We are a part of the Fusion Nation

Fusion Nation Red Vest

This year at Oracle OpenWorld there will be a lot of people in these red vests.  We are part of what is dubbed ‘Fusion Nation’, consisting of early adopter customers, partners, system integrators, user groups and a few Oracle dev folks (that’s where I come in).  All these people have been working in depth with Fusion Applications and are more than happy to talk to others about their experiences.  I collected my red vest today and I have to admit it is a high quality garment and I have already been asked more than once “How do I get one of those?’ (They are not available, try ebay after the conference ends).  It comes with a red satchel and also a button saying ‘Ask me about Oracle Fusion Applications’.  So if you see somebody wearing the vest, feel free to stop and ask them, they’ll be happy to talk as people are very enthusiastic and excited about the product.  Debra may not stop when she gets started.

I am closing this post with the first music video ever in this blog.  Whenever I hear the term Fusion Nation, I can’t help but sing Janet Jackson’s 1990 hit ‘Rhythm Nation’, switching out Rhythm for Fusion.   Click on the video below if you want to be humming the song involuntarily too.  The rumor that Janet Jackson will join Steve Miranda on stage for his keynote on Wednesday are probably starting to circulate about now.

To cc:, or not to cc:, that is the question

One of my favorite Oracle Bloggers, Floyd Teter often uses Rock Lyrics quotes to open his posts.  I’ve blogged before about email management (26,138 Emails in My Inbox (and I feel fine) using a play on an REM song, but I thought I’d be a little more upscale today and go with Shakespear.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

I decided to write this post in response to a post on the Talented Apps blog, by Sri Subramanian discussing how we process lots of information from feeds, twitter and emails and mentioning that adding people to the cc: on an email is ok as long as the subject is good so they can filter.  I disagree.  There is a very big difference between email and feeds (RSS, twitter, facebook feed, blogs etc), one is like me going to a bookstore and browsing and the other is like junk mail, let’s compare the two.

Junk mail -  somebody gets my address and specifically sends a message to me and it is delivered right to my door and I have to look at it and chuck into the recycle bin that I keep close to where I pick up my mail.  If I don’t like something I’m sent, I cannot easily stop them sending more.

Bookstore – I look around for a bookstore I like the look of and I go in and navigate to the sections of interest and look around maybe thumb through a few, maybe buy some and read them fully, or not.  I decide when I leave and if I go back there again.

In summary the difference is that email (or junk snail mail) is not on my terms.  I opt in to feeds (or bookstores) and I can opt out whenever I like, but email I have no choice it comes to my inbox and I have to deal with it.  I can set up filters, but that is error prone because I may filter something that I need and miss it.

I love feeds and information flowing from them are great, because it is on my terms but I think people sending emails have some responsibility to attempt to cc: only people that need to know.

What’s your opinion on the topic, is it ok to cc: everyone on your mail, just in case they are interested?  Let me know in the comments section.

photo credit:  StreetAlbum

www.flickr.com/photos/streetalbum/3102886548/in/photostream/

[The RISA mentioned in the photo is a company that paints over graffiti - some say it is cleaning up, some say it is destroying street art]

EBusiness Suite Legal Entity FAQ

I’ve been preparing these for a presentation at Oracle OpenWorld next week, they were mostly taken from the questions asked by Alyssa Johnson in her comment, but they are very typical questions that I get asked a lot.

What is the difference between the 11i GRE/LE and R12 LE?

• GRE/LE is upgraded as an LE in R12
• In 11i GRE/LE was often a dummy LE, not real LE structure and had little use
• R12 LE has a more robust definition
• R12 LE is used more by processes and reports across financials

Where does the LE impact R12 processing?

• Short answer – Tax, Intercompany (AGIS), Global Features

Why should I assign BSVs to my LEs in the Ledger?

• It is optional, if your BSV is your company code, you have an implied LE there in your GL
• It helps with some LE derivation for transaction stamping
• Allows you to run reports by LE
• May make Intercompany rules easier to define

In 11i, the LE doesn’t really correspond to the true Legal Entities of the Organization (e.g. only one LE is setup even though there are multiple companies). What is going to break in R12 if I leave it that way?

• Nothing will break if you do nothing and stay with one ‘dummy’ LE
• You won’t get all the good stuff we talked about earlier

Is there a connection between the LE and the BU?

• If you map LE to Ledgers / BSV, there is an indirect LE-OU relationship
• There is a Default Legal Entity for an OU (Default Legal Context) which in some cases(1:1:1) it will be the only LE so it is a direct assingment

If you want to add anything to this, or have more questions then fine the comments section below…

Things to do at Oracle OpenWorld

Looking for financials sessions at OpenWorld this year?  I would start with this list from Theresa Hickman and if you are interested in the Record to Report / GL area, then the Oracle Apps User Group (OAUG) has a Special Interest Group(SIG) for you and they will be meeting on Sunday.   As I posted earlier, I’ll be chatting about Legal Entites in EBS R12 and giving a super quick sneak peak into Fusion GL.

One thing I always plug is the Demogrounds, this is the place to go if you want to spend some quality time with a product and an expert form Oracle on that product.  You will often have a chance for one on one discussions and demos and get to the answers you are particularly interested in.  We will have two dedicated Fusion Fiancnails demo pods this year.   I’ll be there on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon, so come please drop by and see the most compelling product I have ever had the pleasure of working on, the title is “Oracle Fusion Financials Delivers Revolutionary Reporting and Insight”

 

Want more on Legal Entities?

I was perusing the statistics that wordpress.com provides for this blog and was interested to learn that the most commented on post, with a whopping 69 comments, is the classic from November 2007 – How do I define my Legal Entities? .  It has also received 18,449 page views which is the second most viewed post on this blog.  My conclusion is that people are interested in this topic and want to learn more, so I thought I would mention the OAUG GL SIG meeting at OpenWorld where I have been asked to make a short presentation about Legal Entities, essential details are:

 

Title:		OAUG General Ledger SIG
Time		Sunday, 04:00 PM, Moscone West – 3005
Length		1 Hour
Abstract:		The OAUG General Ledger SIG is a worldwide community of professionals engaged in the use of record-to-report business processes. Group members are business users, consultants, and support members engaged in the use of Oracle General Ledger. This session focuses on Oracle Fusion Financials’ General Ledger feature, the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12+ update, and the Oracle Financials release roadmap.

I have just started to think about preparing slides and I thought that rather than actually work on them, I would blog and see if anyone had ideas on the type of thing I should talk about (the hip crowd would call it crowd sourcing).  It’s been almost 4 years since that post, so let me know in the comments what more information you would like on Legal Entities in Oracle Apps.

The comments section is just down below, past all the widgets asking you to like the post and share it…

26,138 Emails in My Inbox (and I feel fine)

For many years I tried to file away emails using a variety of systems and found none of them effective.  The big problem for me was that I could never remember what folder I had filed something in, when filing things it was not clear cut where some thing belonged.  I wasted a lot of time filing emails and often had that feeling of guilt of a load of emails in my inbox that I need to file.

Since deciding to just leave everything in my Inbox about 7 years ago I have never looked back and this study(pdf) seems to vindicate my decision.  I must have saved days or weeks by not filing and I no longer waste energy trying to organize something that doesn’t need organizing.  If I want to find an email I use the Three S Technique(copyright that phrase; me):

• Searching – I use Thunderbird 3 from Mozilla which has a reasonable search, there is also Google desktop search which can search emails.
• Sorting – Usually I search for the person I know sent me an email and then sort by date or subject, sometimes I search for a keyword in the subject and sort by sender.
• Scrolling – I could also add Scan here for another S.  I often just sort by date and scan my eyes over as I scroll through emails and locate what I want.

The other issue is how I deal with incoming emails, filtering them and determining what to action first.  My prime technique is  Scrolling and Scanning, I tend to scan for Senders primary and Subject second and look for anything that might be urgent and deal with those first.  Then as I go through other mails, if there is something I want to come back to later and take some action on, I will just mark it as Unread so I will be able to find it later easily.

So now you know how I deal with the 200+ emails I get every day.  How do you deal with yours?  Do you think I am insane and filing is the only way?  Share your thoughts in the comments.

First Report from Collaborate 11

Last week week I attended Collaborate 11 in Orlando, Florida.  It’s the big Oracle technology and applications user group conference and  I was attending for the first time, invited to speak at the GL Special Interest Group (GL SIG), who go beyond GL and focus on the entire record to report business flow.  I presented at two sessions on the Fusion Apps Record to Report flow and did some demos of Fusion.

I was slightly surprised and mildly embarrassed that several people ‘recognized’ me from this blog, it good to here that people enjoy reading it and more importantly find it a helpful resource.  Many people asked when I would start blogging about Fusion, considering it has been discussed and talked about and shown extensively at Open World last year and again at Collaborate.  The answer is not yet, firstly I think most people are really interested in R12 right now given the number of people recently upgraded, in the process of upgrading or planning for an upgrade, secondly I’m not risking any issues regarding revenue recognition and other problems talking about things which are not released.

I did also attend and speak at some R12 sessions and for the AGIS session run by Alyssa Johnson I somewhat hijacked it during the Q&A but Alyssa did a great job and I’m hoping she will send me the slides.  I was impressed to see the knowledge around on R12 now and there are plenty of consultants with good experience sharing specific examples and giving advice to people who are in the process of upgrading.  This knowledge sharing inspired me to get back on this blog, so I am determined to try and get a few more useful posts out there and start some good conversations in the comments.  So watch this space.

Great Blog for Financial Accounting Hub Information

I have mentioned the Financial Accounting Hub (FAH) before on this blog, but have never really gone into a lot of detail.  The good news is that you don’t need to wait for me to get around to writing about it, Sven Van Leempt has got some great posts on his blog, he has real world experience implementing FAH and in particular integrating it with Peoplesoft GL.  I would recommend starting with is post explaining the relationship between FAH and the Subledger Accounting(SLA), this is a question that comes up a lot.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 57,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 7 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 6 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 85 posts. There were 11 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 358kb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was February 10th with 352 views. The most popular post that day was How do I define my Legal Entities?.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were oracleappshub.com, en.wordpress.com, orafaq.com, forums.oracle.com, and it.toolbox.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for intercompany, intracompany, 101, intra company, and access control.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

How do I define my Legal Entities? November 2007
65 comments

2

Intercompany Vs Intracompany November 2007
38 comments

3

Financial Services Accounting Hub(FSAH) is now called Financials Accounting Hub (FAH) April 2009
18 comments

4

Useful Oracle Financials Resources January 2008
11 comments

5

Defining Intracompany Balancing Rules January 2008
12 comments

More Information on Fusion Applications

In his opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2010, Larry Ellison announced Fusion Applications.  As they are not released I don’t plan on blogging about them yet.   However I will point you to some resources.  On Oracle.com you can go to the Fusion Applications page and it links off to the individual product families.  The Fusion Financials page has a number of resources including a screencast and Podcast, well worth a look.

If you are attending Oracle OpenWorld, there are a number of sessions on Fusion Financials you can attend to learn more.  I listed some relevant to Financials at the end of this post.

You can also find demos in the demogrounds in Moscone South Exhibition Hall in the following locations.

Oracle Fusion Financials Moscone South, S-073 (E-Business Suite)
Oracle Fusion Financials Moscone South, S-113 (PeopleSoft)

General Fusion Apps Sessions

Wednesday September 22, 2010

10:00 am – 11:00 am S318137: Oracle Fusion Applications: Adoption and Deployment Overview
Steve Miranda, Senior VP Oracle
Moscone West L2
Rm 2002/2004
11:30 am – 12:30 pm S318647: Oracle Fusion Applications: An Intro to Oracle Fusion Functional
Setup Manager
Mandar Borkar, Tim Dubois, & Chitra Mitra, Oracle
Moscone West L2
Rm 2016

Thursday September 23, 2010
12:30 pm – 1:30 pm S318276: General Session: Oracle Fusion Applications Overview (REPEAT)
Steve Miranda, SVP Applications Development, Oracle
Moscone West L2
Rm 2002/2004

Financials Specific Sessions

Tuesday September 21, 2010
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm S31830: Oracle Fusion Financials Overview
Rondy Ng & Terrance Wampler, Oracle & Sajit Vijayakumar, Infosys
Moscone West L2
Rm 2002/2004

Wednesday September 22, 2010
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm S318302: Oracle Fusion ERP Applications: Answers to the Top 10 Questions
Rondy Ng & Terrance Wampler, Oracle & Hirak Kayal, Wipro
Moscone West L2
Rm 2002/2004

Thursday September 23, 2010
9:00 am – 10:00 am S318304: Understanding Oracle Fusion Financials for PeopleSoft Customers
Terrance Wampler & Alex Man, Oracle
Moscone West L2
Rm 2005
10:30 am – 11:30 am S318303: Understanding Oracle Fusion Financials for Oracle E-Business Suite
Customers
Rondy Ng & Terrance Wampler, Oracle
Moscone West L2
Rm 2005
1:30 pm – 2:30 pm S318301: Oracle Fusion Financials Overview (REPEAT)
Rondy Ng & Terrance Wampler, Oracle & & Sajit Vijayakumar, Infosys
Moscone West L2
Rm 2002/2004