Configuration: Points to Consider

Start your global enterprise structure configuration by discussing what your organization's reporting needs are and how to represent those needs in the Oracle Fusion Applications. Consider deployment on a single instance, or at least, on as few instances as possible, to simplify reporting and consolidations for your global enterprises. The following are some questions and points to consider as you design your global enterprise structure in Oracle Fusion.

• Enterprise Configuration

• Business Unit Management

• Security Structure

• Compliance Requirements

Enterprise Configuration

What is the level of configuration needed to achieve the reporting and accounting requirements? What components of your enterprise do you need to report on separately? Which components can be represented by building a hierarchy of values to provide reporting at both detail and summary levels? Where are you on the spectrum of centralization versus decentralization?

Business Unit Management

What reporting do I need by business unit? How can you set up your departments or business unit accounts to achieve departmental hierarchies that report accurately on your lines of business? What reporting do you need to support the managers of your business units, and the executives who measure them? How often are business unit results aggregated? What level of reporting detail is required across business units?

Security Structure

What level of security and access is allowed? Are business unit managers and the people that report to them secured to transactions within their own business unit? Are the transactions for their business unit largely performed by a corporate department or shared service center?

Compliance Requirements

How do you comply with your corporate external reporting requirements and local statutory reporting requirements? Do you tend to prefer a corporate first or an autonomous local approach? Where are you on a spectrum of centralization, very centralized or decentralized?

Modeling Your Enterprise Management Structure in Oracle Fusion: Example

This example uses a fictitious global company to demonstrate the analysis that can occur during the enterprise structure configuration planning process.

Scenario

Your company, InFusion Corporation, is a multinational conglomerate that operates in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). InFusion has purchased an Oracle Fusion enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution including Oracle Fusion General Ledger and all of the Oracle Fusion subledgers. You are chairing a committee to discuss creation of a model for your global enterprise structure including both your US and UK operations.

InFusion Corporation

InFusion Corporation has 400 plus employees and revenue of $120 million. Your product line includes all the components to build and maintain air quality monitoring (AQM) systems for homes and businesses. You have two distribution centers and three warehouses that share a common item master in the US and UK. Your financial services organization provides funding to your customers for the start up costs of these systems.

Analysis

The following are elements you need to consider in creating your model for your global enterprise structure.

• Your company is required to report using US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) standards and UK Statements of Standard Accounting Practice and Financial Reporting Standards. How many ledgers do you need to achieve proper statutory reporting?

• Your managers need reports that show profit and loss (revenue and expenses) for their lines of business. Do you use business units and balancing segments to represent your divisions and businesses? Do you secure data by two segments in your chart of accounts which represents each department and legal entity or one segment that represents both to produce useful, but confidential management reports?

• Your corporate management requires reports showing total organizational performance with drill down capability to the supporting details. Do you need multiple balancing segment hierarchies to achieve proper rollup of balances for reporting requirements?

• Your company has all administrative, account payables, procurement, and human resources functions performed at their corporate headquarters. Do you need one or more business unit in which to perform all these functions? How will your shared service center be configured?

Global Enterprise Structure Model

The following figure and table summarize the model that your committee has designed and uses numerical values to provide a sample representation of your structure. The model includes the following recommendations:

• Creation of three separate ledgers representing your separate legal entities:

  • InFusion America Inc.

  • InFusion Financial Services Inc.

  • InFusion UK Services Ltd.

• Consolidation of results for system components, installations, and maintenance product lines across the enterprise

• All UK general and administrative costs processed at the UK headquarters

• US Systems' general and administrative costs processed at US Corporate headquarters

• US Financial Services maintains its own payables and receivables departments

In this chart, the green globe stands for mandatory and gold globe stands for optional setup. The following statements expand on the data in the chart.

• The enterprise is mandatory because it serves as an umbrella for the entire implementation. All organizations are created within an enterprise.

• Legal entities are also mandatory. They can be optionally mapped to balancing segment values or represented by ledgers. Mapping balancing segment values to legal entities is mandatory if you plan to use the intercompany functionality.

• At least one ledger is mandatory in an implementation in which you record your accounting transactions.

• Business units are also mandatory because financial transactions are processed in business units.

• A shared service center is optional, but if used, must be a business unit.

• Divisions are optional and can be represented with a hierarchy of cost centers or by a second balancing segment value.

• Departments are mandatory because they track your employees.

• Optionally, add an item master organization and inventory organizations if you are tracking your inventory transactions in Oracle Fusion Applications.

Define Initial Configuration

Establishing Enterprise Structures Using the Enterprise Structures Configurator: Explained

The Enterprise Structures Configurator is an interview-based tool that guides you through the process of setting up a basic enterprise structure. By answering questions about your enterprise, the tool creates a structure of divisions, legal entities, business units, and reference data sets that reflects your enterprise structure. After you create your enterprise structure, you also follow a guided process to determine whether or not to use positions, and whether to set up additional attributes for jobs and positions. After you define your enterprise structure and your job and position structures, you can review them, make any necessary changes, and then load the final configuration.

This figure illustrates the process to configure your enterprise using the Enterprise Structures Configurator.

To be able to use the Enterprise Structures Configurator, you must select the Enterprise Structures Guided Flow feature for your offerings on the Configure Offerings page in the Setup and Maintenance work area. If you do not select this feature, then you must set up your enterprise structure using individual tasks provided elsewhere in the offerings, and you cannot create multiple configurations to compare different scenarios.

Establish Enterprise Structures

To define your enterprise structures, you use the guided flow within the Establish Enterprise Structures task to enter basic information about your enterprise, such as the primary industry and the location of your headquarters. You then create divisions, legal entities, business units, and reference data sets. The Establish Enterprise Structures task enables you to create multiple enterprise configurations so that you can compare different scenarios. Until you load a configuration, you can continue to create and edit multiple configurations until you arrive at one that best suits your enterprise.

Establish Job and Position Structures

You also use a guided process to determine whether you want to use jobs only, or jobs and positions. The primary industry that you select in the Establish Enterprise Structures task provides the application with the information needed to make an initial recommendation. You can either accept the recommendation, or you can answer additional questions about how you manage people in your enterprise, and then make a selection. After you select whether to use jobs or positions, the guided process prompts you to set up a descriptive flexfield structure for jobs, and for positions if you have chosen to use them. Descriptive flexfields enable you to capture additional information when you create jobs and positions.

Review Configuration

Finally, you can review a summary of the results of the two interview processes. For each configuration, the online summary lists the divisions, legal entities, business units, reference data sets, and job and position structures that the application will create when you load the configuration.

For a more detailed analysis of a configuration, you can access the Technical Summary Report. This report lists the same information as the online summary, but also lists the following information that will be created by the application when you load the configuration, based on your configuration:

• Legislative data groups (the application creates one legislative data group for each country that is identified in the configuration.)

• Name of the legislative data group that will be assigned to the payroll statutory unit that is generated for each legal entity.

• Organization hierarchy.

The Technical Summary report also lists the default settings that will be loaded for these fields, which you access from the Manage Enterprise HCM Information task: Worker Number Generation, Employment Model and Allow Employment Terms Override. You can print the Technical Summary Report for each of your configurations and compare each scenario.

Load Configuration

You can load only one configuration. When you load a configuration, the application creates the divisions, legal entities, business units, and so on. After you load the configuration, you then use individual tasks to edit, add, and delete enterprise structures.

Designing an Enterprise Configuration: Example

This example illustrates how to set up an enterprise based on a global company operating mainly in the US and the UK with a single primary industry.

Scenario

InFusion Corporation is a multinational enterprise in the high technology industry with product lines that include all the components that are required to build and maintain air quality monitoring (AQM) systems for homes and businesses. Its primary locations are in the US and the UK, but it has smaller outlets in France, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Enterprise Details

In the US, InFusion employs 400 people and has a company revenue of $120 million. Outside the US, InFusion employs 200 people and has revenue of $60 million.

Analysis

InFusion requires three divisions. The US division will cover the US locations. The Europe division will cover the UK and France. Saudi Arabia and the UAE will be covered by the Middle East division.

InFusion requires legal entities with legal employers, payroll statutory units, tax reporting units, and legislative data groups for the US, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, and UAE, in order to employ and pay its workers in those countries.

InFusion requires a number of departments across the enterprise for each area of business, such as sales and marketing, and a number of cost centers to track and report on the costs of those departments.

InFusion requires business units for human capital management (HCM) purposes. Infusion has general managers responsible for business units within each country. Those business units may share reference data. Some reference data can be defined within a reference data set that multiple business units may subscribe to. Business units are also required for financial purposes. Financial transactions are always processed within a business unit.

Resulting Enterprise Configuration

Based on this analysis, InFusion requires an enterprise with multiple divisions, ledgers, legal employers, payroll statutory units, tax reporting units, legislative data groups, departments, cost centers, and business units.

This figure illustrates the enterprise configuration that results from the analysis of InFusion Corporation.

Division: Explained

Managing multiple businesses requires that you segregate them by their strategic objectives and measure their results. Responsibility to reach objectives can be delegated along the management structure. Although related to your legal structure, the business organizational hierarchies do not need to reflect directly the legal structure of the enterprise. The management entities and structure can include divisions and subdivisions, lines of business, and other strategic business units, and include their own revenue and cost centers. These organizations can be included in many alternative hierarchies and used for reporting, as long as they have representation in the chart of accounts.

Divisions

A division refers to a business oriented subdivision within an enterprise, in which each division organizes itself differently to deliver products and services or address different markets. A division can operate in one or more countries, and can be comprised of many companies or parts of different companies that are represented by business units.

A division is a profit center or grouping of profit and cost centers, where the division manager is responsible for attaining business goals including profit goals. A division can be responsible for a share of the company's existing product lines or for a separate business. Managers of divisions may also have return on investment goals requiring tracking of the assets and liabilities of the division. The division manager reports to a top corporate executive.

By definition a division can be represented in the chart of accounts. Companies may choose to represent product lines, brands, or geographies as their divisions: their choice represents the primary organizing principle of the enterprise. This may coincide with the management segment used in segment reporting.

Oracle Fusion Applications supports a qualified management segment and recommends that you use this segment to represent your hierarchy of business units and divisions. If managers of divisions have return on investment goals, make the management segment a balancing segment. Oracle Fusion applications allows up to three balancing segments. The values of the management segment can be comprised of business units that roll up in a hierarchy to report by division.

Historically, divisions were implemented as a node in a hierarchy of segment values. For example, Oracle E-Business Suite has only one balancing segment, and often the division and legal entity are combined into a single segment where each value stands for both division and legal entity.

Use of Divisions in Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM)

Divisions are used in HCM to define the management organization hierarchy, using the generic organization hierarchy. This hierarchy can be used to create organization based security profiles.

Legal Entities: Explained

A legal entity is a recognized party with rights and responsibilities given by legislation.

Legal entities have the right to own property, the right to trade, the responsibility to repay debt, and the responsibility to account for themselves to regulators, taxation authorities, and owners according to rules specified in the relevant legislation. Their rights and responsibilities may be enforced through the judicial system. Define a legal entity for each registered company or other entity recognized in law for which you want to record assets, liabilities, expenses and income, pay transaction taxes, or perform intercompany trading.

A legal entity has responsibility for elements of your enterprise for the following reasons:

• Facilitating local compliance

• Taking advantage of lower corporation taxation in some jurisdictions

• Preparing for acquisitions or disposals of parts of the enterprise

• Isolating one area of the business from risks in another area. For example, your enterprise develops property and also leases properties. You could operate the property development business as a separate legal entity to limit risk to your leasing business.

The Role of Your Legal Entities

In configuring your enterprise structure in Oracle Fusion Applications, you need to understand that the contracting party on any transaction is always the legal entity. Individual legal entities own the assets of the enterprise, record sales and pay taxes on those sales, make purchases and incur expenses, and perform other transactions.

Legal entities must comply with the regulations of jurisdictions, in which they register. Europe now allows for companies to register in one member country and do business in all member countries, and the US allows for companies to register in one state and do business in all states. To support local reporting requirements, legal reporting units are created and registered.

You are required to publish specific and periodic disclosures of your legal entities' operations based on different jurisdictions' requirements. Certain annual or more frequent accounting reports are referred to as statutory or external reporting. These reports must be filed with specified national and regulatory authorities. For example, in the United States (US), your publicly owned entities (corporations) are required to file quarterly and annual reports, as well as other periodic reports, with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who enforces statutory reporting requirements for public corporations.

Individual entities privately held or held by public companies do not have to file separately. In other countries, your individual entities do have to file in their own name, as well as at the public group level. Disclosure requirements are diverse. For example, your local entities may have to file locally to comply with local regulations in a local currency, as well as being included in your enterprise's reporting requirements in different currency.

A legal entity can represent all or part of your enterprise's management framework. For example, if you operate in a large country such as the United Kingdom or Germany, you might incorporate each division in the country as a separate legal entity. In a smaller country, for example Austria, you might use a single legal entity to host all of your business operations across divisions.

Creating Legal Entities in the Enterprise Structures Configurator: Points to Consider

Using the Enterprise Structures Configurator (ESC), you can create legal entities for your enterprise automatically, based on the countries in which divisions of your business operate, or you can upload a list of legal entities from a spreadsheet.

Automatically Creating Legal Entities

If you are not certain of the number of legal entities that you need, you can create them automatically. To use this option, you first identify all of the countries in which your enterprise operates. The application opens the Map Divisions by Country page, which contains a matrix of the countries that you identified, your enterprise, and the divisions that you created. You select the check boxes where your enterprise and divisions intersect with the countries to identify the legal entities that you want the application to create. The enterprise is included for situations where your enterprise operates in a country and acts on behalf of several divisions within the enterprise and is a legal employer in a country. If you select the enterprise for a country, the application creates a country holding company.

The application automatically creates the legal entities that you select, and identifies them as payroll statutory units and legal employers. For each country that you indicated that your enterprise operates in, and for each country that you created a location for, the application also automatically creates a legislative data group.

Any legal entities that you create automatically cannot be deleted from the Create Legal Entities page within the Enterprise Structures Configurator. You must return to the Map Divisions by Country page and deselect the legal entities that you no longer want.

Example: Creating Legal Entities Automatically

InFusion Corporation is using the ESC to set up their enterprise structure. They have identified two divisions, one for Lighting, and one for Security. The Lighting division operates in Japan and the US, and the Security division operates in the UK and India.

This figure illustrates InFusion Corporation's enterprise structure.

This table represents the selections that InFusion Corporation makes when specifying which legal entities to create on the Map Divisions by Country page.

Based on the selections made in the preceding table, the ESC creates the following four legal entities:

• InFusion Lighting Japan LE

• InFusion Lighting US LE

• InFusion Security UK LE

• InFusion Security India LE

Creating Legal Entities Using a Spreadsheet

If you have a list of legal entities already defined for your enterprise, you can upload them from a spreadsheet. To use this option, you first download a spreadsheet template, then add your legal entity information to the spreadsheet, and then upload directly to your enterprise configuration. You can export and import the spreadsheet multiple times to accommodate revisions.

Legal Entity in Oracle Fusion: Points to Consider

Oracle Fusion Applications support the modeling of your legal entities. If you make purchases from or sell to other legal entities, define these other legal entities in your customer and supplier registers, which are part of the Oracle Fusion Trading Community Architecture. When your legal entities are trading with each other, you represent both of them as legal entities and also as customers and suppliers in your customer and supplier registers. Use legal entity relationships to determine which transactions are intercompany and require intercompany accounting. Your legal entities can be identified as legal employers and therefore, are available for use in Human Capital Management (HCM) applications.

There are several decisions that need to be considered in creating your legal entities.

• The importance of legal entity in transactions

• Legal entity and its relationship to business units

• Legal entity and its relationship to divisions

• Legal entity and its relationship to ledgers

• Legal entity and its relationship to balancing segments

• Legal entity and its relationship to consolidation rules

• Legal entity and its relationship to intercompany transactions

• Legal entity and its relationship to worker assignments and legal employer

• Legal entity and payroll reporting

• Legal reporting units

The Importance of Legal Entity in Transactions

All of the assets of the enterprise are owned by individual legal entities. Oracle Fusion Financials allow your users to enter legal entities on transactions that represent a movement in value or obligation.

For example, the creation of a sales order creates an obligation for the legal entity that books the order to deliver the goods on the acknowledged date, and an obligation of the purchaser to receive and pay for those goods. Under contract law in most countries, damages can be sought for both actual losses, putting the injured party in the same state as if they had not entered into the contract, and what is called loss of bargain, or the profit that would have made on a transaction.

In another example, if you revalued your inventory in a warehouse to account for raw material price increases, the revaluation and revaluation reserves must be reflected in your legal entity's accounts. In Oracle Fusion Applications, your inventory within an inventory organization is managed by a single business unit and belongs to one legal entity.

Legal Entity and Its Relationship to Business Units

A business unit can process transactions on behalf of many legal entities. Frequently, a business unit is part of a single legal entity. In most cases the legal entity is explicit on your transactions. For example, a payables invoice has an explicit legal entity field. Your accounts payables department can process supplier invoices on behalf of one or many business units.

In some cases, your legal entity is inferred from your business unit that is processing the transaction. For example, your business unit A agrees on terms for the transfer of inventory to your business unit B. This transaction is binding on your default legal entities assigned to each business unit. Oracle Fusion Procurement, Oracle Fusion Projects, and Oracle Fusion Supply Chain applications rely on deriving the legal entity information from the business unit.

Legal Entity and Its Relationship to Divisions

The division is an area of management responsibility that can correspond to a collection of legal entities. If desired, you can aggregate the results for your divisions by legal entity or by combining parts of other legal entities. Define date-effective hierarchies for your cost center or legal entity segment in your chart of accounts to facilitate the aggregation and reporting by division. Divisions and legal entities are independent concepts.

Legal Entity and Its Relationship to Ledgers

One of your major responsibilities is to file financial statements for your legal entities. Map legal entities to specific ledgers using the Oracle Fusion General Ledger Accounting Configuration Manager. Within a ledger, you can optionally map a legal entity to one or more balancing segment values.

Legal Entity and Its Relationship to Balancing Segments

Oracle Fusion General Ledger supports up to three balancing segments. Best practices recommend that one of these segments represents your legal entity to ease your requirement to account for your operations to regulatory agencies, tax authorities, and investors. Accounting for your operations means you must produce a balanced trial balance sheet by legal entity. If you account for many legal entities in a single ledger, you must:

1. Identify the legal entities within the ledger.

2. Balance transactions that cross legal entity boundaries through intercompany transactions.

3. Decide which balancing segments correspond to each legal entity and assign them in Oracle Fusion General Ledger Accounting Configuration Manager. Once you assign one balancing segment value in a ledger, then all your balancing segment values must be assigned. This recommended best practice facilitates reporting on assets, liabilities, and income by legal entity.

Represent your legal entities by at least one balancing segment value. You may represent it by two or three balancing segment values if more granular reporting is required. For example, if your legal entity operates in multiple jurisdictions in Europe, you might define balancing segment values and map them to legal reporting units. You can represent a legal entity by more than one balancing segment value, do not use a single balancing segment value to represent more than one legal entity.

In Oracle Fusion General Ledger, there are three balancing segments. You can use separate balancing segments to represent your divisions or strategic business units to enable management reporting at the balance sheet level for each division or business unit. For example, use this solution to empower your business unit and divisional managers to track and assume responsibility for their asset utilization or return on investment. Using multiple balancing segments is also useful when you know at the time of implementation that you are disposing of a part of a legal entity and need to isolate the assets and liabilities for that entity.

If you decided to account for each legal entity in a separate ledger, there is no requirement to identify the legal entity with a balancing segment value within the ledger.

Legal Entity and Its Relationship to Consolidation Rules

In Oracle Fusion Applications you can map legal entities to balancing segments and then define consolidation rules using your balancing segments. You are creating a relationship between the definition of your legal entities and their role in your consolidation.

Legal Entity and its Relationship to Intercompany Transactions

Use Oracle Fusion Intercompany functionality for automatic creation of intercompany entries across your balancing segments. Intercompany processing updates legal ownership within the enterprise's groups of legal entities. Invoices or journals are created as needed. To limit the number of trading pairs for your enterprise, set up intercompany organizations and assign then to your authorized legal entities. Define processing options and intercompany accounts to use when creating intercompany transactions and to assist in consolidation elimination entries. These accounts are derived and automatically entered on your intercompany transactions based on legal entities assigned to your intercompany organizations.

Intracompany trading, in which legal ownership isn't changed but other organizational responsibilities are, is also supported. For example, you can track assets and liabilities that move between your departments within your legal entities by creating departmental level intercompany organizations.

Legal Entity and Its Relationship to Worker Assignments and Legal Employer

Legal entities that employ people are called legal employers in the Oracle Fusion Legal Entity Configurator. You must enter legal employers on worker assignments in Oracle Fusion HCM.

Legal Entity and Payroll Reporting

Your legal entities are required to pay payroll tax and social insurance such as social security on your payroll. In Oracle Fusion Applications, you can register payroll statutory units to pay and report on payroll tax and social insurance on behalf of many of your legal entities. As the legal employer, you might be required to pay payroll tax, not only at the national level, but also at the local level. You meet this obligation by establishing your legal entity as a place of work within the jurisdiction of a local authority. Set up legal reporting units to represent the part of your enterprise with a specific legal reporting obligation. You can also mark these legal reporting units as tax reporting units, if the legal entity must pay taxes as a result of establishing a place of business within the jurisdiction.

Business Units: Explained

A business unit is a unit of an enterprise that performs one or many business functions that can be rolled up in a management hierarchy. A business unit can process transactions on behalf of many legal entities. Normally, it will have a manager, strategic objectives, a level of autonomy, and responsibility for its profit and loss. Roll business units up into divisions if you structure your chart of accounts with this type of hierarchy. In Oracle Fusion Applications, you assign your business units to one primary ledger. For example, if a business unit is processing payables invoices they will need to post to a particular ledger. This assignment is mandatory for your business units with business functions that produce financial transactions.

In Oracle Fusion Applications, use business unit as a securing mechanism for transactions. For example, if you run your export business separately from your domestic sales business, secure the export business data to prevent access by the domestic sales employees. To accomplish this security, set up the export business and domestic sales business as two separate business units.

The Oracle Fusion Applications business unit model:

• Allows for flexible implementation

• Provides a consistent entity for controlling and reporting on transactions

• Anchors the sharing of sets of reference data across applications

Business units process transactions using reference data sets that reflect your business rules and policies and can differ from country to country. With Oracle Fusion Application functionality, you can choose to share reference data, such as payment terms and transaction types, across business units, or you can choose to have each business unit manage its own set depending on the level at which you wish to enforce common policies.

In countries where gapless and chronological sequencing of documents is required for subledger transactions, define your business units in alignment with your ledger definition, because the uniqueness of sequencing is only ensured within a ledger. In these cases, define a single ledger and assign one legal entity and business unit.

In summary, use business units in the following ways:

• Management reporting

• Processing of transactions

• Security of transactional data

• Reference data definition and sharing

Brief Overview of Business Unit Security

Business units are used by a number of Oracle Fusion Applications to implement data security. You assign data roles to your users to give them access to data in business units and permit them to perform specific functions on this data. When a business function is enabled for a business unit, the application can trigger the creation of data roles for this business unit based on the business function's related job roles.

For example, if a payables invoicing business function is enabled, then it is clear that there are employees in this business unit that perform the function of payables invoicing, and need access to the payables invoicing functionality. Therefore, based on the correspondence between the business function and the job roles, appropriate data roles are generated automatically. Use Human Capital Management (HCM) security profiles to administer security for employees in business units.

Creating Business Units in the Enterprise Structures Configurator: Points to Consider

Business units are used within Oracle Fusion applications for management reporting, processing of transactions, and security of transactional data. Using the Enterprise Structures Configurator (ESC), you create business units for your enterprise either automatically or manually.

Automatically Creating Business Units

To create business units automatically, you must specify the level at which to create business units. Business units within your enterprise may be represented at the business function level, such as Sales, Consulting, Product Development, and so on, or they may be represented at a more detailed level, where a business unit exists for each combination of countries in which you operate and the functions in those countries.

You can automatically create business units at the following levels:

• Country

• Country and Division

• Country and business function

• Division

• Division and legal entity

• Division and business function

• Business function

• Legal entity

• Business function and legal entity

Select the option that best meets your business requirements, but consider the following:

• If you use Oracle Fusion Financials, the legal entity option is recommended because of the manner in which financial transactions are processed.

• The business unit level that you select determines how the application automatically creates reference data sets.

After you select a business unit level, the application generates a list of business units, and you select the ones you want the application to create. If you select a level that has two components, such as country and division, then the system displays a table listing both components, and you select the check boxes at the intersections of the components.

The business units listed by the application are suggestions only, and are meant to simplify the process to create business units. You are not required to select all of the business units suggested. When you navigate to the next page in the ESC guided flow, which is the Manage Business Units page, you cannot delete any of the business units that were created automatically. You must return to the Create Business Units page and deselect any business units that you no longer want.

Example: Selecting Business Unit Levels

InFusion Corporation is using the Enterprise Structures Configurator to set up their enterprise structure. They have identified two divisions, one for Lighting, and one for Security. They operate in four countries: US, UK, Japan, and India, and they have created a legal entity for each of the countries. The sales and marketing functions are based in both India and Japan, while the US and the UK have only the sales function.

This figure illustrates InFusion Corporation's enterprise structure.

The following table lists the options for business unit levels and the resulting business units that the application suggests for InFusion Corporation.

Manually Creating Business Units

If none of the levels for creating business units meets your business needs, you can create business units manually, and you create them on the Manage Business Units page. If you create business units manually, then no reference data sets are created automatically. You must create them manually as well.

Jobs and Positions: Critical Choices

Jobs and positions represent roles that enable you to distinguish between tasks and the individuals who perform those tasks. The key to whether to use jobs or positions is how each is used. Positions offer a well-defined space independent of the person performing the job. Jobs are a space defined by the person. A job can be defined globally in the Common Set, whereas a position is defined within one business unit.

You can update the job and department of a position at any time. This is useful if you hire someone into a new role and want to transfer the position to another department.

During implementation, one of the earliest decisions you will make is whether to use jobs or a combination of jobs and positions. The determinants for this decision are:

• The primary industry of your enterprise

• How you manage your people

Primary Industry of Your Enterprise

Primary industries and how they usually set up their workforce are listed in the table below.

Management of People

The following table displays suggestions of whether to use jobs or a combination of jobs and positions based on your industry and how you manage your employees when there is turnover.

Positions: Examples

Positions are typically used by industries that use detailed approval rules, which perform detailed budgeting and maintain head counts, or have high turnover rates.

Retail Industry

ABC Corporation has high turnover. It loses approximately 5% of their cashiers monthly. The job of cashier includes three positions: front line cashier, service desk cashier, and layaway cashier. Each job is cross trained to take over another cashier position. When one cashier leaves from any of the positions, another existing cashier from the front line, service desk or layaway can assist where needed. . But to ensure short lines and customer satisfaction, ABC must replace each cashier lost to turnover.

Since turnover is high in retail it is better for this industry to use positions. There is an automatic vacancy when an employee terminates employment. The position exists even when there are no holders. This is important if the person who leaves the company is a manager or supervisor with direct reports. All direct reports continue reporting to the position even if it is empty. You do not need to reassign these employees to another manager or supervisor; the replacement manager is assigned to the existing position.

Also, an advantage to using positions is that when you hire somebody new many of the attributes are defaulted in from the position. This speeds up the hiring process.

This figure illustrates the retail position setup.

Health Care Industry

The hospital has a structured head count and detailed budgeting. For example, a specific number of surgeons, nurses, and interns of various types are needed. These positions need to be filled in order for the hospital to run smoothly. Use jobs and positions if you need to apply detailed head count rules.

Health care is an industry that needs to regulate employment, roles, and compensation according to strict policies and procedures. Fixed roles tend to endure over time, surviving multiple incumbents. Industries that manage roles rather than individuals, where roles continue to exist after individuals leave, typically model the workforce using positions.

This figure illustrates the hospital position setup.

Jobs: Example

Jobs are typically used without positions by service industries where flexibility and organizational change are key features.

Software Industry

For example, XYZ Corporation has a director over the departments for developers, quality assurance, and technical writers. Recently, three developers have left the company. The director decides to redirect the head count to other areas. Instead of hiring all three back into development, one person is hired to each department, quality assurance, and technical writing.

In software industries, the organization is fluid. Using jobs gives an enterprise the flexibility to determine where to use head count, because the job only exists through the person performing it. In this example, when the three developers leave XYZ Corporation, their jobs no longer exist, therefore the corporation has the flexibility to move the headcount to other areas.

This figure illustrates the software industry job setup.

Job and Position Structures: Explained

Job and position structures identify the descriptive flexfield structure that enables you to specify additional attributes that you want to capture when you define jobs and positions. Job and position attributes provide further detail to make jobs and positions more specific. You also use attributes to define the structure of your jobs and positions. You can specify attributes at the enterprise level for jobs and positions, at the business unit level for positions, and at the reference data set level for jobs. Job and position structures are optional.

Enterprise-Level Job Attributes

When you define a job, you enter a value for the name of the job. To make job names more specific, set up attributes that enable you to identify additional details about the job, such as the nature of the work that is performed or the relative skill level required for the job. If these attributes apply to all jobs within your enterprise, set up enterprise-level job attributes. Standard capabilities mean that you can use the different segments of the name to identify common jobs or job holders for analysis or compensation, or for grouping records in reports, for example, to find all jobs of a specific job type. You should not use attributes with values that change regularly, for example, salary ranges or expense approval levels that change every year.

This figure illustrates how job type and job level provide further details for the HR Application Specialist job.

Enterprise-Level Position Attributes

Position attributes at the enterprise level are similar to those for jobs. Each position that you define identifies a specific role in the enterprise, which you can manage independently of the person in the position, and it will belong to one specific department or organization. The name of each position must be unique. To simplify the process of managing unique names for positions, set up enterprise-level attributes to identify separate components of the position name. For example, you can set up an attribute for position title and one for position number. When defining the attributes that make up the structure of a position name you should also consider if any of your attributes are part of the definition of a common job type. Using job types for a position can help you manage common information that applies to many different positions. For example you can define a job type of Manager.Level 1 and use this for comparison of positions across departments or lines or business, or for setting common job requirements. You can then define multiple manager type positions in your HR department, each of which has responsibility for a different management function or group.

This figure illustrates how title and position number provide further details for the manager position.

Business Unit-Level Attributes for Positions

If you have information that you want to capture for positions that is specific to each business unit, then you can define attributes at the business unit level for positions. When you create positions, these attributes appear in addition to any enterprise-level attributes. For example, you may want to identify the sales region for all positions in the sales business unit. You can set up a text attribute called Sales Region and use it to enter the necessary information when creating positions for the sales business unit.

Reference Data Set-Level Attributes for Jobs

If you have information for jobs that applies to specific reference data sets, set up attributes for jobs at the reference data set level. When you create jobs, these attributes appear in addition to any enterprise-level attributes. For example, you may want to identify all information technology (IT) jobs within a specific set. You can set up a text attribute called Function and use it to enter IT in jobs that you create that perform an IT function within a specific set.

FAQs for Define Initial Configuration

What happens if I don't use the Enterprise Structures Configurator to set up my enterprise structures?

The Enterprise Structures Configurator is an interview-based tool that guides you through setting up divisions, legal entities, business units, and reference data sets. The tool also enables you to assign reference data sets to business units and locations. You can set up multiple configurations to perform what-if scenarios, and then print each configuration to compare the resulting enterprise structure. If you do not use the Enterprise Structures Configurator, then you must set up your enterprise structure using the individual tasks that correspond to each enterprise component. In addition, you will not be able to set up multiple configurations and compare different scenarios. It is recommended that you use the Enterprise Structures Configurator.

What's an ultimate holding company?

The legal entity that represents the top level in your organization hierarchy, as defined by the legal name entered for the enterprise. This designation is used only to create an organization tree, with the ultimate holding company as the top level, divisions and country holding companies as the second level, and legal employers as the third level.

Define Enterprise for Marketing

Enterprise: Explained

An enterprise consists of legal entities under common control and management.

Enterprise Defined

When implementing Oracle Fusion Applications you operate within the context of an enterprise that has already been created in the application for you. This is either a predefined enterprise or an enterprise that has been created in the application by a system administrator.

An enterprise organization captures the name of the deploying enterprise and the location of the headquarters. There is normally a single enterprise organization in a production environment. Multiple enterprises are defined when the system is used to administer multiple customer companies, for example, multiple tenants, or when a customer chooses to set up additional enterprises for testing or development.

Oracle Fusion Applications offers capabilities for multiple tenants to share the same applications instance for some human resources processes. If you offer business process outsourcing services to a set of clients, each of those clients may be represented as an enterprise within an Oracle Fusion Application instance. To support this functionality, system owned reference data such as sequences, sets, and flexfields are also defined within an enterprise.

In Oracle Fusion Applications, an organization classified as an enterprise is defined before defining any other organizations in the HCM Common Organization Model. All other organizations are defined as belonging to an enterprise.

Managing Enterprise Information for Non-Oracle Fusion HCM Users: Explained

The Manage Enterprise HCM Information task includes default settings for your enterprise such as the employment model, worker number generation, and so on. If you are not implementing Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM), then the only action you may need to perform using this task is to change the enterprise name, if necessary. The other settings are HCM-specific and are not relevant outside of Oracle Fusion HCM.

Locations: Explained

A location identifies physical addresses of a workforce structure, such as a department or a job. You can also create locations to enter the addresses of external organizations that you want to maintain, such as employment agencies, tax authorities, and insurance or benefits carriers.

The locations that you create exist as separate structures that you can use for reporting purposes, and also in rules that determine employee eligibility for various types of compensation and benefits. You enter information about a location only once. Subsequently, when you set up other workforce structures you select the location from a list.

Location Sets

When you create a location, you must associate it with a set. Only those users who have access to the set's business unit can access the location set and other associated workforce structure sets, such as those that contain departments and jobs.

You can also associate the location to the common set so that users across your enterprise can access the location irrespective of their business unit. When users search for locations, they can see the locations that they have access to along with the locations in the common set.

The following figure shows how locations sets restrict access to users.

Creating Multiple Locations Simultaneously

If you have a list of locations already defined for your enterprise, you can upload them from a spreadsheet. To use this option, you first download a spreadsheet template, then add your location information to the spreadsheet, and then upload directly to your enterprise configuration. You can upload the spreadsheet multiple times to accommodate revisions.

FAQs for Define Enterprise for Marketing

Why can't I see my location in the search results?

You can search for approved locations only. Also, if you created a location in Oracle Fusion Trading Community Model, then you can't access that location from Oracle Fusion Global Human Resources. For use in Oracle Fusion HCM, you must recreate the location from the Manage Locations page.

What happens if I select a geographic hierarchy node when I'm creating or editing a location?

The calendar events that were created for the geographical node start to apply for the location and may impact the availability of worker assignments at that location. The geographical hierarchy nodes available for selection on the Locations page display from a predefined geographic hierarchy.

What happens if I select an inventory organization when I'm creating or editing a location?

The location is available for selection in purchase documents of that inventory organization in Oracle Fusion Inventory Management. If you don't select an inventory organization, then the location is available in purchase documents across all inventory organizations.

What happens if I inactivate a location?

Starting from the effective date that you entered, you can no longer associate the location with other workforce structures, assignments, or applications. If the location is already in use, it will continue to be available to the components that currently use it.

How can I associate a location with an inventory organization?

From the Manage Locations page in Oracle Fusion Global Human Resources.

To appear on the Create or Edit Location pages, your inventory organization must be effective on today's date and must exist in the location set that you selected.

Define Geographies

Geography Structure, Hierarchy, and Validation: How They Fit Together

There are three components that are dependent on each other when defining a country: geography structure, geography hierarchy, and geography validation. Every country has to have the geography structure defined first before the hierarchy can be defined, and the geography hierarchy has to be defined before the validation can be defined.

Geography Structure

Firstly, you need to create a geography structure for each country to define which geography types are part of the country structure, and how the geography types are hierarchically related within the country structure. For example, you can create geography types called State, City, and Postal Code. Then you can rank the State geography type as the highest level within the country, the City as the second level, and the Postal Code as the lowest level within the country structure. Geography structure can be defined using the Manage Geographies task, or can be imported using tasks in the Define Geographies activity.

Geography Hierarchy

Once the geography structure is defined, the geographies for each geography type can be added to the hierarchy. For example, below the United States you can create a geography called California using a State geography type.

As part of managing the geography hierarchy you can view, create, edit, and delete the geographies for each geography type in the country structure. You can also add a primary and alternate name and code for each geography. A geography hierarchy can be created using the Manage Geographies task, or can be imported using tasks in the Define Geographies activity.

Geography Validation

After defining the geography hierarchy, you need to specify the geography validations for the country. You can choose which address style formats you would like to use for the country, and for each selected address style format you can map geography types to address attributes. You can also select which geography types should be included in geography or tax validation, and which geography types will display in a list of values during address entry in other user interfaces. The geography validation level for the country, such as error or warning, can also be selected.

Geography Structures: Explained

A geography structure is a hierarchical grouping of geography types for a country. For example, the geography structure for the United States is the geography type of State at the top, then followed by the County, then the City, and finally the Postal Code.

You can use the geography structure to establish:

• How geographies can be related

• The types of geographies you can define for the country

How Geographies Can Be Related

You can determine how a country's geographies are hierarchically related by creating the hierarchy of the geography types in the geography structure. When you define a country's structure the country geography type is implicitly at the top of the geography structure, and the numbering of the subsequent levels start with 1 as the next geography level after country.

You must add a geography type as a level in the country structure before you can define a geography for that geography type in a country. For example, before defining the state of California, the State geography type must be added to the United States country structure. Only one geography type can be used for each level, you cannot define more than one geography type at the same level.

To simplify the creation of a country structure you can copy a structure from another country, and then amend the geography type hierarchy for the country.

The Types of Geographies You Can Define for the Country

The application provides you with a set of available master reference geography types. If required, you can create a geography type before adding it to the country structure. Each geography type is added below the current lowest level.

A geography type that you create within the country structure can be used for other country structures as well.

Geography Hierarchy: Explained

Geography hierarchy is a data model that lets you establish conceptual parent-child relationships between geographies. A geography, such as Tokyo or Peru, describes a boundary on the surface of the earth. The application can extrapolate information based on this network of hierarchical geographical relationships.

For example, in the geography hierarchy the state of California is defined as the parent of San Mateo county, which is the parent of Redwood City, which is the parent of the postal code 94065. If you enter just 94065, the application can determine that the postal code is in California, or that the corresponding city is Redwood City.

The application leverages geography hierarchy information to facilitate business processes that rely on geography information, for example, tax calculation, order sourcing rules, sales territory definition. The geography hierarchy information is centrally located in the Trading Community Model and shared among other application offerings.

The top level of the geography hierarchy is Country, so the hierarchy essentially contains countries and their child geographies. Other aspects of the geography hierarchy include:

• Geography

• Geography type

• Geography usage

• Master reference geography hierarchy

• User defined zones

Geography

A geography is a boundary such as a country, state, province or city. It is a physical space with boundaries that is a defined instance of a geography type. For example, San Jose is a geography of the City geography type.

Geography Type

Geography types are a divisional grouping of geographies, which can be either geopolitical (for example, City, Province, and District) or user defined (for example, Continent, Country Regions, Tax Regions).

Geography Usage

Geography usage indicates how a geography type or geography is used in the application. A master reference geography always has the usage of Master Reference. User defined zones can have the usages of Tax, Shipping, or Territory, based on what is relevant for their purpose.

Master Reference Geography Hierarchy

The geography hierarchy data is considered to be the single source of truth for geographies. It is all the data, including geography types and geographies, that you define and maintain in the Trading Community Model tables.

The geography usage for the entire hierarchy is the master reference, and defined geography types and geographies are considered as master reference geography types and geographies. For example, Country is a universally recognized geography type, and United States is considered a master geography.

User Defined Zones

User defined zones are a collection of geographical data, created from master reference data for a specific purpose. For example, territory zones are collections of master reference geographies ordered in a hierarchy. Tax and shipping zones are collections of master reference geographies without a hierarchical grouping.

Geography Validation: Explained

Geography validation determines the geography mapping and validation for a country's address styles, as well as the overall geography validation control for a country.

The No Styles Format address style format is the default address style format for a country. By defining the mapping and validation for this format you will ensure that validations can be performed for any address in the country. After the No Styles Format is defined you can set up additional mapping for specific address styles.

For each address style format, you can define the following:

• Map to attribute

• Enable list of values

• Tax validation

• Geography validation

• Geography validation control

Map to Attribute

For every address style format, you can map each geography type to an address attribute. For example, you can map the State geography type to the State address attribute for the United States, or map the State geography type to the County address attribute for the United Kingdom. The geography types that appear are based on how the country structure is defined. The list of address attributes that appear are based on address formats delivered with the application, or your customer defined address formats.

Enable List of Values

Once a geography type is mapped to an attribute, then you can specify whether the geography type will appear in a list of values during address entry in user interfaces. It is very important to review carefully if you want to enable a list of values. You should only enable a list of values if you have sufficient geography data imported or created for that geography. Once you have enabled a list of values for an address attribute, you can only select the geography data available for the geography type. This means that if a specific geography value is not available in the geography hierarchy, you cannot create an address with a different geography value.

Tax Validation

You can also specify whether a geography type will be included in tax validation. For example, for the United States North America address style format you specify that County, State, and City are used for tax validation. This will mean that when a transaction involves an address with the North America address style, the address must have the correct county, state, and city combination based on the geography hierarchy data, to be considered valid for tax calculation.

Geography Validation

You can specify whether a geography type will be included in geography validation. This will mean that, for example, when the user enters a United States address using the North America address style format, the address must have the correct country, state, and postal code combination based on geography hierarchy data to be considered geographically valid.

If an address element is mapped to a geography type, but not selected for geography validation usage, then during address entry suggested values will be provided for the address element, but the address element will not be validated.

Geography Validation Control

You can select the geography validation level for a country. Validation will check if the entered address maps to the geography hierarchy data available for the country, and the geography validation control determines whether you can save an address that did not pass validation during address entry. For example, if the validation level is Error, then an address cannot be saved if the values do not match the geography hierarchy data.

These are the geography validation levels you can choose:

• Error - only completely valid addresses can be saved, with all mandatory address elements entered.

• No Validation - all addresses can be saved including incomplete and invalid addresses.

Regardless of the result of validation, the validation process will try to map any address attribute to a geography of the country, and store any mapping it could establish based on the available data. This is called Geography Name Referencing and it is executed as part of validation. The result of this referencing is used in several business processes in the application to map an address to a specific geography or zone.

Defining Address Cleansing: Explained

Address cleansing provides a way to validate, correct, and standardize addresses that are entered in a user interface. Geography validation only validates the geography attributes of an address, for example, State, City, and Postal codes; address cleansing validates both the geography attributes and the address line attributes.

Address cleansing can only be used through the Oracle Fusion Trading Community Data Quality product, because the feature is delivered using Data Quality integration. You need to ensure that you have a license for the countries that will use Trading Community Data Quality data cleansing.

You can specify the real time address cleansing level for each country by choosing either None, meaning that there is no real time address cleansing, or by choosing Optional, meaning that you will have the choice to cleanse addresses. Once you have enabled address cleansing for a country a Verify Address icon appears at address entry points in the application. You can then click the icon to perform address cleansing and receive a corrected, standardized address. If Trading Community Data Quality does not find a matching address the application will alert you.

Managing Geography Structures, Hierarchies, and Validation: Worked Example

This example shows how to configure the geography structure, hierarchy, and validation for a country geography, using the United Kingdom country geography as an illustration.

The following table summarizes the key decisions for this scenario.

Add the County and Post Town geography types to the geography structure. Next, add the geographies for the County and Post Town geography types to define the geography hierarchy. Finally, specify the geography validations for the geography types you have added to the geography structure.

Defining the geography structure

Add the County and Post Town geography types to the United Kingdom geography structure.

1. On the Manage Geographies page, enter GB in the Code field. Click Search.
2. On the Manage Geographies page, click Structure Defined.
3. On the Manage Geography Structure page, click the Create button next to the Copy Country Structure From field.
4. In the Geography Structure section, select the County list item in the Add Geography Type field.
5. Click Add.
6. Select the Post Town list item in the Add Geography Type field.
7. Click Add.

Defining the geography hierarchy

To begin creating the geography hierarchy for the United Kingdom, you add the geographies for the County and Post Town geography types using the geography hierarchy user interfaces. You can also use the Manage File Import Activities task to import geography hierarchies using a csv or xml file.

1. On the Manage Geographies page, enter GB in the Code field. Click Search.
2. On the Manage Geographies page, click Hierarchy Defined.
3. On the Manage Geography Hierarchy page, Geography Hierarchy section, click the United Kingdom to highlight the table row.
4. Click the Create button.
5. In the Create County page, Primary and Alternate Names section, enter Berkshire in the Name field.
6. Click Save and Close.
7. On the Manage Geography Hierarchy page, Geography Hierarchy section, click Berkshire to highlight the table row.
8. Click the Create button.
9. In the Create Post Town page, Primary and Alternate Names section, enter Reading in the Name field.
10. Click Save and Close.

Defining the geography validations

Now you want to specify the geography validations for the geography types you have added to the United Kingdom. Define the geography mapping and validation for the United Kingdom default address style format. Then map the geography types to attributes, enable the geography types for Lists of Values and Geography validation, and set the geography validation level.

1. On the Manage Geographies page, click Validation Defined.
2. On the Manage Geography Validation page, Address Style section, click No Styles Format to highlight the table row.
3. For the County geography type, click the County list item in the Map to Attribute field.
4. Click the Enable List of Values option for the County geography type.
5. Click the Geography Validation option for the County geography type.
6. For the Post Town geography type, click the City list item in the Map to Attribute field.
7. Click the Geography Validation option for the Post Town geography type.
8. In the Geography Validation Control section, click the Error list item in the Geography Validation Level for Country field.
9. Click Save and Close.

Define Geographies: FAQs for Define Geographies

When do I define address cleansing?

When address data entered into the application needs to conform to a particular format, in order to achieve consistency in the representation of addresses. For example, making sure that the incoming data is stored following the correct postal address format.

Why can't I update a geography structure by copying an existing country structure?

You can only update a geography structure by adding existing geography types, or by creating new geography types and then adding them to the geography structure. You can only copy an existing country structure when you are defining a new country structure.

Why can't I delete a level of the country geography structure?

If a geography exists for a country geography structure level then you cannot delete the level. For example, if a state geography has been created for the United States country geography structure, then the State level cannot be deleted in the country geography structure.

Can I add any geography to the geography hierarchy?

Yes. However, the geography type for the geography that you want to add must be already added to the country geography structure.

Can I edit a specific geography in the geography hierarchy?

Yes. In the Manage Geography Hierarchy page you can edit details such as the geography's date range, primary and alternate names and codes, and parent geographies.

How can I add a geography that is the level below another geography in a geography hierarchy?

Select the geography that you want your geography to be created below, and then click the Create icon. This will allow you to create a geography for a geography type that is the level below the geography type you selected. The structure of the country's geography types are defined in the Manage Geography Structure page.

Define Geographies: Define File-Based Data Import

File-Based Data Import: How It Works

The Define File-Based Data Import group of tasks relies on integration with different Oracle Fusion Applications and architecture components, such as interface tables and application base tables. This topic provides an overview of these components to help you understand the import process and the different import activity statuses.

The following figure provides an overview of the major application components used when you import data from a file. These components include

• Import object

• Import mapping

• Import activity

• File repository

• Oracle Fusion CRM Application Composer

• Interface tables

• Application tables

Import Objects, Import Mapping, and Import Activity

The import objects you select when you create an import activity are provided by Oracle. They are managed using the Manage File Import Objects task.

When you create an import activity, you must specify a mapping of the fields in your file to the attributes of the import object You can create the mapping either while creating an import activity or separately using the Manage File Import Mappings task. The mapping is stored and managed as a separate object.

File Repository

The text or XML data file you upload for import is stored in a file repository so that it is available for import processing when you schedule an import activity. Any attachments you upload are stored in the same repository.

Application Composer and Customer Extensions

When you create additional attributes for import using Oracle Fusion CRM Application Composer, these extensions are stored in a separate repository and are available when you create your mapping.

Interface Tables

The import activity populates the application interface tables with your data. This is an intermediate holding area for your data that permits you to correct any import errors. Oracle Fusion CRM application data is not changed at this point.

Application Tables

The import activity loads your data into Oracle Fusion CRM application tables to complete the import.

Importing Country Structures Using File-Based Import: Explained

This topic explains how to prepare and import country structure data from an external data source into Oracle Fusion Applications using the File-Based Data Import feature. A country structure is a hierarchical grouping of geography types for a country. For example, the geography structure for the United States has the geography type of State at the top, followed by the County, then the City, and finally the Postal Code.

You can use the country structure to set up the following:

• The relationships between geographies within a country

• The types of geographies that you can define for a country

Consider the following questions when importing your data:

• How does your legacy system or source system represent the country structure compared to how Oracle Fusion Applications represent the same data?

• Do you have to configure values in Oracle Fusion Applications to map to your data values?

• Do you have to customize Oracle Fusion Applications to capture additional attributes that are critical to the way you do business?

• What import features are available for importing your business object?

• How do you verify your imported data?

Comparing Business Object Structures

You must understand how your country structure data corresponds with the data in Oracle Fusion Applications in order to be able to map your legacy data to the data needed by Oracle Fusion Applications. First, you must understand how Oracle Fusion Applications represent the structure of the data for a country structure.

You must import a separate country structure import object for each country. Each of these import objects must contain the geography types that are used in the country's structure, organized in a hierarchy using geography level numbers. For example, if you are importing the country structure of Australia, the country structure could be the following: 1: Country, 2: State, 3: County, 4: Town, 5: ZIP.

Import Objects for the Country Structure

To facilitate the import of country structures, Oracle Fusion Applications incorporate the structure of the country structure into import objects. The import object for country structures is GeoStructureLevel.

Comparing Business Object Data

Each import object is a collection of attributes that helps to map your data to the Oracle Fusion Applications data and to support one-to-many relationships between the structural components that make up the country structure.

A good understanding of the attribute details of the import objects is critical to preparing your import data. For information about the Oracle Fusion Applications attributes, see the Oracle Enterprise Repository. The reference files contain descriptions, logic used to choose default values, and validation information for each of the Oracle Fusion Applications attributes. The validation information includes the navigation to the task where you can define values in Oracle Fusion Applications. For example, if you have values in your data that correlate to a choice list in Oracle Fusion Applications, then the validation information for that attribute provides the task name in the Setup and Maintenance work area where you can define your values. For additional information, including a list of reference file names and locations that you need to complete this task, see the following table.

Extensible Attributes

If you need to extend the Oracle Fusion Applications object to import your legacy or source data, you must use Oracle Fusion CRM Application Composer to design your object model extensions and to generate the required artifacts to register your extensions and make them available for importing. The corresponding import object is updated with the extensible attributes, which can then be mapped to your source file data. You can use the same source file to import both extensible custom attributes and the standard import object attributes.

Importing Country Structures Using File-Based Data Import

For the country structure business object, you must use the File-Based Data Import feature. You prepare XML or text source data files in a form that is suitable for file-based import. The file-based import process reads the data included in your source file, populates the interface tables according to your mapping, and imports the data into the application destination tables.

The Define File-Based Data Import Setup and Maintenance task list includes the tasks needed to configure the import objects, to create source-file mappings, and to schedule the import activities. You submit file-based import activities for each import object. When creating a new country structure, you import the Country Structure object.

You must be assigned the Master Data Management Administrator job role to access and submit the import activities for country structures.

Verifying Your Imported Data

You can view the list of import activities from the Manage Import Activities page. You can verify your imported data by clicking the Status column for your import activity.

Country Structure Import Objects: How They Work Together

This topic describes the Country Structure import object. You use the Country Structure import object when you submit a file-based import activity to import your country structure information. This topic introduces the following:

• Target import object concepts

• Target objects for the Country Structure import object

• Target import object attributes

• Target object attribute reference guide files

Target Import Object Concepts

The Country Structure import object is used to import a country structure hierarchy, including details, such as geography type, geography type name, parent geography type, geography level numbers, and so on. To map the source data in your import file to the target attributes in Oracle Fusion Applications, you must understand how the target objects are related and what attributes are included in each target object.

Country Structure Target Import Objects

The Country Structure import object contains one target import object that organizes the individual attributes of the different aspects of the geography structure. When updating an existing country structure, you must provide the parent reference information of the existing country structure. This reference information connects the imported geography structure to the existing one. Use the ImpGeoStructureLevel target import object to create and update country structure information.

Target Import Objects Attributes

You must compare the attributes that you want to import with the target object attributes that are available and their valid values. To evaluate your source data and Oracle Fusion Applications attributes for mapping and validation, you use an Oracle Enterprise Repository reference guide, which is available for each target import object. The reference guide file includes attribute descriptions, default values, and validations performed by the import process. Review the validation for each attribute to determine whether there are functional prerequisites or setup tasks that are required.

To import your source file data, you define a mapping between your source file data and the combination of the target object and target object attribute. You can predefine and manage import mappings using the File-Based Import Mapping task, or you can define the mapping when you define the import activity using the File-Based Import Activity task. Both tasks are available in the Setup and Maintenance work area.

Target Import Objects Attributes Resources

To access the reference guide files for the country code's target import objects, see the File-Based Data Import assets in Oracle Enterprise Repository for Oracle Fusion Applications (http://fusionappsoer.oracle.com).

For detailed information on importing geographies using file-based import, refer to Document No. 1481758.1, Importing Master Reference Geography Data, on the Oracle Support site.

The following table lists the reference guide files that are available from the Documentation tab for the Country Code File-Based Data Import asset.

Importing Geographies Using File-Based Import: Explained

This topic describes the tasks you must perform to import geography information. A geography is any region with a boundary around it, regardless of its size. It might be a state, a country, a city, a county, or a ward. You must create or import geographies before you can associate them with custom zones and addresses.

Consider the following questions when importing your data:

• How does your legacy system or source system represent the geography compared to how Oracle Fusion Applications represent the same data?

• Do you have to configure values in Oracle Fusion Applications to map to your data values?

• What import features are available for importing your business object?

• How do you verify your imported data?

Comparing Business Object Structures

You must understand how your geography data corresponds with the data in Oracle Fusion Applications in order to be able to map your legacy data to the data needed by Oracle Fusion Applications. First, you must understand how Oracle Fusion Applications represent the structure of the data for a geography.

You must import a separate country structure import object for each country. Each of these import objects must contain the geography types that are used in the country's structure, organized in a hierarchy using geography level numbers. For example, if you are importing the country structure of Australia, the country structure could be the following: 1: Country, 2: State, 3: County, 4: Town, 5: ZIP.

Import Objects for the Geography

To facilitate the import of geographies, Oracle Fusion Applications incorporate the structure of the geography into import objects. The import object for the geography is ImpGeography.

Comparing Business Object Data

Each import object is a collection of attributes that helps to map your data to the Oracle Fusion Applications data and to support one-to-many relationships between the structural components that make up the geography.

A good understanding of the attribute details of the import objects is critical to preparing your import data. For information about the Oracle Fusion Applications attributes, see the Oracle Enterprise Repository. The reference files contain descriptions, logic used to choose default values, and validation information for each of the Oracle Fusion Applications attributes. The validation information includes the navigation to the task where you can define values in Oracle Fusion Applications. For example, if you have values in your data that correlate to a choice list in Oracle Fusion Applications, then the validation information for that attribute provides the task name in the Setup and Maintenance work area where you can define your values. For additional information, including a list of reference file names and locations that you need to complete this task, see the following table.

Hint: You can use the keyword importing geographies to search for related topics in Oracle Fusion Applications Help.

Extensible Attributes

Oracle Fusion Applications do not support extensible attributes for geographies. You can only import data for attributes provided by Oracle Fusion Applications.

Importing Geographies Using File-Based Data Import

For the geography business object, you must use the File-Based Data Import feature. You prepare XML or text source data files in a form that is suitable for file-based import. The file-based import process reads the data included in your source file, populates the interface tables according to your mapping, and imports the data into the application destination tables.

The Define File-Based Data Import Setup and Maintenance task list includes the tasks needed to configure the import objects, to create source-file mappings, and to schedule the import activities. You submit file-based import activities for each import object. When creating a new geography, you import the Geography object. You must be assigned the Master Data Management Administrator job role to access and submit the import activities for geographies.

When importing geography information, you must provide the parent reference information for all parent levels for the entity.

Verifying Your Imported Data

Oracle Fusion Applications provide File-Based Import activity reports, which can be used to verify imported data. Users with the Master Data Management Administrator job role can also navigate to the Manage Geographies work area to view the imported geographies.

Geography Import Objects: How They Work Together

This topic describes the Geography import object. You use the Geography import object to import geography information.

This topic introduces the following:

• Target import object concepts

• Target objects for the Geography import object

• Target import object attributes

• Target import object attribute reference guide files

Target Import Object Concepts

The Geography import object is used to import geography hierarchy information to create or update the geography data of a country. To map the source data in your import file to the target attributes in Oracle Fusion Applications, you must understand how the target objects are related and what attributes are included in each target object.

Geography Target Import Objects

The target import objects in the Geography import object contain information about the geography hierarchy. When updating an existing geography, you must provide the parent reference information of the existing geography, which connects the geography to the country of which it is a part.

Use the ImpGeography target import object to create and update geography information.

Target Import Objects Attributes

You must compare the attributes that you want to import with the target object attributes that are available and their valid values. To evaluate your source data and Oracle Fusion Applications attributes for mapping and validation, you use an Oracle Enterprise Repository reference guide, which is available for each target import object. The reference guide file includes attribute descriptions, default values, and validations performed by the import process. Review the validation for each attribute to determine whether there are functional prerequisites or setup tasks that are required.

To import your source file data, you define a mapping between your source file data and the combination of the target object and target object attribute. You can predefine and manage import mappings using the File-Based Import Mapping task, or you can define the mapping when you define the import activity using the File-Based Import Activity task. Both tasks are available in the Setup and Maintenance work area.

Target Import Objects Attributes Resources

To access the reference guide files for the geography's target import objects, see the File-Based Data Import assets in Oracle Enterprise Repository for Oracle Fusion Applications (http://fusionappsoer.oracle.com).

For detailed information on importing geographies using file-based import, refer to Document No. 1481758.1, Importing Master Reference Geography Data, on the Oracle Support site.

The following table lists the reference guide files that are available from the Documentation tab for the Geography File-Based Data Import asset.

Importing Geographies Using File-based Data Import: Worked Example

This example demonstrates how to import data using the File-Based Data Import tool. In this particular example you have a source file containing geography data that you want to import into the application, so that the geography data can be used for uses related to locations, such as real time address validation and tax purposes.

The following table summarizes the key decisions for this scenario:

Summary of the Tasks

These are the steps that are required to create an import activity and submit the import:

1. Determine what information is in the source file.

2. Create and schedule the import activity.

3. Monitor the import results.

Prerequisites when importing additional geography data after your initial import

1. You need to ensure that the combination of Source ID and Parent Source ID values are unique for each row of data within a single import. However, your source data files do not need to have the same Source ID and Parent Source ID values as your previously imported geography data. If the geography structure levels and the parents for each geography value are the same, the changed IDs will not affect the import.
2. Ensure that all of the parents of a child geography are included in your data file so that the child geography can be added. For example, if you originally imported US, CA, and San Francisco, and now you want to import the city of San Jose in CA, then your data file needs to include US, CA, and San Jose.
3. Check that your source data file has the correct values for the geography data that you have already loaded. For example, if your initial import included the value US for country and CA as state, and in a subsequent import you have California as a state, your geography import will result in two state records (CA and California) in the application data, with the US as the country parent.

Determine what information is in the source file

1. Your source geography data files should include a unique Source ID value for each row of data, and a Parent Source ID value which identifies the parent of that row of geography data. Source IDs, or Parent Source IDs, should not exceed 18 characters. An example of geography source data could be as follows:
   

   Geography Level	Name	Source ID	Parent Source ID
   1 (Country)	US	1
   2 (State)	CA	11	1
   3 (County)	Alameda	111	11
   4 (City)	Pleasanton	1111	111
   4 (City)	Dublin	1112	111

Create and schedule the import activity

You create an import activity, enter the import details, and schedule the import. An import activity definition provides the instructions for the import processing - this includes selecting the source file, or file location; mapping fields from the source file to the Oracle Fusion object and attribute; and scheduling the import.

1. Navigate to Setup and Maintenance and search for the Manage File Import Activities task. Click Go to Task.
2. In the Manage Import Activities page, click the Create icon.
3. In the Create Import Activity: Set Up page, create an import activity for the Geography object type by completing the fields, as shown in this table:

   Field	Value
   Name	Master Reference Geographies
   Object	Geography
   File Type	Text File
   File Selection	Specific file
   Upload From	Desktop
   File Name	Choose relevant file from desktop
   Data Type	Comma separated

   
   

   Note

   Ensure that the file type that you select in the Create Import Activity: Set Up page matches the file type of the source data file.

4. Click Next.
5. On the Create Import Activity: Map Fields page, map each field from your source file to the Oracle Fusion object and attribute, as shown in this example:
   

   Column Header	Example Value	Ignore	Object	Attribute
   Primary Geography Name	Primary Geography Name	United States	Imp Geography	Primary Geography Name
   Country Code	US	No	Imp Geography	Country Code
   Record Type Code	0	Yes	Imp Geography	Record Type Code
   Source ID	10265	No	Imp Geography	Source ID
   Parent Source ID	1053	No	Imp Geography	Parent Source ID

   If you do not want to import a column in the text file you can select Ignore.

   Note

   If you have any difficulties mapping the fields from your source file to the relevant Oracle Fusion applications object, you can use the import object spreadsheets for reference.

6. Click Next.
7. On the Create Import Activity: Create Schedule page, select Immediate in the Schedule field so that the import will start immediately.

   Instead of immediately importing the data, you can choose a date and time to start the import. You can also specify if the import will be repeated, and the frequency of the repeated import.

8. Click Next.

Monitor the import results

You monitor the progress of the Import Activity processing, and view completion reports for both successful records and errors.

1. On the Create Import Activity: Review and Activate page, you verify your import details in the Import Details, File Details, Import Options, and Schedule sections.
2. Your import details are correct so you click Activate to submit the import.

   Once the import activity has completed, the Status field value will change to Completed.

File-Based Import Objects: Explained

Import objects represent the application and attribute information for business objects that can be imported using external source files.

This topic describes the following:

• Import object management options

• Custom objects

Import Object Management Options

A single import object can have multiple associated components that are considered objects by themselves. An object and associated objects that can be imported within the same source file are grouped together within the application module class.

The following table includes information about the import object:

Custom Objects

To use the file-based import feature for custom objects, you must first generate the artifacts required for import. You generate these required artifacts within Oracle Fusion CRM Application Composer, after making your object model extensions.

File-Based Import Mapping: Explained

Import mapping enables you to predefine a mapping between the columns provided in a source file and the attributes pertaining to the objects being imported. Once you create a mapping, it can be reused in the Import Activity definition.

This topic contains the following sections:

• Import options

• Source file options

• Target options

Import Options

The following attributes pertain to the import mapping.

Source File Options

Map each column that the source file is expected to contain with a specific attribute.

The following table describes the details pertaining to columns provided in the source file:

Target Options

The following table describes the details pertaining to corresponding attributes in the target application table:

Import Activity Source File Options: Explained

The Import Activity consists of a step by step guided process to assist you with creating an import activity for a given object.

This topic describes the source file options defined in the Import Activity that are used by the import process to locate and parse the source file data.

Source File Data

Enter attribute details pertaining to the source file as follows:

Source File Location

The following outlines the options that are available to you when locating your source file for import.

Import Activity Import Options: Explained

This topic describes the import options available while creating import activities.

Source File Data Transformation

The following options are used to identify the formatting of source file data so the data can be correctly interpreted and transformed by the import process:

Interface to Target Import Options

Depending on the object you are importing and the application modules you have implemented, you can select one or more of these options.

Import Activity Field Mapping: Explained

After entering your import options, the second step of the import activity process is to map fields in the source file to the corresponding target attributes.

This topic explains:

• Map Fields

• Saving the Import Mapping

• Constant Values

Map Fields

The Map Fields section can be subdivided into source file columns and target attribute columns.

The source column header value is derived from one of the following:

• Predefined mapping, if one is selected

• The source file, if the Header Row Included option is selected in the first step of the Import Activity definition (for Text file type only)

• Generic values of Column A, Column B, and so on, if the Header Row Included option is not selected (for Text file type only)

• XML tagging structure (for XML file type only)

The following table outlines the source columns:

The following table outlines the target columns:

Saving the Import Mapping

The mapping between source file information and target attributes is saved as a reusable mapping when the Import Activity is saved, using the import activity name and date to derive a mapping name. If you selected a predefined mapping, modifications made in the Import Activity to an unlocked mapping will update and save to the predefined mapping. If the predefined mapping is locked, a modified mapping will be saved as a new mapping. To specify a mapping name for new mappings, select the Save As option from the Map Fields Actions menu.

Constant Values

Constant values provide a way to specify a value for a target attribute that all imported objects will inherit. For example, if a source file does not contain a column for business unit and all of the objects in the file belong to the same business unit, enter a constant value for the object and business unit attribute.

File Import Activity Statuses: Explained

This topic explains the meaning of the different import activity statuses when you import data from a file using the Manage File Import Activities task.

The following table lists and describes the import activity statuses.

File-Based Import Monitoring: Explained

You can monitor all file import activities that are currently scheduled to run, have completed successfully, or failed with errors. For each import activity, you can view the details pertaining to each underlying process and make necessary updates for any failed records to import again.

You can view the list of import activities from the Manage Import Activities page. Select the import activity that you want to monitor by clicking on the hyperlink in the corresponding Status column. The View Import Status results page is displayed which contains the following sections:

• Files Processed

• Import Processes

Files Processed

The Files Processed section displays a row for each source file that is processed.

The import processing details are summarized and displayed for each source file and include the following:

Import Processes

From the Import Processes section, you can view details pertaining to each process involved in importing the objects in the source file. A listing of brief messages provides information on processing steps within each underlying process.

Define Geographies: FAQs for File-Based Data Import

What determines the list of objects displayed?

A single import object can have multiple associated components that are considered objects by themselves. Whether or not an associated object can be grouped as a component of another object for the purpose of file import is determined by the complexity of the object structure and how it is stored in the data model. Oracle Fusion provides import objects predefined to meet the file processing import requirements. Consequently, in some cases, more than one source file may be required to capture all associated components of an object.

What happens if I inactivate an Import Activity?

The Import Activity will not stop the currently running process. However, it will stop the next process that has not started plus any future repeating file import activities. You can always activate the process at a later stage.

Define Legal Entities for Marketing

Legal Entities: Explained

A legal entity is a recognized party with rights and responsibilities given by legislation.

Legal entities have the right to own property, the right to trade, the responsibility to repay debt, and the responsibility to account for themselves to regulators, taxation authorities, and owners according to rules specified in the relevant legislation. Their rights and responsibilities may be enforced through the judicial system. Define a legal entity for each registered company or other entity recognized in law for which you want to record assets, liabilities, expenses and income, pay transaction taxes, or perform intercompany trading.

A legal entity has responsibility for elements of your enterprise for the following reasons:

• Facilitating local compliance

• Taking advantage of lower corporation taxation in some jurisdictions

• Preparing for acquisitions or disposals of parts of the enterprise

• Isolating one area of the business from risks in another area. For example, your enterprise develops property and also leases properties. You could operate the property development business as a separate legal entity to limit risk to your leasing business.

The Role of Your Legal Entities

In configuring your enterprise structure in Oracle Fusion Applications, you need to understand that the contracting party on any transaction is always the legal entity. Individual legal entities own the assets of the enterprise, record sales and pay taxes on those sales, make purchases and incur expenses, and perform other transactions.

Legal entities must comply with the regulations of jurisdictions, in which they register. Europe now allows for companies to register in one member country and do business in all member countries, and the US allows for companies to register in one state and do business in all states. To support local reporting requirements, legal reporting units are created and registered.

You are required to publish specific and periodic disclosures of your legal entities' operations based on different jurisdictions' requirements. Certain annual or more frequent accounting reports are referred to as statutory or external reporting. These reports must be filed with specified national and regulatory authorities. For example, in the United States (US), your publicly owned entities (corporations) are required to file quarterly and annual reports, as well as other periodic reports, with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who enforces statutory reporting requirements for public corporations.

Individual entities privately held or held by public companies do not have to file separately. In other countries, your individual entities do have to file in their own name, as well as at the public group level. Disclosure requirements are diverse. For example, your local entities may have to file locally to comply with local regulations in a local currency, as well as being included in your enterprise's reporting requirements in different currency.

A legal entity can represent all or part of your enterprise's management framework. For example, if you operate in a large country such as the United Kingdom or Germany, you might incorporate each division in the country as a separate legal entity. In a smaller country, for example Austria, you might use a single legal entity to host all of your business operations across divisions.

Legal Entity in Oracle Fusion: Points to Consider

Oracle Fusion Applications support the modeling of your legal entities. If you make purchases from or sell to other legal entities, define these other legal entities in your customer and supplier registers, which are part of the Oracle Fusion Trading Community Architecture. When your legal entities are trading with each other, you represent both of them as legal entities and also as customers and suppliers in your customer and supplier registers. Use legal entity relationships to determine which transactions are intercompany and require intercompany accounting. Your legal entities can be identified as legal employers and therefore, are available for use in Human Capital Management (HCM) applications.

There are several decisions that need to be considered in creating your legal entities.

• The importance of legal entity in transactions

• Legal entity and its relationship to business units

• Legal entity and its relationship to divisions

• Legal entity and its relationship to ledgers

• Legal entity and its relationship to balancing segments

• Legal entity and its relationship to consolidation rules

• Legal entity and its relationship to intercompany transactions

• Legal entity and its relationship to worker assignments and legal employer

• Legal entity and payroll reporting

• Legal reporting units

The Importance of Legal Entity in Transactions

All of the assets of the enterprise are owned by individual legal entities. Oracle Fusion Financials allow your users to enter legal entities on transactions that represent a movement in value or obligation.

For example, the creation of a sales order creates an obligation for the legal entity that books the order to deliver the goods on the acknowledged date, and an obligation of the purchaser to receive and pay for those goods. Under contract law in most countries, damages can be sought for both actual losses, putting the injured party in the same state as if they had not entered into the contract, and what is called loss of bargain, or the profit that would have made on a transaction.

In another example, if you revalued your inventory in a warehouse to account for raw material price increases, the revaluation and revaluation reserves must be reflected in your legal entity's accounts. In Oracle Fusion Applications, your inventory within an inventory organization is managed by a single business unit and belongs to one legal entity.

Legal Entity and Its Relationship to Business Units

A business unit can process transactions on behalf of many legal entities. Frequently, a business unit is part of a single legal entity. In most cases the legal entity is explicit on your transactions. For example, a payables invoice has an explicit legal entity field. Your accounts payables department can process supplier invoices on behalf of one or many business units.

In some cases, your legal entity is inferred from your business unit that is processing the transaction. For example, your business unit A agrees on terms for the transfer of inventory to your business unit B. This transaction is binding on your default legal entities assigned to each business unit. Oracle Fusion Procurement, Oracle Fusion Projects, and Oracle Fusion Supply Chain applications rely on deriving the legal entity information from the business unit.

Legal Entity and Its Relationship to Divisions

The division is an area of management responsibility that can correspond to a collection of legal entities. If desired, you can aggregate the results for your divisions by legal entity or by combining parts of other legal entities. Define date-effective hierarchies for your cost center or legal entity segment in your chart of accounts to facilitate the aggregation and reporting by division. Divisions and legal entities are independent concepts.

Legal Entity and Its Relationship to Ledgers

One of your major responsibilities is to file financial statements for your legal entities. Map legal entities to specific ledgers using the Oracle Fusion General Ledger Accounting Configuration Manager. Within a ledger, you can optionally map a legal entity to one or more balancing segment values.

Legal Entity and Its Relationship to Balancing Segments

Oracle Fusion General Ledger supports up to three balancing segments. Best practices recommend that one of these segments represents your legal entity to ease your requirement to account for your operations to regulatory agencies, tax authorities, and investors. Accounting for your operations means you must produce a balanced trial balance sheet by legal entity. If you account for many legal entities in a single ledger, you must:

1. Identify the legal entities within the ledger.

2. Balance transactions that cross legal entity boundaries through intercompany transactions.

3. Decide which balancing segments correspond to each legal entity and assign them in Oracle Fusion General Ledger Accounting Configuration Manager. Once you assign one balancing segment value in a ledger, then all your balancing segment values must be assigned. This recommended best practice facilitates reporting on assets, liabilities, and income by legal entity.

Represent your legal entities by at least one balancing segment value. You may represent it by two or three balancing segment values if more granular reporting is required. For example, if your legal entity operates in multiple jurisdictions in Europe, you might define balancing segment values and map them to legal reporting units. You can represent a legal entity by more than one balancing segment value, do not use a single balancing segment value to represent more than one legal entity.

In Oracle Fusion General Ledger, there are three balancing segments. You can use separate balancing segments to represent your divisions or strategic business units to enable management reporting at the balance sheet level for each division or business unit. For example, use this solution to empower your business unit and divisional managers to track and assume responsibility for their asset utilization or return on investment. Using multiple balancing segments is also useful when you know at the time of implementation that you are disposing of a part of a legal entity and need to isolate the assets and liabilities for that entity.

If you decided to account for each legal entity in a separate ledger, there is no requirement to identify the legal entity with a balancing segment value within the ledger.

Legal Entity and Its Relationship to Consolidation Rules

In Oracle Fusion Applications you can map legal entities to balancing segments and then define consolidation rules using your balancing segments. You are creating a relationship between the definition of your legal entities and their role in your consolidation.

Legal Entity and its Relationship to Intercompany Transactions

Use Oracle Fusion Intercompany functionality for automatic creation of intercompany entries across your balancing segments. Intercompany processing updates legal ownership within the enterprise's groups of legal entities. Invoices or journals are created as needed. To limit the number of trading pairs for your enterprise, set up intercompany organizations and assign then to your authorized legal entities. Define processing options and intercompany accounts to use when creating intercompany transactions and to assist in consolidation elimination entries. These accounts are derived and automatically entered on your intercompany transactions based on legal entities assigned to your intercompany organizations.

Intracompany trading, in which legal ownership isn't changed but other organizational responsibilities are, is also supported. For example, you can track assets and liabilities that move between your departments within your legal entities by creating departmental level intercompany organizations.

Legal Entity and Its Relationship to Worker Assignments and Legal Employer

Legal entities that employ people are called legal employers in the Oracle Fusion Legal Entity Configurator. You must enter legal employers on worker assignments in Oracle Fusion HCM.

Legal Entity and Payroll Reporting

Your legal entities are required to pay payroll tax and social insurance such as social security on your payroll. In Oracle Fusion Applications, you can register payroll statutory units to pay and report on payroll tax and social insurance on behalf of many of your legal entities. As the legal employer, you might be required to pay payroll tax, not only at the national level, but also at the local level. You meet this obligation by establishing your legal entity as a place of work within the jurisdiction of a local authority. Set up legal reporting units to represent the part of your enterprise with a specific legal reporting obligation. You can also mark these legal reporting units as tax reporting units, if the legal entity must pay taxes as a result of establishing a place of business within the jurisdiction.

HCM Organization Models: Examples

These examples illustrate different models for human capital management (HCM) organizations. Each example includes a legislative data group (LDG). LDGs are not an organization classification, but they are included in the example to show how you associate them with a payroll statutory unit to partition payroll data.

Simple Configuration

This example illustrates a simple configuration that does not include any tax reporting units. The legal employer and payroll statutory units are the same, sharing the same boundaries. Reporting can only be done at a single level. Countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) might use this type of model, as reporting in these countries is done at the legal entity level.

This figure illustrates a simple configuration where the enterprise has only one legal entity that is both a payroll statutory unit and a legal employer.

Multiple Legal Employers and Tax Reporting Units Under One Payroll Statutory Unit

This example illustrates a more complex configuration. In this enterprise, one legal entity, InFusion US, is defined as a payroll statutory unit and has two separate legal entities, which are also legal employers. This model shows multiple legal employers that are associated with a single payroll statutory unit, and how tax reporting units are always associated with a specific legal employer (or employers) through the payroll statutory unit. The implication is that payroll statutory reporting boundaries vary from human resources (HR) management, and the balances can be categorized separately by either payroll statutory unit, legal employer, or tax reporting unit. This configuration is based on tax filing requirements, as some tax-related payments and reports are associated with a higher level than employers. An example of a country that might use this model is the US.

This figure illustrates an enterprise that has one payroll statutory unit and multiple legal employers and tax reporting units.

One Payroll Statutory Unit and Two Tax Reporting Units That Are Subsidiaries of the Legal Entity

This model makes no distinction between a legal employer and a payroll statutory unit. Tax reporting units are defined as subsidiaries to the legal entity. In this enterprise, legal entity is the highest level of aggregation for payroll calculations and reporting, and statutory reporting boundaries are assumed to be the same for both payroll and HR management. An example of a country that might use this model is France.

This figure illustrates an example of an organization with one legal entity that is both a legal employer and a payroll statutory unit and that has two tax reporting units.

One Payroll Statutory Unit with Several Tax Reporting Units That Are Independent from the Legal Employer

In this model, the enterprise has one legal entity, and legal employers and tax reporting units are independent from each other within a payroll statutory unit, because there is no relationship from a legal perspective. Therefore, you can run reporting on both entities independently. Using this model, you would not typically need to report on tax reporting unit balances within a legal employer, and balances can be categorized by either or both organizations, as required. An example of a country that might use this model is India.

This figure illustrates an enterprise with one legal entity that is a payroll statutory unit and a legal employer, and the tax reporting units are independent from the legal employer.

Multiple Payroll Statutory Units with Several Tax Reporting Units that are Independent from the Legal Employer

In this model, the enterprise has two legal entities, and legal employers and tax reporting units are independent from each other within a payroll statutory unit, because there is no relationship from a legal perspective. Therefore, you can run reporting on both entities independently. Using this model, you would not typically need to report on tax reporting unit balances within a legal employer, and balances can be categorized by either or both organizations, as required. An example of a country that might use this model is the United Kingdom (UK).

This figure illustrates an enterprise with two legal entities, and legal employers and tax reporting units are independent from each other.

Payroll Statutory Units, Legal Employers, and Tax Reporting Units: How They Work Together

When you set up legal entities, you can identify them as legal employers and payroll statutory units, which makes them available for use in Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM). A tax reporting unit is created automatically when you add a legal entity and identify it as a payroll statutory unit. Depending on how your organization is structured, you may have only one legal entity that is also a payroll statutory unit and a legal employer, or you may have multiple legal entities, payroll statutory units, and legal employers.

Legal Employers and Payroll Statutory Unit

Payroll statutory units enable you to group legal employers so that you can perform statutory calculations at a higher level, such as for court orders or for United Kingdom (UK) statutory sick pay. In some cases, a legal employer is also a payroll statutory unit. However, your organization may have several legal employers under one payroll statutory unit. A legal employer can belong to only one payroll statutory unit.

Payroll Statutory Units and Tax Reporting Units

Payroll statutory units and tax reporting units have a parent-child relationship, with the payroll statutory unit being the parent.

Tax Reporting Units and Legal Employers

Tax reporting units are indirectly associated with a legal employer through the payroll statutory unit. One or more tax reporting units can be used by a single legal employer, and a tax reporting unit can be used by one or more legal employers. For example, assume that a single tax reporting unit is linked to a payroll statutory unit. Assume also that two legal employers are associated with this payroll statutory unit. In this example, both legal employers are associated with the single tax reporting unit.

FAQs for Define Legal Entities for Marketing

What's a legal employer?

A legal employer is a legal entity that employs workers. You define a legal entity as a legal employer in the Oracle Fusion Legal Entity Configurator.

The legal employer is captured at the work relationship level, and all employment terms and assignments within that relationship are automatically with that legal employer. Legal employer information for worker assignments is also used for reporting purposes.

What's a payroll statutory unit?

Payroll statutory units are legal entities that are responsible for paying workers, including the payment of payroll tax and social insurance. A payroll statutory unit can pay and report on payroll tax and social insurance on behalf of one or many legal entities, depending on the structure of your enterprise. For example, if you are a multinational, multicompany enterprise, then you register a payroll statutory unit in each country where you employ and pay people. You can optionally register a consolidated payroll statutory unit to pay and report on workers across multiple legal employers within the same country. You associate a legislative data group with a payroll statutory unit to provide the correct payroll information for workers.

Define Business Units for Marketing

Business Units: Explained

A business unit is a unit of an enterprise that performs one or many business functions that can be rolled up in a management hierarchy. A business unit can process transactions on behalf of many legal entities. Normally, it will have a manager, strategic objectives, a level of autonomy, and responsibility for its profit and loss. Roll business units up into divisions if you structure your chart of accounts with this type of hierarchy. In Oracle Fusion Applications, you assign your business units to one primary ledger. For example, if a business unit is processing payables invoices they will need to post to a particular ledger. This assignment is mandatory for your business units with business functions that produce financial transactions.

In Oracle Fusion Applications, use business unit as a securing mechanism for transactions. For example, if you run your export business separately from your domestic sales business, secure the export business data to prevent access by the domestic sales employees. To accomplish this security, set up the export business and domestic sales business as two separate business units.

The Oracle Fusion Applications business unit model:

• Allows for flexible implementation

• Provides a consistent entity for controlling and reporting on transactions

• Anchors the sharing of sets of reference data across applications

Business units process transactions using reference data sets that reflect your business rules and policies and can differ from country to country. With Oracle Fusion Application functionality, you can choose to share reference data, such as payment terms and transaction types, across business units, or you can choose to have each business unit manage its own set depending on the level at which you wish to enforce common policies.

In countries where gapless and chronological sequencing of documents is required for subledger transactions, define your business units in alignment with your ledger definition, because the uniqueness of sequencing is only ensured within a ledger. In these cases, define a single ledger and assign one legal entity and business unit.

In summary, use business units in the following ways:

• Management reporting

• Processing of transactions

• Security of transactional data

• Reference data definition and sharing

Brief Overview of Business Unit Security

Business units are used by a number of Oracle Fusion Applications to implement data security. You assign data roles to your users to give them access to data in business units and permit them to perform specific functions on this data. When a business function is enabled for a business unit, the application can trigger the creation of data roles for this business unit based on the business function's related job roles.

For example, if a payables invoicing business function is enabled, then it is clear that there are employees in this business unit that perform the function of payables invoicing, and need access to the payables invoicing functionality. Therefore, based on the correspondence between the business function and the job roles, appropriate data roles are generated automatically. Use Human Capital Management (HCM) security profiles to administer security for employees in business units.

Business Functions: Explained

A business unit can perform many business functions in Oracle Fusion Applications. Prior to Oracle Fusion Applications, operating units in Oracle E-Business Suite were assumed to perform all business functions, while in Oracle PeopleSoft , each business unit had one specific business function. Oracle Fusion Applications blends these two models and allows defining business units with one or many business functions.

Business Functions

A business function represents a business process, or an activity that can be performed by people working within a business unit and describes how a business unit is used. The following business functions exist in Oracle Fusion applications:

• Billing and revenue management

• Collections management

• Customer contract management

• Customer payments

• Expense management

• Incentive compensation

• Marketing

• Materials management

• Inventory management

• Order fulfillment orchestration

• Payables invoicing

• Payables payments

• Procurement

• Procurement contract management

• Project accounting

• Receiving

• Requisitioning

• Sales

Although there is no relationship implemented in Oracle Fusion Applications, a business function logically indicates a presence of a department in the business unit with people performing tasks associated with these business functions. A business unit can have many departments performing various business functions. Optionally, you can define a hierarchy of divisions, business units, and departments as a tree over HCM organization units to represent your enterprise structure.

Your enterprise procedures can require a manager of a business unit to have responsibility for their profit and loss statement. However, there will be cases where a business unit is performing only general and administrative functions, in which case your manager's financial goals are limited to cost containment or recovering of service costs. For example, if a shared service center at the corporate office provides services for more commercially-oriented business units, it does not show a profit and therefore, only tracks its costs.

In other cases, where your managers have a responsibility for the assets of the business unit, a balance sheet can be produced. The recommended best practice to produce a balance sheet, is to setup the business unit as a balancing segment in the chart of accounts. The business unit balancing segment can roll up to divisions or other entities to represent your enterprise structure.

When a business function produces financial transactions, a business unit must be assigned to a primary ledger, and a default legal entity. Each business unit can post transactions to a single primary ledger, but it can process transactions for many legal entities.

The following business functions generate financial transactions and will require a primary ledger and a default legal entity:

• Billing and revenue management

• Collections management

• Customer payments

• Expense management

• Materials management

• Payables invoicing

• Project accounting

• Receiving

• Requisitioning

Business Unit Hierarchy: Example

For example, your InFusion America Company provides:

• Air quality monitoring systems through your division InFusion Air Systems

• Customer financing through your division InFusion Financial Services

The InFusion Air Systems division further segments your business into the System Components and Installation Services subdivisions. Your subdivisions are divided by business units:

• System Components by products: Air Compressors and Air Transmission

• Installation Services by services: Electrical and Mechanical

Oracle Fusion applications facilitates independent balance sheet rollups for legal and management reporting by offering up to three balancing segments. Hierarchies created using the management segment can provide the divisional results. For example, it is possible to define management segment values to correspond to business units, and arrange them in a hierarchy where the higher nodes correspond to divisions and subdivisions, as in the Infusion US Division example above.

Define Workforce Structures for CRM

Locations: Explained

A location identifies physical addresses of a workforce structure, such as a department or a job. You can also create locations to enter the addresses of external organizations that you want to maintain, such as employment agencies, tax authorities, and insurance or benefits carriers.

The locations that you create exist as separate structures that you can use for reporting purposes, and also in rules that determine employee eligibility for various types of compensation and benefits. You enter information about a location only once. Subsequently, when you set up other workforce structures you select the location from a list.

Location Sets

When you create a location, you must associate it with a set. Only those users who have access to the set's business unit can access the location set and other associated workforce structure sets, such as those that contain departments and jobs.

You can also associate the location to the common set so that users across your enterprise can access the location irrespective of their business unit. When users search for locations, they can see the locations that they have access to along with the locations in the common set.

The following figure shows how locations sets restrict access to users.

Creating Multiple Locations Simultaneously

If you have a list of locations already defined for your enterprise, you can upload them from a spreadsheet. To use this option, you first download a spreadsheet template, then add your location information to the spreadsheet, and then upload directly to your enterprise configuration. You can upload the spreadsheet multiple times to accommodate revisions.

Division: Explained

Managing multiple businesses requires that you segregate them by their strategic objectives and measure their results. Responsibility to reach objectives can be delegated along the management structure. Although related to your legal structure, the business organizational hierarchies do not need to reflect directly the legal structure of the enterprise. The management entities and structure can include divisions and subdivisions, lines of business, and other strategic business units, and include their own revenue and cost centers. These organizations can be included in many alternative hierarchies and used for reporting, as long as they have representation in the chart of accounts.

Divisions

A division refers to a business oriented subdivision within an enterprise, in which each division organizes itself differently to deliver products and services or address different markets. A division can operate in one or more countries, and can be comprised of many companies or parts of different companies that are represented by business units.

A division is a profit center or grouping of profit and cost centers, where the division manager is responsible for attaining business goals including profit goals. A division can be responsible for a share of the company's existing product lines or for a separate business. Managers of divisions may also have return on investment goals requiring tracking of the assets and liabilities of the division. The division manager reports to a top corporate executive.

By definition a division can be represented in the chart of accounts. Companies may choose to represent product lines, brands, or geographies as their divisions: their choice represents the primary organizing principle of the enterprise. This may coincide with the management segment used in segment reporting.

Oracle Fusion Applications supports a qualified management segment and recommends that you use this segment to represent your hierarchy of business units and divisions. If managers of divisions have return on investment goals, make the management segment a balancing segment. Oracle Fusion applications allows up to three balancing segments. The values of the management segment can be comprised of business units that roll up in a hierarchy to report by division.

Historically, divisions were implemented as a node in a hierarchy of segment values. For example, Oracle E-Business Suite has only one balancing segment, and often the division and legal entity are combined into a single segment where each value stands for both division and legal entity.

Use of Divisions in Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM)

Divisions are used in HCM to define the management organization hierarchy, using the generic organization hierarchy. This hierarchy can be used to create organization based security profiles.

Adding a New Division After Acquiring a Company: Example

This example shows how to restructure your enterprise after acquiring a new division.

Scenario

You are part of a senior management team at InFusion Corporation. InFusion is a global company with organizations in the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), France, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Its main area of business is in the high tech industry, and it has just acquired a new company. You must analyze their current enterprise structure and determine what new organizations you need to create to accommodate the new company.

Details of the Acquired Company

The acquired company is a financial services business based in Germany. Because the financial services business differs significantly from the high tech business, you want to keep the financial services company as a separate business with all the costs and reporting rolling up to the financial services division.

Analysis

The following table summarizes the key decisions that you must consider when determining what new organizations to set up and how to structure the enterprise.

Resulting InFusion Enterprise Structure

Based on the analysis, you must create the following:

• One new division

• One new location

• Three new departments

• Three new cost centers

• One new legal entity

• One new legislative data group

The following figure illustrates the structure of InFusion Corporation after adding the new division and the other organizations.

Cost Centers and Departments: Explained

A cost center represents the smallest segment of an organization for which costs are collected and reported. A department is an organization with one or more operational objectives or responsibilities that exist independently of its manager and has one or more workers assigned to it.

The following two components need to be considered in designing your enterprise structure:

• Cost centers

• Departments

Cost Centers

A cost center also represents the destination or function of an expense as opposed to the nature of the expense which is represented by the natural account. For example, a sales cost center indicates that the expense goes to the sales department.

A cost center is generally attached to a single legal entity. To identify the cost centers within a chart of accounts structure use one of these two methods:

• Assign a cost center value in the value set for each cost center. For example, assign cost center values of PL04 and G3J1 to your manufacturing teams in the US and India. These unique cost center values allow easy aggregation of cost centers in hierarchies (trees) even if the cost centers are in different ledgers. However, this approach will require defining more cost center values.

• Assign a balancing segment value with a standardized cost center value to create a combination of segment values to represent the cost center. For example, assign the balancing segment values of 001 and 013 with cost center PL04 to represent your manufacturing teams in the US and India. This creates 001-PL04 and 013-PL04 as the cost center reporting values.

  The cost center value of PL04 has a consistent meaning. This method requires fewer cost center values to be defined. However, it prevents construction of cost center hierarchies using trees where only cost center values are used to report results for a single legal entity. You must specify a balancing segment value in combination with the cost center values to report on a single legal entity.

Departments

A department is an organization with one or more operational objectives or responsibilities that exist independently of its manager. For example, although the manager may change, the objectives do not change. Departments have one or more workers assigned to them.

A manager of a department is typically responsible for:

• Controlling costs within their budget

• Tracking assets used by their department

• Managing employees, their assignments, and compensation

The financial performance of departments is generally tracked through one or more cost centers. In Oracle Fusion Applications, departments are defined and classified as Department organizations. Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) assigns workers to departments, and tracks the headcount at the departmental level.

The granularity of cost centers and their relationship to departments varies across implementations. Cost center and department configuration may be unrelated, identical, or consist of many cost centers tracking the costs of one department.

Department Classifications: Points to Consider

A department can be classified as a project organization, sales and marketing organization, or cost organization.

Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) uses trees to model organization hierarchies. It provides seeded tree structures for department and other organizational hierarchies that can include organizations with any classification.

Project Organization

Classify departments as a project owning organization to enable associating them with projects or tasks. The project association is one of the key drivers for project access security.

In addition, you must classify departments as project expenditure organizations to enable associating them to project expenditure items. Both project owning organizations and project expenditure organizations can be used by Oracle Fusion Subledger Accounting to derive accounts for posting Oracle Fusion Projects accounting entries to Oracle Fusion General Ledger.

Sales and Marketing Organization

In Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management (CRM), you can define sales and marketing organizations. Sales organization hierarchies are used to report and forecast sales results. Sales people are defined as resources assigned to these organizations.

In some enterprises, the HCM departments and hierarchies correspond to sales organizations and hierarchies. It is important to examine the decision on how to model sales hierarchies in relationship to department hierarchies when implementing customer relationship management to eliminate any possible redundancy in the definition of the organizations.

The following figure illustrates a management hierarchy, in which the System Components Division tracks its expenses in two cost centers, Air Compressors and Air Transmission. At the department level, two organizations with a classifications of Department are defined, the Marketing Department and Sales Department. These two departments can be also identified as a Resource Organizations, which will allow assigning resources, such as sales people, and other CRM specific information to them. Each department is represented in the chart of accounts by more than one cost center, allowing for granular as well as hierarchical reporting.

Cost Organization

Oracle Fusion Costing uses a cost organization to represent a single physical inventory facility or group of inventory storage centers, for example, inventory organizations. This cost organization can roll up to a manager with responsibility for the cost center in the financial reports.

A cost organization can represent a costing department. Consider this relationship when determining the setup of departments in HCM. There are no system dependencies requiring these two entities, cost organization and costing department, be set up in the same way.

Jobs: Explained

As part of your initial implementation, you specify whether to use jobs and positions, or only jobs. Jobs are typically used without positions by service industries where flexibility and organizational change are key features.

Basic Details

Basic details for a job include an effective start date, a job set, a name, and a code.

A job code must be unique within a set. Therefore, you can create a job with the code DEV01 in the US set and another job with the same code in the UK set. However, if you create a job with the code DEV01 in the Common set, then you cannot create a job with the same code in any other set.

Benchmark Information

You can identify a job as being a benchmark job. A benchmark job represents other jobs in reports and salary surveys. You can also select the benchmark for jobs. Benchmark details are for informational purposes only. A progression job is the next job in a career ladder.

Progression Information

Progression jobs enable you to create a hierarchy of jobs and are used to provide the list of values for the Job field in the Promote Worker and Transfer Worker tasks. The list of values includes the next three jobs in the progression job hierarchy. For example, assume that you create a job called Junior Developer and select Developer as the progression job. In the Developer job, you select Senior Developer as the progression job. When you promote a junior developer, the list of values for the new job will include Developer and Senior Developer. You can select one of these values, or select another one.

Jobs and Grades

You can assign grades that are valid for each job. If you are using positions, then the grades that you specify for the job become the default grades for the position.

Evaluation Criteria

You can define evaluation criteria for a job, including the evaluation system, a date, and the unit of measure for the system. One predefined evaluation system is available, and that is the Hay system. An additional value of Custom is included in the list of values for the Evaluation System field, but you must add your own criteria and values for this system.

Uploading Jobs Using a Spreadsheet

If you have a list of jobs already defined for your enterprise, you can upload them from a spreadsheet. To use this option, you first download a spreadsheet template, then add your job information to the spreadsheet, and then upload directly to your enterprise configuration. You can upload the spreadsheet multiple times to accommodate revisions.

Jobs: Example

Jobs are typically used without positions by service industries where flexibility and organizational change are key features.

Software Industry

For example, XYZ Corporation has a director over the departments for developers, quality assurance, and technical writers. Recently, three developers have left the company. The director decides to redirect the head count to other areas. Instead of hiring all three back into development, one person is hired to each department, quality assurance, and technical writing.

In software industries, the organization is fluid. Using jobs gives an enterprise the flexibility to determine where to use head count, because the job only exists through the person performing it. In this example, when the three developers leave XYZ Corporation, their jobs no longer exist, therefore the corporation has the flexibility to move the headcount to other areas.

This figure illustrates the software industry job setup.

FAQs for Define Workforce Structures for CRM

Why can't I see my location in the search results?

You can search for approved locations only. Also, if you created a location in Oracle Fusion Trading Community Model, then you can't access that location from Oracle Fusion Global Human Resources. For use in Oracle Fusion HCM, you must recreate the location from the Manage Locations page.

How can I associate a location with an inventory organization?

From the Manage Locations page in Oracle Fusion Global Human Resources.

To appear on the Create or Edit Location pages, your inventory organization must be effective on today's date and must exist in the location set that you selected.

What happens if I select an inventory organization when I'm creating or editing a location?

The location is available for selection in purchase documents of that inventory organization in Oracle Fusion Inventory Management. If you don't select an inventory organization, then the location is available in purchase documents across all inventory organizations.

What happens if I select a geographic hierarchy node when I'm creating or editing a location?

The calendar events that were created for the geographical node start to apply for the location and may impact the availability of worker assignments at that location. The geographical hierarchy nodes available for selection on the Locations page display from a predefined geographic hierarchy.

What happens if I inactivate a location?

Starting from the effective date that you entered, you can no longer associate the location with other workforce structures, assignments, or applications. If the location is already in use, it will continue to be available to the components that currently use it.

What's the difference between a job set and a job family?

A job family is a group of jobs that have different but related functions, qualifications, and titles. They are beneficial for reporting. You can define competencies for job families by associating them with model profiles.

A job set is an organizational partition of jobs. For example, a job set can be global and include jobs for use in all business units, or it can be restricted to jobs for a specific country or line of business. When you select a job, for a position or an assignment, the available jobs are those in the set associated with the business unit in which you are working, and also those in the Common set.

Define Facilities for Marketing

Schedule Components: How They Fit Together

Schedules are comprised of workday patterns and exceptions. Workday patterns are comprised of shifts. You can also create exceptions, nonworking days, to the schedules.

Begin by creating shifts and then assigning those shifts to workday patterns. Next, create a schedule that is a collection of workday patterns and any exception dates.

Shift

A shift is a period of time, typically expressed in hours, and it can be defined by a start time and an end time, or a duration. A shift can be for a work period or a off period. You can create time, duration, and elapsed shifts.

Workday Pattern

A workday pattern is a collection of shifts for a specific number of days. You can create time, duration, and elapsed workday patterns.

Exception

An exception is a record of a date that overrides the availability of a resource to which a schedule has been assigned. For example, a resource is assigned a schedule that includes December 25 as a working day. An exception can be created for December 25 and applied to that schedule to override resource availability for that date. Exceptions can also be for a date time period such as 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. on December 25th.

Schedule

A schedule is defined by a start date, an end date, and a sequence of workday patterns to be followed between those dates. A schedule can also contain exception dates that override the availability of resources to which the schedule is assigned. Quarter types such as 4-4-5, 4-5-4 are supported.

Managing Shifts: Examples

A shift is a period of time, typically expressed in hours, that is used to build workday patterns. Workday patterns are used to build schedules. There are multiple types of shifts you can create. The following scenarios illustrate each type.

Managing Time Shifts

Next month you are adding a second shift for your manufacturing operations. This new shift will start right after your regular first shift. You can create a time shift that starts at 4:00 p.m. and ends at 12:00 a.m. There are restrictions in updating existing shifts and patterns. Shifts and patterns cannot be updated if the change affects a schedule, that is they are associated to a schedule. If a shift is created but not assigned to a pattern (or assigned to a pattern but the pattern is not assigned to a schedule) it can be updated. If a pattern is created and not assigned to a schedule it can be updated.

Managing Time Shifts with Punch Details

Your division has decided that the employees in the office must clock in and out for lunch starting next week. All employees will take the same lunch hour. Add punch shift details to the existing shift so that employees punch in at 8:00 a.m.; they punch out for lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.; they punch back in at 12:30 p.m.; and they punch out for the day at 5:00 p.m.

Managing Time Shifts with Flexible Details

Jorge Sanchez is a contractor who is starting work in your department next week. His hours will be flexible, so you need to create a new time shift with flexible details that he can use to record his time. He will have a flexible start time from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and a flexible end time from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. His core work hours will be from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Managing Duration Shifts

One of the divisions in your organization does not use fixed start and end times for its daily shifts; the division only records the total duration of the shift and indicates if resources are available or not during that time. All of the employees in the division are available for 24 hours straight, and then they are not available for the next 24 hours. You should create a duration shift that indicates that resources are available for 24 hours, and create a second duration shift that indicates that resources are not available for 24 hours.

Managing Elapsed Shifts

The employees in the Human Resources department all work 8 hours a day, but the start and end times vary by employee. Some employees start at early as 6:00 a.m., while others don't start until 9:00 a.m. Create an elapsed shift with a duration of 8 hours, where all employees are assumed to be available for the number of hours in the shift at any time during the day.

Managing Workday Patterns: Examples

A workday pattern is a collection of shifts for a specific number of days. There are multiple types of workday patterns you can create. The following scenarios illustrate each type.

Managing Time Workday Patterns

Your department works a Monday through Friday workweek with 8 hour shifts each day. Time patterns always have time shifts. That is, the shift will have start time and end time. You can create a time workday pattern with a length of 7 days and details of an 8 hour time shift for days 1 through 5. Days 6 and 7 are considered nonworking days.

Managing Duration Workday Patterns

A new group of employees starts next month, and each employee will work a schedule where he or she is available for 10 hours, and then not available for the next 16 hours, and then available for 10 hours again, and so on. This pattern starts on midnight of the first day of the next month. Create a duration workday pattern with a 10-hour available duration shift, followed by a 16-hour not available duration shift. Do not specify the pattern length or start and end days, and the pattern will repeat for the length of the schedule to which it is associated.

Managing Elapsed Workday Patterns

In the summer, several divisions in your organization work only 4 hours on Fridays. They work extended hours on Wednesdays and Thursdays to cover the 4 hours they will not work on Fridays. Create an elapsed workday pattern with a length of 7 days. Days 1 and 2 will have an 8-hour shift assigned, while days 3 and 4 will have a 10-hour shift assigned. Finally, day 5 will have a 4-hour shift assigned. As in the time workday pattern, days 6 and 7 are considered nonworking days.

Item Organization: Explained

An item organization defines an item when inventory balances are not stored and inventory storage or inventory movement is not reflected in the Oracle Fusion Applications. For example, you would use an item organization in a retail scenario, if you need to know the items that are listed by and sold through each retail outlet even though inventory and transactions are recorded in another system. In Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management (CRM), item organizations are used to define sales catalogs.

Item Master Organization: Explained

An item master organization lists and describes items that are shared across several inventory organizations or item organization.

The following example shows the choice between inventory organizations that track inventory transactions, stored in two warehouses, and item organizations that just track items, listed in two sales catalogs.

For the most efficient processing, you should:

• Have a single item master

• Include an item and its definition of form, fit, and function only once in the item master

• Separate the item master organization from organizations that store and transact items

Define Social Networking

Getting Started with Oracle Fusion CRM Collaboration: Overview

Oracle Fusion CRM Collaboration is a collection of features of the Oracle WebCenter product. Employees in an organization can use these features to collaborate and stay informed of the latest information.

Employees can use Oracle Fusion CRM Collaboration features to do the following business tasks:

• Access real-time feeds of business transactions.

• Engage in contextual discussions around key business goals.

• Leverage group spaces to enhance team collaboration.

• Enhance virtual team communication by staying up-to-date on peer activities, deals, connections, and community updates.

• Gain greater visibility into opportunities and best practices.

• Make informed decisions with peer feedback.

• Access critical information to streamline the sales process.

From Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Fusion CRM Collaboration leverages the following features.

Activity Streams

Activity streams provide an ongoing view of activities from connections, actions taken in group spaces, and other business activities. Within Oracle Fusion CRM Collaboration, activity streams have been enabled for opportunities and customer business events, as displayed in the following Oracle Fusion CRM areas:

• Welcome page

• Sales Dashboard

• Customer Center overview page

Employees can use activity streams to:

• Stay current on relevant business updates or updates from the communities of which the user is a member.

• Stay up-to-date on what others are working on and what is happening in your organization.

• Make timely decisions with real-time contextual insight.

• Overcome organizational and geographical boundaries that make it hard to find help and expertise.

• Increase employee interaction and collaboration.

For more information, see "Tracking Your Connections Activities" in the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces.

Blogs

Blogs are typically personal records of an individual user's experience and opinions. In Oracle WebCenter Spaces, users can create blogs to group related blog posts, for example to group topics by the same author or otherwise related topics. Each blog contains various blog posts. Although, blogs have not been exposed in Oracle Fusion CRM, users can access blogs by way of Oracle Web Center Spaces. For more information, see "Working with Blogs" in the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces.

Discussion Forums

You can use a discussion forum to post, respond to, and preserve topical information, and other users can post information relevant to those topics. All of this information is preserved within the discussion forum so that teams of users can collaborate on opportunities and customer records. Everyone who is part of the opportunity or customer team can post and reply to discussions. Within Oracle Fusion CRM Collaboration, discussions are enabled for opportunities and customer business objects. For more information, see "Creating a Discussion Forum" in the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces.

Discussions has been enabled for:

• Opportunity

• Customer

• References

• Competitors

Group Spaces

Teams of employees can use group spaces to collaborate in the context of an opportunity or customer record. Within a group space, employees can collaborate by engaging in existing discussions or creating new ones, and they can create new wikis. They can also create new group spaces and leverage available features, such as discussions, blogs, wikis, announcements, and so on. By using group spaces, employee groups can contend with work blockages, such as:

• Unstructured sales activities that are not captured.

• Information that is locked in silos.

• Hard-to-find successful or useful content.

• Numerous e-mail threads used for collective content authoring.

For more information, see "Understanding Space Basics" in the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces.

Tags

Tags categorize business objects in Oracle Fusion Applications, for example specific invoices and opportunities, with your own keywords. You can share tags so that anyone searching or browsing for items can find them based on common tags. For more information, see "Working with the Tags Service" in the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces.

Wikis

Wikis are Web sites of interlinked Web pages that members of a group can create and edit in a Web browser. Members who have the appropriate permissions can add and edit information to share it with their group. For more information, see "Working with Wikis" in the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces.

Wikis have been enabled for:

• References

• Competitors

Collaboration Capabilities in Oracle Fusion CRM: Highlights

Oracle Fusion CRM Collaboration includes the following features.

Fusion Welcome Page

Across all Fusion applications, the Fusion Welcome page shows all activity stream messages:

• Opportunities and customer records that a user is following.
• Discussion groups of which the user is a member.
• Updates to wikis, blogs, announcements, and so on, from the group space of which the user is a member. The features available in a group space depend on the template that was used when the group space was created.
• Connections updates.
• Status updates.
• Healthcare management activity stream messages.
• Projects.
• All corresponding comments and likes for any of the above activity messages.

Sales Dashboard Page

The Sales Dashboard shows activity stream messages for the following functions:

• Opportunities and customer records that a user is following.
• Discussion groups of which the user is a member.
• Updates to wikis, blogs, announcements, and so on, from the group space of which the user is a member. The features available on a group space depend on the template that was used when the group space was created.
• Connections updates.
• Status updates.
• All corresponding comments and likes for any of the above activity messages.

Customer Center Overview Page

The Customer Center Dashboard shows activity stream messages for the following functions:

• Opportunities and customer records that a user is following.
• Discussion groups of which the user is a member.
• Updates to wikis, blogs, announcements, and so on, from the group space of which the user is a member. The features available on a group space depend on the template used when the group space was created.
• Connections updates.
• Status updates.
• All corresponding comments and Likes for any of the above activity messages.

Posting Messages

You can post a status update message from the Oracle Fusion Welcome page. This message can be posted to Everyone, to members of a specific group space, or to members of a specific opportunity or customer sales team. A user can also post a message from an Oracle WebCenter group space. Within a group space, the same field is available for users to post a status update.

• For more information on Oracle Fusion CRM Collaboration capabilities,
  See: Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces

Group Spaces in Oracle Fusion CRM: Highlights

Group spaces bring people together in a virtual environment for ongoing interaction and information sharing, enabling the formation and support of social networks. Teams can use group spaces to collaborate through discussions, in the context of an opportunity or customer record, and create new wikis. Users can also create a new group space and leverage available features, such as discussions, blogs, wikis, announcements, and so on. Group spaces support the collaboration of project teams and communities of interest by providing a dedicated and readily accessible area for relevant services, pages, and content, and by supporting the inclusion of specified members. A member can invite you to join a space, in which case you receive a notification. To see all the spaces that you can join, use the Spaces link in the global area or go to the Spaces dashboard, which contains a list of the spaces to which you belong, a list of any recommended spaces, and a tool to search for all public spaces that you can join.

The available features in a group space depend on the template that was selected when the group space was created. Out-of-the-box templates provide a variety of features. Spaces are an Oracle WebCenter feature that is used not only in the Oracle WebCenter Spaces application but also throughout Oracle Fusion Applications.

Accessing Group Spaces

You can access group spaces by the Spaces link in the global navigation area. From there, you can access the existing public group spaces or the group space of which you are a member. From within the Edit Opportunity page of an opportunity record, you can also access an existing group space or create a new group space. Click an icon to display a popup window where you can do the following group space activities:

• Select and add a group space: You can select an existing group space from the list. The application allows all users who have access to the opportunity record to use the features exposed in the selected group spaces.
• Create and link a group space: You can create new group spaces using existing group spaces templates. Users who have access to the opportunity record can use the features that are exposed in the newly created group spaces.

Setting Up Group Spaces

You can associate existing group spaces to an object, or you can create new ones. These associations have no impact on any embedded group spaces within the object, nor do they create a new embedded forum or wiki for that object. You can make associations in the following ways:

• Opportunity management: A default group space is associated with each opportunity record. Drill into the group space to use any of the features available in the default group space (wikis and discussions). You can create and associate new group spaces to the opportunity record. Depending on the template that was selected when the group space was created, you can use any of the features in the group space, such as wikis, discussions, blogs, announcements, and so on.
• Group Spaces link: From the top navigation menu, you can create and access a group space and use any of the features available in the group space.

Security for Enabling or Viewing Group Space Widgets

Users need specific security permissions to enable or view group space widgets, such as forums, wikis, and so on, for the following objects:

• Opportunity: For enabling, the typical role is a sales person or other advanced user. Security is controlled by an opportunity team member with full access plus the functional privilege View Opportunities. For viewing, the typical role is a sales person with regular access. Security is controlled by an opportunity team member with View or Edit access plus the functional privilege View Opportunities.
• Competitor: For enabling, the typical role is a sales administrator. Security is controlled with the functional privilege Manage Sales Competitor. For viewing, the typical role is a sales person with the functional privilege View Sales Reference.
• Reference: For enabling, the typical role is sales administrator. Security is controlled with the functional privilege Manage Sales Reference. For viewing, the typical role is a sales person with the functional privilege View Sales Reference.

Optional Enabling

Deploying organizations have a choice of enabling embedded forums and wikis for sales objects by using two profile options:

• Key: (<Object> Group Space Enabled) Determines whether or not a particular object, such as an opportunity, has support for embedding forums and wikis.
• Key: (<Object> Group Space Template Default) Determines which group space template to use in case the object is to have embed support (if the value for the first option is Y.)
• For an embed-enabled sales object, the edit view for an instance of that object provides an additional check box to show existing embedded forums and wikis (or enable embedding and showing forums and wikis if no embedded widgets exist at that point). Only advanced users of the object instance (with full access for opportunities, sales administrators for competitors and references) can see and interact with this check box. It is not visible to other users.

Embedding Group Space Widgets

To embed group space widgets, use the following actions:

• When embedded forums or wikis already exist, display the Discussions tab and Wikis tab with existing embedded content by checking the Discussions and Wikis check box. Forums and wikis are created for that object instance using the group spaces template that was specified in the first profile option. The Discussions tab and Wikis tab appear in the object instance for the newly-created widgets.
• To hide The Discussions tab and Wikis tab with existing embedded content, uncheck the Discussion and Wikis check box.

Group Spaces and Oracle WebCenter

For more information on group spaces, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter. As you read that guide, note the following points:

• Disregard content that is specific to the Oracle WebCenter Spaces application, for example the home space. Although there is no home space in Oracle Fusion Applications, many of the features within the home space are also available in Oracle Fusion Applications.
• The way to access spaces in Oracle Fusion Applications is different from the instructions in the guide. In Oracle Fusion Applications, you can use the Spaces link in the global area or on pages where available, as well as the Spaces dashboard.
  See: Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter

Discussion Forums in Oracle Fusion CRM: Highlights

Teams of users can use discussion forums to collaborate on opportunities and customer records. Everyone who is part of an opportunity or customer team can collaborate and take part in discussions by posting and replying to discussions. When someone posts a new discussion entry or replies to an existing discussion, the users who are members of the opportunity or customer team are notified by an activity stream message.

Members can drill into a discussion to read all replies, watch the forum where discussions are created, and view, edit, reply, and create their own discussions by accessing the group space. Members can also create and participate in text-based discussions with other users within the scope of specific business objects, an application, or a space. For example, in Oracle Fusion Applications Help, you can post questions or comments regarding topics covered by a specific help file and view posts from other members regarding the same help.

The Discussions feature is an Oracle WebCenter service used within and outside of spaces in Oracle Fusion Applications. Discussions are fully described in the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces. As you read that guide, note the following points:

• In Oracle Fusion Applications, discussions can exist outside of spaces. Content that is specific to spaces applies to spaces within Oracle Fusion Applications, but discussions work similarly outside of spaces.

• Various user interfaces, or task flows, are described in the guide. The interfaces and flows that are available to you depend on the pages that you can access.

Setting Up and Using Discussion Forums

Moderators can create discussion forums in which members can view and participate in topics and threads. Set up and use discussion forums in the following ways:

• Edit Opportunity page: This option is available only to users at the level of someone like an opportunity owner, that is, a member with full access. To enable a discussion forum for an opportunity, click an Opportunity Name. Then in the Edit Opportunity page Summary region, check the Show Discussions and Wiki check box and then Save. This option creates discussions and wikis for the opportunity, and a Discussions tab in the Additional Details region of the Edit Opportunity page. After you enable discussions, you cannot disable them. When a discussion is enabled on the opportunity, anyone with a minimum of view access on the opportunity can contribute to it.
• Customer Center: For each customer record, the Discussion Forums link is displayed in the Customer Center region. A setup is not necessary.
• Opportunity Management: In each opportunity record the Discussions tab is available in the Additional Details region. You can create and associate new group spaces to the opportunity record and the user Discussions feature under the group space.
• Global group space: At the global navigation level, click the Spaces link, then Create. When you create a space choose the Discussion template, then you can navigate to the space, add members, create pages, and upload documents.

See Also

• For more information about discussion groups,
  See: Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces

Wikis in Oracle Fusion CRM: Highlights

A wiki is a Web site of interlinked Web pages that allows members of a group to create and edit the Web pages in a Web browser. Members of a group who have the appropriate permissions can add and edit information and share it among the group. Wikis are available by way of CRM References and Competitors.

In Oracle WebCenter Spaces, you can create and manage wiki documents by using the Documents service. To support the wiki functionality, the Documents service stores all wiki documents on Oracle Content Server. For this feature to work, the Oracle Content Server needs to be set up.

Setting Up Wikis

This option is available only to users at the level of full access, for example, someone like an opportunity owner.

• In the Edit Opportunity page, to enable a wiki for an opportunity, click an Opportunity Name.
• Then in the Edit Opportunity page Summary region, check the Show Discussions and Wiki check box and then save.
• This option creates wikis for the opportunity and a Wiki tab about competitors. When a wiki is enabled on the opportunity, anyone with a minimum of view access on the opportunity can contribute to it.
• After you enable wikis, you cannot disable them.

See Also

• For more information about wikis, see the following document.
  See: Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces

Tags in Oracle Fusion CRM: Highlights

Use tags to categorize business objects in Oracle Fusion Applications, for example specific invoices and opportunities, with your own keywords. You can share tags so that anyone searching or browsing for items can find them based on common tags. For example, members collaborating on a project can tag all related work with a particular term. Although tags are available to anyone who has access to the item, when you create tags you can designate them to be private .

The tags feature is an Oracle WebCenter service.

Tags are fully described in the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces. As you read that guide, note the following points:

• Disregard discussions specific to the Oracle WebCenter Spaces application, for example the global search in the application.

• Although the guide describes tagging Oracle WebCenter pages and documents, in Oracle Fusion Applications you tag specific business objects.

• Not all tag features are available in Oracle Fusion Applications, for example the Tags and Similarly Tagged Items user interfaces.

Understanding Tags

Aside from the Tags icon and the Tag Center dialog box, tags are available in Oracle Fusion Applications from applicable Oracle Fusion Applications Search results. The search considers tags in finding matching results. The search results do not indicate the number of times a particular tag was applied, and not all searches retrieve private tags. You can access the Tag Center dialog box from the global area or other places in Oracle Fusion Applications, for example in Oracle Fusion Applications Help. The Tag Center shows all tags, not only those relevant to what you are working on. For example, the tag center in Oracle Fusion Applications Help displays all tags, not only the tags for help files. Use tags to do the following actions:

• Use the tag icon to tag specific business objects. Read only about the step that describes the fields you enter to tag an item.
• Browse and search for items using tags in the Tag Center dialog box. Disregard instructions about how to open the tag center.
• For more information about tags,
  See: "Understanding the Tag Center" in Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces
  See: "Working with Tags and Tagged Items in the Tag Center" in Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces
  See: "Tagging Application Pages" in Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces

Activity Streams in Oracle Fusion CRM: Highlights

Activity streams show a continuous view of activities from connections, actions in group spaces, and other business activities. For example, you might see that specific users have created, edited, or deleted specific business objects, such as customers or opportunities, and you can use activity streams to access more information about that user or object. Additionally, similar to social networking Web sites, the activity stream displays messages that other users want to broadcast.

Activity Stream is an Oracle WebCenter feature, available in Oracle Fusion Applications on the Welcome dashboard and various other locations within and without the context of spaces. The types of activities that are tracked vary depending on each Activity Stream region.

Setting Up Activity Streams

You can set up activity streams from the Navigator link by selecting Setup and Maintenance under Tools. In the Search: Tasks field, type "Activity". In the Search Results list select Set Activity Streams Options. Click the icon in the Go to Task column to open the Setup and Maintenance page. Expand Service Categories. In the rows for Customer and Opportunity select the following check boxes:

• Display Activities: When new updates are made, the application displays the corresponding activity messages on the application UI.
• Allow Owner Override: This function allows the end user to override the Display Activities option by going to the Activity Streams Options feature.
• Publish: The system publishes the activity stream messages when new updates are made. These messages are first published or written to the Activity Streams repository, where they are written to the database table but not displayed. To display them, click Display Activities.

Understanding Activity Stream Security

Activity stream messages are only displayed to users who are:

• Following the opportunity or customer record (specific to CRM).
• Members of a discussion group who are involved with a discussion entry that is associated to an opportunity or customer record. In this case, users who have been invited to be part of the discussion receive an activity stream message for create, read, update, and delete operations about the discussion. The events tracked for opportunities are different from the ones tracked for customers.
• Connected to specific users.
  See: "Tracking Your Connections' Activities" in Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces.
• Members of a group space.

Tracking Activity Streams

Users can start receiving activity streams for opportunities or customer records by accessing the Opportunity or Customer Edit page. Under the header, click Follow. The system starts displaying the activity stream for changes to the records that the user is following. When using activity streams, note the following points:

• A user can stop receiving activity stream messages for opportunities or customer records by unfollowing the opportunity or customer record. Hover over the message and click Unfollow.
• You can hide (not display) updates to connections by hiding the person. You can also hide the activity stream messages from the group spaces that are associated to the opportunity or customer record.
• To view or unhide the connection or group space, click the Options link to see a list of connections or group spaces that are hidden. If you choose to unhide them, the system displays the connections or group space activity stream messages again.
• When an activity stream message is displayed, the message contains hyperlinks to the user who updated the record. Clicking that user's name returns the user's Profile page. If the activity stream is for an opportunity record, then the hyperlink is to that opportunity record. If you click an opportunity name, then the application returns the Opportunity Edit page. If the activity stream is for a customer record, then the hyperlink is to that customer record. If the you click a customer name, then the application opens the Customer Edit page.

Liking and Commenting in an Activity Stream

• For information on liking and commenting in an activity stream,
  See: "Liking, Commenting On, and Sharing Objects" in Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces.

Activity Stream and Oracle WebCenter Spaces

Activity streams are described fully in the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces. As you read that guide, note the following points:

• Although the guide describes activity streams only in the context of spaces, in Oracle Fusion Applications activity streams work similarly outside of spaces.
• The scope of what is potentially tracked in activity streams is different from what is described in the guide. Many types of activities are specific to Oracle Fusion Applications.
• The exact navigation or user interface in Oracle Fusion Applications might differ from what is described in the guide. Ignore any subject matter that is specific to Oracle WebCenter Spaces.
  See: "What You Should Know About Activity Stream" in Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces.

Using Profiles

In an activity stream message, click a person's name or picture to open the Portrait tab giving general information about that person, such as contact information and areas of expertise. If you click on your own name or picture, then the My Portrait tab opens, showing more detailed, human resources-related information about you, such as your professional development goals.

• For more information about profiles,
  See: "Configuring Profile" in Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Portal: Spaces.

Blogs in Oracle Fusion CRM: Highlights

Blogs are typically personal records of an individual user's experience and opinions. The word "blog" is a contraction of the term "Web log". In Oracle WebCenter Spaces, you can create blogs to group related blog posts, for example to group topics by the same author or related subjects.

In Oracle WebCenter Spaces, each blog contains various blog posts, with the most recently added blog post displayed at the top. In a Blog page style mode, the Archives pane on the right provides controls for navigating to blog posts. Blog posts are categorized automatically by year and subcategorized by month. Next to the date of a year, the number in parenthesis represents the total number of blog posts created during that year. The number next to a month represents the total number of blog posts created during that month. For example, the designation December (2) shows that two blog posts were created in the month of December. Clicking any month displays all blog posts that were created during that month. You can view all blog posts available in a blog, regardless of the month or year they were created, by clicking the View All link. If there are more blog posts than can be displayed on one page, typically 10 posts, you can use the Next and Previous buttons to navigate through the list of blog posts.

See Also

• For more information on blogs, see the following document.
  See: Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Spaces

How can I enable social networking features?

Set the Social Networking Features Enabled profile option to "Y" on the Manage Social Networking Profile Option Values page. If you enable this profile option, users can access the following features:

• Kudos

• Message board

• Activity stream

• Connections

• Personal status

Define Workforce Profiles

Profile Management: Explained

Profile management provides a framework for developing and managing talent profiles that meet your industry or organizational requirements. Profiles summarize the qualifications and skills of a person or a workforce structure such as a job or position. Profiles are valuable for tracking workers' skills, competencies, and accomplishments, and for various talent management activities, such as career planning, identifying training needs, performance management, and in the recruitment process for identifying job requirements and suitable applicants.

This topic discusses:

• Profile search

• Profile comparison

• Best-fit analysis

Profile Search

You can search profiles for workers, jobs, and positions with certain criteria. For example, an HR (Human Resources) specialist in London who is looking to fill an applications developer position from within the company can search for profiles of all workers who are based in London and have experience with Java and PL/SQL.

Profile Comparison

Using the comparison feature, you can compare profiles to determine next career moves or training needs for workers, and identify suitable candidates for jobs. For example, if John is looking for his next career move, he can compare his profile to that of a job to determine whether his competency ratings match the targeted competency ratings in a job profile. For example, if his Teamwork rating is 3 and the Product Strategy Teamwork requirement is 4, he has a deficiency of -1. John and his manager can use this gap to drive development plans and for other talent management-related functions.

Best-Fit Analysis

Use the best-fit analysis to determine the person profile that most closely matches a job profile, or the job profile that is the best match for a person profile. For example, if you are trying to fill a Developer vacancy, and the job profile requires a B.S. degree in Computer Science, level 4 expertise coding Java, and a Teamwork rating of at least 3, you can review an automatically-generated list of workers who most closely match this set of requirements. You can also use the best-fit analysis to find workers who are similar to a selected worker, or jobs that are similar to a selected job.

Oracle Fusion Profile Management Components: How They Work Together

You can configure Oracle Fusion Profile Management to meet your business requirements using these components: the content library, profiles and profile types, content subscribers, educational establishments, instance qualifier sets, and rating models.

This figure illustrates how the components of Profile Management fit together.

Content Library

The content library provides the foundation for profiles as it stores both content types and content items.

Profile Types

Profile types are templates that you use to create profiles. Profile types determine whether the profile is for a person or for a workforce structure such as a job or a position, and the content of the profile. You select content types from the content library to create content sections for the profile type.

Profiles

You create person profiles for individual workers and model profiles for workforce structures, such as a jobs or positions. The information that you complete for the profile is determined by how the profile type has been set up. For example, a person profile might contain information about a person's education, language skills, competencies, and activities and interests. A job profile might contain information about the requirements for the job, such as competencies, language skills, degrees, or certifications.

Content Subscribers

Content subscribers are applications external to Oracle Fusion Profile Management that use content types.

Educational Establishments

You can define educational establishments for workers to use when they add education information, such as degrees, to their profile.

Instance Qualifier Sets

You assign instance qualifiers to content types. Instance qualifier sets uniquely identify multiple instances of a content item on a profile. For example, if multiple people update a performance rating for a competency on a worker's profile, instance qualifiers provide a unique identifier to each instance of the competency so that you can determine who provided each rating.

Rating Models

When you create content types in the content library, you can attach rating models to determine the scale for measuring performance and proficiency. You can also use rating models to measure the risk and impact of loss for workers, and to measure their potential.

Oracle Fusion Profile Management, Performance Management, Goal Management, and Talent Review: How They Work Together

Oracle Fusion Profile Management supports talent management business processes in these products:

• Oracle Fusion Performance Management

• Oracle Fusion Goal Management

• Oracle Fusion Talent Review

Oracle Fusion Performance Management

Oracle Fusion Performance Management uses the rating models that you define in Profile Management to rate workers on their performance. When you define a performance document template, you can specify whether the ratings and comments from managers and workers are uploaded automatically to workers' profiles when the performance document is finalized. Instance qualifier sets distinguish the manager ratings from the workers' self ratings. Performance Management also uses competencies from the content library in performance documents.

Oracle Fusion Goal Management

You can set up a content type relationship between the Goals content type and other content types, such as the Competencies content type and the Memberships content type. Using these relationships, you can then set up target outcomes for goals. Target outcomes are the content items within the content type that is related to the Goals content type. For example, if you set up a relationship between the Goals content type and the Competencies content type, workers can add a target outcome of a specific competency to their goals. In this case, the specific competency is the content item within the Competencies content type. When workers complete the goal, their profiles are updated to include the competency.

Oracle Fusion Talent Review

Oracle Fusion Talent Review uses information from the Performance and Potential and Risk of Loss sections within a worker's profile to build the analytics that are part of the talent review process. These sections are defined as content types within the content library and included in the person profile type. When a talent review is complete, workers' profiles are updated automatically with the performance and potential ratings given during calibration discussions. Instance qualifier sets enable you to distinguish the talent review rating from ratings given by the worker's manager, a peer, or perhaps the worker's self-evaluation.

Define Talent Profile Settings

Profile Management Lookups: Explained

This topic identifies common lookups that are profile management-related and have user or extensible customization levels. Review these lookups, and update them as appropriate to suit enterprise requirements.

Profile Management Lookups

Profile management lookups are described in the following table.

Value Sets: Explained

A value set is a set of valid values that you assign to a flexfield segment.

An end user enters a value into a flexfield segment while using the application. The flexfield validates the segment against the set of valid values that you configured as a value set and assigned to the segment.

For example, you can define a required format, such as a five digit number, or a list of valid values, such as green, red, and blue.

Flexfield segments are usually validated, and typically each segment in a given flexfield uses a different value set. You can assign a single value set to more than one segment, and you can share value sets among different flexfields.

Defining value sets involves making decisions about the following.

• Validation

• Security

• Precision and scale

• Usage and deployment

Validation

The following types of validation are available for value sets.

• Format only, where end users enter data rather than selecting values from a list

• Independent, a list of values consisting of valid values you specify

• Dependent, a list of values where a valid value derives from the independent value of another segment

• Subset, where the list of values is a subset of the values in an existing independent value set

• Table, where the values derive from a column in an application table and the list of values is limited by a WHERE clause

A segment that uses a format only value set does not present a list of valid values to users.

You can build a tree structure from the values in an independent value set whose data type is character.

For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide.

Security

Value set security only works in conjunction with usage within flexfield segments. If a value set is used standalone, meaning outside a flexfield, value set security is not applied, but Oracle Fusion data security is enforced.

You can specify that data security be applied to the values in flexfield segments that use a value set. Based on the roles provisioned to users, data security policies determine which values of the flexfield segment end users can view or modify.

Value set security applies at the value set level. If a value set is secured, every usage of it in any flexfield is secured. It is not possible to disable security for individual usages of the same value set.

Value set security applies to independent, dependent, or table-validated value sets.

Value set security applies mainly when data is being created or updated, and to key flexfield combinations tables for query purposes. Value set security does not determine which descriptive flexfield data is shown upon querying.

Security conditions defined on value sets always use table aliases. When filters are used, table aliases are always used by default. When predicates are defined for data security conditions, make sure that the predicates also use table aliases.

For key flexfields, the attributes in the view object that correspond to the code combination ID (CCID), structure instance number (SIN), and data set number (DSN) cannot be transient. They must exist in the database table. For key flexfields, the SIN segment is the discriminator attribute, and the CCID segment is the common attribute.

Precision and Scale

For a value set with the data type Number, you can specify the precision (maximum number of digits user can enter) or scale (maximum number of digits following the decimal point).

Usage and Deployment

The usage of a value set is the flexfields where that value set is used. The deployment status of flexfields in which the value set is used indicates the deployment status of the value set instance.

The figure shows a value set used by a segment in a key flexfield and the context segment of a descriptive flexfield.

For most value sets, when you enter values into a flexfield segment, you can enter only values that already exist in the value set assigned to that segment.

Global and context-sensitive segment require a value set. You can assign a value set to a descriptive flexfield context segment. If you specify only context values, not value sets for contexts, the set of valid values is equal to the set of context values.

Defining Value Sets: Critical Choices

Validation and usage of value sets determine where and how end users access valid values for attributes represented by flexfield segments.

Value Sets for Context Segments

When assigning a value set to a context segment, you can only use table-validated or independent value sets. The data type must be character and the maximum length of the values being stored must not be larger than column length of the context.

Format Only Validation

The format only validation type enables end users to enter any value, as long as it meets your specified formatting rules. That is, the value must not exceed the maximum length you define for your value set, and it must meet any format requirements for that value set.

For example, if the value set allows only numeric characters, your user could enter the value 456 (for a value set with maximum length of three or more), but could not enter the value ABC. A format only value set does not otherwise restrict the range of different values that users can enter. For numeric values, you can also specify if a numeric value should be zero filled or how may digits should follow the radix separator

Interdependent Value Sets

You cannot specify a dependent value set for a given segment without having first defined an independent value set that you apply to another segment in the same flexfield. You use a dependent value set to limit the list of values for a given segment based on the value that the end user has chosen for a related independent segment. The available values in a dependent list and the meaning of a given value depend on which value was selected for the independently validated segment.

For example, you could define an independent value set of U.S. states with values such as CA, NY, and so on. Then you define a dependent value set of U.S. cities, with values such as San Francisco and Los Angeles that are valid for the independent value CA, and New York City and Albany that are valid for the independent value NY. In the UI, only the valid cities can be selected for a given state.

Because you define a subset value set from an existing independent value set, you must define the independent value set first. End users do not need to choose a value for another segment first to have access to the subset value set.

Table Validation

Typically, you use a table-validated set when the values you want to use are already maintained in an application table (for example, a table of vendor names). Table validation allows you to enable a segment to depend upon multiple prior segments in the same context or structure.

Table-validated value sets have unique values across the table, irrespective of bind variables. The WHERE clause fragment of the value set is considered if it does not have bind variables. If it has bind variables, the assumption is that the values are unique in the value set.

Range

In the case of format, independent, or dependent value sets, you can specify a range to further limit which values are valid. You can specify a range of values that are valid within a value set. You can also specify a range validated pair of segments where one segment represents the low end of the range and another segment represents the high end of the range

For example, you might specify a range for a format-only value set with format type Number where the user can enter only values between 0 and 100. If you use a table value set, you cannot reference flexfield segments in the WHERE clause of the value set . For example, the WHERE clause cannot reference a segment or a value set.

Security

In the case of independent and dependent values, you can specify that data security be applied to the values in segments that use a value set. Based on the roles provisioned to users, data security policies determine which values of the flexfield segment end users can view or modify.

When you enable security on a table-validated value sets, the security rule that is defined is absolute and not contingent upon the bind variables (if any) that may be used by the WHERE clause of the value set. For example, suppose a table-validated value set has a bind variable to further filter the value list to x, y and z from a list of x, y, z, xx, yy, zz. The data security rule or filter written against the value set should not assume anything about the bind variables; it must assume the whole list of values is available and write the rule, for example, to allow x, or to allow y and z. By default in data security all values are denied, and show only rows to which access has been provided.

Maintenance

There is no need to define or maintain values for a table-validated or subset value set, as the values are managed as part of the referenced table or independent value set, respectively.

If your application has more than one language installed, or there is any possibility that you might install one or more additional languages for your application in the future, select Translatable. This does not require you to provide translated values now, but you cannot change this option if you decide to provide them later.

For more information about defining value sets, see the Oracle Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide.

Define Talent Profile Content

Rating Models: Explained

Use rating models to rate workers on their performance and level of proficiency in the skills and qualities that are set up on the person profile. You can also use rating models to specify target proficiency levels for items on a model profile, so that the model profile can be compared to workers' profiles.

To rate workers on their performance and proficiency, you attach rating models to the content types that are included in the person profile, and then workers can be rated on the items within the type. For example, you can rate workers on the Communication content item within the Competencies content type.

For model profiles, you can specify target proficiency levels for items on the profile, so that the model profile can be compared to workers' profiles. Using the ratings, managers can compare a model profile to workers' profiles to determine the best person suited to fill a position. Workers can compare their profile to model profiles to identify other positions within the organization that they are suited for, or to identify gaps in skills that they need to fill before applying for other positions.

Rating models that measure workers' potential and the impact and risk of loss are also available.

Rating models can include some or all of the following components, depending on the use for the model:

• Rating levels

• Review points

• Rating categories

• Distributions

Rating Levels

Rating levels identify the qualitative values, such as 1, 2, 3, or 4, that you use to rate a worker.

For rating models that are used by Oracle Fusion Performance Management, the following applies:

• You must define numeric ratings for rating models that you use with performance documents that use calculated ratings.

• You must define rating levels using whole numbers, with the highest number indicating the best rating, for the Performance Management analytics to render correctly. Rating levels determine high and low ratings in the analytics.

Review Points

Define review points for rating models that you use with performance documents that use the sum or band calculation method. The review points and point ranges that you define for the rating model are used to calculate ratings.

Rating Categories

Rating categories enable you to group rating levels together for analysis tools used in the talent review process, such as the box chart that is used in the talent review process. You can group rating levels into categories such as low, medium, and high, and those categories then become the labels for the analytic. You should not change rating categories after setting them up, as the changes could affect the analytic.

Distributions

Oracle Fusion Compensation Management and Oracle Fusion Performance Management both use rating model distributions to determine the targeted minimum and maximum percentage of workers that should be given each rating level. Compensation Management uses the distribution values that you set up directly on rating models. However, you can set up distributions at the performance template level for rating models that are used in Performance Management.

Content Types: Explained

Content types are the skills, qualities, and qualifications that you want to track in talent profiles. The content library contains predefined content types such as competencies, languages, and degrees, but you can create new content types as needed. You can also create free-form content types.

Content types contain:

• Properties

• Relationships

• Subscribers

Properties

For each content type, you define the properties that all content items of the content type can or must have. To define properties of the content type, you select fields to be displayed when setting up the content items and the attributes of those fields. The attributes that you specify for each field are: field label, default value, whether the field is required, and whether the field is hidden, display-only, or editable. If the field is attached to a predefined list of values, you also specify the source of the list.

Relationships

Specify where one content type is a parent of another, or where one content type supports another. Content items of content types with relationships inherit the relationship. You cannot create two kinds of relationships between two types or create a relationship between a type and itself. For example, content type A cannot be both the parent and child of content type B. A content type cannot be related to itself.

Subscribers

Specify the subscriber codes of the applications or other Oracle Fusion products that use each content type. If you do not specify a subscriber code for the content type, you cannot view the content type in other applications. For example, if you add a new content type called Corporate Citizenship to the person profile type, you cannot view the content section for Corporate Citizenship in person profiles until you add the new content type to the HRMS content subscriber code.

Content Type Relationships: Examples

Content relationships enable you to associate content items of related content types with each other. The following scenarios illustrate the use of content type relationships.

Tracking Product Expertise

The Resource Manager component of Oracle Fusion Trading Community Model uses content type relationships to track the areas of expertise of workers. Using the predefined content type relationship where the Categories content type is a parent of Products, and Products is a parent of Components, resource managers can keep track of the categories, products, and components that are considered to be their areas of expertise for their resources.

Specifying Target Outcomes for Goals

To help your workers manage their goals, you want them to associate their goals with target outcomes, which are content types such as Competencies and Memberships. To accomplish this, you can set up a relationship on the Competencies content type where Competencies is supported by Goals. Workers can then set up goals that have a specific competency as a target outcome.

Content Items: Explained

Content items are the individual skills, qualities, and qualifications within the content types in the content library. For example, within the Competencies content type, communication is a content item. You can create content items to meet your business needs.

This topic discusses:

• Item properties

• Related content items

• Proficiency descriptions

Item Properties

Content items inherit the fields and field properties that you define for the content type to which the item belongs. For example, one of the fields defined for the Memberships content type is ITEM_DESCRIPTION field. The attributes of this field are set up so that the label is Description, the field is editable, and the field does not require an entry. When you set up a content item for the Memberships content type, you will see a field labeled Description, in which you can enter text to describe the agency, but the field will not be required.

Related Content Items

If the content type for which you are creating an item has related content types, then you can enter the related content items for the item. For example, if you have a content type relationship where the Competencies content type is supported by the Goals content type, then on the content items for competencies, you can enter the related goals.

Proficiency Descriptions

If the content item belongs to a content type that has a rating model defined for it, then you can either use the existing descriptions for the ratings within the model, or define descriptions for the ratings that are specific to the content item. When ratings are given for the content item, the descriptions defined for the item are used instead of those on the rating model.

Creating Content Types and Content Items: Worked Example

This example demonstrates how to set up a new content type and content items to track the corporate citizenship activities of your workers so that you can rate them on their involvement in the organization. This example also demonstrates how to set up a rating model to be used with the content type and add the new content type to the person profile.

The following table summarizes key decisions for this scenario.

To track corporate citizenship for your workers, complete the following tasks:

• Create a rating model.

• Create a content type.

• Create content items.

• Add the content type to the person profile type.

Creating a Rating Model

1. In the Setup and Maintenance work area, search for the Manage Profile Rating Models task and click Go to Task.
2. On the Manage Rating Models page, click Create.
3. On the Create Rating Model page, complete the following fields, as shown in this table. Use the default values except where indicated.

   Field	Value
   Code	Citizenship
   Rating Name	Corporate Citizenship
   Description	Rating model for corporate citizenship

   
   
4. On the Rating Levels tab, complete the following fields, as shown in this table.

   Rating Level	Name	Short Description
   1	Demonstrates limited or unused influence.	Limited
   2	Demonstrates clear evidence of influence.	Clear Evidence
   3	Provides a successful image of the company as socially responsible in limited environments.	Successful Image
   4	Actively called upon to use influence as a corporate representative in selected environments.	Influential in Selected Environments
   5	Demonstrates high level of influence and is able to operate effectively in all environments.	High Level of Influence

   
   
5. Click Save and Close.

Creating a Content Type

1. In the Setup and Maintenance work area, search for the Manage Profile Content Types task and click Go to Task.
2. On the Manage Content Types page, click Create.
3. On the Create Content Type page, add a content type by completing the following fields, as shown in this table. Use the default values except where indicated.

   Field	Value
   Code	Citizenship
   Name	Corporate Citizenship
   Description	Ratings for corporate citizenship behaviors for workers.

   
   
4. Set up the following field properties, as shown in this table. Use the default values except where indicated.

   Field Name	Field Label	Required	Display Option
   ITEM_TEXT_20	Comments	Selected	Editable
   RATING_MODEL_ID	Company Contribution	Selected	Editable

   
   
5. Click Save and Close.
6. On the Manage Content Types page, select the Corporate Citizenship content type and click Edit.
7. On the Edit Content Type page, select the Subscribers tab.
8. On the Subscribers tab, click Add.
9. In the Subscriber Code field, select HRMS.
10. Click Save and Close.

Creating Content Items

1. In the Setup and Maintenance work area, search for the Manage Profile Content Items task and click Go to Task.
2. On the Manage Content Items page, click Create.
3. In the Create Content Item dialog box, complete the following fields, as shown in this table.

   Field	Value
   Content Type	Corporate Citizenship
   Content Item	Corporate Social Responsibility

   
   
4. On the Create Content Item: Corporate Social Responsibility page, select the Corporate Citizenship rating model in the Rating field.
5. Click Save and Close.
6. Repeat steps 2 through 5 to add content items for Corporate Environmental Responsibility, Corporate Industrial Citizenship, Corporate State Citizenship, and Corporate Borough, Council, or Municipal Citizenship.

Adding the Corporate Citizenship Content Type to the Person Profile Type

1. In the Setup and Maintenance work area, search for the Manage Profile Types task and click Go to Task.
2. On the Manage Profile Types page, locate the Person profile type and click Edit.
3. On the Edit Profile Type: Person page, select the Content Sections tab.
4. In the Content Sections region, click Add Content Section.
5. In the Content Types dialog box, select Citizenship.
6. In the Content Sections region, click Citizenship.
7. On the Content Section page, set up the following field properties, as shown in this table. Use the default values except where indicated.

   Column Name	Display Flag	Required	Searchable
   ITEM_TEXT240_1	Detail	Selected	Selected
   RATING_LEVEL_ID1	Detail	Selected	Selected

   
   
8. On the Edit Profile Type: Person page, click Save and Close.
9. In the Content Access Section region, click Add.
10. In the Role field, select Employee.
11. Select the Update check box.
12. Click Add.
13. In the Role field, select Manager.
14. Click OK.
15. Click Add.
16. In the Role field, select HR Specialist.
17. Click OK.
18. On the Edit Profile Type: Person page, click Save and Close.

Free-Form Content Types: Worked Example

This example demonstrates how to set up a free-form content type, add it to the HRMS content subscriber code, and then add the content type to the person profile type.

Your company wants to track the previous employment information for workers, including employer name, dates of employment, and job description. However, you do not want to set up and maintain content items for each employer, and this information applies only to person profiles. You decide to use a free-form content type for this information. You can set up the free-form content type with minimal information, and then when you add it to the person profile as a content section, you can define properties for employer name, dates of employment, and job description. Workers can complete their employment information on their profile based on how you set up the content section. The following table summarizes key decisions for this scenario.

To set up a free-form content type to track previous employment information for workers, you must:

• Set up a free-form content type

• Add the free-form content type to the person profile type

Setting Up a Free-Form Content Type

1. In the Setup and Maintenance work area, search for the Manage Profile Content Types task and click Go to Task.
2. On the Manage Content Types page, click Create.
3. On the Create Content Type page, complete the following fields, as shown in this table.

   Field	Value
   Code	PREVEMP
   Name	Previous Employment
   Description	Track previous employment information for workers.

   
   
4. Select the Free-Form Type check box.
5. Click Save and Close.
6. On the Manage Content Types page, select the Previous Employment content type and click Edit.
7. On the Edit Content Type page, select the Subscribers tab.
8. On the Subscribers tab, select HRMS in the Subscriber Code field.
9. Click Save and Close.

Adding the Free-Form Content Type to the Person Profile Type

1. In the Setup and Maintenance work area, search for the Manage Profile Types task and click Go to Task.
2. On the Manage Profile Types page, select the Person profile type, and click Edit.
3. On the Edit Profile Type: Person page, select the Content Sections tab and click Add Content Section.
4. In the Content Types dialog box, select the Previous Employment content type.
5. In the Content Sections region, click the Previous Employment content type and enter the following properties on the Content Section page, as shown in this table.

   Column Name	Label	Display
   ITEM_TEXT30_1	Previous Employer	Detail
   ITEM_DATE_1	From Date	Detail
   ITEM_DATE_2	To Date	Detail
   ITEM_TEXT240_1	Job Description	Detail

   
   
6. In the Content Access Section region, click Add.
7. In the Role field, select Employee.
8. Select the Update check box.
9. Click Add.
10. In the Role field, select Manager.
11. Click OK.
12. Click Add.
13. In the Role field, select HR Specialist.
14. Click OK.
15. On the Edit Profile Type: Person page, click Save and Close.

FAQs for Define Talent Profile Content

What's a rating category?

A label for a grouping of rating levels. Rating categories are used in talent management processes such as performance management and talent reviews to group ratings for analysis tools such as the performance and potential box chart.

Why are some content type relationships not editable?

You can edit any content type relationships that you define. However, the relationships that are predefined cannot be changed.

How can I define a relationship between the Goals content type and other content types?

Set up the relationship on the content type that you want to relate to goals using the relationship type: Is supported by. For example, if you want to define a relationship between the Goals content type and the Competencies content type, set up the relationship on the Competencies content type, instead of the Goals content type.

What's a free-form content type?

Free-form content types enable you to capture information in a profile that you do not need to store in the content library. For example, you can set up a free-form content type to store information about the previous employment information for your workers.

A free-form content type contains only a code, name, and a description, and does not have any properties defined for it until you add it to a profile type. Free-form content types do not include any content items.

Why can't I change the relationship type of a content item?

A content item's relationship type is derived from its content type, and you cannot change it. You can only change relationships at the content type level. You cannot change predefined relationships.

Define Talent Profiles

Profile Types: Explained

Profile types include person profile types and model profile types. The person profile type is the template that you use to create profiles of your workers. The person profile contains the skills, qualities, and qualifications that you want to track for your workers. The person profile type is predefined, and you can have only one. Model profile types are templates for workforce structures such as jobs and positions. Model profiles identify the targeted and required skills and qualifications for a job or position, and also identify work requirements, such as work schedule and travel frequency. You can set up multiple model profile types.

To define profile types, you first specify whether the profile type is a person or model profile. For model profiles, you also specify the workforce structures for which the model profile can be used. For example, if you specify that the model profile can be used for jobs and positions, then you can use the profile type to create both job and position profiles. To define the structure of the profile type, you add one or more content sections using content types from the content library and free-form content types. Define the following for each content section:

• Instance qualifier sets

• Section properties

• Role access

Instance Qualifier Sets

If you have defined instance qualifier sets for the content type, you select the instance qualifier set to use for the sections.

Section Properties

The properties determine the fields and how they are displayed when you create profiles based on the type. For example, properties determine the label for the field, whether the field is required, and whether the field should be included in profile searches. For sections with content types from the content library, you can use the field properties as they have been defined in the content library, or add, remove, or change the properties to suit the content section. You define all of the properties for free-form content types.

Role Access

You can specify the user roles, such as Employee or Manager, that can view the content section, and which user roles have access to update the section.

Adding Common Lookup Types to a Content Section Property: Explained

When defining content sections for a profile type, you can associate common lookup types with a content section property, enabling you to provide a list of values for the content section property. For example, you can add a list of industries to a content section called Industry Expertise. You can use existing common lookup types, or create your own. Common lookups can be associated with these content section properties: ITEM_TEXT30_6 through ITEM_TEXT30_15.

Adding Common Lookup Types to a Content Section Property: Explained

When defining content sections for a profile type, you can associate common lookup types with a content section property, enabling you to provide a list of values for the content section property. For example, you can add a list of industries to a content section called Industry Expertise. You can use existing common lookup types, or create your own. Common lookups can be associated with these content section properties: ITEM_TEXT30_6 through ITEM_TEXT30_15.

Instance Qualifier Sets: Explained

An instance qualifier set is a group of codes that you use to uniquely identify different occurrences of the same profile item within the Competency content type. Instance qualifiers typically identify the role of the person who edited a competency. For example, if a worker, the worker's peer, and the worker's manager all enter a rating for a competency on the worker's profile, instance qualifier sets uniquely identify each instance, or, the rating given by each different role. Uniquely identifying different instances of competencies enables you to specify which instance is used when you view or compare profiles.

Each instance qualifier contains a code and a description, which indicate the role or the application that updated the competency. For example, P is the code that is used when an employee's peer rates the employee and T is used for the rating that results from the talent review meeting. You can use the predefined codes and descriptions, or you can create your own.

In addition to the code and description, each instance qualifier has the following properties:

• Priority

• Employer and manager views

• Search ability

• Default instance qualifier for employer and manager

Priority

Priority determines the order in which different instances of a competency are displayed, and also determines which instance to use when searching and comparing profiles. The lowest number indicates the highest priority.

Employer and Manager Views

Employer and manager views determine which instances are visible to employees and to managers.

Search Ability

You can specify whether items that have been assigned the instance qualifier code should be included in profile searches. For example, you might not want the ratings for competencies given by peers to display when other workers are searching person profiles.

Default Instance Qualifier for Employee and Manager

You can specify the default instance qualifier to use when managers and employees update a competency. Each time an employee or manager updates a competency, the record is assigned the instance qualifier code that is identified as the employee or manager default code.

FAQs for Define Talent Profiles

How can I hide or delete an attribute on the person profile?

You must have the human resource (HR) specialist role to hide or delete an attribute on the person profile.

To hide an attribute on the person profile, use the Manage Profile Types task in the Setup and Maintenance work area and edit the person profile. On the Edit Profile Type page, select a content section that includes the attribute you want to hide. To hide the attribute, select None as the Display value for that attribute. For example, to hide the attribute School Name, select Degrees from Content Sections on the Edit Profile Type page, and set the Display value of the attribute School Name to None.

To delete an attribute that is not a predefined attribute on the person profile, you navigate to the Manage Profile Types task in the Setup and Maintenance work area, edit the person profile, and delete the attribute. For example, to delete the attribute School Name, you navigate to the Manage Profile Types task in the Setup and Maintenance work area. Edit the person profile, select Degrees from Content Sections, and then from the Content Properties section, click Delete to delete the attribute School Name.

Define Security for Customer Relationship Management

Oracle Fusion CRM Security: Functional Overview

Oracle Fusion CRM Applications come secured using the industry standard for access control that is called role-based access control (RBAC). This topic discusses key aspects of the RBAC approach that are specific to an Oracle Fusion CRM implementation. You must review other documentation to understand how RBAC is designed to handle a broad range of security needs.

The RBAC standard supports the enforcement of user access control that is based on the role of the user within the organization rather than the user's individual identity. In RBAC, you assign users with roles that represent the job functions in your enterprise. These roles provide access both to the application functions that users need to perform their jobs as well as the permissions to access the data where they need to perform those functions.

Oracle Fusion Applications, including Oracle Fusion CRM, are secured with a predefined set of enterprise roles. This security reference implementation fulfills the needs of midsize horizontal enterprises, generally between 250 and 10,000 employees. To enable users to perform specific jobs in your CRM enterprise, you provision them with the appropriate enterprise roles. For example, when you provision sales managers with the sales manager job role, they can perform all their job duties, including managing sales teams and their forecasts, setting quotas, and managing sales leads and opportunities.

You can change this security reference implementation if the roles in your enterprise are different or if you want to accommodate expansion into vertical industries, such as health care, insurance, automobiles, or food manufacturing. Application patching does not affect your changes.

Key Components of Oracle Fusion CRM Application Security

The following graphic provides an overview of the key components that determine what functions users can perform in the application (functional security) and on what data they can perform those functions (data security).

For Oracle Fusion CRM, the relevant security components are the following:

• User

  This document refers to security for human users, not background processes and other system users that are also secured with RBAC.

• Autoprovisioning rules

  Rules automatically provision users with enterprise roles that carry all the security settings that are appropriate for their duties. You can provision users based on their role in your organization and other factors, such as their status as an employee or contractor.

• Enterprise roles

  There are two types of enterprise roles:

  • Job roles

    Job roles permit users to perform activities specific to their job. For example, providing users with the Sales Manager job role permits them to manage salespersons within the organization, follow up on leads, generate revenue within a territory, build a pipeline, manage territory forecasts, and assist salespersons in closing deals.

  • Abstract roles

    Abstract roles permit users to perform functions that span the different jobs in the enterprise. For example, each user who is an employee must be provisioned with the Employee abstract role to be able to update their employee profile and picture. For CRM, you must also provision users with the Resource abstract role, this permits users to be assigned to work on leads, opportunities, and other CRM work.

• Duty roles

  Job and abstract roles permit users to carry out actions by virtue of the duty roles they include. For example, the Sales Manager job role includes the Sales Lead Follow Up Duty and the Quota Management Duty. The Sales Management Duty makes it possible for the managers to create and update a sales lead, qualify a sales lead, and convert a sales lead into an opportunity. The Quota Management Duty enables the management of sales territory quotas and territory quota formulas.

• Functional security policies

  Duty roles include functional security policies that provide access to user interface elements, Web services, tasks flows, and other functions. For example, a sales manager who has the Delete Opportunity functional policy can view and click the Delete button. Removing that policy removes the button from view.

  A functional policy is made up of the duty role name and the Delete Opportunity functional privilege. The functional privilege specifies the application features that are being secured. In the security reference manuals, functional privileges are listed in the Privileges section.

• Data security policies

  Duty roles also include data security policies that specify which roles can perform an action under what conditions. For example, the Opportunity Sales Manager Duty includes a data security policy that specifies that sales managers can view opportunities if they are in the management chain or are members of the sales team on the opportunity.

  Each data security policy represents an underlying SQL query. Oracle Fusion CRM Applications evaluate the query at run time, and permit access to data that meets the condition.

  A data security policy is composed of the name of the duty where it applies, a data privilege, and a condition. A data privilege is the combination of the action users can take, the conditions under which they can carry them out, and the object they can act on. Data privileges are listed in the Data Security Policies section of the security reference manuals.

How enterprise roles work in practice is best illustrated with an example from the Sales Manager job role outlined in the following diagram:

• A provisioning rule automatically provisions employee sales managers with the enterprise roles they need to do their jobs.

• The rule provisions the Sales Manager job role and the Employee and Resource abstract roles.

• The Sales Manager job role includes the Quota Viewing Duty and the Sales Manager Duty.

• Duty roles inherit other duty roles. For example, the Sales Manager Duty inherits many other duty roles including the Marketing Lead Analysis Duty and the Opportunity Sales Manager Duty.

• The duty roles are associated with functional security policies and data security policies. For example, the inherited Opportunity Sales Manager Duty comes with the following:

  • Functional security policies that specify which application pages and functions sales managers can access for deleting, assigning, closing, creating, and viewing an opportunity. For example, the view opportunity policy permits sales managers to view all UIs, Web services, and task flows that are related to opportunities.

  • Data security policies that specify what actions opportunity sales managers can take on what opportunities and under what conditions.

    For example, opportunity sales managers can view all data related to opportunities where they are opportunity sales team members with view, edit, or full access.

The following diagram provides more detail about the composition of a policy. Each policy, such as the View Opportunity policy, is composed of a duty role name and a privilege:

• The view opportunity functional security policy is composed of the duty name and the View Opportunity functional privilege.

• The view opportunity data security policy is composed of the duty name, the View Opportunity data privilege, and a condition. It specifies that sales managers can view all data related to opportunities where they are an opportunity sales team member with view, edit, or full access.

About the Security Reference Implementation

Details about the available enterprise roles, duty roles, and policies in the security reference implementation are described in reference manuals organized by business process.

Each of the enterprise roles provided by Oracle is composed of a hierarchy of other roles and duties. The following diagram displays a portion of the hierarchy for the Sales Manager job role from the Oracle Fusion Applications Sales Security Reference Manual as an illustration.

The Sales Manager job role inherits the Business Intelligence Applications Worker abstract role. This abstract role comes with the Business Intelligence Applications Analysis Duty that permits the viewing of business analysis reports.

The Sales Manager job role also inherits the Sales Manager duty role. All job roles include a top-level duty role with the same name as the job role. This top-level duty role is the container for all of the duty roles assigned to a job role. As a general rule, the permissions are attached to the duties at the lowest level of the hierarchy.

The top-level duty roles make it easier for you to create job roles of your own. For example, if you want to create a new job role because you want to give additional functionality to a special class of sales managers, then you can assign the top-level Sales Manager duty to the new job role to give the users all the same permissions as a regular sales manager and then add whatever additional duty roles you want. (For an example of how to do this task, see the Enabling Salespeople to Obtain Microsoft Outlook Access to All Sales Accounts: Worked Example help topic.)

How Opportunity Information Is Secured: Explained

This topic explains how the security reference implementation provided by Oracle determines who can access what opportunity information in your CRM organization.

Your CRM application data comes secured with Oracle's security reference implementation. The following diagram illustrates who can access what opportunity information:

• Named agents in the diagram (A, B, and C) can access the opportunity because they have created it, are on the sales team, or own a territory related to the opportunity.

• Unnamed agents (highlighted in yellow) cannot view the opportunity although they have the same manager as their peers who can view them.

• Managers can view the opportunity because a salesperson in their management chain can view it.

This figure shows who in a sales hierarchy can access an opportunity:

You can see the opportunity in this figure if you do the following:

• You create the opportunity.

  Agent A can access the opportunity because she created it. When you create an opportunity, you are the initial owner.

• You are on the opportunity sales team.

  Agent B can access the opportunity because he is on the sales team.

• You are the owner of the territory.

  Agent C can access the opportunity because he is the owner of the NW territory.

• The opportunity owner is your direct or indirect report in the resource hierarchy.

  Sales managers who are higher up in the management chain can also see the opportunity because access is provided through the resource hierarchy. Agent C's manager can access the opportunity information, but agent C's colleagues cannot.

• You can also access the opportunity if you are assigned to a territory for the sales account associated with the opportunity or if a territory is assigned to the revenue lines on the opportunity. (Revenue lines and sales accounts are not shown in this diagram).

Access differs between territory members and opportunity members:

• An opportunity owner gets full access to the opportunity, which includes the ability to edit as well as add and remove team members.

• Owners and members of territories assigned to the sales account of the opportunity get read-only access to the opportunity and are not added to the opportunity sales team.

• Owners and members of territories assigned to the opportunity revenue lines are added as a distinct list of territories to the opportunity sales team. Owners and members of these territories get full access to the opportunity. Depending on a profile option, either only the owner or all the members of the territory are added as resources to the opportunity sales team. Regardless of the access level for these members as a resource on the opportunity team, they will always have full access.

Special Access

Some access is not affected by the management hierarchy and membership in sales teams or territories. This special access includes:

• Administrators: Administrators get access to opportunities and other objects. This access is based on their privileges, regardless of where the administrators are in the management hierarchy. Administrators do not have to be on the sales team or members of territories.

• Deal Protection: Salespersons assigned to an opportunity retain the sales credit on an opportunity even if they are moved to another opportunity.

• Team Selling: You can configure the application to allow salespersons to see all opportunities related to their sales accounts.

Oracle Fusion CRM Security: Architectural Overview

Setting up Oracle Fusion CRM security involves the use of multiple application components outlined in this topic. For example, you create duty roles and enterprise roles in separate Oracle Fusion Middleware applications and the rules to provision them in Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM). While you can access all of these application components from the Setup and Maintenance work area, understanding what components are used for what purpose and terminology differences in these applications will help you with your setup.

Application Components Used for Implementing Oracle Fusion CRM Security

This diagram provides an overview of the key security setups and the application components that you use to configure them.

The following table provides an explanation of the application components:

Terminology Differences Between Applications

Oracle Fusion CRM applications use different terminology from Oracle Fusion Middleware applications. The key differences are described in the following table:

Oracle Fusion CRM Security: Implementation Planning

Users gain access to application functionality when you provision them with enterprise roles. Oracle provides you with the enterprise roles required for all the standard jobs in a CRM organization. This topic outlines the steps you must complete to provision users with the enterprise roles provided by Oracle and what additional steps you must complete if you are planning to make changes.

Implementing Security If You Plan to Use Enterprise Roles Provided by Oracle

Follow these steps if you want to provision users with the preconfigured enterprise roles provided by Oracle:

1. Create resource roles if the existing resource roles do not match the job titles in your organization.

   Resource roles indicate the role the resource plays in the CRM organization. When you create users for Oracle Fusion CRM applications, you must specify their resource role, which appears as the job title of the person in the resource directory and in social applications, such as the Activity Stream.

   You also use resource roles to trigger the provisioning rules you will set up in the next step.

   Oracle supplies the resource roles that correspond to the preconfigured job roles. For example, Oracle includes the Sales Vice President and the Marketing Vice President resource roles, which correspond to the Sales VP and the Marketing VP job roles.

   If your organization uses different titles, then you must create additional resource roles.

   You can review a list of the existing resource roles and create additional resource roles by navigating to the Setup and Maintenance work area and searching for the Manage Resource Role Lookups task.

   See the Creating Resource Roles: Worked Example help topic for step-by-step instructions on creating resource roles.

2. Create rules that automatically provision users with job roles and abstract roles.

   When you create users, the provisioning rules automatically provision users based on the user resource role and employment status.

   You must create the provisioning rules from the Setup and Maintenance work area, by using the Manage HCM Role Provisioning Rules task.

   See the following help topics for information on best practices to create the rules and step-by-step instructions:

   • Rules to Automatically Provision Oracle Fusion CRM Users with Enterprise Roles: Explained

   • Creating Rules to Automatically Provision Enterprise Roles to Oracle Fusion CRM Users: Worked Example

3. You are now ready to create users.

Implementing Security If You Plan to Customize Enterprise Roles Provided by Oracle

The following steps will help you plan your security implementation if you decide to make changes to the preconfigured job roles and abstract roles provided by Oracle:

1. Review the enterprise roles provided by Oracle.

   Details on the available job roles, abstract roles, duty roles, privileges, and data security roles are described in reference manuals organized by different business areas, such as sales, marketing, and partner relationship management.

   If the jobs in your organization do not match the job roles provided by Oracle, then you can modify access for users by assigning them with multiple existing job roles or creating new job roles. Creating new job roles makes it possible for you to select which duty roles to include and, in some cases, to configure new data security policies that govern on what data those duty roles grant access to.

2. Create any additional job roles.

   You create additional job roles in Oracle Identity Manager, an Oracle Fusion Middleware application, which can be accessed from the Setup and Maintenance work area by using the Manage Job Roles task.

   Note

   If you are implementing security in the Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service, then you must request the Oracle provision administrator to create job roles for you because access to this functionality has not been extended to the Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service.

   Before creating job roles, review the hierarchy of job roles and duty roles in the security reference manuals. The hierarchy of duty roles is not visible when you view them in Oracle Identity Manager.

   Each job role includes a top-level duty role with the same name, which inherits all the other duty roles. If you want to give additional functionality to a group of users, for example, sales managers, then assign the Sales Manager Duty role to the job role you are creating to inherit all the current permissions and data access, and then add whatever additional duty roles you needed.

   Tip

   Oracle Identity Manager uses different terminology from Oracle Fusion CRM. Job roles and abstract roles are referred to as roles.

3. Create duty roles and add them to the job roles that you created.

   If you do create a job role, then use the Oracle Authorization Policy Manager, which is a separate Oracle Fusion Middleware application, to do the following:

   1. Create a top-level duty role for the job role.

   2. Add the duty roles that you want to inherit to that top-level duty role.

   3. Associate the job role that you created with your duty role on the External Role Mapping tab.

   Tip

   Oracle Authorization Policy Manager uses different terminology from Oracle Fusion CRM. Duty roles are referred to as application roles and job roles as external roles. You can identify duty roles by the word DUTY at the end of their names.

   You can access Oracle Authorization Policy Manager from the Setup and Maintenance work area using the Manage Duties task.

   Detailed steps on how to create a job role and duty role are provided in the following help topic: Enabling Sales Representatives to Obtain Microsoft Outlook Access to All Sales Accounts: Worked Example.

   The duty role that you create inherits all of the data security policies from the duty roles that you add. You can create additional data security policies if you want to change user access to specific data. For example, the predefined data security policies for the duty roles inherited by the Sales Representative Duty permit salespeople to view only sales accounts if they are on the sales account team. If you want to give salespeople access to all sales accounts, then you can create a data security policy. The same example, Enabling Sales Representatives to Obtain Microsoft Outlook Access to All Sales Accounts: Worked Example, provides the detailed steps.

4. Retrieve any security changes made in Oracle Identify Manager (stored in the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) store) so they are available for creating users.

   Modifications to the reference become available only after the LDAP store is synchronized. The Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service takes care of the synchronization for you. If you are implementing on premises, then you must run the synchronization process from the Setup and Maintenance work area using the Run User and Roles Synchronization Process task.

5. Follow the steps for implementing the preconfigured security described in the Implementing Security If You Plan to Use Enterprise Roles Provided by Oracle section.

Oracle Fusion CRM Security: Special Considerations

This topic explains what happens if you omit the security setups and highlights the differences between implementing security on premises and in the Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service.

Minimum Required Security Setups

If you plan to use only the preconfigured enterprise roles provided by Oracle, then you must:

1. Review the existing resource roles to see if they correspond to the titles of the different resources in the CRM organization, and create any additional resource roles you need.

2. Create the provisioning rules to automatically provision the required job roles and abstract roles.

3. If you are implementing on premises, then you must Synchronize the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) store by using the Run User and Roles Synchronization Process task from the Setup and Maintenance work area.

   If you are implementing in the Oracle Sales and Marketing Service, then the process is run for you.

Differences Between Implementing Security On Premises and In the Cloud

The following table highlights the differences between implementing security on premises and in the Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service:

Siebel CRM and Oracle Fusion CRM Security Differences: Explained

Siebel CRM and Oracle Fusion CRM implement different methods of securing access to application functionality and data. This topic outlines the mechanisms provided by Siebel CRM to control the privileges or resources that users are entitled to after they have accessed a Siebel application and been authenticated. For additional information on Siebel CRM security, see Siebel Security Guide on Oracle Technology Network.

Siebel CRM uses two primary access-control mechanisms:

• View-level access control to manage the application functionality that a user can access

• Record-level access control to manage the data items that are visible to each user on a view

View-Level Access control

In Oracle Fusion CRM, access to functionality is provided by assigning enterprise roles to users. In Siebel CRM, access to functionality is provided by assigning responsibilities to users.

Within each Siebel application, screens provide a broad area of functionality. A screen is composed of views, and the collection of views to which users have access determines the application functionality available to them. Access to views is determined by responsibilities.

Organizations are generally arranged around job functions, with employees being assigned one or more functions. In Siebel CRM, these job functions are called responsibilities. Each responsibility is associated with more or more views, which represent data and functionality needed for a job function. Each user must be assigned at least one responsibility to access the Siebel application.

Siebel Business Applications ship with many predefined responsibilities. However, you can also define any additional responsibilities that you require that correspond to the major job functions in your organization.

Record-Level Access Control

Record-level access control is used to assign permissions to individual data items within an application so that only authenticated users who need to view particular data records have access to that information. In Oracle Fusion CRM, access to data is primarily determined by the data security policies that apply to specific enterprise roles. In Siebel CRM, the access control mechanism that applies to a view determines the data records that a user sees in a view.

Siebel CRM uses the following types of record-level access control mechanisms:

• Personal access control. Access to data associated with a user's Person record in the database is restricted to that user.

• Position access control. Access to data that is specific to a job title is restricted to users assigned that job title, to their team members, or to their subordinates.

• Organization access control. Employees assigned to a position within an organization are granted access to the data assigned to that organization.

• Access-group access control. Access groups are used to control access to master data by diverse groups of individuals.

• All-access control. All-access control provides access to all records in a view that has a valid owner. If a view applies all-access control, then all users with access to the view see the same data in the view.

Business Components and Record-Level Access Control

Within Siebel CRM, views are based on business components and must use one of the view modes specified for the business component. A business component's view mode determines which access control mechanisms can be applied to the business component in any view. Applet and view properties also determine the data available in a view. Applet visibility properties define the business component on which a view is based, and a view's access control properties determine what access control mechanism is applied to the business component on which the view is based. For example, a business component might have personal or position access control available. The view access control property specifies which of these to use.

Creating Resource Roles: Worked Example

Follow the steps in this topic to create resource roles. Resource roles, for example, Sales Manager, Salesperson, or Vice President of Marketing, describe the role that a resource plays in the CRM organization and appear as job titles in the resource directory and in social applications, such as Activity Stream. Resource roles are also used to assign users with the enterprise roles they need to carry out the duties of their job.

After you create a resource role, you must create the appropriate provisioning rules to provision the user with the required enterprise roles. The resource role by itself is only a title.

Steps to Create a Resource Role

1. Navigate to the Setup and Maintenance work area by selecting the link in the Navigator menu.
2. On the All Tasks tab, search for the Manage Resource Role task.
3. Click the Go to Task button.

   The Manage Resource Roles page appears.

4. Click the Create button.

   The Create Resource Role page appears.

5. In the Role Name field, enter the name of the resource role as it will appear in the application, for example, CEO.
6. In the Role Code field, enter a unique internal name. No spaces are permitted.
7. Select the Manager option if the resource role belongs to a manager, or the Member option if the resource role belongs to a single contributor.
8. In the Role Type list, select either Sales or Marketing to classify the role that you are creating. Your selection has no impact on the security functionality.
9. Click the Save and Close button.

Rules to Automatically Provision Oracle Fusion CRM Users with Enterprise Roles: Explained

By creating rules using the Manage HCM Role Provisioning Rules task from the Setup and Maintenance work area, you can automatically provision users with all the enterprise roles they need for their job. These roles ensure the users have access to all the application functions and data they need to carry out their job duties. The rules automatically provision the users when they are created or move positions within your organization. If resources leave your company, the roles can be automatically removed so the resources can no longer access the application.

You must ensure that the rules you create assign Oracle Fusion CRM application users with:

1. One or more job roles required to perform their job in the organization.

2. If the users work in the CRM organization, then you must assign them the Resource abstract role. This role permits users to be assigned to sales teams, territories, and other CRM work.

3. If the users are employees, then you must also assign them with the Employee abstract role. If they are temporary workers, then you must instead assign them with the Contingent Worker abstract role.

   In CRM, both abstract roles assure that users can update their personal profiles and other common tasks.

As a best practice:

• Create rules that provision the Resource abstract role and the job roles users need to perform their job based on the resource role assigned to them. Most resource roles will require just one job role, but some may have more than one. For example, the Sales and Marketing Vice President may require both the Sales VP and the Marketing VP job roles.

• Create one rule that provisions all users who are employees (Person Type of Employee) with the Employee abstract role.

• If you hire contractors, then create a separate rule to provision the Contingent Worker abstract role to all users with the Person Type of Contingent Worker.

• For all rules you create, ensure that the privileges the users are granted are automatically removed when they are no longer with the company. You can do this by stipulating the condition that the rule apply only when the user has the Assignment Status of Active.

• If you plan to create users to perform implementation tasks who are not resources in the CRM organization, then you must create a provisioning rule that is based not on the resource role but some other user attribute. For example, you can create a rule to provision the required Application Implementation Consultant and IT Security Manager job roles based on the user's job assignment.

The following figure provides an example of the rules you would create to provision employee users who are assigned the Sales Manager resource role:

• Rule one assigns the Employee abstract role to users who are employees with an Assignment Status of Active.

• Rule two assigns the Sales Manager job role and the Resource abstract role to users with the Sales Manager resource role and an Assignment Status of Active.

Creating Rules to Automatically Provision Enterprise Roles to Oracle Fusion CRM Users: Worked Example

Follow the steps in this example to create rules that automatically provision Oracle Fusion CRM application users with the necessary enterprise roles. The provisioning is based on the resource role that you assign to a user.

In this example, you create a rule to provision users with the Sales Vice President resource role with the enterprise roles they need to perform their jobs.

Steps to Create an Autoprovisioning Rule

1. From the Navigator menu, click the Setup and Maintenance link located under the Tools heading.
2. On the Overview page All Tasks tab, search for the Manage HCM Role Provisioning Rules task.
3. Click the Go to Task button for the Manage HCM Role Provisioning Rules task.

   The Manage HCM Role Provisioning page appears.

4. Click the Create button.

   The Create Role Mapping page appears.

5. In the Mapping Name field enter a name, for example, Sales Vice President.
6. In the Conditions region, enter the resource role as a condition. In this example, you enter Sales Vice President in the Resource Role field.
7. Enter Active for Assignment Status.

   This additional condition ensures that the provisioned enterprise roles are automatically removed if the user is terminated.

8. In the Associated Roles region, click Add to add the enterprise roles. For this example, you add the following:

   • Sales Vice President

   • Resource

   Note

   Each CRM resource who is an employee must be provisioned with both the Resource and Employee abstract roles. You must create a separate rule that assigns the required Employee abstract role to all users who are employees. You must always provision the Resource role along with the appropriate job roles. This provisioning ensures that the user can be assigned work in your CRM application.

9. Make sure the Autoprovision option is selected for all the job roles.
10. Click Save and Close.

Enabling Sales Representatives to Obtain Microsoft Outlook Access to All Sales Accounts: Worked Example

On premises implementations of Oracle Fusion CRM can use this example as a template for creating a new job role that provides sales representatives with the ability to use Microsoft Outlook to access and copy information on all sales accounts.

Provisioning sales representatives with the Sales Representative job role provides the ability to use Microsoft Outlook to access and copy sales account information if they are on the sales account sales team. You are a member of the sales account sales team if you own the sales account or if someone else adds you to the sales team.

If you want to enable a special class of inside sales representatives to use Microsoft Outlook to access all sales accounts regardless of assignment, then you must:

1. Create a new Inside Sales Representative job role for this special class of sales representatives.

2. Create an Inside Sales Representative Duty role.

3. Inherit the Sales Party Management Duty role. This is the duty role that provides the functional and data permissions for the Microsoft Outlook integration.

4. Associate to the Inside Sales Rep job role to the new duty role.

5. Create the data security policy to provide this job role with the additional access you want.

After you have completed the setup outlined in this example, you must then provision the new job role to the inside sales representatives along with the regular Sales Representative job role. The steps for setting up autoprovisioning rules are outlined in related topics.

Create the Inside Sales Representative Job Role

1. Navigate to the Setup and Maintenance work area, search for the Manage Job Roles task, and click the Go to Task button.

   The Identity Manager - Delegated Administration page appears.

   Note

   If the application instead displays the Identity Manger - Self Service page, select the Administration link at the top right of the page to navigate there.

2. In the Roles Region on the right side of the screen, select the Create Role link.

   The Create Role region appears in the right hand pane of the tab.

   Enter the following in the Basic Role Information region:

   Field	Value	Comment
   Name	INSIDE_SALES_REP_JOB	This internal technical name must be unique and contain no spaces.
   Display Name	Inside Sales Representative
   Role Category Name	CRM - Job Roles

   
   
3. Save.

   The page displays a confirmation message that the role was created for you. You can now close the browser window.

Create a Duty Role for Assignment to the New Job Role

1. Navigate to the Setup and Maintenance work area, search for the Manage Duties task, and click the Go to Task button.

   The Oracle Entitlements Server page appears in a new browser window.

2. From the Application Name list on the Home tab, select crm.
3. Under the Application Roles heading, click New.

   The Untitled role creation page appears.

4. Enter the following:

   Field	Value	Comments
   Display Name	Inside Sales Representative Duty
   Role Name	INSIDE_SALES_REP_DUTY	This internal technical name must be unique and contain no spaces.
   Role Category	CRM_ENTERPRISE_DUTY

   
   
5. Save.

   The new Inside Sales Representative Duty is created for you.

Inherit the Sales Party Management Duty Role

On the Application Role Hierarchy tab of the Inside Sales Representative Duty role you just created, add the Sales Party Management Duty. This inherits all the functional and data access for the Microsoft Outlook integration normally assigned to sales representatives.

1. On the Application Role Hierarchy tab, make sure the Inherits link is selected.
2. Click the Add button.

   The Add a Role dialog appears.

3. Search for the Sales Party Management Duty role and select it from the search results.
4. Save.

Map the Inside Sales Representative Job Role to the Inside Sales Representative Duty Role

Now that you have created the duty role and added all the duty roles it inherits, you will associate the job role you created.

1. Select the External Role Mapping tab.
2. click theAdd button.

   TheAdd a Role dialog appears.

3. Search for the Inside Sales Representative job role and select it from the search results.
4. Save.

Create a New Data Security Policy to Provide Additional Access

The predefined data security policies for the Sales Party Management Duty you inherited permit sales representatives to view only sales accounts if they are on the sales account team. To provide Inside Sales Managers access to all sales accounts, you will create a new data security policy to permit this.

1. While viewing the duty role , click the Find Policies button.

   The Search Authorization Policies tab appears.

2. Select the Data Securitytab in the Policies For: region.
3. Click the New button.

   The Create Data Security Policy page appears.

4. On the General Information tab, enter the following information:

   Field	Value
   Name
   DB Resource	Trading Community Person
   Module	Trading Community Model

   
   
5. On the Roles tab and verify that the duty role you created is assigned to this policy.
6. Select the Rules tab and enter the following:
7. Select Multiple Values from the Row Set list of values.
8. Select the condition by clicking on the magnifying glass icon to launch the Pick a Set of Database Row dialog.
9. Select the Action tab and select the action by moving it from the Available Actions list to the Selected Actions list.

   Note

   Understanding which condition and action to select may require Service Administrator assistance.

10. Save.

Define Users for CRM

Creating Oracle Fusion CRM Application Users: Functional Overview

This topic outlines concepts that will help you understand and plan the creation of Oracle Fusion CRM applications users.

Types of Users That You Can Create

The types of users that are available to you differs for Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service implementations and on-premises implementations.

• On-premises implementations can use Oracle Identity Manager, an Oracle Fusion Middleware application, to create and provision enterprise roles to implementation users outside Oracle Fusion CRM applications.

• Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service implementations do not have access to Oracle Identity Manager, so you must create and provision implementation users within Oracle Fusion CRM. The term setup users distinguishes the implementation users created from within the Oracle Fusion CRM applications from those created in Oracle Identity Manager.

The following table lists the different user types. Because permissions granted to users depend on the enterprise roles you assign them, you are not restricted to the user types listed in the table.

Ways of Creating Oracle Fusion CRM Application Users

You can create Oracle Fusion CRM application users in multiple ways. You can:

• Create users individually in the user interface

  Use this method for creating implementation and sales administrator users and for creating application users unless the number of the number users you are creating is very large.

• Import users from a file

  Import users from a file using the file-based import feature only if you have a very large number. You cannot import implementation users because the import process requires you to import CRM resources.

• Load user records into the database tables

  If you are implementing CRM on premises and you are creating a large number of users, then you can load users into the application using a loader of your choice.

Tasks That Are Accomplished When You Create Users

When you create CRM implementation and application users, you are accomplishing multiple tasks at the same time, depending on the type of user. The following table lists the tasks:

Setting Up E-Mail Notifications for New Users

For each CRM user that you create, you must enter a unique e-mail address. By default, the application automatically sends an e-mail notification with the user name and temporary password to this address immediately after the user is created. Users then sign in and change their passwords.

If you do not want users to receive the notification e-mail right away because you are in the trial phase of your implementation project, then you can disable the automatic notification using the following steps:

1. Navigate to the Setup and Maintenance work area.

2. Search for the task Manage Enterprise HCM Information on the All Tasks tab of the Overview page.

3. Click the Go to Task button.

4. In the Enterprise page, click the Edit button, and select Update.

5. In the User and Role Provisioning Information region, set the Send User Name and Password option to No.

6. Click Done.

When users are ready to receive their temporary passwords, you can send all of the notifications at the same time, using the following steps:

1. In the Navigator menu, select Scheduled Processes under the Tools heading.

2. In the Scheduled Processes Overview page, click Schedule New Process.

3. In the Schedule New Process dialog box, make sure the Job option is selected for Type.

4. Enter Send User Name and Password E-Mail Notifications in the Name field.

5. Click OK.

6. In the Process Details window, click Submit.

7. Click Close.

Alternately, you can send a notification to an individual user:

1. While editing the user in the Create User or Edit User page, select the Send User Name and Password check box in the User Notification Preferences region.

Creating the Resource Reporting Hierarchy

The resource reporting hierarchy provides the basis for CRM data security. The resource reporting hierarchy need not mirror the formal reporting hierarchy, which is captured separately in the Oracle Fusion HCM application if it has been implemented.

You build a resource reporting hierarchy when you create CRM application users by specifying the manager for each user. If you are creating users one-by-one in the user interface, then you must start by creating the user at the top of the hierarchy and work your way down. If you are importing users using file-based import, then the order does not matter provided that all of your users are in the same file.

Creating Resource Organizations and the Resource Organization Hierarchy

In Oracle Fusion CRM, you must assign each manager that you create as a user with his or her own resource organization. All direct reports who are individual contributors inherit their manager's organization.

In Oracle Fusion CRM, resource organizations serve a limited purpose. Their names appear in the application's Resource Directory, which users can access to obtain information about their coworkers, and in social media interactions. Resource organizations are not used for work assignment.

The following screen capture shows the Resource Directory, which is available on the application Navigator. The resource organization names appear under each person's title.

The application automatically builds a resource organization hierarchy, using the resource reporting structure.

Suppose, for example, that your CRM enterprise includes sales and marketing departments that report to the Executive VP of Sales and Marketing and its members as follows:

• Mathew Fullerton, Executive VP Sales and Marketing

• Bob Doyle, Sales VP

• Mateo Lopez, Sales Manager

• Gabrielle Lee, Sales Manager

• Jillian Henderson, Sales Representative (reporting to Mateo Lopez)

• Joseph Kerr, Sales Analyst (reporting to Gabrielle Lee)

A diagram of the reporting hierarchy looks like the following:

Now, also suppose that you create the following resource organizations and assign them to the managers.

The application automatically builds the resource organization hierarchy, shown in the following figure, using the hierarchy of managers.

The resource organizations remain even if managers leave. You can reassign the resource organizations to their replacements.

The resource organization names do not have to reflect the names of departments. Departments are tracked along with employee records in the Oracle Fusion HCM application if it has been implemented. The resource organizations are not used in application security or to assign work to users. For example, you cannot include a resource organization on an opportunity sales team or as a territory owner.

Creating Oracle Fusion Human Resources Employee Records

When you create application users, you must include information that is used to create basic employee records for the Oracle Fusion HCM application. This requirement is part of the CRM application architecture. These records are used only if you are implementing this application now or plan to do so.

Creating Oracle Fusion CRM Application Users: Architectural Overview

This topic describes the different applications and application modules that you use when you create Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management (CRM) users. These include Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM), File-Based Data Import, Universal Messaging Service, and Oracle Identity Management, which is an Oracle Fusion Middleware application.

The following figure outlines the different application components that you use when you are creating and managing users:

• Creating users

  You can create CRM application users in one of three ways. Each method involves different application components.

  • To create users individually in the user interface, you select the Manage Users option in the application Navigator.

    The Create User page is part of the Oracle Fusion HCM application, but you are not required to purchase or to implement Oracle Fusion HCM. The core Oracle Fusion HCM features that are required to create and manage CRM users are provided with Oracle Fusion CRM.

  • To import users from a file, use the tasks in the setup task group Define File-Based Data Import. You can search for this task group from the Setup and Maintenance work area. You can use the File-Based Data Import task group, which is described in a separate topic, to import many application objects, including customer records, opportunities, and leads.

  • If you are implementing CRM on premises, then you can also create users by importing them using a loader of your choice. To use a loader, select Data Import under the Customer Data Management heading in the Navigator menu, or use the Define Trading Community Import task list in the Setup and Maintenance work area.

• Managing notifications

  When you create users using any of these methods, you can automatically send an e-mail notification with the user name and temporary password. The e-mails are sent by the User Messaging Service, a part of the Oracle Service-Oriented Architectures Suite, which is a separate Oracle Fusion Middleware application. If you are implementing your CRM application on premises, then a superuser can also manage the notifications and the notification templates from the User Messaging Service application.

• Managing users

  When you create users, basic user information is copied to Oracle Identity Management, which is a separate Oracle Fusion Middleware application. If you are implementing CRM on premises, then you can use Oracle Identity Management for user management. For example, you can use Oracle Identity Management to reset user passwords and manage the enterprise roles that provision users with the security settings they require to carry out their duties. On premises implementations can use Oracle Identity Management to create implementation users, but not CRM application users.

The following table provides a breakdown by task or component:

Creating Oracle Fusion CRM Application Users: Implementation Planning

This topic provides an overview of how to create Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application users and their resource organizations.

This topic covers:

• Creating the resource organization at the top of the CRM organizational hierarchy

• Creating the resource organizations that you must assign to each manager

• Creating the users

Prerequisites

Before you create CRM users you must:

• Make sure that all enterprise information has been set up.

• Complete the security setup. Make sure you have all the resource roles, enterprise roles, and autoprovisioning rules you need for the users you are creating.

Creating the Resource Organization at the Top of the CRM Hierarchy

Before you can create resource organizations for your users, you must create the top-level organization in your hierarchy.

To create the top-level organization, do the following:

1. Create the top-level organization as you would create any other resource organization by using the Manage Sales and Marketing Organizations task from the Setup and Maintenance work area.

2. Specify the resource organization that you created as the top of your sales and marketing hierarchy by using the Manage Resource Organization Hierarchies task from the Setup and Maintenance work area.

For more information, see the Creating the Top Level of the CRM Resource Organization Hierarchy: Worked Example help topic.

Creating Resource Organizations for Manager Users

If you are creating users individually in the user interface using the Create User page, then you can create the resource organizations while you are creating the users, or you can create them before using the Manage Sales and Marketing Organizations task from the Setup and Maintenance work area.

If you are importing users, then you must have the resource organizations created before you import any data.

For more information, see the Creating Resource Organizations for Oracle Fusion CRM: Worked Example help topic.

Creating Users

This section provides an overview of the different methods of creating Oracle Fusion CRM users:

• To create users individually in the user interface:

  Navigate to the Manager Users work area, which is available as a selection on the application's Navigator.

  The Create User page, displays up to six regions, depending on your release version, your enterprise defaults, and the enterprise roles assigned to you. The following screen capture shows the page.

  
  
  

  The following table describes the regions.

  
  

  Create User Page Region	Description
  Personal Details	You are required to enter the user's last name, hire date, and a unique e-mail address for the initial e-mail notification.
  User Details	Enter the user name that the user will use to sign in.
  User Notification Preferences	Select the option in this region if you want to send the user name and password to the user you are creating. This region appears only if you decided to turn off automatic notifications by setting the Send User Name and Password option to No while editing the enterprise information using the Manage Enterprise HCM Information task.
  Employment Information	The information you enter in this region is used to create the basic employee record for use with the Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) application. Only the required fields are relevant to CRM.
  Resource Information	Make entries in this region if you are creating a CRM application user who is a CRM resource. Leave this region blank for setup users who are not members of the CRM organization. You must enter a resource role and a manager for every CRM application user, because access to application data depends on the resource hierarchy. For every user with a manager resource role, you must enter a resource organization. The resource role you select determines the job roles that the user will be assigned when you click the Autoprovision Roles button
  Roles	Clicking the Autoprovision Roles button provisions the user with the enterprise roles that provide access to the application functions and data. If you are importing resources from a file, then the autoprovisioning is done automatically.

• To import users from a file:

  Use the Manage File Import Activities task from the Setup and Maintenance work area, and create an import activity. To import users, you must select the Employee Resource object when creating the import activity. Before you can import users, you must:

  • Understand what attributes are required, and what values are permitted.

  • Create a mapping between the user data that you are importing and the attributes in the application.

  Refer to Define File-Based Data Import topics for more information on how to import users and other data.

• If you are implementing CRM on premises, then you can load user data into the application by using a loader of your choice.

  Use the Import Worker Users task from the Setup and Maintenance work area.

Creating Oracle Fusion CRM Application Users: Special Considerations

This topic summarizes the main differences between creating users when you are implementing Oracle Fusion CRM on premises and in the Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service.

The following table summarizes the main differences.

Creating Resource Organizations for Oracle Fusion CRM: Worked Example

In Oracle Fusion CRM, you must assign a resource organization to each manager user that you create. All direct reports of that manager inherit the organization. You can create resource organizations before you create users according to the steps in this example.

Steps to Create a Resource Organization

1. Navigate to the Setup and Maintenance work area, and search for the Manage Sales and Marketing Organizations task.
2. Click the Go to Task button.

   The Manage Sales and Marketing Organization page appears.

3. Click the Create button.

   The Create Organization: Select Creation Method page appears.

4. Select Option 2: Create New Organization.
5. Click Next.

   The Create Organization: Enter Basic Information page appears.

6. Enter the name of the organization, for example, Sales.
7. In the Organization Usages region, click Add Row (green plus sign) to specify whether the organization is going to be used as a sales organization, a marketing organization, or both.

   Specifying a usage determines whether the organization is visible when creating a sales manager or a marketing manager.

8. Click Finish.

Creating the Top Level of the CRM Resource Organization Hierarchy: Worked Example

Use this example as a guide for creating the resource organization at the top of the resource organization hierarchy. You must complete this setup before you create users.

When you create users who are managers in the Oracle Fusion CRM organization, you must assign a resource organization to each of them. The application automatically builds a resource organization hierarchy for you from the management hierarchy that you create.

Before you can create the resource organizations for the managers, you must create the top-level resource organization in your hierarchy following the steps in this example.

Creating the top-level resource organization in the resource organization hierarchy involves the following:

1. Creating the resource organization

2. Specifying the organization as the top of your sales and marketing hierarchy

Creating the Resource Organization at the Top of the Hierarchy

1. Search for the Manage Sales and Marketing Organizations task in the Setup and Maintenance work area.
2. Click the Go to Task button.

   The Create Organization: Select Creation Method page appears.

3. Click Create and select Option 2: Create New Organization.
4. Click Next.
5. Enter Global Organization (or another name of your choice) in the Name field.
6. In the Organization Usages region, click Add Row to add Sales Organization and Marketing Organization.

   This step identifies how the organization is being used.

7. Click Finish.

Specify the Organization as the Top of Your Sales and Marketing Hierarchy

1. Search for the Manage Resource Organization Hierarchies task in the Setup and Maintenance work area.
2. Click the Go to Task button.

   The Manage Resource Organization Hierarchies page appears.

3. Click Search.
4. In the Search Results, select the Sales and Marketing Organization Hierarchy link.

   You will associate the resource organization you created with the predefined hierarchy type.

5. From the Action menu at the top right-hand corner of the page, select Edit This Hierarchy Version.

   The Edit Organization Hierarchy Version page appears.

6. Click the Add button in the Global Sales and Marketing Organization Hierarchy region.

   The Add Tree Node window appears.

7. Click Search.

   The Search Node window appears.

8. Click Search.
9. Select Global Organization.
10. Click OK.

    The application returns you to the Edit Organization Hierarchy Version page.

11. Click Done.

Creating Setup Users for Oracle Fusion CRM: Worked Example

Follow the steps in this example to create a setup user, an application user with the privileges to set up application security, make changes to the enterprise setup, create other users, and complete most setup tasks. Because setup users are not created as CRM resources, they cannot view CRM data or reports and cannot be assigned to sales teams and territories.

Creating a Setup User Overview

Setup users do not work in the CRM organization and so should not appear in the CRM application directory or be available as resources for assignment to sales teams. For this reason, you do not specify a resource role or any other resource information for this type of user.

To provision these users with the required Application Implementation Consultant and IT Security Manager job roles, you must create a provisioning rule that is triggered not by the resource role assigned to the user, but by some other attribute. In this example, you will trigger the rule on the user's job.

To create the setup user, you will:

1. Sign in as a user with implementation privileges. This can be another setup user.

2. Create the job that will trigger the rule, Customer Administrator in this example.

3. Synchronize the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory with any changes to the security setups by running a scheduled process.

   The LDAP directory enables quick access by CRM Fusion Applications to security settings, so it is a good idea to update the directory to make sure it reflects all the latest security changes.

4. Create the provisioning rule to provision the required enterprise roles to users with the Customer Administrator job.

5. Create a rule to provision the Employee abstract role to all employee users. This is a one-time setup, so you can ignore this step if you created the rule previously.

6. Create the user.

Creating a Job

To create the job:

1. Navigate to the Setup and Maintenance work area.
2. On the All Tasks tab search for the Manage Job task.
3. Click the Go to Task button for the Manage Job task.

   The Manage Job page appears.

4. Click the Create button.
5. Enter a name for job that will be displayed for selection in the Create User page. For example, Customer Administrator.
6. In the Code field, enter an internal code for the job, for example, CUSTADMIN. The code must be uppercase with no spaces.
7. For Job Set, select Common.
8. Click Next.

   The Create Job: Details page appears.

9. Click Submit.

Updating the LDAP Directory

To update the LDAP directory:

1. Select the Scheduled Processes link in the Navigator.
2. Click the Schedule New Process button.

   The Schedule New Process window appears.

3. Select Retrieve Latest LDAP Changes from the Name list.
4. Click OK.
5. Click Submit.

Creating the Role Provisioning Rule for the Setup User

To set up the provisioning rule that automatically assigns the appropriate enterprise roles:

1. Navigate to the Setup and Maintenance work area.
2. On the All Tasks tab search for the Manage HCM Role Provisioning Rules task.
3. Click the Go to Task button for the Manage HCM Role Provisioning Rulestask.

   The Manage HCM Role Provisioning page appears.

4. Click the Create button.
5. In theMapping Name field enter a name, for example, Customer Administrator.
6. In the Conditions region, enter the job you created earlier as a condition. In this example, you would enter Customer Administrator in the Job field.
7. Enter Active for Assignment Status. This additional condition ensures that the provisioned enterprise roles are automatically removed if the user is terminated.
8. In the Associated Roles region, use the Add button to add the following job roles:

   • Application Implementation Consultant

   • IT Security Manager

9. Make sure the Autoprovision option is selected for both job roles.
10. Click Save and Close.

Creating the Role Provisioning Rule for All Employees

You must create one rule to provision all users who are employees with the Employee abstract role. This is a one-time-only setup.

To create the provisioning rule for employees:

1. Navigate to the Setup and Maintenance work area.
2. On the All Tasks tab search for the Manage HCM Role Provisioning Rules task.
3. Click the Go to Task button for the Manage HCM Role Provisioning Rulestask.

   The Manage HCM Role Provisioning page appears.

4. Click the Create button.
5. In theMapping Name field enter the rule name, for example, Employee.
6. In the Conditions region, select Employee from the Assignment Type field.
7. Select Active for Assignment Status. This additional condition ensures that the role is automatically removed if the user is terminated.
8. In the Associated Roles region, use the Add Row button to add the Employee role.
9. Make sure the Autoprovision option is selected for the role.
10. Click Save and Close.

Creating the Setup User

To create the setup user:

1. On the Navigator select the Manage Users link under the Manager Resources heading.

   The Manage Users page appears.

2. Click the Create button.

   The Create User page appears.

3. In the Personal Details region, enter the following fields:
   

   Field	Entry
   Last Name	Enter the user's last name. Entry is required.
   First Name	Optionally, enter the user's first name.
   E-Mail	Enter a unique e-mail address. This e-mail address is used to send the initial notification to the user and can be changed later.

4. In the User Details region, enter the user name. If you leave the User Name field blank, the application creates a user name based on the entries you already made.
5. If the User Notification region appears and the Send User Name and Password is unselected, then select it if you want to send the e-mail notification with the login and password to the user when you save the record.

   If this region is not present in the page, then the notification will be sent automatically.

6. In the Employment Information region, enter the following:
   

   Field	Entry
   Person Type	Select Employee. Do not select Contingent Workerbecause enterprise role provisioning is based on the employee's job, a field that appears only for employees.
   Legal Employer	Select the legal employer created as part of enterprise setup. If you are implementing in the Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service, then the legal employer was set up for you based on the information that you provided when you signed up for the service.
   Business Unit	Select the business unit created as part of enterprise setup. If you are implementing in the Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service, then the business unit was set up for you based on the information that you provided when you signed up for the service.
   Job	Select the job you created earlier.

7. Click the Autoprovisioning Roles button.

   The Roles region should now display the following roles:

   • Application Implementation Consultant

   • IT Security Manager

   • Employee

8. Click Save and Close.

Define Automated Governance, Risk, and Performance Controls

Segregation of Duties: Explained

Segregation of duties (SOD) separates activities such as approving, recording, processing, and reconciling results so an enterprise can more easily prevent or detect unintentional errors and willful fraud. SOD policies, called access control policies in Application Access Controls Governor (AACG), exert both preventive and detective effects.

SOD policies constrain duties across roles so that unethical, illegal, or damaging activities are less likely. SOD policies express constraints among roles. Duty role definitions respect segregation of duties policies.

Application Access Controls Governor

You manage, remediate, and enforce access controls to ensure effective SOD using the Application Access Controls Governor (AACG) product in the Oracle Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) suite.

AACG applies the SOD policies of the Oracle Fusion Applications security reference implementation using the AACG Oracle Fusion Adapter.

AACG is integrated with Oracle Identity Management (OIM) in Oracle Fusion Applications to prevent SOD control violations before they occur by ensuring SOD compliant user access provisioning. SOD constraints respect provisioning workflows. For example, when provisioning a Payables role to a user, the SOD policy that ensures no user is entitled to create both an invoice and a payment prevents the conflicting roles from being provisioned. AACG validates the request to provision a user with roles against SOD policies and provides a remediating response such as approval or rejections if a violation is raised.

Use AACG to for the following.

• Define SOD controls at any level of access such as in the definition of an entitlement or role.

• Simulate what-if SOD scenarios to understand the effect of proposed SOD control changes.

• Use the library of built-in SOD controls provided as a security guideline.

Managing Segregation of Duties

SOD policies express incompatible entitlement or incompatible access points into an application. In GRC, an access point is the lowest level access for a particular application. In GRC, entitlement is a grouping of access points. As a security guideline, group the lowest level access points or define the SOD policy at the access level causing the least amount of change. Business activities are enabled at access points. In Oracle Fusion Applications, the hierarchy of access points in descending levels is users, roles, and entitlement.

Remediating Segregation of Duties Policy Violations

The risk tolerance of your enterprise determines what duties must be segregated and how to address violations.

AACG assists in remediation of violations with a guided simulation that identifies corrective action. You determine the exact effects of role and entitlement changes prior to putting them into production, and adjust controls as needed.

For information on managing segregation of duties, see the Oracle Application Access Controls Governor Implementation Guide and Oracle Application Access Controls Governor User's Guide.

Segregation of Duties in the Security Reference Implementation: Explained

Segregation of duties (SOD) is a special case of function security enforcement. A segregation of duties conflict occurs when a single user is provisioned with a role or role hierarchy that authorizes transactions or operations resulting in the possibility of intentional or inadvertent fraud.

The predefined SOD policies result in duty separation with no inherent violations. For example, an SOD policy prevents a user from entitlement to create both payables invoices and payables payments.

However, the most common duties associated with some job and abstract roles could conflict with the predefined segregation of duties. A predefined role hierarchy or job or abstract role may include such common duties that are incompatible according to a segregation of duties policy. For example, the predefined Accounts Payable Supervisor job role includes the incompatible duties: Payables Invoice Creation Duty and Payables Payment Creation Duty.

Every single predefined duty role is free from an inherent segregation of duties violation. For example, no duty role violates the SOD policy that prevents a user from entitlement to both create payables invoices and payables payments.

Jobs in the reference implementation may contain violations against the implemented policies and require intervention depending on your risk tolerance, even if you define no additional jobs or SOD policies.

Provisioning enforces segregation of duties policies. For example, provisioning a role to a user that inherits a duty role with entitlement to create payables invoices enforces the segregation of duties policy applied to that duty role and ensures the user is not also entitled to create a payables payment. When a role inherits several duty rules that together introduce a conflict, the role is provisioned with a violation being raised in the Application Access Controls Governor (AACG). If two roles are provisioned to a user and introduce a segregation of duties violation, the violation is raised in AACG.

Aspects of segregation of duties policies in the security reference implementation involve the following.

• Application Access Controls Governor (AACG)

• Conflicts defined in segregation of duties policies

• Violations of the conflicts defined in segregation of duties policies

Application Access Controls Governor (AACG)

AACG is a component of the Oracle Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) suite of products where segregation of duties policies are defined.

• Define SOD controls at any level of access such as in the definition of an entitlement or role.

• Simulate what-if SOD scenarios to understand the effect of proposed SOD control changes.

• Use the library of built-in SOD controls provided as a security guideline.

Your risk tolerance determines how many duties to segregate. The greater the segregation, the greater the cost to the enterprise in complexity at implementation and during maintenance. Balance the cost of segregation with the reduction of risk based on your business needs.

Conflicts

An intra-role conflict occurs when a segregation of duties policy expresses constraints within the construct of a single role (entitlement and duties) that creates violations.

Violations

A segregation of duties violation occurs when a policy is defined that allows a segregation of duties conflict to occur.

Notifications report conflicts to the requester of the transaction that raised the violation. Oracle Identity Management (OIM) shows the status of role requests indicating if a segregation of duties violation has occurred.

For information on configuring audit policies, see the Oracle Fusion Applications Administrator's Guide.

For more information on managing segregation of duties, see the Oracle Application Access Controls Governor Implementation Guide and Oracle Application Access Controls Governor User's Guide.

Defining Segregation of Duties Policies: Points To Consider

Segregation of duties (SOD) policies express incompatibilities enforced to control access in defined contexts.

In Oracle Fusion Applications, SOD policies protect against the following incompatibilities.

• Privilege X is incompatible with privilege Y

• Role A is incompatible with role B

• Any privileges in role A are incompatible with any privileges in role B.

• Privilege X is incompatible with any privileges in role B.

The following examples of SOD policies illustrate incompatible entitlement.

• No user should have access to Bank Account Management and Supplier Payments duties.

• No user should have access to Update Supplier Bank Account and Approve Supplier Invoice entitlement.

Data Contexts

You can extend SOD policies to control access to specific data contexts.

For example, no single individual must be able to source a supplier in a business unit and approve a supplier invoice in the same business unit.

Exclusion and Inclusion Conditions

SOD policies may include exclusion conditions to narrow the SOD scope and reduce false positive violations, or inclusion conditions to broaden the scope.

Conditions apply to access points globally, to policies, or to access paths defined by policies. Access path conditions can exclude a user from a role, an Oracle Fusion Applications entitlement from a role, or a permission from an Oracle Fusion Applications entitlement.

The following global exclusion conditions are predefine in Oracle Fusion Applications and available when creating SOD policies.

• User Status

• User Name

• Enterprise Role

• Action

• Business Unit

• Within Same Business Unit

Enforcement

Oracle Fusion Applications enforces SOD policies under the following circumstances.

• When granting entitlement to a role

• When provisioning a role to a user

For information on managing segregation of duties, see Oracle Application Access Controls Governor Implementation Guide and Oracle Application Access Controls Governor User's Guide.

A single SOD policy can include entitlement from multiple instances of a single enterprise resource planning environment. For example, one SOD policy is enforced in implementation, test, and production instances of Oracle Fusion Applications.

Managing Segregation of Duties Risks and Violations: Critical Choices

You assess and balance the cost of duty segregation against reduction of risk based on the requirements of your enterprise.

The types of people who resolve SOD conflicts include the following.

• Administrator of an external program such as the Procurement Administrator for the supplier portal or the Partner Manager for the PRM Program

• Senior executive spanning multiple organizations in an enterprise with opposing interests

• Risk management professional implementing an Oracle Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) initiative

  • Predefines a set of conditions and informs access provisioning staff to approve requests and prove the exception based on certain conditions

  • Allows defining rules to route SOD violations for approval

You view and respond to risks and violations in the Application Access Controls Governor (AACG).

You may wish to override an SOD violation. For example, the Accounts Payable Supervisor includes incompatible duties to create both invoices and payments. When you provision this job role to a user, you may waive the violation in the AACG. You may waive the violation for the currently provisioned user, for the SOD policy that raised the violation, or for the SOD policy within a particular data set, such as a business unit.

The risk tolerance of your enterprise guides how you respond to conflicts. For example, a user may be provisioned with both the role of Order Manager and Shipping Agent. The Order Manger role entitles the user to enter orders, which could result in exploitation when filling shipping quotas. You can remove the entitlement to enter orders that the Order Manger job role inherits from the Orchestration Order Scheduling Duty role. Or you could segregate the shipping and order entry duties by defining an SOD policy that allows a user to have either job role but not both.

False Positives

False positives can be SOD policy violations that are not actually violations, or are violations within your risk tolerance and therefore do not require corrective action.

You can reduce false positives by the following methods.

• Define exclusion conditions that can be applied to individual or groups of policies.

• Define logically complex SOD policies that enforce more exacting specifications.

• Determine whether conflicts should be prevented, monitored, or subjected to approval during provisioning.

Path Level Detection

Conflict analysis detects a user's multiple paths to one or more conflicting access points.

For example, a user may be able to reach a single access point through one or more roles, or by one entitlement leading to another through submenus to a function that represents a risk. The resulting conflict path shows if the conflict is generated by inappropriate role provisioning or configuration of applications. The audit shows the paths from any number of users to any number of access points involved in conflicts, which lets you visualize the root cause and remediate effectively.

AACG assigns one or more users to review all paths involved in a given conflict so that the entire conflict can be addressed in a coherent way.

Waiving or Accepting Violations

AACG lets you accept or waive a violation. Your reasons may include that you accept the risk or will define compensating controls.

A waiver may apply to the current user, constraint, or constraint within a dimension such as the business unit.

Resolving Conflicts

The risk tolerance of the enterprise determines whether a segregation of duties conflict must be removed from the security reference implementation.

The following approaches resolve conflicts.

• Change the segregation of duties policy.

• Ensure a job role does not contain incompatible duties.

• Define data security policies that restrict authorized access by incompatible duties.

Changing a segregation of duties policy may not be possible in most cases. For example, a policy that segregates creation of payables invoice from making payables payments should be preserved, even if the Accounts Payables Manager job role includes a duty role for each activity. To prevent an accounts payables manager from being authorized to perform both duties, or from being authorized to make payables payments to self and direct reports, the Accounts Payables Manager job role must be changed. The security implementation can be changed to include two job roles that segregate the incompatible duties. Added data security policy grants can restrict the access to at risk data.

For information on managing segregation of duties, see the Oracle Application Access Controls Governor Implementation Guide and Oracle Application Access Controls Governor User's Guide.

Role Provisioning and Segregation of Duties: How They Work Together

Segregation of duties (SOD) checks occur when roles are assigned to users. The checks are based on Oracle Application Access Controls Governor (AACG) policies in Oracle Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC). The Oracle Identity Management (OIM) integration includes predefined routing rules for remediation in the Manage IT Security business process.

External users such as suppliers or partners need to be provisioned with roles to facilitate access to parent company interfaces and data. The process by which such provisioning requests are approved in Oracle Fusion Applications helps explain the request flows and possible outcomes.

The figure shows the role provisioning request flow. OIM uses AACG to check segregation of duties violations.

Tables

A supplier or partner requests admission to a program using an implementation of the Supplier Portal Submission. The submission is captured in one or both of the following tables in advance of approving or rejecting the supplier or partner.

• Oracle Fusion Trading Community Model

• Interface Staging

Oracle Fusion Applications collects the employee names for the supplier or partner company at the time the company submits its request to join the program so that all employees accessing Oracle Fusion Applications on behalf of the supplier or partner are provisioned.

AACG in the Oracle Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) suite is certified to synchronize with the policy and identity stores for all pillars or partitions of Oracle Fusion Applications and integrated with the Oracle Fusion Applications security approach to roll up entitlements (by means of duty roles) to the roles that are provisioned to internal users. SOD policies can be defined and enforced at any level of authorization. For external users, SOD policies use attribute information stored in the Trading Community Model tables.

OIM and the SPML Client

Enterprise business logic may qualify the requester and initiate a role provisioning request by invoking the Services Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) client module, as may occur during onboarding of internal users with Human Capital Management (HCM), in which case the SPML client submits an asynchronous SPML call to OIM. Or OIM handles the role request by presenting roles for selection based on associated policies.

OIM recognizes the role provisioning request and initiates a call to AACG.

OIM apprises the SPML client of the current state of the role provisioning request as SOD_CHECK_IN_PROGRESS.

OIM stores the SOD check result as part of OIM audit data.

OIM apprises SPML client of the current state of the SPML request. The provisioning is either still in progress with segregation of duties being checked, or conflicts were found. If conflicts exist, AACG rejects the request and notifies the application.

In the absence of an SOD exception, OIM provisions all relevant users.

OIM provides AACG with the details of SOD exception approval workflow. AACG audits the outcome for use in future detective controls and audit processes.

Oracle Application Access Controls Governor

AACG may respond with the following.

• Roles may be provisioned to the external user or its employees because no SOD conflict is found

• SOD conflict is found and request is denied because the relevant SOD policy is to be strictly enforced and no exception approval should be allowed

• SOD conflict is found and the exception to the policy is allowed, so the request goes through additional processing, such as an approval process.

Supplier or Partner Relationship Management responds to an SOD exception by updating Trading Community Model tables with the current state. An enterprise may elect to implement a landing pad that offers external users a means of addressing the SOD problem by providing more information or withdrawing the request.

SOD violation checking occurs during role implementation and provisioning, and can be turned on or off if AACG is provisioned and enabled as part of the Oracle Fusion Applications deployment.

Segregation of Duties Exception Resolution or Approval Workflow

Depending upon status, OIM kicks off an auditable SOD exception resolution workflow. Resolution can be conditional based on approval or requirements such as contracts being met.

If one of the paths for exception resolution is to get an approval, then the SOD exception resolution drives the approval using AMX. Standard AMX rules, not business rules, resolve the approval for the SOD exception, including the following.

• Organizational hierarchies

• Multiple mandatory and optional approvers

• Rerouting and approval delegation

The approver resolution uses AMX Rules Designer to access various user attributes and organizational hierarchies managed in Oracle Fusion Applications repositories. This information is typically not available in OIM or the LDAP identity store repository. Enterprises can define additional approval rules using AMX Thin Client.

The SOD Exception Approver gets a notification through supported channels that a new request is awaiting approval. The approver signs in to the global SOA federated worklist application that aggregates all pending worklist items for the user from all Oracle Fusion applications and logical partitions or pillars of applications. The SOD exception approval tasks show up in the same list.

The SOD exception approval task shows the details of the SPML request and SOD Provisioning results in a page rendered by OIM. The approver may take one of the following actions.

• Approve the request as it is

• Reject the request

If the approver approves the request, OIM sends an SOD_REMEDIATION_APPROVED status to the SPML client.

If the approver rejects the request, OIM sends an SOD_REMEDIATION_REJECTED status to the SPML client. The provisioning request is considered completed with a failure outcome and the external users is notified. Oracle Fusion Applications updates the Trading Community Model tables with the rejected status

Remediation Task Assignments

The SOD remediation tasks are assigned based on the role being requested.

1. If the role requested is Chief Financial Officer, the SOD remediation task is assigned to the IT Security Manager role.

2. If the SOD violation results from a policy where the SOD control tag is the Information Technology Management business process and the control priority is 1, the SOD remediation task is assigned to Application Administrator role.

3. In all other scenarios, the SOD remediation task is assigned to the Controller role.

For more information about configuring audit policies, see the Oracle Fusion Applications Administrator's Guide.

For information on managing segregation of duties, see the Oracle Application Access Controls Governor Implementation Guide and Oracle Application Access Controls Governor User's Guide.

Creating Partner User Accounts: Explained

When you create a partner user, you enable the partner member to access and use the deploying company's resources for working on assigned tasks. You also assign job and security roles to the partner member's user profile and specify the organization to which the new user needs to belong.

Assigning Job and Security Roles to Partner Users

Every partner user needs to have an assigned job role. This job role can be used to create security roles for the user. Based on the security roles you assign, the user can access applications, locations, and data within the deploying company. You may choose to assign security roles automatically to a user; you can also assign additional security roles individually if needed.

Assigning Partner Users to Organizations

While assigning non-manager partner users to organizations, you can either select an organization or a manager. Once you select an organization, the manager of the selected organization becomes the new user's manager. Similarly, once you select a manager, the new user automatically becomes a member of the organization to which the manager belongs.

Assigning Manager-Level Partner Users to Organizations

If the role of the new user is that of a manager, you need to assign the new user to an organization even after specifying a manager. This is because you granted the new user a managerial role, and you now need to specify the organization that the new user needs to manage. You can either select an organization from the list of available organizations, or you can create a new one if required.

Define Approval Management for Customer Relationship Management

Approval Management: Highlights

Use approval management to determine the policies that apply to approval workflows for particular business objects such as expense reports. For example, you can specify levels of approval for expense reports over a particular amount, to reflect your own corporate policies. You also determine the groups of users who act on these workflow tasks, for example, the chain of approvers for expense reports.

Approval management is fully described in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Modeling and Implementation Guide for Oracle Business Process Management. Though the concepts described there apply also to Oracle Fusion Applications, the only setup relevant to Oracle Fusion Applications involves approval groups and task configuration. Customization of approval workflows themselves is described in the Oracle Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide.

Overview

• Approval management is an extension of the human workflow services of Oracle SOA Suite. Refer to the Oracle Fusion Middleware Modeling and Implementation Guide for Oracle Business Process Management.
  See: Introduction to Approval Management
  See: Understanding Approval Management Concepts

Approval Groups and Task Configuration

• An approval group consists of a name and a predefined set of users configured to act on a task in a certain pattern. Refer to the Oracle Fusion Middleware Modeling and Implementation Guide for Oracle Business Process Management.
  See: Administering Approval Groups
• Task configuration involves managing policies that control approval flows. Refer to the Oracle Fusion Middleware Modeling and Implementation Guide for Oracle Business Process Management.
  See: Using Task Configuration
• To configure a predefined approval policy, select the predefined rule set and click the Edit task icon button.
• To disable a predefined rule set, select the Ignore this participant check box for that rule set.
• To edit the rules within a predefined rule set, you can insert, update, or delete from the seeded rules as needed while in edit mode.
• You can configure a specific rule to automatically approve without being sent to any approver. Modify the routing for that rule so that it is sent to the initiator (which means the requestor is the approver), set the Auto Action Enabled option to True, and enter APPROVE in the Auto Action field.

Customization

• You can optionally customize predefined approval workflows, for example add post-approval activities or additional stages. Refer to the Oracle Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide.
  See: Customizing and Extending SOA Components

Define Help Configuration

Define Help Configuration: Overview

The Define Help Configuration task list contains tasks that let you set up and maintain Oracle Fusion Applications Help for all users. Use the Set Help Options task to determine if certain aspects of Oracle Fusion Applications Help are available to users and to control how aspects of the help site work. Use the Assign Help Text Administration Duty and Manage Help Security Groups tasks to set up customization of help content.

After performing the help configuration tasks, you can review the predefined help and consider whether to add or customize any content. You can also customize help that is embedded in the application, for example hints and help windows, using other tools such as Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Composer.

Use the Setup and Maintenance work area to access the tasks in the Define Help Configuration task list.

Help Feature Choices and Help Options: Points to Consider

Help feature choices on the Configure Offerings page in the Setup and Maintenance work area control the look and behavior of Oracle Fusion Applications Help, and also determine which help options are available. Help options are setup options on the Set Help Options page.

Local Installation of Help

Select the Local Installation of Help feature choice so that the Define Help Configuration task list appears in your implementation project, and you can select two additional features (Access to Internet-Based Help Features and Help Customization) to control the fields available on the Set Help Options page.

Access to Internet-Based Help Features

Select this feature choice to provide users access to features that involve navigation to sites on the Web. If you select this feature choice, then the Web Sites Available from Help Site section is available on the Set Help Options page. For Oracle Cloud, always leave this feature choice selected so that your users can access the Cloud Learning Center.

Help Customization

Select the Help Customization feature choice if you intend to customize predefined help or add your own files to help. For example, you can add internal policies or procedures as help, and Oracle User Productivity Kit content, if any. Only users with job roles containing the Application Help Text Administration duty role have access to customize help.

If you select this feature choice, then the Custom Help Security feature choice is available, as well as all these sections on the Set Help Options page:

• Custom Help

• User Productivity Kit

• Privacy Statement

Custom Help Security

Select this feature choice if you want certain help files to be available only to a restricted set of users. You can define the user groups allowed to view corresponding help files. Do not select this feature choice if you do not have this requirement, because the feature can have an impact on performance.

If you select the Custom Help Security feature choice, then the Manage Help Security Groups task is available in the Define Help Configuration task list in your implementation project. There are no help options associated with this feature choice.

Administering Collaboration Features and Announcements in Help: Points to Consider

Announcements and collaboration features (discussions, ratings and comments) allow users to share information regarding help and the subjects that particular help files cover. The collaboration features are also used elsewhere in Oracle Fusion Applications. Discussions may not be available in Oracle Cloud implementations.

Use the Set Help Options page in the Setup and Maintenance work area to enable the announcements and discussions features and to set options about ratings. When administering these features, consider the purpose of each feature and points that are specific to Oracle Fusion Applications Help.

Announcements

Use announcements to broadcast information to all users of your help site. You can provide information about help, for example new custom help that was recently added, or about anything that users should take note of, for example a change in company policy. Announcements can appear on any of the tabs on the home page of Oracle Fusion Applications Help. You can target specific user groups by posting announcements to specific tabs, for example, posting information related to implementation to the Functional Setup tab.

Only users with the Application Help Text Administration duty role have access to the Manage Announcements icon button in the Announcements sections. They can create, edit, and delete announcements for the tab that they are on, and set the date range for when each announcement is to be displayed.

Discussions

Users can use discussions to post questions or comments about subjects covered in specific help files. For example, after reading help on expense reports, users might have questions or comments about company policies or processes for expenses. Other users who later access this help file would benefit from the information in the discussion.

You can set a help option to enable discussions. Each help file would contain a Discuss link that all users can use to read discussions about that file. They can also start a discussion topic or post to existing topics. These discussions are visible only to users in your enterprise.

Only users with the appropriate administrator role can moderate discussions. For more information on granting the administrator role on the discussions server, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Portal.

Ratings and Comments

Users can rate any help file on a five star system and provide feedback about the content. This information is helpful to other users in deciding which help file to open. Help files with a higher average rating are listed first in help windows, and in the help listings you see as you browse using the help navigators.

The scope of ratings and reviews is limited to your enterprise.

Creating Help Security Groups: Worked Example

This example demonstrates how to create a help security group to define a set of job roles that have access to help. The help security group can then be assigned to particular help files so that only users with any of the defined roles have access to the help.

The following table summarizes key decisions for this scenario.

Define a help security group and assign a duty role to the group.

1. From the Setup and Maintenance work area, find the Manage Help Security Groups task and click Go to Task.
2. On the Manage Help Security Groups page, add a new row.
3. Complete the fields, as shown in this table. Leave the start and end dates blank.

   Field	Value
   Help Security Group	HR
   Meaning	HR Only
   Description	Viewing by HR specialists only
   Display Sequence	1

   
   
4. Click Save.
5. With your new help security group selected, go to the Associated Roles section and add a new row.
6. Select PER_HUMAN_RESOURCE_SPECIALIST as the role name.
7. Click Save and Close.

   You have created a new lookup code for the Help Security Groups lookup type, which is a standard lookup. The lookup code has the name, meaning, and description that you defined for the help security group.

   You have also created a data security policy for the help database resource, specifying that the Human Resource Specialist role can view help that is defined with the HR security group. If you go to the Manage Database Resources and Policies page and find the database resource, or object, ATK_KR_TOPICS, then you can see the policy for the Human Resource Specialist role, with the condition that the column name, SECURITY_CODE, is equal to the value HR.

Help File Customization: Overview

If you have the appropriate job roles, then you can customize the help files in the help site. Use the Manage Custom Help page to maintain both predefined and custom help files. You can create, duplicate, edit, and delete custom files, or set their status to Active or Inactive. For predefined files, you can only duplicate them or set their status. For each help file, predefined or custom, use help locations to determine where the help file appears in the application and in the help site. You have various options in how you add custom help, for example by uploading a file or specifying a URL.

There are various ways to access help customization.

• Many help files can be accessed from help windows in the application. If you want to customize help in the context of a help window, for example create a custom help file and add a link to it from a specific help window, then start by opening that help window. When you click the Manage Custom Help link, you go to the Manage Custom Help page, and the help location fields are automatically populated with values that correspond to the help window. This way you can easily select existing files to add to the same help location, and when you create a new file, the same help location appears by default.

• Open the Manage Custom Help page directly from the home page of Oracle Fusion Applications Help or from search result pages.

• To edit a specific file, you can either find it in the Manage Custom Help page, or open the file itself and click the Edit link.

• Likewise, you can find glossary terms in the Manage Custom Help page, or click the Glossary link in the global area to open the Glossary tab, search for the term, and click Edit.

If your enterprise has purchased Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK) content, then your administrator can also add a UPK item to the Help menu in the global area of Oracle Fusion Applications. When users select this menu item, they access UPK content specific to the page that they are on.

Help Types: Explained

Oracle Fusion Applications Help contains various types of help content, including demos, examples, FAQs, glossary terms, help topics, and PDF guides. A business process or product can be supported by some or all of these help types.

Demo

Demos are Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK) topics that visually demonstrate how to use the application to complete a short task or portion of a task. Demos can also provide an introduction to complex dashboards and work areas.

Example

Examples provide real use cases of features to illustrate how and when to use the feature, or scenarios to illustrate abstract concepts. Worked examples show exactly what you need to do to achieve a specific result, emphasizing decisions that you make and values that you enter.

FAQ

FAQs, or frequently asked questions, provide brief answers to questions that you might have regarding a task or page. For example, they can briefly explain what a term means, why something happened, how you can perform an action, or what happens if you perform the action.

Glossary

Glossary terms provide definitions for words or phrases used in help. You can search or browse glossary terms in the Glossary tab of Oracle Fusion Applications Help. Where the links are available, you can also see the definition when you hover over the term in help content for other help types.

Help Topic

Help topics explain key concepts, illustrate how application components work together, or assist in decision-making by explaining points to consider or the options you have. Help topics can also provide reference, overview, and other information.

PDF Guide

PDF guides present a collection of help content from the other help types, except demos, in an organized and logical format. For example, there are guides addressing specific business processes and setup offerings. You can see lists of all guides from the Guides menu in Oracle Fusion Applications Help.

Help Locations: Explained

Help locations determine where users can find help files, custom or not, from either the application or the help site.

Help locations include:

• Page or section values

• Help hierarchies

• Primary locations

Page or Section Values

The value in the Page or Section field on the help customization pages represents where users can click a help icon to open a help window that contains a link to the help file. In most cases, this value represents a page or region header in the application. Help windows are also available on specific tabs or windows, and in the Setup and Maintenance work area for specific task lists or tasks. You can associate a help file with multiple page or section values, or with none at all.

The page or section value reflects the logical navigation to the help window. For example, Edit Opportunity page, Revenue tab, Recommendations window does not mean that the help file is available in three different places. The help icon is in the Recommendations window, which is accessed from the Revenue tab on the Edit Opportunity page.

If the value suggests multiple locations, for example Create and Edit Opportunity pages, then the help file is available from the page header of both the Create Opportunity and Edit Opportunity pages. If the page or section value is, for example, a dashboard region that appears in multiple dashboards, then the value does not specify the page name but just the region. The help file is available from that region in multiple dashboards.

Help Hierarchies

Help files are associated with help hierarchies, which are used to categorize help files and aid users in finding help. Each help file can have multiple hierarchies, with at least one of type Business Processes. The business process hierarchy is based on the Business Process Management model. Every page or section value is predefined with a specific business process hierarchy. If you select a page or section without entering a business process hierarchy, the predefined hierarchy appears by default.

The Search by Business Process navigator in the help site is based on the business process hierarchy. For example, if you assign two business process hierarchies to a help file, users can find the file in both locations in the navigator. When the user clicks More Help from a help window, all help files assigned to the same business process hierarchy as the page or section value are returned as search results.

Similarly, the Search by Product navigator is based on the Product hierarchy type, in which level 1 is the product family, level 2 is the product, and level 3 is the business activity owned by that product.

The Search by Functional Setup navigator is based on the Functional Setup hierarchy type. The level 1 nodes for this hierarchy are:

• Functional Setup Manager, which includes help about using the Setup and Maintenance work area.

• Guides, which contains level 2 nodes that correspond to business areas and setup offerings. All the user reference and functional setup PDF guides are included.

• Offerings, which contains level 2 nodes for each setup offering, and lower levels for the main task lists in the offerings. Help for the task lists and tasks are included.

The Search by Common Tasks navigator is based on the Welcome hierarchy type. The level 1 nodes represent categories of functional areas common to all users.

Primary Locations

The primary location of a help file designates the hierarchy that is displayed for the help file in search results and within the help content as breadcrumbs. You cannot change the primary location of a help file that came with your help installation. Primary locations of predefined help are based on the business process hierarchy, while custom help files can have primary locations based on hierarchies of any type.

Editing Predefined Help and Glossary Terms: Points to Consider

When you open any predefined help file, including glossary terms, that came with Oracle Fusion Applications Help, you can see an edit option if you have roles allowing edit access. When you edit predefined help, keep in mind:

• What happens to the original help file

• Where predefined help appears

• Considerations specific to glossary terms

What Happens to the Original Files

When you edit predefined help, you are actually creating a new custom help file based on the original file, with the same help locations. The customized version replaces the original, which becomes inactive and hidden from users. You can display both versions by reactivating the original in the Manage Custom Help page.

Where Predefined Help Appears

All predefined help comes with preassigned help locations, including at least one based on the hierarchy of type Business Processes. Many also have predefined page or section values that indicate where the help can be accessed from help windows in the application.

To change where predefined help appears, either in the help site navigators or in the application, create a duplicate in the Manage Custom Help page. Change or add help locations to your custom copy, and inactivate the original.

Even though glossary terms do not appear in the help site navigators, you still need to enter at least one help location to categorize the glossary term.

Considerations Specific to Glossary Terms

When you edit a predefined glossary term, the original term becomes inactive. Existing links to the glossary term, from other predefined and custom help files, will automatically point to your custom version. If you later inactivate the custom glossary term, make sure to activate the original term so that the links still work.

Links in Custom Help: Points to Consider

When you create or edit custom help, follow best practices when you include links to help files or other content. If you are working on custom help created by duplicating a predefined help file, then you may see existing links from the original file in the Help Content section. The types of links that you can work with include:

• Related help links

• Standard hypertext links

• Links to documentation library content

• Glossary term links

For all link types, except the standard hypertext links, you must create or edit custom help with a Text or Desktop source type. In other words, you must type the help content directly in the application or use an HTML file that you upload to help. For standard hypertext links, the source type can also be URL.

Related Help Links

Related help is the section at the end of help files that contains links to other help files. The syntax for related help contains a comma-separated list of title IDs that represent help files.

This figure provides an example of related links code.

• You can delete this code to remove all related help, or delete title IDs to remove individual links (for example, CREATE_AUTOMATIC_POSTING_CRITERIA_S_0000).

• To replace existing links or add new links, you need to retain the code syntax and enter desired title IDs. To find title IDs, search for the help files on the Manage Custom Help page. Title IDs are displayed in the search results, but the Title ID column is hidden by default.

Standard Hypertext Links

You can create standard hypertext links to any file or Web site as long as you ensure the stability and validity of the links, including links to other help files, custom or not. These links can appear anywhere in the body of your help file as long as they come before any related help links.

In the Help Content section, highlight the text that you want to use as link text and click the Add Link icon button.

For links to other help files, open the file to which you want to link, and click the E-Mail link. Use the URL in the autogenerated e-mail text as the link to the file.

Links to Documentation Library Content

The syntax for links to HTML files in documentation libraries, for example the Oracle Fusion Applications Technology Library, is:

<span class="HP_topic-link_bridgeDocument-linkToSTDoc_"><?ofa linkToSTDoc(WCSUG4636) ?><span class="HP_topic-linktext_">Understanding Tags</span><?ofa endLink ?></span>.

WCSUG4636 is the anchor ID and Understanding Tags is the link text. You can:

• Modify the link by replacing the existing anchor ID or editing the link text, or both.

• Remove the link by deleting all the code for it.

• Create links to documentation library content by following the same syntax. These links can appear anywhere in the body of your help file as long as they come before any related help links.

Glossary Term Links

Glossary term links provide definitions in a note box when users hover over the term in help files.

This figure shows an example of code for a glossary term link.

In this example, accounting period is the link text, or glossary term, and ACCOUNTING_PERIOD_001 is the identifier, or title ID.

• To remove the link but retain the text, delete all the code except the term itself.

• To add glossary term links, you must follow the link syntax and use the correct title ID for the glossary term. You can find title IDs in the search results of the Manage Custom Help page.

Customizing PDF Guides: Worked Example

This example demonstrates how to customize a PDF guide that came with Oracle Fusion Applications Help. This guide is currently not available from any help window in the application.

The following table summarizes key decisions for this scenario.

Edit a copy of the original PDF guide, and use the Manage Custom Help page to replace the original PDF guide with your new file.

Copying and Editing the PDF Guide

1. Open the original PDF guide from the help site and save a copy to your desktop. Leave open the help file for the guide.
2. Using a PDF editor application, change the title of the chapter wherever the chapter title appears. Delete the content you want to hide from users.
3. Make sure that your new PDF guide is less than 6 MB.

Replacing the Original PDF Guide

1. In the help file that you still have open for the original PDF guide, click the Edit link.
2. On the Create Help page, use the default values except where indicated.
3. Update the title to the name that you want to display to users.
4. In the File Name field, browse for and select your customized guide.
5. Delete any keywords or parts of the description relevant to the content you removed from the PDF guide.
6. Add a help location with the Business Processes hierarchy type and select Information Technology Management as the level 1 node, Manage Enterprise Application Software as the level 2 node, and Use Applications as the level 3 node.
7. Select Welcome page in the Page or Section column.
8. Click Save and Close. The help file for the original PDF guide is automatically set to inactive.

Adding Custom UPK Content to Help: Worked Example

This example demonstrates how to add custom Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK) topics as demo help files. These help files function like any predefined help file for demos. You can search and include these files in help windows and navigators as you would other help.

In this scenario, you are adding two demos about social networking, to appear in help windows on the Welcome dashboard.

The following table summarizes key decisions for this scenario.

Generate a report of UPK document IDs, which you will use when creating custom help, to identify the UPK topics that you want to add. Publish the UPK module as a player package, then create custom help for the UPK topics that you want to use as help demos.

Generating a UPK Document ID Report

1. In the UPK Developer, select Details View.
2. Right-click any column header, for example Name, and select Column Chooser.
3. In the Column Chooser dialog box, click and drag the Document ID column header and drop it after the Name column. Close the Column Chooser dialog box.
4. From the File menu, select to print, and save the output as a Microsoft Excel file to your desktop.

Creating the Player Package

1. From the UPK Developer, make sure that the topics that you want to add as demos have the See It play mode. The topics can also have other modes, but only the See It mode is included in the custom help file.
2. Publish the module, specifying any location for the output and selecting to publish the selection only.
3. In the Formats section of the Publish Content window, select the Player check box under the Deployment check box group.
4. In the Player section, select the Include HTML Web Site check box, to ensure that the custom help file includes a text-only version of the UPK topic.
5. Finish the publishing process, after optionally setting other options.
6. Navigate to the location where you specified the output to be generated.
7. In the Publishing Content folder, copy the PlayerPackage folder and add it to the web server where you store UPK content.

Creating Custom Help for Demos

1. Open the help window in the Activity Stream region on the Welcome dashboard of Oracle Fusion Applications, and click Manage Custom Help.
2. On the Manage Custom Help page, the page or section and hierarchy values are populated with the values for the Activity Stream region.
3. Click Create.
4. On the Create Help page, complete the fields in the General Information section, as shown in this table. Use the default values except where indicated.

   Field	Value
   Title	The name of the UPK topic.
   Source Type	Oracle User Productivity Kit
   File Location	The full URL of the player package folder on the Web server, for example, http://<your domain>.com/UPKcontent/PlayerPackage.
   Document ID	The document ID of the UPK topic to add to the help window in the Activity Stream region. You can copy and paste this ID from the Microsoft Excel file that you generated earlier.
   Help Type	Demo
   Help Security Group	Unsecured
   Keywords	Terms relevant to the demo.
   Description	Summary of the demo.
   Include in New and Updated pane	Selected

   
   

   The Help Location section contains values for the help window in the Activity Stream region. This help file will also appear in the Search by Business Process navigator under this predefined hierarchy.

5. Click Save and Close.
6. On the Manage Custom Help page, open the help locations for the help file that you just created.
7. Add a help location with the Welcome hierarchy type and select Collaboration Features as the level 1 node.
8. Add another help location with the Business Processes hierarchy type and select Information Technology Management as the level 1 node, Manage Networking and Communications as the level 2 node, and Manage Social Networking Capabilities as the level 3 node.
9. Click Save and Close.
10. Starting at the Connections region, repeat steps 1 to 9 for the other UPK topic that you want to add.

Customizing Embedded Help: Highlights

You can customize help that is embedded in the application, for example hints and help windows, for all users of Oracle Fusion Applications.

Embedded help customization is fully described in the Oracle Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide.

• Edit, create, or delete hint text that appears on hover over buttons, links, icons, or tab titles.
  See: Customizing or Adding Bubble Embedded Help
• Edit, create, or delete other types of embedded help. Refer to the Customizing or Adding Static Instructions, In-Field Notes, and Terminology Definitions section.
  See: Oracle Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide

FAQs for Define Help Configuration

When do I link to the Oracle User Productivity Kit library from the help site?

Provide a link to your Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK) library if you have UPK licensed and custom UPK content to share with your users. You give them access to a library of custom UPK content in addition to any custom UPK demos that you added to the help site itself. UPK demos that you add as custom help are available only in the See It mode, so the library can include the same demo in other modes. If you have UPK versions earlier than 3.6.1, then you cannot add UPK demos as custom help, so the link is the only way for users to access custom UPK content from the help site.

How can I find the URL to the Oracle User Productivity Kit library?

The URL to enter on the Set Help Options page should be the full path from the Web server where you are hosting your Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK) content to the index.html file that opens the table of contents for the library, for example, http://<your domain>.com/UPKcontent/PlayerPackage/index.html. In this example, you or your UPK administrator would publish one UPK player package that contains all the content to be linked to from Oracle Fusion Applications Help, as well as the index.html file, and place the PlayerPackage folder in a manually created folder called UPKcontent on the Web server.

Who can add and manage custom help?

Users with the Application Help Text Administration duty role have access to customize help in Oracle Fusion Applications Help. This duty is assigned by default to various job roles, in particular the administrators for product families.

You can assign the duty role to other users who need access to customize help. Use the Manage Duties task in the Setup and Maintenance work area to search for the Application Help Text Administration duty role on the Role Catalog page, and map additional job roles to this duty role.

How can I restrict help content to specific user roles?

When you create or edit help, select a help security group that represents the set of roles that you want to have access to the help. If you do not see the Security Group field, then your administrator has not selected the Custom Help Security feature choice. The Unsecured group has no associated roles, so anyone can view the help. The predefined Secured group includes all internal employees and contingent workers, unless this group has been edited. You can create security groups and associate roles using the Manage Help Security Groups page, which you can access by starting in the Setup and Maintenance Overview page and searching for the Manage Help Security Groups task. Your new security groups are immediately available for use to secure new or edited help files.

Why can't I select and add help to a location?

You must specify a page or section to add the existing help to. To ensure that help is added to the correct help window, go to the page or section in the application, click the Help icon, and click the Manage Custom Help link in the help window. Alternatively, in the Manage Custom Help page, search for at least a page or section and a level 1 value for the Business Processes hierarchy type before selecting the Select and Add option.

You cannot select and add help to a particular hierarchy, on the Manage Custom Help page, without a page or section. To add just a hierarchy, search for the help file, add a new help location, and specify only the hierarchy information.

What happens to custom help when a help patch is applied?

Oracle Fusion Applications Help patches update all help files, both active and inactive, except custom help. Custom help files are not affected by patches. Consider reviewing inactive files to see if you want to activate the updated version, or to make similar edits to the custom versions of those files, if any.

Define Application Toolkit Configuration

Define Application Toolkit Configuration: Overview

Oracle Fusion Application Toolkit (ATK) is an application that provides various core components of Oracle Fusion Applications, including the Welcome dashboard, Oracle Fusion Applications Help, the Reports and Analytics pane, and the Watchlist feature. Use the Define Application Toolkit Configuration task list to set up and maintain some of these components for all users, and the Define Help Configuration task list for Oracle Fusion Applications Help.

Use the Setup and Maintenance work area to access the tasks in the Define Application Toolkit Configuration task list.

Map Reports to Work Areas

Additional Report Setup in the Context of the Reports and Analytics Pane: Highlights

Aside from determining which work areas a specific report is mapped to, you can perform additional setup for reports in the context of the Reports and Analytics pane. You can set up report permissions, and enable Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Publisher reports for scheduled submission.

This additional setup is described in the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition) and the Oracle Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide.

Report Permissions

• You can restrict access to specific reports for specific users, and this security is not limited to the Reports and Analytics pane. Refer to the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition).
  See: Assigning Permissions

Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Reports Submission

• Oracle BI Publisher reports must be registered as processes with Oracle Enterprise Scheduler to be enabled for scheduling. This registration also enables a Schedule link for the report in the Reports and Analytics Pane. Refer to the Oracle Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide, and perform the following steps in the specified order.
• Create an Oracle Enterprise Scheduler job definition for the report.
  See: Tasks Required to Run Custom Reports with Oracle Enterprise Scheduler Service
• Specify the job definition details in the report's properties.
  See: Enabling Reports for Scheduling from the Reports and Analytics Pane

FAQs for Map Reports to Work Areas

How can I set up the Reports and Analytics pane for all users?

You can remove any currently mapped report from the Reports and Analytics pane, or add mappings to reports from the Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Presentation catalog. To access the setup, click Edit Settings in the Reports and Analytics pane, or use the Map Reports to Work Areas task in the Setup and Maintenance work area. If you do the former, then you can set up only the Reports and Analytics pane on the work area that you are in.

If you do the latter, then you can select a work area to set up. If you do not see the desired work area, most likely you do not have access to it due to security. You can request to be granted a role that has access to the work area, or another administrator or business user with access to the work area can be granted the Reports and Analytics Region Administration Duty to be able to map reports to the work area.

Any changes you make in either UI apply to all users with access to the mapped work area.

Why can't I see reports when mapping reports to work areas for the Reports and Analytics pane?

It is possible that there are no reports currently mapped to the work area that you select in the Map Reports to Work Areas page. Alternatively, reports are mapped, but you do not see them due to security.

Similarly, in the list of all available reports from the catalog, you can see only the reports that you have access to. You can request to be granted a role that has access to the reports that you want to map, or another administrator or business user with access to those reports can be granted the Reports and Analytics Region Administration Duty to be able to map reports to work areas.

Why can't I see reports when I edit settings for the Reports and Analytics pane?

In the Edit Settings window, you may not be able to see a currently mapped report because you do not have access to it due to security.

Similarly, in the list of all available reports from the catalog, you can see only the reports that you have access to. You can request to be granted a role that has access to the reports that you want to map, or another administrator or business user with access to those reports can be granted the Reports and Analytics Region Administration Duty to be able to map reports to work areas.

Set Watchlist Options

Watchlist Setup: Points to Consider

For all users across the site, you can disable or enable predefined Watchlist categories and items, edit their names, and determine how often item counts refresh. You cannot delete predefined Watchlist categories and items, nor create any for the site. Users can create their own Watchlist items through saved searches.

Access the Set Watchlist Options page by starting in the Setup and Maintenance Overview page and searching for the Set Watchlist Options task.

Disabling Predefined Categories and Items

Use the Set Watchlist Options page to enable or disable predefined Watchlist categories and items. Disabling any category or item also disables associated processes involved in calculating the Watchlist item counts for all users. These processes include creating data caches, performing security checks, invoking services across domains, running queries, and so on.

An item with the Predefined type represents the actual predefined Watchlist item that appears in the Watchlist. If you disable this type of Watchlist item, then:

• The item is not available for users to display in their watchlist

• The item is removed from any watchlist where it is currently displayed

A Watchlist item with the User-created saved search type does not appear in the Watchlist; it controls the display of the Manage Watchlist button or menu item in pages with saved searches. If you disable this type of Watchlist item, then:

• The Manage Watchlist option is not available to users in the corresponding work area, so users cannot use their own saved searches as Watchlist items. A message is displayed to users when they try to use this option.

• Any user-defined saved searches from that work area already used as Watchlist items are no longer available in the users' watchlist. The user-defined saved searches are still available to be used for searching, but not for the Watchlist.

If you disable a Watchlist category, then the category is not available for users to include in their watchlist, and all Watchlist items within the category are also disabled.

Ultimately, the Watchlist for any user contains the subset of categories and items that are enabled in the Set Watchlist Options page:

• Plus any items based on user-defined saved searches

• Minus any categories or items that the user chooses to hide using Watchlist preferences

• Minus any items with no results found, if the user chooses to hide such items using Watchlist preferences

Specifying Refresh Intervals

All Watchlist items have a predefined refresh interval, which controls how often the query that calculates the count for a Watchlist item can be run. Use the Set Watchlist Options page to edit the interval values. What you specify as the refresh interval for a Watchlist item of type User-created Saved Search applies to all Watchlist items based on saved searches created by users on the corresponding search page.

When the user is in the Welcome dashboard with the Watchlist open for at least two and a half minutes, the query automatically runs for all Watchlist items if no refresh already ran in this user session. To subsequently run the query again, users can manually refresh the Watchlist region. The Refresh icon is enabled after five minutes since the last refresh.

When users open Watchlist from the global area, a refresh automatically runs if five minutes have passed since the last refresh. During this refresh, the query runs for an individual Watchlist item only if the time since the last query for this item is equal to or greater than the specified refresh interval.

For example, you set the interval to eight minutes for a particular Watchlist item. When the user signs in and goes to the Welcome dashboard, with the Watchlist open, the query automatically runs for this Watchlist item after two and a half minutes. Every two and a half minutes after, a check is performed for stale counts and new cached counts are displayed.

Five minutes after the query ran, the Refresh icon is enabled and the user performs a manual refresh. However, the query does not run for this Watchlist item, because the refresh interval is eight minutes. The user navigates away from the Welcome dashboard and opens the Watchlist from the global area six minutes later. A refresh automatically runs because more than five minutes have passed since the last refresh. This time, the query runs for this Watchlist item because it has been more than eight minutes since the query last ran for this item.

Editing Predefined Category and Item Names

Predefined Watchlist category and item names are stored as meanings of standard lookups. Lookup types for predefined categories end with WATCHLIST, for example EXM_EXPENSES_WATCHLIST. Edit the lookup type meaning to change the category name. To change item names, edit lookup code meanings for that lookup type.

Maintain Common Reference Objects

Maintain Common Reference Objects: Overview

The Maintain Common Reference Objects task list contains Oracle Fusion Middleware Extensions for Applications (Applications Core) tasks that support implementation of common behaviors, such as data security or reference data sets.

Use this task list to manage common reference objects that are defined centrally and shared across applications, in addition to those that are specific to Applications Core functionality. You can access this task list by starting in the Setup and Maintenance Overview page and searching for common reference object task lists.

For more information on configuring custom objects, see the Oracle Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide.

To make the Maintain Common Reference Objects task list available in your implementation project, go to Setup and Maintenance Overview - Configure Offerings, and for a specific offering, select the Maintain Common Reference Objects feature choice.

Define Application Taxonomy

Application Taxonomy: Highlights

Application taxonomy is the organization of Oracle application components and functions in a hierarchical structure, from product lines to logical business areas. This hierarchy represents a breakdown of products into units based on how applications are installed and supported. Maintain this hierarchy on the Manage Taxonomy Hierarchy page, which you can access by starting in the Setup and Maintenance Overview page and searching for the Manage Taxonomy Hierarchy task.

A detailed introduction to application taxonomy is provided in the Oracle Fusion Applications Developer's Guide.

Hierarchy

• The application taxonomy hierarchy contains various levels and types of nodes, or modules.
  See: Characteristics of the Level Categories
  See: Benefits of a Logical Hierarchy

Usage

• Use application taxonomy to understand relationships among applications and between an application and its files. This information is helpful in managing various phases of the product lifecycle.
  See: How to Manage the Lifecycle

Modules in Application Taxonomy: Explained

A module is any node in the application taxonomy hierarchy. The top level of the hierarchy is product line, followed by product family, application, and logical business area. There can be multiple levels of logical business areas, with one or more nested within a parent logical business area.

Product Line

A product line is a collection of products under a single brand name, for example, Oracle Fusion.

Product Family

A product family is a collection of products associated with a functional area that may or may not be licensed together as a single unit, for example Financials.

Application

An application is a single product within a product family, containing closely related features for a specific business solution, for example General Ledger.

Logical Business Area

A logical business area is a collection of business object definitions organized into a logical grouping. It contains the model objects, services, and UI components for those business objects. Logical business areas have their own hierarchy levels and in some cases can be two or three levels deep. Each leaf node has at least one business object and service, up to a maximum of four business objects and associated services. A logical business area with more than four business objects are further refined with child logical business area levels. Each of these parent-child levels is represented by a directory in the physical package hierarchy.

Managing Modules in Application Taxonomy: Points to Consider

Manage modules on the Create Child Module or Edit Module page, which you can access by starting in the Setup and Maintenance Overview page and searching for the Manage Taxonomy Hierarchy task. When you create a module, it is a child of the currently selected node in the application taxonomy hierarchy. This determines which values are available, for example for module type. Once created, you cannot delete the module or move it elsewhere in the hierarchy. As you create or edit modules, consider the following points regarding specific fields.

Identifiers

Module ID is the unique primary key for nodes in the taxonomy table. When you create a module, an ID is automatically generated. Once the module is created, you cannot update the ID.

Module key and alternative ID are additional identifiers of the module, presented in a way that is easier to read than the module ID. The module key is a string identifier, for example AP for the Oracle Fusion Payables application. The alternative ID is a numeric identifier, for example 1 for the Oracle Fusion product line. These IDs are provided for the product line, product family, and application modules, but you can optionally add them for logical business areas and new custom modules.

The product code is relevant only to application and logical business area modules. You can leave the field blank for other module types. The product code for applications is the short name that can be displayed in lists of application values, for example FND for Oracle Fusion Middleware Extensions for Applications.

Names

Module name is the logical name for the module and is always available. The name must be unique among nodes in the same hierarchy level with the same parent, but try to make it as unique in the whole hierarchy as possible.

The user name and description can appear to users in other parts of Oracle Fusion Applications, so make sure that the values are something that users know to represent the module.

Usage Types

Though you can update the usage type to reflect the current state of the module, just doing so does not affect the actual state. For example, setting a module as installed does not mean it is actually installed if the installation itself has not taken place. Installation refers to operations related to laying down all the components needed to create an Oracle Fusion Applications environment, while deployment is the process that starts the managed servers and clusters and facilitates the actual use of product offerings. A licensed module is available for installation and deployment, and a deployed module is considered actively used when actually used by users.

Seed Data

If seed data is allowed, then seed data such as flexfields and lookups can be extracted for the module using seed data loaders. By default, extract is allowed for all predefined modules of type application and logical business area.

Associations

You can associate a logical domain to modules of type product family, as well as one or more enterprise applications to modules of type application. This association represents the relationship between the taxonomy modules and the corresponding domain and enterprise applications stored in the Oracle Fusion Applications Functional Core (ASK) tables.

Define Lookups

Lookups: Explained

Lookups are lists of values in applications. You define a list of values as a lookup type consisting of a set of lookup codes, each code's translated meaning, and optionally a tag. End users see the list of translated meanings as the available values for an object.

Lookups provide a means of validation and lists of values where valid values appear on a list with no duplicate values. For example, an application might store the values Y and N in a column in a table, but when displaying those values in the user interface, Yes or No (or their translated equivalents) should be available for end users to select. For example, the two lookup codes Y and N are defined in the REQUIRED_INDICATOR lookup type.

In another example, a lookup type for marital status has lookup codes for users to specify married, single, or available legal partnerships.

In this case, tags are used for localizing the codes. All legislations list Married and Single. Only the Dutch legislation lists Registered Partner. And all legislations except France and Australia also list Domestic Partner.

When managing lookups, you need to understand the following.

• Using lookups in applications

• Customization levels

• Accessing lookups

• Enabling lookups

• The three kinds of lookups: standard, common, and set enabled

Using Lookups in Applications

Use lookups to provide validation or a list of values for a user input field in a user interface.

An example of a lookup used for validation is a flexfield segment using a table-validated value set with values from a lookup type. An example of a lookup in a list of values is a profile option's available values from which users select one to set the profile option. Invoice Approval Status gives the option of including payables invoices of different approval statuses in a report. The lookup code values include All so that users can report by all statuses: Approved, Resubmitted for approval, Pending or rejected, and Rejected.

Customization Level

The customization level of a lookup type determines whether the lookups in that lookup type can be edited. This applies data security to lookups.

Some lookup types are locked so no new codes and other changes can be added during implementation or later, as needed. Depending on the customization level of a lookup type, you may be able to change the codes or their meanings. Some lookups are designated as extensible, so new lookup codes can be created during implementation, but the meanings of predefined lookup codes cannot be modified. Some predefined lookup codes can be changed during implementation or later, as needed.

The customization levels are user, extensible, and system. The following table shows which lookup management tasks are allowed at each customization level.

Predefined data means LAST_UPDATED_BY = SEED_DATA_FROM_APPLICATION.

If a product depends on a lookup, the customization level should be system or extensible to prevent deletion.

Once the customization level is set for a lookup type, it cannot be modified. The customization level for lookup types created using the Define Lookups page is by default set at the User level.

Standard, Common, and Set-Enabled Lookups

The available kinds of lookups are as follows.

Standard lookups are the simplest form of lookup types consisting only of codes and their translated meaning. They differ from common lookups only in being defined in the standard lookup view.

Common lookups exist for reasons of backward compatibility and differ from standard lookups only in being defined in the common lookup view.

Set enabled lookup types store lookup codes that are enabled for reference data sharing. At runtime, a set-enabled lookup code is visible because the value of the determinant identifies a reference data set in which the lookup code is present.

Accessing Lookups

Standard, set-enabled, and common lookups are defined in the Standard, Set-enabled, and Common views, respectively. Applications development may define lookups in an application view to restrict the UI pages where they may appear.

In lookups management tasks, lookups may be associated with a module in the application taxonomy to provide a criteria for narrowing a search or limiting the number of lookups accessed by a product specific task such as Manage Purchasing Lookups.

Enabling Lookups

A lookup type is reusable for attributes stored in multiple tables.

Enable lookups based on the following.

• Selecting an Enabled check box

• Specifying an enabled start date, end date, or both

• Specifying a reference data set determinant

If you make changes to a lookup, users must sign out and back in before the changes take effect. When defining a list of values for display rather than validation, limit the number of enabled lookup codes to a usable length.

For more information on the predefined lookups and lookup codes, see assets with the Lookup type in the Oracle Enterprise Repository for Oracle Fusion Applications (http://fusionappsoer.oracle.com).

Managing a Standard Lookup: Example

Creating a new standard lookup involves creating or selecting a lookup type to which the lookup code belongs, and determining appropriate values for the lookup codes and their meanings.

Creating a Lookup Type Called COLORS

Your enterprise needs a list of values for status to be used on various objects such as processes or users. The lookups are colors, so the lookup type you create is COLORS.

The lookup codes you define for the COLORS lookup type are, BLUE, RED, GREEN, and YELLOW.

Understanding the Resulting Data Entry List of Values

Users need to respond to a process question by indicating whether to stop it, use caution, go ahead, or complete it urgently.

The list of values for the COLORS lookup type includes the meanings for the enabled codes.

Analysis

The BLUE lookup code was not enabled and does not appear in the list of values. The display sequence of values in the list of values is alphabetical unless you enter a number manually to determine the order of appearance. Number 1 indicates the value listed first in the list of values.

Understanding the Transaction Table

When users enter one of the values from the list of values for the lookup type COLORS, the transaction table records the lookup code. In this example, the code is stored in the Status column

The status for one user is BLUE because at the time they entered a value, BLUE was enabled. Disabling a lookup code does not affect transaction records in which that code is stored. Data querying and reporting have access to disabled lookup codes in transaction tables.

FAQs for Define Lookups

How can I edit lookups?

You can edit the existing lookup codesof a lookup type or add new lookup codes on the Define Lookups pages, which you can access by starting in the Setup and Maintenance work area and searching for lookup tasks. You can edit the existing lookup codes of a lookup type, or add new lookup codes to a lookup type, if the customization level for the lookup type supports editing

Why can't I see my lookup types?

Lookups are listed by lookup type. Typically lookup types are managed using tasks that handle a group of related lookups, such as Manage Geography Lookups. Each task gives you access only to certain lookup types. The generic tasks provide access to all lookups types of a kind, such as all common lookups using the Manage Common Lookups task.

If existing lookups are not available to the tasks of the Define Lookups activity, they may be validated for use in a lookup view that is not central to all applications or whose owning application has not been specified in a lookup view.

Lookups can only be managed in the Define Lookups tasks if the lookup's view application is the standard lookups view, common lookups view, or set-enabled lookups view. Lookups defined in an application view can only be managed by following instructions provided by the owning application.

What's the difference between a lookup type and a value set?

A lookup type consists of lookup codes that are the values in a static list of values. Lookup code validation is a one to one match.

A table-validated value set can consist of values that are validated through a SQL statement, which allows the list of values to be dynamic.