Overview of Oracle

E-Business Suite
Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) is an integrated suite of enterprise software modules
for financial management, supply chain management, manufacturing, project
management, human capital management, and customer relationship management.
Oracle E-Business Suite history dates back to nearly 25 years ago when Oracle started
the Oracle Applications division, a group focused on building business management
software closely integrated with Oracle database. The first Oracle ERP Application,
Oracle General Ledger was launched in August 1988. Since then, Oracle Application
releases have continued at regular intervals. May 2000 saw the introduction of
Release 11i and in January 2007 Release 12 was launched.
This book is intended to serve as a quick guide for Oracle E-Business Suite users and
implementers. This handbook discusses two key business process flows—Order to
Cash and Procure to Pay.
In this chapter, we will discuss the foundation features and various products that
make up Oracle Financials:
• Navigation within Oracle E-Business Suite with focus on Release 12
• Fundamentals of flexfields
• Shared entities
• Multiple Organization (MO) concepts
• Multiple Organization Access Control (MOAC)
• Integrated flows
• Globalization support
• Key aspects of application security
Overview of Oracle E-Business Suite
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ERP and Oracle E-Business Suite

Oracle E-Business Suite has multiple products that support the capability to manage
an enterprise. The term often used with these type of software solutions is ERP,
which stands for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
There are various ERP software solutions in the market but this book focuses on the
solution from Oracle and the latest version is most often referred to as "EBiz Suite
R12" or just simply R12 in this book (and in discussions and forums).
This handbook focuses on Oracle Financial products for Procure to Pay (P2P) and
Order to Cash (O2C) business flows. As we will also be covering Oracle Fixed Assets
and some reporting aspects in the following chapters it might seem like we are also
covering additional flows or portions thereof, but the focus will remain on these two
flows mentioned previously.
It is important to note the fact that these are separate products (and were at some
point in time developed as stand-alone products) and there are differences in the
way they feel, act, and look. Though they accomplish their goals in an integrated
fashion, some of the technological framework is different. This does in many cases
lead to interesting scenarios.
Over the following chapters, you will be introduced to key setups and key
configurations considerations of Oracle Financial Applications products and
transaction processing concepts.
The modules that will be covered are:
• General Ledger
• Subledger Accounting
• Accounts Payables
• Accounts Receivables
• Cash Management
• Treasury
• Fixed Assets
• Inventory
• Purchasing
• Order Management
• Credit Management
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The following common products are integrated with the Oracle Financials suite and
serve as important building blocks:
• Oracle E-Business Tax
• Oracle Workflow
• Oracle Approvals Management Engine (AME)
Key setups and configurations will be discussed for the common modules.
Oracle E-Business Suite is a complete set of business applications that enables
corporations to efficiently track detailed business transaction data to help gather
decision-making information. Oracle Financials are a subset of the E-Business Suite
and are a family of products designed to capture and analyze your financial data.
Oracle Financials applications helps to meet your obligations in key areas such as:
• Compliance
• Financial control
• Regulatory reporting
• Cost containment
• Risk management
Though the following chapters do not necessarily cover all these aspects in detail the
controls and reporting capabilities are inherently built into the suite and are available
to be implemented and used as needed.
Some products may need additional licensing. One of the data entities we will talk
about in this chapter is generically called organizations. The financial suite supports
the capability to help represent various business models in its configuration structure
and are represented with related data entities. These can be listed in brief as follows:
• Your organization
• The role of your Legal entities
• Representing your organization in the system
• Organizational classifications in Oracle Financials
• Chart of Accounts
• System entities
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We will briefly cover the inherent aspects of the organization in this chapter and the
details will be covered in subsequent chapters where they are more relevant and
configured. In Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (R12) the legal entity has been
upgraded to an important data entity and now controls the ownership of various
transactional and master data within the product suite. This is covered in more
detail in Chapter 2, General Ledger.
The Chart of Accounts is a key feature in capturing your transactional accounting
information to be able to report in a manner that supports and benefits the
organizations' various organizational requirements.
Organizations and what they denote and identify will be briefly covered in a later
part of this chapter.

Integration and process flows

As mentioned in the earlier part of this chapter, E-Business Suite is an integrated
solution that has the capability to manage multiple business processes that support
any given enterprise. The supported processes are:
• Financial Control and Reporting
• Corporate Performance Management
• Corporate Governance
• Credit to Cash
• Procure to Pay
• Asset, Real Estate, and Lease Management
• Cash and Treasury Management
• Travel and Expense Management
The business flows depict the close integration between the products as data flows
from one to the other and also highlight the shared data sets that they use.
The two main business process flows associated with Oracle E-Business Suite Release
12 financial modules and the ones that we intend to cover in this book are as follows:
• Order to Cash (O2C)
• Procure to Pay (P2P)
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LEDGERS
GENERAL LEDGER
INVENTORY
ORDER MANAGEMENT
BANKS UNIT OF MEASURES
CUSTOMERS
ITEMS
CASH MANAGEMENT
RECEIVABLES

Order to Cash modules and processes

The Order to Cash (O2C) process is the revenue generating business process in the
enterprise and is supported by the following E-Business Suite products:
• Oracle General Ledger: Accounting journals for Receivables and
Inventory activity
• Oracle Receivables/iReceivables: Book receivables for goods shipped and
services rendered (only if Service Contracts is not installed)
• Oracle Inventory: Items, inventory relief
• Oracle Order Management: Manage Orders, ship goods, and services
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• Oracle Cash Management: Banks for collecting Cash Receipts
LEDGERS
GENERAL LEDGER
INVENTORY
BANKS UNIT OF MEASURES
SUPPLIERS
ITEMS
CASH MANAGEMENT
PAYABLES
PURCHASING

Procure to Pay Modules and Processes

The Procure to Pay (P2P) process is the procurement and related activity in the
enterprise, and is supported by the following E-Business Suite products:
• Oracle General Ledger: Accounting journals for Accruals, Invoices,
Payments, and Inventory receipts
• Oracle Cash Management: Reconcile cash payments, adjustments and
corrections to cash payments and manage Banks
• Oracle Payables/iExpenses: Record invoices and employee expense reports
• Oracle Inventory: Set up inventory/expense items, record inventory activity
such as receipts of inventory, returns, and corrections.
• Oracle Purchasing/iProcurement: Procure goods and services, record
periodic and perpetual accruals
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Shared entities
The financial application suite of products share a common data model and a set
of integrated applications to give the enterprise a holistic view of their data. This
enables the enterprise to view their business/financial information in a consolidated
view and assist in their making informed decisions.
The products also share—due to the tight integration—data elements across them
so that an entity (say an Employee) that has been defined in one product is the
same entity that is used across all products that require that entity. This reduces
maintenance overhead and leads to accuracy in the data that is used across
the products.
Shared entities allow one-time definition of a business object so that it can be
used across various modules. The ownership of a shared entity within a business
organization may vary but technically the ownership is linked to a single module.
Here is a list of some often used shared entities with corresponding product owners:
Shared entities Product owner
Unit of Measure Inventory
Items Inventory
Suppliers Purchasing
Customers Receivable
Salespersons Sales
Employees Human Resources
Locations Human Resources
Currencies Application Object Library
The last product Application Object Library (AOL) is a technological layer that
owns a lot of internal data elements and the currencies happen to be part of
this product.
Not many other data sets that you will work on at a functional level are owned
by this product. We will identify in this chapter one more such important data
set owned by this product.