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 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]

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

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”

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…

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.

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.

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.

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

Intercompany Vs Intracompany November 2007
38 comments

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

Useful Oracle Financials Resources January 2008
11 comments

Defining Intracompany Balancing Rules January 2008
12 comments

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

iPhone Apps are all the rage at the moment, but I do feel there are a lot of Apps created just for the sake of it and not well thought out.  Reminds me of the dot com era where all companies were desperate to have a web presence but didn’t necesserily know why they wanted it or what they wanted to get out of it.  That said, managing my expenses with a mobile device, taking pictures of receipts and entering them real time is always going to be a Killer App.

Anyway, enough of me, here’s the video…

1) In WordPress go to Tools Export and click on the Export button

This will give you an XML file to save to your computer in the WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR format with all your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags.  Excellent for loading to another WordPress Blog.

2) You need to convert this WXR format to something blogger can read, so got to http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/

Load up your WXR file and you will get a file back in blogger format.  All powered by the Google App Engine (thanks guys)

3) Go to blogger dashboard and click import, select the file you got from 2) above

One thing to be careful about is it will also pull in your draft posts from WordPress, so I recommend that you don’t check the box to publish right away, better to review and publish after the import.

So now I have all my blog posts on blogger as well as on wordpress, next problem to solve is if I could keep them synched up automatically, which I think might be a more difficult problem.

If you have any other blogs of interest or tweeters, please share them with all the readers in the comments below.

I applied the embedded BI concept to my habitual tardiness and I liked the analogy, so rather than write 500 words on a facebook status, I decided to put my thoughts in a blog post.  Here goes…

My operational activity is getting out of bed, ready for work, maybe doing some work/checking mails, maybe having breakfast, maybe getting kids dressed and finally I walk out of the door to jump on a bus to the office.

My traditional BI world is looking back on a week and wondering why I missed the bus three times, what impact that had on my life and how I might take some corrective action.  I may determine it takes 6 minutes to walk to the bus stop or 4 minutes if I run a little.  Maybe I notice that on two occasions the bus left 1 minute early and that was why I missed it.  I might analyze decide that for the next week I will set all the clocks in the house 1 minute fast, that way I should arrive at the bus stop 1 minute early and that ought to prevent me missing two buses a week that arrive early and make a huge difference to my punctuality and effectiveness in morning meetings.

Now as anybody who has tried setting clocks forward in order to trick themselves into leaving earlier and so preventing occurrences of tardiness will testify, it doesn’t work.  You look at the clock showing 6:50am and mentally subtract a minute and figure you have time for one more slice of toast if you eat it fast and then run a little.

So how is embedded BI going to help me more?  (I am getting to the point soon, I hope you’re still reading) Well the BI I get needs to embedded into my operational world and help me make better decisions in real time.  In order to do that I would need it to be relevant, timely and actionable.  Let’s look at these three three items in teh context of an example – I am considering eating one more slice of toast at 6:50, my next bus is at 7:05, the one after that at 7:40, the bus journey takes 12 minutes, then I have a 5 minute walk and I need to be at my desk at 8am to host a Web Conference, the fare is $2 and I only have a $20 bill in my pocket.

Timely – This is easy, I need information before I put the toast in the toaster.  If it comes after I put the toast in the toaster but before I start eating it then I might still get my bus but have to leave the toast behind and wasted.  If I get it even later I may miss my bus.  As you can see the later in the task I get the information the worse the result is.

Relevant – I don’t want generic information on my bus catching/missing history over the last 12 months.  I want to know how often does having a slice of toast 15 minutes before my bus is due causes me to miss my bus. Some information about how often the 7:05 bus arrives early would help too.

Actionable – In my bus example the action is pretty much down to me, I get up from the table and head out of the door, the action is in my own hands.  One action I might need to take is to break my $20 bill to make sure I have the correct change for the bus fare, embedded BI would remind me of this and might even present the alternative option of borrowing $2 in change from my 5 year old’s money box (A further action might be to remind me when I get home to pay it back)

The example I am using is fairly trivial and most people would tell me to just arrive 5 minutes early all the time to be sure of catching the bus.  However in business the decisions are much more important and the results translate into operational efficiencies, less mistakes, higher productivity, higher sales, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction better profits all those good things.

So that was my attempt to explain how I see embedded BI.  Agree, disagree or otherwise express your thoughts in the comments section below.

]]> http://davidhaimes.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/what-is-embedded-bi/feed/ 6 davidhaimes Deborah http://davidhaimes.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/a-few-gl-r12-ledger-faq/ http://davidhaimes.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/a-few-gl-r12-ledger-faq/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:30:55 +0000 David Haimes http://davidhaimes.wordpress.com/?p=371 ]]> Here are a few questions about R12 I have been asked a number of times, and if a few people asked me, I am guessing that even more people are searching from Google, (or maybe even Yahoo or Bing) looking for answers.

1) What is a Ledger?  What happened to my Sets of Books?

Your 11i Set of Books is now an R12 ledger, any 11i sets of books you had will be a ledger after you run the R12 upgrade.

2) Why did you change the name?

I am not fully aware of the history of the decision, but a Ledger is a much better description and matches the business terminology more closely.  Also with the introduction of Ledger Sets in R12, we’d have had a clumsy  ‘Set of Books Sets’ term to deal with.

3) Does the new table gl_ledgers replace gl_sets_of_books table.

Yes.

4) So what about my custom reports that query gl_sets_of_books table or gl_sets_of_books_v view

No need to change those.  For backward compatibility we created a view gl_sets_of_books which references the gl_ledgers table.  gl_sets_of_books_v is also modified to reference gl_ledgers table.

5) What happens to the sob_id, are these primary keys preserved?

Yes, the sob_id from 11i will become the ledger_id you see in R12

6) I see Ledger_id in the gl_interface table, do I have to update all my feeder programs that write to that to populate ledger_id instead of sob_id?

No.  GL_INTERFACE is backward compatible, the sob_id column is still there and ledger_id is optional, if Journal Import does not find any value in ledger_id it will use the sob_id

I have not got into any of the powerful new functionality that is introduced as part of the Ledger Architecture, or discussed what you can do with Ledger Sets, those items are for another day.  If you want to read about those now you should look at the document below.

Oracle Financials and Oracle Procurement Functional Upgrade Guide: Release 11i to Release 12 (Part No. B31543-01)

1. Lack of time – busy job at Oracle, arrival of our 3rd and 4th children, spending summer in Europe, moving house…
2. I can’t discuss my day job – I have the pleasure of managing a development team building truly amazing and ground breaking Fusion products. Downside is we can’t talk much about it yet as it isn’t released.

Regarding the second point, I should still blog about R12, all the reasons I started this blog are still valid, but I find it increasingly hard to switch gears from Fusion to R12 (maybe something to do with age?).

As for lack of time this will always be a problem.  I have tried to respond to comments and keep up reading some of the other great oracle blogs, but only now whilst starting out on a 22 hour flight to India do I feel I have a little time to think about blogging… So when I next get connected I can hit publish and I am a blogger again.

I have had a number of people asking for more details on this product, you can start with Oracle’s data sheet or the link above to the oracle.com FAH site. There is a nice article introducing FSAH and SLA on the Oracle Consulting Solutions site by Sven van Leemput, this is a a good read. There is also presentation on slideshare from capgemini and kpn telecom about their experience with the Accounting Hub, nice to see some practical examples, even if it is at a high level. I have not done a metalink search recently, but I am sure there is plenty of information there too for those with access to metalink and of course there are the OTN forums.

Anyone else have any good sources of information – please share them via the comments.

I have 75 posts and 430 Approved comments

Average of almost 6 comments per post

Most active poster (after me) is Jake

Average of just over one comment per day since the blog started

John Maeda has an excellent book and companion website on the laws of simplicity, which is a must read. I have lent the book out to a lot of people and I can’t remember who has it now, but if it’s you and you’re reading this – please return it! This book lays out a set of laws that all design should adhere to in order to reduce complexity and having these ideas in the front of your mind is going to help guide you in the right direction when working on designs.

It is a challenge to create a set of complex applications, but the real challenge is to keep the complexity hidden giving a simple user experience and this is where I believe applications vendors will provide most value going forward.  We simply need to reduce the complexity (and hence cost) associated with owning applications without sacrificing any functionality – this is not easy, but I like a challenge and fortunately the people I work with do too.