Pay Value trick

When Pay Value is filled, no fast formula attached to the element type will trigger. Basic stuff.

But I learned recently that when a prorated fast formula is attached to the element type, pro ratio will kick in, and will eventually modify the Pay Value...

Quick Retropay

Oracle Payroll came with a new feature on top of 12.1.3: Quick Retropay. We had build a similar functionality ourselves before, but it is good to see we have it now out of the box.

Quick Retropay comes as a concurrent program. You specify the assignment and a date where you want the retro entries to be created. The start date is optional. The program is smart enough to find out from where to start the recalculations.

Next on my to do list is some performance profiling of the concurrent program, so that Quick means Fast.

Making Quickpay faster

For years we know that quickpay is not the fastest payroll process, and we pointed to the wait time of the concurrent manager.

But we had a closer look, and saw that even an empty Quickpay took always at least 5 seconds, excluding the time doing nothing in a concurrent queue. A sql trace file was generated at concurrent program level.


OVERALL TOTALS FOR ALL NON-RECURSIVE STATEMENTS

call     count       cpu    elapsed       disk      query    current        rows
------- ------  -------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------  ----------
Parse      151      0.00       0.00          0          0          0           0
Execute    760      0.06       0.07          2        110        115         112
Fetch      663      0.08       0.07          0       7926          0        1317
------- ------  -------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------  ----------
total     1574      0.16       0.16          2       8036        115        1429

Misses in library cache during parse: 1
Misses in library cache during execute: 1

Elapsed times include waiting on following events:
  Event waited on                             Times   Max. Wait  Total Waited
  ----------------------------------------   Waited  ----------  ------------
  SQL*Net message to client                     837        0.00          0.00
  SQL*Net message from client                   837        5.00          5.08
  asynch descriptor resize                       13        0.00          0.00
  Disk file operations I/O                        2        0.00          0.00
  SQL*Net more data from client                   8        0.00          0.00
  SQL*Net more data to client                    17        0.00          0.00
  log file sync                                  12        0.02          0.04
  utl_file I/O                                   22        0.00          0.00
  db file sequential read                         2        0.00          0.00

The totals show clearly that the sql part needed only 0.16 seconds, while the wait event “Sql*net message from client” took in total 5.08 seconds, where there was a max wait of 5 seconds. We see this line in the raw tracefile that corresponds with that maximum wait:

WAIT #0: nam='SQL*Net message from client' ela= 5001949 driver id=1952673792 #bytes=1 p3=0 obj#=-1 tim=1304197240453556

That wait event indicates that the database is waiting (doing nothing) for a next sql statement to process. During that time, the client application must be busy performing other non-database, non-sql related activities. The client over here is the pyugen pro*C program, that executes the concurrent program of the Quickpay. We do not have access to the source code of that pro*C program. So it was time to call support, and a few weeks later patch 12565924 was released.

Some challenges

Designing a payroll system for a few million employees. Mapping cash management reconciliation, costing of payments, continuous calculations and voiding of payments on the core process.

eBS 12.2 : summer sleep

We went throught the updated RCD docs today on metalink and very little has been added for HCM. Succession planning got some extra features.

For Payroll, they only announced that Enhanced Retropay will be the only supported flavor of Retropay. So when you upgrade to 12.2, and your localisation is not yet on Enhanced Retropay, you have to pay attention.

Fusion HCM

The radio silence of Oracle around Fusion is over. Last week a webcast explained the Next Generation of Hr software in the cloud.

If the Easter tea leaves are right, Fusion HCM will be available within a few weeks. Fusion Talent management will be Saas-ed by Oracle.

mission accomplished : apex on apps

Years ago we developed a solution to integrate Apex with Oracle's eBusiness suite.

It worked fine on 11i, and we came with a jsp solution for some of our initial R12 customers.

We had sometimes the "Apex is not supported by Oracle for the EBusiness Suite" discussion.

On the Apex site you can now read the "official" white paper how to integrate Apex on Apps. You should be on a recent 12.1.3, and it requires some patching.

The paper is introduced on David Peake's blog, Apex product manager.

I will blog how it works out, the next time we gonna use the official integrator.

Upgrade stories : Web Adi again

We had a nasty web ADI issue on a few of the upgraded instances. It worked before, it works on some other R12 instances, but we are not able to make it working again.

It throws all the time "Mail Merge Aborted due to error in creating the Mail Merge Data Source". Nothing in the log files.

Escalated the P2, but no reactions from support side. After some background fighting, a senior support analyst jumped in, and the next day it worked.

The $BNE_TOP/sql/BNENLINS.sql script fixed some NLS data issues in the custom integrator, et voila.

Upgrade stories : Apex integration

The security model in 12.1.3 is a little bit more picky, so we had to add a few more configuration steps to made the secured HR views working again. Without these 2 steps, the secured views returned 0 rows.

First, we registered the APEX_PUBLIC_USER in eBS via the regular Forms, and then a little update was needed to make it working.

update fnd_oracle_userid a
set a.read_only_flag = 'U'
where a.oracle_username = 'APEX_PUBLIC_USER';

No electricity, but the application is up

Dakar is having more troubles then normal with electricity. Never thought that the SaaS model would be that useful when the light goes out. And the extra battery in the office dies, and the router goes down. But you still can access the application over your smartphone and finish your payroll run.

And hope you can charge your phone's battery some time in the evening ...

Payroll 13th month

A monthly payroll has 12 periods, but a customer requested a 13th run, so that all corrections made over 2010 would still be processed in 2010.

By using the standard processes a little bit smarter, we achieved the goal.

Retropay was launched so that the differences were created in December again.

The Payroll ran again for December with an element set, that contained only retro element types. So only the differences found by Retropay were processed by the second December run.

And just a tweak of the (custom) payslip, so that only run results of that latest run were shown, completed the picture.

And the post-payroll processes pick up all results of both December runs.

Upgrade stories : Bursting

The parameters of the concurrent "XML Publisher Report Bursting Program" have changed between 11i and R12. Oracle added a new parameter, before the previously defined 2 parameters.

The new and hidden parameter is called "Dummy for Data Security", and is defaulted by "select xdo_cp_data_security_pkg.get_concurrent_request_ids from dual".

Upgrade stories : Web Adi error

Launching Web ADI from HR forms throws a http 404 error under Internet Explorer. Firefox shows a more meaningful "Resource /OA_HTML/oracle.apps.bne.webui.BneApplicationService not found on this server".

After some digging, it was found that the web html call of seeded and custom Web ADI forms functions had 'oracle.apps.bne.webui.' before 'BneApplicationService'.

It looks like the upgrade scripts do not clean that up correctly.

Upgrade stories : 12.1.2 or 12.1.3

So which version to choose from?

12.1.2 is out for a while, so a nice list of fixes exists already.

12.1.3 is new on the block from August 2010 on. Going for this version brings you to the latest and finest verion of the eBusiness Suite. And will fix some previous bugs. And will introduce some new bugs.

To make things a little more complicated, Metalink states:

"R12.HR_PF.B.Delta.3 (9114911) - Oracle HRMS RUP 3: This is the lowest level of HRMS Release Update Pack (RUP) on which Netherlands Payroll customers are supported for 2010/11 Year End processing and statutory updates effective from 01-Jan-2011."

And this Rup 3 is already included in the 12.1.3 version, but is an extra Rup to install on top of 12.1.2.

I gonna propose 12.1.3. Either way we will have issues to fix, so it seems better to fix them in the latest version. As such, the customer is one relaese point higher, and support can not ask you to upgrade to 12.1.3.

Upgrade stories : Extended support for 11.5.10

Plan is to blog some articles about ongoing R12 upgrades, within the HCM domain.

If you are on 11.5.10 right now :
- Premier support ends by November 2010
- you are forced into Extended support from December 2010 on
- Oracle does not bill extra money for the extended support for the first year
- So you pay extra money for Extended support from December 2011 on

You can avoid the extra money, if
- you talk to your account manager
- Oracle revises their extra money support policy, or extends the grace period
- you upgrade to R12 (which will cost you also money)

Count your options.

Retropay by Employee

I'm posting the last time a lot about Apex. While in reality I'm mainly busy with Oracle Payroll.

If your legislation uses advanced or enhanced retropay, there is the RetroNotifications process to run, to identify which employees have retrospective changes.

And in a next step, you run the RetroPay process. The enhanced version does not have any assignment set parameter anymore. In other words, the people selected by RetroNotifications will be processed by Retropay.

We have now a customer that wants to see the effect of changes in the past as soon as possible on a payslip.

So we engineered a RetroPay by Employee process, on top of the standard Retropay process. It forces an assignment into retropay, runs retropay for all assignments of an employee (yes, multi-assignments), and runs the payroll for all these assignments. All in one process.

It is now part of our Popay Payroll Toolkit.

Apex 4.0

Oracle will never confirm this, but I guess Apex 4.0 will see the light before the end of the worldcup.

This could be understood in between the lines of what was told at the OBUG Apex SIG day in Belgium yesterday.

The feature list looks impressive, and with all demonstrations seen yesterday, I have a way better understanding of the way forward.

But I'm still wondering how to use Websheets in an eBusiness suite context.

And by the way: how to integrate Apex with a version control system is still an open question for me.

Apex on R12 - patch 7377023

This patch brings back the good old SSWA plsql menu functions on R12. And in more recent versions of R12, they are part of the base install.

That does not mean that the eBS team supports mod_plsql. No. But it gives more possibilities to integrate Apex on Apps.

Again:
- Oracle supports Apex
- Oracle supports mod plsql
- Oracle does not support customizations
- Oracle eBS does not support customizations
- Oracle eBS does not support mod plsql anymore
- Oracle eBS does not support Apex applications

So bottomline: Apex on Apps in R12 is supported within Oracle, but not by the eBS team.

The readme of the patch says :

Mod_plsql technology is supported by Oracle Server Technologies Support teams.
Oracle E-Business Suite Support and Development is unable to provide
instructions or diagnostic assistance on any issues that arise from custom
development using mod_plsql.

Fusion on the iPad?

Too many posts these days about the iPad, so one more will not make the difference.

The last (and only) demo I saw from Fusion looked a lot like Flash. But there is not a lot of love lost between Apple and Flash. Meaning that Oracle has still to release their next gen platform, but will not be able to use the next gen client device.

Apex 4.0 Release date

Patrick Wolf shows again a good reason why we should look forward for the 4.0 release of Apex. Cascading LOVs for dummies.

But one little phrase makes me think that the 4.0 production release is not yet for tomorrow. "(Note: Popup LOV and List Manager will be added as well in the final product)". So not yet code complete ...