Oracle acquires BEA

The first thought is that this is a pure middleware play.

Buy installed base and generate support revenue.

Or has it to do something with Fusion Apps. I do not think so. The architecture is defined right now, and BEA will only play a role later on in the life cycle of Fusion Apps. If any.

But the hidden gem could be Tuxedo. Oracle wants to position itself in the primary processes. Think banking processes for banks. And these transactions are handled by Tuxedo, already for years.

And there is the big money. Compared to SAP that hunts for the little cents with Business By Design.

Inovation. Nope. Smart. Yes.

Any link with HR. Nope.

HR 2.0

Every HR implementation tries to structure all kinds of employee related data within the venders shoebox. We just make it fit, but a lot of data and processes are not structured at all.

Why not load all employees within a social network, tag them with competences, positions, domains of interest, ... from the corporate HR system? And then let the employees connect to their peers, discuss issues, create communities within the enterprise, learn from collegues the other side of the world. Free flow versus structure.

From a technical point of view, it is easy. But which organisation will be ready to give this a try?

gross up rounding error

One of the outputs generated by the gross up formula is the remainder. We noticed that we missed a few eurocents in costing, due to these remainders.

First we set the "to within" input value to 1 eurocent, but gross up still was coming up with a few remainders of one cent.

And we could not decrease the value of "to within", since the unit of measure was money.

So we changed the unit of measure to Number, filled 0.009 as the "to within" tollerance, and grossup did a perfect job, leaving 0 as remainder. We still have to see if this perfect job has no performance consequences.

We opted not to create an additional element to store the remainder, and cost it.

Gross up, out of the box

This article describes the configuration steps for the grossup or gross to net functionality. The seeded fast formulas are used, but you could implement your own variations on them.

1. define an element type.

• In the Advance tab, set Gross up (which activates the iterative flag and the process seperate)
• define input values, based on the inputs of the seeded fast formula default_grossup.

• Pay Value
• Amount
• Additional amount
• Low gross
• High gross
• Remainder
• To within
• Method (defaulted to interpolation)
  
• Grossup balance

• map the input values to the inputs of the fast formula (which is in this case a 1-1) via the iterative rules button.
  


• (optional) exclude grossup balances, via the exclude balances button. Only those balances that are defined as grossup show up in the list to be excluded.

2. Link the seeded fast formula calc_grossup_pay_value to the element type created above. The output of that fast formula (payment_amount) must be linked directly to the pay value.

3. Define an element link, and happy testing.

Yes you can change the names of the input values, since a mapping is foreseen by the payroll engine, and also the fast formulas can be used as a template for your custom solution, although i would not advise that.

Grossup only works from an element entry, so you can not activate it from an indirect run result.

result name	type	input value	severity
ADDITIONAL_AMOUNT	Adjust	Additional amount	.
CHANGER	Adjust	Changer	.
GROSSUP_BALANCE	Adjust	Grossup balance	.
HIGH_GROSS	Adjust	High gross	.
LOW_GROSS	Adjust	Low gross	.
MESG	Message	_	Information
REMAINDER	Adjust	Remainder	.
STOPPER	Stop	_	.

BEE Spreadsheet Interface

We wanted to load BEE batch element lines via Excel. And we remembered somehow it was described as new standard functionality a few family packs ago.

So just search metalink and there we go. At least, that was the plan. Metalink came with a lot of results, pointing to web ADI, error messages and how to work around them, but a simple doc that describes how to activate the functionality was not found.

I guess Google set the search standards too high.

But ok, a new try the next day on some slightly different keywords, and all of a sudden "BEE Spreadsheet Interface" docs showed up within the top 40 list. So that was the magic search string.

And from that moment on we found some docs, and one hour later a first xls (sorry spreadsheet) was loaded.

Before you ask it: note 341427.1 did the trick.

apps password

today the customer asked to work out a fairly easy forms personalisation. Trouble was that we were not getting the apps password on the development instance. Some pressure, some extra decibles, and we were delighted to receive the very secret apps password.

By the way, on production the password is simply apps. Go figure out.

Documentool for Alerts

In the previous post i mentionned the Belgian summer. Sorry about that.

We just created a Documentool for Alerts. So if you are in need to document all your alerts, leave a comment over here, and i'll send you the code.

Discussions are ongoing, but we think to make it freeware, as Documentool for Flexfields.

HRMS Release 11i Family Pack K Rollup 2

The summer is almost there (here in Belgium), and a new family pack is coming. Sorry, roll up.

One of the nice new payroll core features is the possibility to handle payments to foreign bank accounts. Dev made it now possible to select organizational payment methods from an other legislation then the one of your business group.

And i have the impression this is only implemented in framework, so i wonder how the form will behave.

Oracle in the blogging community: they don't get it yet

In the eBusiness suite corner, i'm not aware of good blogs from Oracle, except the tech stack blog of shan.

With a good blog, i mean a blog where personal opinions are expressed in an open, transparent way, by key players. For that to happen, Oracle is way too closed and hierarchical. Marketing and legal are close followers of all expressions.

First thing to happen is an internal cultural shift to openess. Inviting the blog community to their events can help that transformation to happen. I'm sure that the top bloggers will not all follow the official marketing strategy and message, and will post critical questions. If Oracle internals will then reply, an open communication and exchange can start.

But this will take time, and i'm not sure if Oracle wants to open the windows when the Fusion story needs to be told. A single marketing message is then so important, and the fusion message will not be easy to communicate anyway.

applications unlimited

From a marketing point of view, again, genious. Oracle will support your solution all over the time, if you pay for it.

But the pieces below will be desupported anyway by other suppliers, so you are forced by others to upgrade.

I'm afraid to raise a SR

Disclaimer: i work sometimes directly for Oracle support, so receive money from them.

But on almost every SR i have to pleasure to work on, they drive me nuts. To bring the status of an SR asap back to the customer, they paste in the most fanstatic texts. Or ask for whatever diagnostic information. And ask first for the traces that have nothing to do with the problem itself, but take ages to generate. Or ask for versions, even when you pasted it in already 3 times.

But ok, that is the first layer of analysts you should try to go through. It takes time, but once you now their top 10 of preferred useless info, you can prepare yourself pretty well. Unless you do not have the time (P1).

It becomes more dangereous when they suggest out of context recommendations, that can make the problem worse, or can have impact on other modules. But if you explain why you think it is not a good idea to perform a step, and thus refuse to implement their recommendation, they will not proceed in handling the SR. Catch 22, or better, deadlock.

It would help if all of these analysts had some on-site experience. For all the money customers pay for support from Oracle, this is not asking too much.

Before i end this flow of thoughts, let me stress too that some analysts simply do their job very well, and just play their role as intermediate between customer and development.

After a while, you start knowing them by name. One hint, if your SR is randomly assigned to one of these that think that collecting 10 Giga of data is necessary before contacting dev, try to escalate untill a knowledgable analyst takes over.

retropay, i hate it, i love it

I scanned my blog for retropay. I found back a post of september 2003. At that time we worked out in the Netherlands a solution around reversals. Standard retropay was not an option at that time, since the specifications of the customer were too specific, volumes were huge, and the NL localisation and core solution were not yet 100% finished.

Q: Would i do it again, more then 3 years later?
A: Yes.

Main reason is performance. Retropay is designed to recalculate exceptions. When massive retropay is needed, you can start it very early in the payroll cycle. And run it an other time to process the last minute exceptional cases.

key flex fields

It is not the first time they ask me to "decode" a flex structure. Till now, i havent found a generic way of doing that, but the supported package fnd_flex_ext does the trick nicely for key flexfields. The function get_segs returns the concatenated display value off all segments.

Please drop me a line when you can point me to a similar function for descriptive flexfields.

a passionate user has gone

There will always be a few psychos around. But one can be enough to ruin your life.

We do not use custom.pll

Why do people still enhance the Apps forms via custom.pll coding?

Are forms personalizations not enough? Maybe, but apply the 80/20 principle, and don't code custom anymore.

Are we not shifting towards self service? So every business logic you add in custom.pll, you can do again in for those lovely web pages.

But my first try anyway is always user hooks.

Salary updates via Web ADI

The standard integrator 'HR Update Salary Proposals' is showing only seeded US salary components, the columns to change the amount or percentage by component are missing, and the headers are not meaningfull.

Showing other components then the seeded once was solved by changing the view hru_salary_proposal. This is a documented change. Searching online help or metalink by the name of the view of peupl01.v.sql will explain you. How to find these docs without knowing these details already is an other story. But Oracle is marketing now a search solution.

Adding additional columns was done by enabling hidden columns in the Web ADI layout of the 'HR Update Salary Proposals' integrator.

Note 389624.1 on CWB was helpfull in explaining how the change column names. Once the 'Web ADI - Interface Columns Integrator' was enabled and unsecured, we could download the interface and do the modifications.

But the end user was not happy with the order of the columns. With an update statement (on bne_layout_cols) we could work around that, but we have still not found a documented way to realize that. Feel free.

Release 12

I guess R12 will be the most stable release ever, since
1. there are no new functionalities in it for HCM
2. the technology stack is simplified

(1) It seems all new functionalites have been released already on previous 11i family packs and RUPs. I only found some changes on the new financial legal entities, operating units and business groups (based on hr security profiles!) and checklist Self Service functionality.

(2) No 9 database anymore. Only a few Oracle Homes. Fusion middleware.

apologies

I was not realizing it was so long ago i was not blogging. How do you find time to do it anyway?

I was very busy the last months, so sorry, but i'm afraid the next months will be even worse.

Some things i was working on, since the last post, so far i remember:
- serving a payroll customer in the Netherlands having issue after issue. There is light at the end of the tunnel.
- Implementing a payroll upgrade from 11.0.3 to 11.5.10. Nasty NLS issues, and the volume test was challenging.
- Self service implementation (with AME).
- upgrading Documentool
- creating an extention on the Dutch payroll for foreign payments (bic/iban/btl91)
- Compensation Workbench. Oracle using their own OAB framawork.

element sets within Payroll

Is it possible to prevent users from updating particular element entries? Well, today i learned that a profile option can be set to specify an element set which defines the 'do not touch me' element types.

An overview of the different types of element sets:

Customization set, for element entries

• Limit the elements that can be seen on a configured version of the Element Entries window
• List the elements to be entered for assignments using BEE
• Prevent users updating entry values in the Element Entries form for a set of elements. (set the element set in the profile option HR:Non-Updateable Element Set)

Run set, for payroll processing

• Use a run set to specify the elements to be processed in a payroll run.

Distribution set, for costing

• Use a distribution set to define the elements over which the costs of other elements are to be distributed.

Bye bye family packs, welcome Rollups

Oracle released the first rollup patch for Hrms.

One of the new features is the FastFormula Assistant. She let's you

• choose multiple FastFormulas to compile
• show line numbers for formula text to locate easily errors
• upload/download a formula for integration with your favorite text editor
• generate FastFormula text templates