Configure Data Synchronization

Both the Oracle Fusion and Oracle Utilities applications require a record of customer information to perform functions such as:

  • Identifying a customer when an interaction is initiated through a Customer Experience for Utilities solution.

  • Creating a service request for follow-up and resolution of a customer issue.

  • Managing a service agreement or service contract with a financially responsible entity.

  • Generating a bill for the customer’s service usage.

  • Sending a service communication to a customer.

In the Oracle Fusion applications, a customer party can be classified as follows:

  • Customers: These records represent Oracle Fusion contacts or accounts who are associated with a utility billing account. These entities exist as contacts or accounts in the Oracle Fusion systems and also as Persons in your Oracle Utilities customer information system.

  • Contacts: These records represent Oracle Fusion contacts who are not associated with a utility billing account. These could be persons that the utility wants to establish a relationship with, or any other person you need to record details for that is not attached to a billing account. These records exist only as contacts in the Oracle Fusion system, and do not exist in your Oracle Utilities customer information system.

  • Prospects: These records can represent businesses or people in multiple scenarios, as follows:

    • Businesses that exist only as Oracle Fusion accounts. These could be businesses the utility wants to establish a relationship with.

    • Businesses that exist as both an Oracle Fusion account and also as a Person (with Type = Business) in your Oracle Utilities customer information system, but were never associated with a utility billing account.

    • People that exist as both an Oracle Fusion contact and also as a Person (with Type = Person) in your Oracle Utilities customer information system, but were never associated with a utility billing account.

  • Premises: These records represent vacant premises, or premises that do not currently have any active service contracts.

The type of information stored varies for a contact or account, and for individual or business customers. In Oracle Utilities customer information systems, a Person record can be classified as a person or a business.

For the experiences to function, the following customer information must be synchronized between the Oracle Fusion and Oracle Utilities systems:

  • Primary Name

  • Communication Contact Points

  • Internal System Record Identifiers

  • Characteristics and Mapped Attributes

The data synchronization allows each application to make changes to these customer details independently.

If you are using an existing Oracle Utilities customer information system that already has customer data, you must first complete the initial data synchronization process before the ongoing data synchronization process can be used. For the initial synchronization to occur, you create csv files from your Oracle Utilities system, use the information in the Appendix A: Data Mapping topic to edit the files, and then import the files into Oracle Fusion.

In the ongoing data synchronization process, updating this data from the Oracle Fusion Customer Experience for Utilities solutions is an asynchronous update using Oracle Signals. Updates made only in the Oracle Utilities customer information system are triggered via an asynchronous batch process. You can schedule this batch process to run as frequently as required.

For the ongoing synchronization to occur, you must:

  • Set up the Oracle Fusion data synchronization using Oracle Signals, which includes:

    • Activating the ORA_ZCA_ENABLE_SIGNALS profile option

    • Provision the Sales Administrator role to fetch signals

    • Submit a request to run the Utilities Migration job

    • Create an Oracle Utilities user to persist data in your Oracle Utilities customer information system

  • Set up the Oracle Utilities data synchronization process, which includes:

    • Mapping business configurations between Oracle Fusion and Oracle Utilities so that the right information is transferred and stored in the appropriate place in each system. You use the Fusion CX for Industries Framework Utility Configurations REST Service to configure this mapping and to define target URLs.

    • Running the sync request batch process (F1-SYNRQ) to generate messages for all pending changes from your Oracle Utilities system since the last batch run. You can schedule this batch process to run as frequently as required.

For additional information about this REST service and about person data mapping and configuration, see:

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