Connections improve productivity - Quelle Surprise

Thanks to Oracle nerd for this post, referencing an article on CIO magazine. Apparantly connected employees are more productive. I thought this was a no brainer, if I know a lot of people I can get help and advice from a lot of people, equally if I know a lot of stuff people want to stay connected to me so they can pick my brains and get their job done.

The article goes into more depth and backs it’s argument up with stats, research and references, but I’m a blogger not a journalist. I think the paragraph above is obvious so I state it as my opinion and I’m done. For more detail on my ideas around what I call dev 2.0 you can read my original post, if you want to see it in action - you need to come and join my team, or maybe offer me a job (Boss - if you’re reading, this is a joke).

What does that radio button do?

I try to be clever and/or funny by putting a cryptic title for my posts, I think it’s my attempt to make Financial Software sound fun, perky and exciting (which it is of course). Probably the real result is for some people to get here from google (or Yahoo - do they still do search?) and be very disappointed, in fact they are probably hitting the back button right now. WordPress can show me what searches people did that got them to my page and without going into the details let me tell you that my posts about the Intercompany Periods feature (why do I need another Period?) and my musings about clearing my desk to move office (Cleaning out my Closet?) have probably been read by many confused young people and I apologize to them if they are now here reading this too. Right now those of you who know this is a blog about Oracle Financials are probably wondering when they can stop skimming the preamble and I might get to something of use or interest, so without further ado…

I was working with some AGIS users creating an Intercompany transaction from the entry screen when somebody asked “What does that radio button do?” I realized nobody in the room fully understood the feature. Automatic distribution mode is essentially an aid to ease the amount of data entry you have to make. If you’re creating a transaction batch with multiple transactions (ie. multiple recipients) you’ll have a set of initiator (that will be you as you are entering the batch) accounting distributions for each of the transactions in the batch. Now if I have a batch with dozens or hundreds of transactions in and I want each of those transactions distributed to the same accounts, entering them manually against each transaction will take some time. So if I select automatic distribution mode you just enter your initiator distributions once and the batch header level and when you submit we will prorate those down to all teh transactions in the batch. So you can save a lot of key strokes entering transactions.

Financial Services Accounting Hub (FSAH)

Financial Services Accounting Hub or FSAH (pronounced F-saa apparently) is a great product and is not only for Financial Services companies either, I understand we’ll sell it to anyone.

From a (very) high level perspective it allows you to use Oracle SLA and GL to perform the accounting for third party applications. Companies the Financial services industry tend to build a lot of highly complex applications (e.g. loan systems, trading systems) in house, but they want the final accounting of transactions form these disparate system to end up in the same place and it will be nice if they can re-use the same accounting rules too. Hence the concept of an accounting hub.

If you are using FSAH on R12, you can also utilize all the new AGIS features introduced in R12 and that could help you to apply common intercompany processing rules across your entire business too.

I have had a few discussions with customers asking if AGIS could be used as a hub for all intercompany trading across many ERP systems and the answer is very much so, that is something that we had in mind when building the product. You should be able to push transactions from multiple Oracle instances, even on different versions and throw in an SAP or Peoplesoft instance too if you want. There will be some integration work, but we use standard interfaces, services, API and also make use of the Workflow Business Event system to make this process as easy as possible.

Tax Avoidance, Planning, Mitigation and Evasion

What is the difference between Tax Avoidance, Planning, Mitigation and Evasion? The first three of these are legal and the last one isn’t. With the recent conviction of Wesley Snipes, tax has been in the news quite a lot and over in the UK there has been some interesting stuff written about the country’s largest retailer, Tesco and it’s tax situation. The guardian newspaper responded today to a writ issued by Tesco, over an article in the guardian back in February.  The article talks about how Tesco has been moving assets to different companies in a variety of jurisdictions.

Global corporations have complex legal structures and whenever any assest or liability moves to a different Legal Entity, that is Intercompany and there may be tax involved. The complex and ever changing laws in this area mean it is increasingly important that you have tight control on your intercompany and it is documented because auditors and tax authorities may need to take a close look.

Product Development 2.0

I had dinner with the Appslab crew last night, they’ve been at the Web 2.0 Expo doing their thing; I expect Jake will blog about th conference soon. I enjoyed listening to their ideas and figuring out how they fit into not only our products but our development process. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how web 2.0 concepts fit into my daily work in product development and have come up with the phrase “Product Development 2.0″.

So what is Dev 2.0? Dion Hinchcliffe talks about it as business reaching out to customers over the web and letting them influence the direction of products. An example he uses is XM radio station playing records voted for by it’s users over the web or by sending in text messages. I think customer input is important and tools like this blog and Oracle Mix are great ways to engage customers, but my vision of development 2.0 has a totally different angle, I am looking at the daily life of a software developer or product manger in a large software shop and how we can add web 2.0 into the mix

Oracle has thousands of employees in product development and communication is always a huge issue in an organization of that size. We need to make maximum use of the latest tools to ensure the hard work put in by a person in the org to figure out the best way to do something doesn’t go to waste and that knowledge is available to people who need it. Traditionally we rely a lot on informal networks, for example if I need info on BI Publisher, I call Tim, I used to work with him and know him. I have 10 years worth of contacts like that, dozens of favors I owe and am owed, friends of friends people I know from the gym, car pool partners, snowboarding friends etc etc. This is the ‘phone a friend’ model, when I am stuck I call a person who will know an answer and who will take my call (This reminds me of a trick I use when people are not taking my calls - dial an outside line and then call their number so the caller ID does not show as you, they pick up and get a shock when they hear your voice). The problem with this model is it just doesn’t scale, I need a way to let other’s tap into the knowledge networks and web 2.0 is all about connecting people, to each other and to information.

Example of Development 2.0 in action are blogging by subject matter experts, social networks inside the firewall, user docs and standards guides on wikis, annotation tools to comment on others work, digg like sites where you can vote on the most useful information, the list goes on. This is something sagar talked with passion about when he was at Oracle and I think in Apps development many people really get it and the the word is spreading.

However Product Development 2.0 should not just be about technology that enables communication on a scale never possible before, it has to be about changing the attitudes and mindsets of people. We need to be committed to sharing what we know making it part of our daily job to add to the common knowledge base of organization. There is probably a full post on that in my head, but ironically I don’t have the energy to share my ideas and knowledge on that right now (it’s after midnight and I’ve been up since 7am).

So what does product development 2.0 mean to you? Do you see it on your organization? If you are in development at Oracle, do you agree with my opinion that things are changing? Share your wisdom in the comments.

AGIS Out of the Box

When I was about 10 years old I got a new electric train set for Christmas, but before I got to play with it I had to pinch a plug from one of my siblings toys and fit the only available (and dangerously mismatched) fuse in it. Then I had to read a complicated set of instructions to assemble a delicate set of parts and it was a minor miracle that I had it working before the New Year.

Now when I buy something new, the first thing I do is open the box, turn it on and press buttons to work out how to use it, if I get stuck I maybe look to see if they have a quick start guide. Consumer goods manufacturers make things very intuitive and ready to work right out of the box these days and we have grown to expect that. Remember that iMac add? step 1: plug into power, step 2: plug into a phone line, step 3: - there is no step 3! Wow can I have an ERP system like that please?

When designing AGIS for R12 we tried to minimize the time it would take to get started entering transactions in an initiative we internally called ‘AGIS out of the Box’.  I have to give credit to this idea to my former bosses Joe and Terrance for initiating this, but the whole team stopped, sat down and thought about what we could do to allow users to open the box and start using AGIS right away.

We came up with a few ideas

1) No profile options

Bloggers Block?

It’s nice to feel wanted and I’m pleased a few people have asked why no blog posts for a while from me.  Is it Bloggers block, have I lost interest, has somebody got to me?  None of the above - I’ve been really busy working and traveling, now I am in a hotel room and not sleepy just yet so here I am.

I’m in Hyderabad all week spending some time in meetings with our Indian team based here, this is a long overdue trip and it’s really exciting to meet people and put faces to names, voices, IM buddies etc.  A nice example of the power of web 2.0 happened today too, Venkat noticed from my twittering that I was over here so he dropped by to say hello and tell me about his new blog, he isn’t in my division anymore so without twitter he wouldn’t have known I was around.   Nice story - anyone else in Oracle Hyderabad (or just Hyderabad for that matter) reading this - feel free to drop me a note.

Now to prove I really don’t have bloggers block, I need to write something of substance…

Multi-Org Access Control

Written by David Haimes

Multiple Organizations Access Control or MOAC (pronounced MOW-ACK) to use the seemingly obligatory acronym, is a powerful, yet simple to implement feature available in R12.

Implementors spend a lot of time figuring out how to configure their Legal Entities, Ledgers and Operating Units. There are a number of options some restrictions, depending on what features you want to implement and where you are. See my earlier posts on Legal Entities and Operating Units for details on that. However it is worth remembering that change is the Status Quo (No, not the band of rocking all over the world fame - it’s latin, look it up) and flexibility is important, what was the optimal way to organize your transaction processing yesterday may not be right today. Many companies are creating shared service centers to centralize processing of financial transactions and a single user may process transactions on behalf of many different Operating Units(OU).

So MOAC allows you to create a security group which can contain many operating units and assign that to the User’s responsibility. All the forms

Why Product Development Should Blog - Part 3

I appreciate the shout out from Jake, I’d like to get more opinions on this from other bloggers, particularly my colleagues in Apps (Are you listening Joe, Anne, Puneet, Meg, Gretchen?). So in this edition I explain how blogging saves you time and makes you more productive in your day job. If you are interested check out part 1 and part 2.

Avoiding Customer Calls

Floyd Teter mentioned to me that he expected we could use more customer interaction in
development.

Why Product Development Should Blog - Part 2

In part 1 I talked about how a conversation on my blog took a frustrated customer with problems to a situation where they got sales to quote them for another Oracle product. Part 2 is a more personal branding issue.

Generating Consulting Opportunities

I contacted a reader of my blog who’d added some comments and I got the reply below:

<company X> is using Oracle as well, but they are not fully implemented across the globe. I’m noticing that we are having a hard time with intercompany transactions as they relate to foreign currencies.

I was researching the issue on google and I came across your blog. I think your blog is a great tool for questions, but I think I have too many question to ask on your blog. I was wondering if you did any consulting work?

Happy as I am in my job, especially now I’m working on GL too, it’s always nice to have other options. Of course this might lead to Oracle Consulting getting some work from this person, which would be nice too.

What is also really important to note is the research started with Google; not the user documentation, not support, not metalink or OTN, straight to google. I had a similar experience yesterday, I needed to know the IP address of my netgear wireless router. I didn’t go and dig out the instruction manual that came with it (not sure if I still have it), I didn’t go to netgear.com and start to navigate through that, I just googled it and I had the answer in seconds (192.168.0.1 for the record) and I have no idea what the source of the information was, I just know it worked. So if you have information about how best to use your products, you better get those tips and tricks out there so google can find them. I call it Help 2.0, but it seems other people have thought of that term already.

UPDATE: I now have added part 3 in this series.