The Financial Services moniker was always misleading because there is nothing specific to the Financial Services industry in the product, now this has been fixed and the official name is Financials Accounting Hub. So that one is cleared up.

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 enabled threaded comments on the blog, which should help make conversations easier to read and follow. Thanks WordPress for this feature. I’ve been surprised, delighted and more recently unable to find time to keep up with the number of comments on the blog.  Some stats:

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

Reading Meg’s post on the Talented Apps blog I was inspired to write a quick blog post rather than leave a long comment. Meg talks about how we can strive to improve the usability of our applications, something that we need to continually work on. We did what we thought was the right thing with our AGIS out of the box in R12, but this was really just scratching the surface, there is always room for improvement and we need to constantly reduce the complexity we present to users.

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.

Written by David Haimes

This blog turned one year old this week, so a short review of the year is in order.

I started this blog after Open World 2007, mostly as a way to put answers ‘out there’ to the questions I was being asked multiple times during the conference. I was hoping to do a couple of posts a week and have managed a total of 74, or 1.4 per week, which considering I have got a lot more responsibility at work than 12 months ago I’m pleased with. Most of all I enjoyed the conversations, there have been 400 comments including one from Charles Phillips (indirectly) but I didn’t hear form Larry when I posted a picture of his Yacht which incidentally gave me by far my highest day of hits, the majority coming from Digg.

What has pleasantly surprised me about blogging is how much I have learned in the past year from the comments on the blogs and from following the plethora of other excellent Oracle bloggers that a year ago I didn’t really know existed. I’ve also spent a lot of time on twitter, following a lot of interesting, entertaining, knowledgeable and helpful people many of whom are also bloggers.

So all in all a good first year and now I look forward to the next one and wonder what the stars have in store for me over the next 12 months…

XO Laptop

Written by David Haimes

I blogged some time ago about the One Laptop per Child Foundation and how myself and others had taken part in the give one get one program last year. I think the XO laptop is an amazing machine and more importantly I fully support the goals of the foundation.

I got an email and a message to thank me for giving the laptop and as it suggests I will tell 100 people (I hope I have that many readers) and be taking my XO laptop to work this week so I can show people the machine and spread the word about the excellent work the foundation is doing – feel free to drop by my office to check it out. If you want to give then you can do this at www.amazon.com/xo

Written by David Haimes

As Intercompany transactions are very likely to cross systems they are a good candidate for integration in a ‘Hub’ of some sort.

In R12 the Financials Services Accounting Hub (FSAH) allows integration of third party systems to Oracle and is incredibly powerful and flexible.

Let’s use a simple example:

Company A and B both use two different Ledgers. A Sales Invoice is issued by Company A (to Company B) for $5,000

The accounting needs to be created as below, they need to be booked with the same accounting date in the same period.

In Company A

Debit Intercompany AR $5,000
Credit Intercompany sales $5,000

In Company B

Debit Expense or inventory (per content), $5,000
Credit Intercompany AP, $5,000

So there’s a number of options that come to mind (in no particular order).

1) Using Oracle Accounting Hub you can account for transactions form third party systems, it uses the Subledger accounting engine to process accounting events defined for the third party system. If your invoice systems are third party applications, you could create 2 events (one for each company/ledger/party to the transaction) for the sales invoice and get the full accounting out of the single system integration.

2) Enter these transactions in AGIS, the specific accounting will be entered/generated and approvals from company A and B obtained before AGIS either books it direct to GL or generates the Invoice for company A and B if required.

3) It may not be ideal to force users to navigate to a different screen (or change some import process, EDI, XML feed etc) to issue Intercompany invoices from other invoices as in 2) above. So continue to enter in your regular sales invoice system but run a process which detects an invoice is Intercompany and cancels it, then generates a transaction for it in AGIS (via the Open Interfaces) or FSAH.

I don’t think any one of these is right for all situations, detailed analysis of the particular implementation environment and requirements needs to be done to figure out the best approach. If you have any thoughts, better suggestions or experience then please share them in the comments.

I was hoping that I’d find time to blog regular updates during the Open World week, but this proved a lot more difficult than I anticipated. There was simply so much going on during the days and evenings plus I had to continue with my day job; building Fusion GL and Intercompany Applications (that’s the day job I can’t blog a lot about). So to summarize my Open World, I saw a lot of people, talked a lot about Oracle, presented an Intercompany Session, spent some time on the DEMO booth and was exhausted at the end of it all.

I was going to attempt to write a review of the week, but there’s so much to say and so many people to remember to give a mention that now is not the time. I will focus on one particular area, the DEMO grounds; working here is IMO the hardest job at Open World (although I haven’t actually done all the jobs so what do I know?). What you do is stand there for four or five hours at a time and wait for people to come and ask you to Demo anything they want to see or ask you any question at all vaguely related to the area you are covering. You get questions ranging from ‘Can you tell me the differentiators between Oracle Apps and SAP?’ or ‘What’s new in R12?’ to ‘I have logged SR number X and I’m not sure I agree with the response, can you take a look?’. The eBusiness suite area seemed pretty busy this year and we often had a decent size group of people gathered round, which can be tough but it’s good that people are interested. The conversations that I most enjoyed were when somebody had a customization in 11i that they thought they could replace with standard functionality in R12 and I could confirm they were right. However the most amazing thing about the demo booth is the amount you learn about how customers actually use, or would like to use our products and the real day to day issues they have around implementing, manging and extending them to meet business needs.

What do you think about the DEMO grounds, best place to go and get questions answered? Or are they somewhere you avoid? If you worked there, let me know what your experience was – sound off in the Comments.

After last year’s Oracle Open World I asked if Oracle was cool again and that post was picked up by eye on oracle and created quite a bit of debate. Now we are approaching Open World again and I see Oracle has put it’s mix social network front and center taking over the oracle.com home page with the Oracle Listens campaign. Already @monkchips thinks it’s cool.

Not as cool as google? I don’t want to go there again. In fact there is a huge amount of buzz on twitter from many people, Oracle and non Oracle alike. I like the cynical take by @jknoll

I don’t think Oracle has run out of ideas, I just think they are admitting that customers and partners might have some equally good ideas that we should listen to.

I’m browsing through the ideas and there’s an amount of noise as you might expect, but there seems to be a new idea submitted about every five minutes. That amount of feedback is immense.  Credit to the Oracle marketing team for driving this, I see Justin is answering a lot of the ideas right now and other Oracle folks are jumping in too.  Expect to hear a lot more about this next week.

My opinion is this is a bold move and Oracle has convinced me its cool again this year. Do you agree or think it is just a gimmick? Make your voice heard in the comments.

I collected my badge here at Oracle HQ, so I can avoid the crowds at the Moscone. Now what I don’t have is a ticket to the Party on Wednesday Night, which is held on Treasure Island with UB40, Seal, Elvis Costello and some Country artist who’s name I don’t recall (sorry – but I only dislike two kinds of music; Country and Western). People may not know this, but Oracle employees in general do not get a ticket to the party even if we have DEMOgrounds or Speaker ribbons on our badges. So there’s normally a load of Oracle folks asking customers for and spare tickets. The past few years friends have sorted me out, but this year I have no leads…I will be in the DEMOgrounds Wednesday and Thursday mornings so you can drop by there to chat or contact me if you want to arrange to meet some time.

I plan to do updates via twitter and post here on the blog regularly throughout the conference so stay tuned.

Also check out the official Open World Blog, they’re getting great content on there this year and I’ll be watching that closely.

A lot of people are asking when various sessions are, readers of this blog are probably interested in Oracle EBS financials, Helle posted on Oracle Mix a couple of useful links. I recommend looking at this pdf which lists all the financials sessions including demogrounds, apps lounges, presentations etc.

My session is listed there, I look forward to seeing some of your there.

Thursday 25th, 3:00 p.m.

Moscone West 2006

Are Intercompany Processing and Reconciliation Currently Pain Points for Your Enterprise?

David Haimes, Oracle; Helle Hennings, Oracle

I blogged last year about the meet the Experts Lounge, well this year it has been renamed to Applications Lounge. I haven’t been asked to attend this year, so if you want to ask me any questions or provide feedback you’ll have to come to the session above, find me at the DEMOgrounds, the Blogger Meetup or follow me in twitter, or use this blog all year round – remember customer interaction is not just for Oracle Open World, it’s for life.

I drive from San Francisco down the Highway 101 to Oracle HQ everyday (sometimes on a Saturday too), I sometimes see people I know on the freeway, I often see the same cars, I certainly see people do (IMHO) idiotic things and I occasionally see people do (IMHO) courteous and considerate things.

So an idea came to me as I passed the ebay commuter bus the other day. Why can’t I rate the drivers on the freeway just like I rate sellers and buyers on ebay? You cut me up, you get a thumbs down, I see you driving whilst eating a bowl of cereal thumbs down for you, if you let me change lane safely I can give a thumbs up. Sound like fantasy land?  Well it could be easily done, I can see your registration easily enough I snap a picture of it with my iPhone, character recognition software reads it I have a nice thumbs up or thumbs down option to hit and this is shuttled off to a website where people’s rating is displayed. The value really comes into play when we display a person’s rating on the car for all to see – I’m thinking of some kind of intelligent display device replacing license plates, then it can show the star rating right there for all to see and heck it might even be able to replace those registration stickers that you have to remember to stick on your plate once a year.

So what goes through your mind as you drive to work? Are you thinking about more important things or do you have some crazy ideas like me that you want to share? Can you think of a better way to apply Web 2.0 principals to the freeways? Sound off in the comments.

UPDATE (9-SEP-08):

Thanks to Caroline for sending me details of a Web 1.0 idea for drivers on Highway 17, that was featured on cnn.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal today, the SEC is proposing to pull the plug on US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and move to the International Financial Reporting Standards(IFRS) which is used in many countries around there world already, notably in Europe. A few weeks ago I blogged about this change that’s been brewing for some time and plugged the IFRS Oracle Mix group, the power of my blog increased membership by over 65%. Yes, there are now 5 members up from from 3. Why am I surprised people are not excited about accounting standards?

If you’re sitting around wondering if Oracle is going to release an IFRS patch, that won’t be necessary, Release 12 has all the tools you will need and Oracle has a White Paper explaining what tools it has to get you ready for IFRS, which I recommend as a good starting point.

If you want more join the mix group, I’ll post information there as I find it and the members though small in number are all top notch including Sanjit Anand who you may know from Oracle Apps Hub, one of the richest sources of information on Oracle Financials.

There is a white paper available on metalink (metalink note 418649.1) that describes in detail each set up step you need to perform to set up AGIS.  It is a very nice document with screen shots to show you every step of the way and there are also some viewlets that show you the set up in progress.

This is a pretty good starting point if you are setting up AGIS

Have a seat

As Meg mentioned last week, we’ve been clearing out old chairs and sprucing up our offices in 300 building at HQ over the last few months.  I am very pleased with my office move and the view is pretty good.

The other morning I took this snap as they unloaded an entire truck full of office chairs, one of these Meg is enjoying now and giving thanks for.

Fixed Asset?

Something I often forget to mention is the enhancement of Intercompany functionality in Fixed Assets (FA) that has been provided in R12. So here is my attempt to explain it, based on an old email discussion with the FA team, I wouldn’t describe myslef as an FA expert, but if there are any comments or questions I might be able to find an FA expert to get an answer. :)

In 11i FA stores reference accounts in two setup entities; Book Controls and Categories. The intercompany Payables and Receivables accounts were stored directly on the book, only the natural accounts segment were stored for these two accounts. The Account Generator definition would combine the natural account with other sources to get a full account combination. Out of the box, those sources were a default ccid which is also on the book and a ccid from the asset assignment. So the balancing segment is derived from the asset assignment, the natural account from the values on the book, and other segments from the default account.

The intercompany would kick in for two transaction types “Transfer” and “Unit Adjustment”. However, other transactions could result in intercompany impacts, but they would not be generated in FA so GL would do the balancing when the accounting was posted there.

So in R12 FA uses the AGIS Intercompany balancing feature, which is called from SLA and so we’ll balance all transactions that are out of balance right there in the subledger without having to let some of it hit GL and with all the flexible rules available in the new Intercompany Accounts Set Up.

Just taken a picture from my office window of the Americas Cup yacht that is now afloat in the lake at Oracle HQ.

I’m using wordpress iPhone app to post this, which seems to be a nice way to write short text based blog posts and post pictures (assuming this works ok).

UPDATE : When I view the post – the photo didn’t get uploaded correctly, looking into that now.

UPDATE 2 : I did nothing and now the photo is there, I think it is just a timing issue, seems the text appears before the photo has finished transferring to the blog.  Anyhow, if I am patient it works :)

I just downloaded worpress for the iPhone, looks like I can write blog posts from my iPhone quite easily. However it doesn’t have a lot of formatting features, not sure I can even insert a hyperlink. Might me good for drafting posts when I have few moments.

International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is a set of standards that are gaining momentum. There is market pressure to have a single language for companies to communicate financial results, globalization of companies and markets make this inevitable. There is also some regulatory pressure likely to come in the US as the SEC are having a round table today, the Wall Street Journal discusses it today too.

I notice the group on Oracle Mix to discuss IFRS has just three members, so I wonder if this is on the radar of the Oracle community yet.

A session I hope to attend at Open World is the one by Nayyar about Oracle’s internal upgrade to R12.  I spent some time working with Nayyar and his team earlier this year and it was a good experience, at times it was very tough but it’s been very valuable. Oracle has a lot of Intercompany transactions and does use AGIS, so they give the product a decent work out. I also represented GL and as I have taken over GL more recently this was a really good chance for me to learn more about how a large GL customer operates and the things that are important to them. I was motivated to help them out when needed not least because they literally pay my wages.

Session ID:	S299147
Session Title:	Lessons Learned in Upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite Financials Release 12: Oracle’s Internal Upgrade
Session Abstract:	Want to hear about Oracle’s Global Single Instance upgrade to Release 12? Want to find out about specific lessons learned from the project team? Come to this session to get a detailed look at Oracle’s own upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite Financials Release 12.
Track:	APPLICATIONS, Oracle E-Business Suite
Focus Areas:	Not Applicable
Session Type:	Conference Session
Product Area:	Financial Management
Duration:	60 minutes
Room:	Rm 2006
Speaker(s)/Company:	Nayyar Siddiqui, Oracle

Written by David Haimes

This is from an email sent to me by Amazon

==============================================

The following items have been shipped to you by Amazon.com:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Qty      Item                           Price  Shipped  Subtotal
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon.com items (Sold by Amazon.com, LLC):
1     Seventh Generation Chlorin...   $42.99      1   $42.99

===================================================

It tells me the Legal Entity that I have a contract with, if those Diapers don’t arrive as advertised I know it is Amazon.com, LLC that I need to drag through the Legal System, it will also tell me something about what taxes they are going to apply if I look up where that Legal Entity is registered.

In this transaction I am the first Party and Amazon is the third Party. If I used an ERP system I’d be entering this transaction into my Payables system, David Haimes would be the first party LE and Amazon.com, LLC are the Supplier also known as the Third Party LE.

In Amazon’s ERP system, they used Receivables to generate the Invoice above and when they entered the Customer they entered David Haimes, he is the Third Party LE and they would also have Amazon.com, LLC as the First Party.

The interaction between myself and Oracle generates two transactions in two ERP systems and the same party is the First Party and the Third Party depending on where you are looking at it from. Still with me? It gets more confusing when we’re dealing with Intercompany (as usual) because we both of those transactions will be in the same ERP system, both the payables and the receivables transaction are present and the the same entity is a First Party LE (in Oracle defined in the Legal Entity Configurator) and a Third Party LE (defined as a Customer and Supplier).

So the only thing remaining is to work out who is the second party and why are they never involved, I have no idea on that one – if you do please let me know in the comments section.