Claremont

Mind the gap: Your guide to Gender Pay Gap reporting for UK businesses

Fri, 26 May 2017 15:17:10 GMT

Mind the gap: Your guide to Gender Pay Gap reporting for UK businesses

Following the triggering of section 78 of the Equality Act 2010 in August 2016, the UK Government implemented the “Equality Act 2010 Regulations 2017” on the 6th April 2017. Part of the plans to reduce inequality in wages between men and women, this legislation requires all UK employers with over 250 employees to publicly report their Gender Pay Gap.

Organisations across the public and private sectors, as well as public bodies in Scotland and Wales will have to publish their first reports in 2018 and annually after that. While there are currently no sanctions as such, failure to comply with the reporting requirements amounts to a breach of the Equality Act 2010 act and leaves you open to action from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, along with possibly irreparable damage to public reputation.

It’s important to remember that if, when undertaking your analysis, you discover your organisation to have a Gender Pay Gap it doesn’t mean that you necessarily discriminate against women. Many organisations currently have a gender pay gap. How they, and you, react is key.

Defining The Gender Pay Gap

Not to be confused with equal pay, The Gender Pay Gap is a measurement of the difference between women's and men's pay in the UK Labour market, expressed as a comparison between the average hourly pay rates for both. The figures that organisations are now obligated to report provide a high-level indicator of women's and men's relative earning power within their business.

Measurement

As The Gender Pay Gap can vary depending upon the method of measurement used for the calculation, each employer is required to publish a set of numbers: The mean and median gender pay gap for hourly pay, the mean and median bonus pay gap and also the proportion of men and women in each salary quartile. Given the importance of these numbers and their indications of pay inequalities, it’s important to understand how to calculate them properly.

Mean & Median Pay Gap:

The median is the numerical value which splits the top 50% of the population from the bottom 50%. It shows the midpoint in all employees’ hourly rates of pay. Therefore, half of employees will earn a rate above the midpoint and half will earn a rate below the midpoint.

The mean (arithmetic average) is calculated by adding all employees’ rates of pay together and dividing by the total number of employees. The mean includes the lowest and highest rates of pay.

It is important to calculate separate pay gap figures for full-time and part-time employees as well as the overall population of employees. Full-time employees are those defined as working 30 or more hours, part-time workers work less than 30 hours per week (defined by the ONS).

The Gender Pay Gap should be calculated on employee’s base pay during the pay period in which the relevant snapshot date falls (5th April). As such “pay” includes basic pay, paid leave, maternity pay, sick pay, area allowances, shift premium pay, bonus pay and other pay (including car allowances paid through the payroll, on call and standby allowances, clothing, first aider or fire warden allowances). It does not include overtime pay, expenses, the value of salary sacrifice schemes, benefits in kind, redundancy pay, arrears of pay and tax credits.

Pay Quartiles:

Employers are required to list each full-time employee’s rate of pay in ascending order, and then divide that list into four quartiles. The proportion of men and women in each quartile is then reported on.

Gender bonus gap:

This should be calculated using an employees' bonus received in a 12-month period prior to the pay period in which the relevant snapshot date falls. Employers will need to publish the difference between the mean bonus payments paid to men and women. The mean considers the full distribution of bonuses paid by an employer. Only those employees who receive bonuses should be included in the calculation. Employers will also be required to publish the proportion of male and female employees that received a bonus.

Gender Pay Reporting Solutions

Oracle have recently released their solution to Gender Pay Gap reporting for e-business customers details of which can be found in document Gender Pay Gap Report (Doc ID 2257644.1) on My Oracle Support.

The report provided by Oracle provides an extract of two configurable balances (Ordinary Pay & Bonus) alongside a small selection of assignment and person details (Gender, Normal Hours, Grade and Frequency). None of the statutory Gender Pay calculations are performed.

We have found that for some of our clients this report is limited and doesn’t accommodate employees who do not use standard conditions or have an hourly, flexible workforce.

If the seeded solution doesn’t meet client requirements we will look to augment or replace it with the Claremont Gender Pay report that has already been developed with a number of our clients. This B.I. publisher report provides an excel output containing the source data and the required calculations to meet the legislative requirements, based upon a number of standard configurable objects that provides the necessary flexibility to meet the requirements irrespective of your payroll configuration.

If you have any queries then drop us a line or pop back here to read our analysis of the Oracle seeded solution once it is released.

Save

Sweating your Oracle E-Business Suite asset doesn't mean doing nothing

Mon, 8 May 2017 15:47:48 GMT

Sweating your Oracle E-Business Suite asset doesn’t mean doing nothing

Uptake of Oracle’s Cloud Applications is gaining momentum, causing Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) customers to re-consider whether and when they may move to the Cloud. But this blog isn’t about the benefits of that change, but rather what you, as a current EBS user, could be doing in the meantime.

EBS 12.3 is coming!

Customers tell us the reality of Cloud Applications means they expect to migrate to Cloud, or at least review their options, but they don’t want to do that now. They’re not ready for this change and delaying for a number of years enables them to sweat their EBS assets: they’ve made significant investments in EBS and its replacement is not a business priority.

This approach is reinforced by Oracle’s announcements demonstrating there’s plenty of life left in EBS. A major upgrade (12.3) is scheduled for 2019 and the current version is already fully supported for another 6 years to 2023.

“Wait and see” is an appealing approach that the support timeline makes safe and 12.3 gives yet another future option. Why commit to a decision now if it’s not required by the business? Hence, many EBS users are postponing wholesale changes to ‘sweat their EBS assets’. However, too often “sweating the asset” is synonymous with ‘doing nothing’ and that creates future problems: systems become out-of-date, failing to support a changing business, and are increasingly difficult to support as they take-on “legacy” status.

Staying active

If staying with EBS makes business sense for customers there are a number of initiatives they should consider. These can reduce costs, optimise business processes and improve the experience for users. Two stand out as positive changes to consider while ‘sweating’ EBS.

Functional Optimisation

Make the most of what you’ve got. Whether it’s improving a business process or the users’ experience, optimising your current system to ensure it continues to meet the demands of your business is crucial. Focusing attention on any of these can quickly lead to tangible benefits, most notably reduced costs and increased user adoption. For example, our implementations of Applaud Solutions for Oracle HCM make such significant improvements to users’ experiences, including mobile deployment, that system adoption and data quality materially increases.

Team Changes or Re-deployment

Ensuring you have the right people, with the right skills, to support and develop EBS is essential. Taking the decision to “sweat” EBS doesn’t change this, it’s still important to have the correct blend of technical and functional skillsets and knowledge in place to support your systems and stakeholders over the coming years.

There is a skills shortage across the whole Oracle EBS market: the skills we have are becoming rarer and more expensive. An increased rate of technological change, rapid digital evolution within businesses and lack of young professionals learning EBS means businesses must review the best and most cost effective use of skills, both inside and outside the organisation.

Businesses need to re-think the current structure and use of internal Oracle support teams. Can you attract and retain sufficient numbers of staff with the right skills? But, more fundamentally, should you be attempting this for an aging system?

The COBOL case:

Let’s use the example of COBOL-based software to demonstrate this. Despite being almost 60 years old, many key business applications still run on COBOL. It is estimated 70% to 80% of UK business transactions are processed on COBOL and, worldwide, there are 200 times more COBOL transactions than Google searches. COBOL assets are being thoroughly sweated!

But retirement and an ageing COBOL workforce has resulted in a skills shortage. That impacts the cost of supporting these applications and business’s ability to develop changes. Given the current state of the skills market, EBS could be set to follow the same path and businesses planning to sweat this asset must have a support strategy.

Staying active, whilst doing nothing

As at the start of the article, and despite the risks demonstrated by COBOL, I still believe sweating the EBS asset (while avoiding a ‘do nothing approach’) is the correct decision for many EBS users. However, I’m not convinced that going it alone is the correct way of delivering that approach.

Engaging the services of a managed service provider (MSP), such as Claremont, offers a way to deliver the benefits of this approach while mitigating the risks. This includes: maintaining and evolving your Oracle EBS system, reducing costs, avoiding the investment required for comprehensive in-house support and enabling staff to be re-deployed to deliver business change rather than business-as-usual activities.

We will help you bridge the EBS capacity and skills gaps in your IT department while helping evolve and improve your Oracle EBS system and its support. By choosing Claremont you make these problems our responsibility and we’ve proven we are very good at solving them. But we do this in partnership with our customers – we’re not an outsourcer trying to take over all aspects of our customers’ Oracle support.

At Claremont, our managed services represent something unique in the Oracle market, we offer the above benefits and more. We deliver a combination of better services and lower costs than alternative providers, and we have the statistics to back our claim:

In our latest customer satisfaction survey, 100% of customers rated us as “exceeded expectations and definitely recommend”.
In March 2017 we handled a record number of tickets (incidents, problems & changes) yet also achieved 100% SLA adherence (including for incident resolution, which most MSPs won’t offer) and record levels of customer satisfaction. Proof that Claremont has the skills, capacity and processes to deliver excellent EBS support.
80% of new customers switch to us from other providers, yet Claremont has never lost a customer to a competitor.
On average, customers have saved 51% when moving to Claremont’s managed services.

Claremont offer the best in Oracle functional and technical managed service support. If you have any questions or if you would like further information please get in touch today.

A DBA shaped miracle

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 13:17:58 GMT

Picture the scene, it's the last Friday of the month and the Financial Controller crashes into the IT department looking for a DBA shaped miracle.

In a rush to close out the financial reporting before the bank holiday weekend, someone has closed the period too early! While this is a good thing for getting the reports printed on time, it's bad news for the content as they're missing huge chunks of revenue. Of course we can perform an emergency point in time restore of the database, but this database is 3TB and it takes many hours to complete such a restore, completely killing any dream of meeting the reporting deadline, not to mention the bank holiday weekend. Thankfully the clever DBA does indeed have said miracle, because he enabled Flashback Database!

Flashback Database was introduced in Oracle 10g to provide the ability to “Rewind” a database to a point in time. When used in conjunction with the Oracle Database Recovery Manager (RMAN) it provides a hugely powerful part of a database recovery solution. Traditionally, Point-In-Time recovery was achieved by restoring to an appropriate backup and then rolling the database forward to the desired point in time. However, if the restore point is close to the current time, it is often far more efficient to rewind the database using flashback logs.

Flashback logs are maintained by the database in order to provide a rolling flashback window (30min by default). Although, using restore points is a great way of enhancing the flashback capability:

Setup Flashback Database

As with archivelog mode, Flashback Database can only be enabled or disabled when the database is in Mount mode:

SQL> alter system set db_recovery_file_dest='/rman/FRA' scope=spfile;
SQL> alter system set db_recovery_file_dest_size=50G scope=spfile;
SQL> alter system set db_flashback_retention_target=4320; # default is 1440 minutes
SQL> shutdown immediate
SQL> startup mount
SQL> alter database archivelog
SQL> alter database flashback on;
SQL> alter database open;

Flash Back a Database

In normal running, the database will automatically manage the level of flashback logs retained based on the retention period. We can check the current flashback potential using commands similar to:

select oldest_flashback_scn, oldest_flashback_time from v$flashback_database_log;

Assuming that the point we want to flash back to is within this window then we can execute via sqlplus or RMAN using the following procedure:

1. Shutdown the database and start in mount mode

SQL> shutdown immediate
SQL> startup mount

2. Flashback the database

SQL> flashback database to scn <scn number>;
OR
SQL> flashback database to time "to_date(<date>,'mm/dd/yy')";

3. Open the database and resetlogs.

SQL> alter database open resetlogs

Flashback restore points

One of the really useful features of Flashback Database is the ability to create Restore Points. In principle these are simply "markers" that are added to the flashback logs, but are incredibly useful in identifying and flashing back to specific points in time. If a restore point is set before an activity, then flashing back to that specific point becomes much easier.

SQL> flashback database to restore point <restore_point_name>;

In addition, If the restore point is created as a "Guaranteed Restore" point, then the database will not remove those flashback until the restore point is removed, thereby, as the name suggests, guaranteeing that you can flashback to that point in time. However, it will continue to generate flashback logs until the FRA is exhausted so Guaranteed Restore points should be used with caution.

Restore points can be managed using commands similar to the following;

SQL> create restore point "PRETEST" guarantee flashback database;
SQL> select name, scn, time, restore_point_time, GUARANTEE_FLASHBACK_DATABASE from v$restore_point;
OR
RMAN> LIST RESTORE POINT ALL;

These can then be used to flashback the database to specific points without having to identify specific SCN or times.

SQL> flashback database to restore point PRETEST;

Common uses

Emergency "rewind" of the database to remove a destructive or incorrect action.
Perform iterative testing (e.g. performance testing) on a known baseline without having to restore from backup each time.
Provide a safety net for high risk production updates

More details on Flashback database can be found in the Database Backup and Recovery User's Guide.

Claremont offer the best in Oracle functional and technical support. If you have any questions or if you would like further information please get in touch today.

-#SignOffTM#-

To approve or not to approve, that's the question. What's the solution?

Thu, 6 Apr 2017 12:05:13 GMT

Oracle EBusiness Suite (EBS) Approvals R11, R12 and Oracle Cloud (Fusion) – Approval Management

To Approve or Not To Approve, That’s the Question? What’s the Solution, Workflow, AME or AMX…?

Over the last 20 years I have seen many Clients struggle with the implementation of Approval Management in the Oracle EBusiness Suite.

Whether this is using any of the following:

Oracle Standard Functionality Approval Process.
Modified/Extended Workflow Processes.
Modified/Extended Workflow Notification (JRAD/OA Framework Style Notification).
Modified/Extended BPEL Processes.
AME Implementations.
AMX the new Cloud Solutions (ERP & HCM).
HRMS Self Service Approvals or Financials PO Approvals.

There are many ways that Oracle can be leveraged to work for the Client with regard to Transactional Approval Management.

From simple approval routing via the supervisory hierarchy chain, all the way through to complex approval routing via positional hierarchy chains with multiple approval groups. And, these groups in support of either parallel approvals or taking the first approver with or without 100’s of cost centre rules or groups…

Predominantly, the solution must fit with your business needs, however we can help by bringing our extensive experience of ALL of the tools mentioned to the party.

There are many routes approval transactions can take (figure 1). It is important to make sure that you have the right routes planned as we all know how disastrous it can be without.

We have seen clients try and limit the AME Approval Rules maintenance by implementing Dynamic Approval Groups that make use of standard approval chains, approval groups and flexfield/lookups. Hence opting for a more technical approach. But if you are moving to the Cloud and cannot make use of Dynamic Approval Groups calling PL/SQL Routines or Java, how can you transition to the Cloud?

Depending on the type of implementation, debugging approvals and logging can encompass many technical and module areas. This means that monitoring and maintaining can become a costly and time consuming process.

Approval Management can be a very complex process if not approached correctly, but can also save time, money and resources on a massive scale if done right.

We can recommend a few handy pointers to ensure that the implementation of your Approval Management processes are realistic, manageable and a success. These tips are offered for both an operational user level and technical service level, as you will have to work with and maintain these hierarchies after go-live.

Think about the following before jumping into hierarchy design and/or configuration, and if you need any advice give us a call:

Analyse both your Current and Future Needs.
Always look at all your business cases and really think outside the box. What happens when there’s that ‘One Off’ business case; is it always just the one? Always think about that ‘One Time’ exception when the rules don’t apply and/or when that notification is sent to that person that’s on holiday.
Keep your Approvals Rules as simple as possible to ease maintenance moving forward.
Think about Oracle Apps Rules, Flexfields and Lookups Maintenance and Technical Maintenance.
Look to exploit Oracle’s Standard Functionality (Flexfields Key/Desc, FND Lookups, User Hierarchies, AP Approval Groups etc).
Think about the technology employed in extending the Standard Oracle Applications and resources at hand (Pl/SQL, Workflow, BPEL, JRAD, OA Framework, Apps Module HRMS/AP/AR, AME/AMX and many more).
Include Logging at every step of the way in your implementation for maintenance if possible and with future queries on ‘Why did that purchase order approval get sent to Mr Smith in the IT Section and not Jenny in Finance three days ago?’ If you don’t document these processes now you’ll never completely remember why they were configured in that particular way. I promise there will have been a good reason but if you can’t remember it how can you evaluate if that reason is still applicable today?
Watch out for patching and keep your patching under control! Many implemented changes/extensions/setups especially in Oracle Workflow can be blown away by patching depending on the way the Workflow has been extended or changed.

Of course implementing any Approval Management carries risk. There could be new business cases that weren’t thought of that could introduce issues into the system or notifications going into black holes with no log of how they got there.

However, a fully documented solution, including logging and thorough testing strategies can help mitigate any risk. At Claremont we pride ourselves on making sure the ‘Nuts and Bolts’ of your system stay shiny and new no matter how old or new your implementations may be.

-#SignOffPW#-

Following the UKOUG Journey to the Cloud event, is your head now in the Cloud?

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 10:37:11 GMT

Following the UKOUG Journey to the Cloud event, is your head now in the Cloud?

We were pleased to attend the UKOUG ‘Applications Journey to the Cloud’ 2017 event on the 8th March. It was great to see those that attended and we hope you enjoyed the event as much as we did.

It was an informative day with a varied and interesting agenda covering all that you need to know during your journey to the Cloud. Notable talk topics included life in the HCM Cloud, integrating Oracle ERP with third party systems and Ten Top Tips to a successful Cloud implementation, presented by Claremont’s ERP Capability lead, Patrick Hopkins.

Having completed two successful ERP Cloud projects to date, Patrick is a knowledgable source when considering the pros and cons before you move. As it was such an interesting talk and one that is too good to keep to ourselves, we wanted to share his presentation with you.

You can find his slides in his most recent blog here.

An emerging trend throughout the day was that it’s not simply about the implementation of Cloud, but also about going beyond the ‘go-live’ stage. Therefore, it’s important to have a managed service provider that you can trust and one which can help you at each stage of your Cloud transformation journey.

Claremont have the expertise and experience to support you, wherever you may be, on your Cloud journey.

If you have any questions or would like to know more, please get in touch.

-#SignOffMV#-

A new lease of life for Clandon Park

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 17:42:53 GMT

Claremont and our Cloud hosting partner Timico are proud to have donated £1,000 to the National Trust’s appeal to restore Clandon House following 2015’s devastating fire. Jonathan Stuart, Claremont’s Managed Services Director, said:

“Claremont & Timico have delivered critical Oracle and Oracle E-Business Suite hosting and Managed Services to the National Trust for 5 years. Clandon House is local to our Guildford office and the fire’s damage was shocking. We wanted to give something back to the National Trust and support them and our local community.”

Clandon Park was built in the 1720s and was one of the country’s most complete examples of a grade I listed Palladian mansion. The interiors featured original stucco ceilings, marble fireplaces and a superb collection of 18th-century furniture, porcelain and textiles. The house came into the National Trust’s care in 1956.

A destructive fire broke out at Clandon Park on 29 April 2015. Everyone was evacuated from the building and there were no reports of injuries but the fire ravaged the building, damaging all but one room and effectively leaving the house a shell. Three centuries of cultural history and important Palladian interiors were lost in the blaze, although a proportion of the contents were saved through a well-rehearsed salvage operation.

The National Trust has announced ambitious plans to rebuild Clandon Park, which will honour its rich history, but also create vibrant, modern spaces to breathe new life into the house. Claremont and Timico are very pleased to be able to support that project and help one of our long-standing Oracle Managed Service customers in this way.

Bacula - An Enterprise Class Backup Solution on a Budget

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 10:59:56 GMT

Bacula – An Enterprise Class Backup Solution on a Budget

What on earth is that I hear you say! To many this is just some strangely named product, and you’d be right. It started life as a freeware product and is still freely available to those that want it.

However, here at Claremont we needed to find a product that could meet our ever increasing and fluid needs of our customer base, but also our own internal requirements for our server and cloud based systems.

Backups are an extremely important backbone of any IT organisation and more so for a managed service provider. For us, we needed a product that was robust, mutli-platform and non-propriety. Finding something that meets these requirements and one that doesn’t cost the earth, is difficult. It can become a task of attrition very quickly.

Thankfully we discovered Bacula and to our surprise it is being used by such organisations as NASA, SKY and a host of large organisations across the world.

So, what is Bacula? Well, in a nutshell it’s a set of computer programs that permits the system administrator to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds. Bacula can also run entirely upon a single computer and can backup to various types of media, including tape, disk, autochangers, USB, NAS and SAN devices.

In technical terms, it is a network Client/Server based backup program. Bacula is relatively easy to use and it’s efficient, while offering many advanced storage management features that make it easy to find and recover lost or damaged files. Due to its modular design, Bacula is scalable from small single computer systems to systems consisting of hundreds of computers located over a large network.

Bacula High Level Architecture

The diagram below shows the main components that have been designed as modules.

While the product is freely available from freeware sites, there is a company called Bacula.org that provides product support and moreover have developed a WEB front end, which makes the management and deployment of the software significantly easier.

We felt it was important to have 3rd party support for such a critical part of our managed services, so we decided to use Bacula.org as our support provider.

We purchased the BWEB front end, which comes complete with the latest Bacula version and a “postgres” database. The installation of this was very straight forward and significantly easier than using and building the “freeware” versions available on the internet.

The BWEB front end is a feature rich addition to the Bacula software and well worth the investment. It provides “admin and user” level logins, thereby allowing users to see their backup status if required.

The console has a clean and uncluttered appearance, thereby making it easy to use and understand.

Initial Impressions of Bacula

Its early days, but we are currently managing several of our customers backups, including some of our own internal systems and we have had no issues to date.
We get daily backup reports from the system automatically via email and it has the ability to be configured to alert via different mechanisms.

Graphs and statistics are readily available for all the backups and of course it is capable of doing all of the normal types of backups including Full, incremental, differentials etc. It can also do “bare metal” backups if required.

The creation and deployment of clients is straight forward and quick. Once completed, backup jobs can be controlled via Bacula on the client, thereby removing the need to use “schedules/cron jobs” on the client machine, again removing another layer of complexity.
Support from Bacula.org has been exceptional, in most cases support calls have been resolved within a few hours and in one case, was resolved in less than 30 mins. On another occasion a bug was discovered, a patch and fix was released within 2 days and incorporated into the next release.

Overall Bacula does exactly what it says on the tin, and in a simple and straight forward way.

If you’re in need of an effective backup solution that doesn’t cost the earth, then Bacula could be the option for you.

-#SignOffDW#-

Save

Another successful HCM & Payroll Event

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 10:55:42 GMT

Another successful HCM & Payroll Event

On 1st March, 2017 we hosted ‘Embracing Change and Innovation in HR’ event at Chandos House in London.

It was an informative day, exploring the latest trends in HR and the potential impact of change on the modern workforce. Industry experts delved into what this could mean for organisations and how the HR professional can capitalise on disruption and change.

Highlighting topics including Brexit, Digital Transformation and new Gender Pay reporting legislation.

The day kicked off with Claremont’s Julian Ford who presented:

Women know your place!

The full-time gender pay gap is currently 13.9% and Deloitte suggest that it’s still 50 years until we reach parity. This is a matter that can no longer be ignored.

Julian discussed the opportunity for meaningful insight and change through gender pay reporting, reporting requirements and the necessity of a tool that enables confident analysis. You can read more about his presentation in his most recent blog.

Launching the Barnardo’s presentation, their IT Director, Bob Darby shared the emotive Barnardo’s promotional video which set the scene for why he gets out of bed everyday. He discussed the importance of a forward thinking IT department which in Barnardo’s case, has enabled the organisation to support so many young people in the UK. Bob then went onto discuss Barnado’s history with Oracle HCM, before giving the context behind their most recent project to add BI and self-service functionalty.

Michele Barritt, I.S Department Principal, went on to offer detail around the projects. Focusing on how implementing Applaud solutions front-end transformed the user experience of Oracle E-Business.

Next up was Tony Hatton, Customer Success Manager from Oracle, who outlined his ‘Top Tips to ensure Customer Success in the Cloud’. He discussed next generation best practice processes, a path to adapting an organisation and how to best deliver real business value through Cloud adoption.

He discussed the path to implementing Oracle HCM for organisations and the benefits that can be experienced in doing so.

The last talk of the day was from was Rachel Suff, Public Policy Adviser from the CIPD. Her talk was focused around how Brexit would affect HR departments in the UK.

So, what does the future hold for the UK workplace?

Through the research that Rachel and her colleagues have done at the CIPD, they emphasised resourcing as a potential challenge in a post Brexit world. Their research has shown that, over half (56%) of the 2.26 million non-UK EU nationals work in industries like manufacturing, hospitality and construction. These employers are expecting to experience a significant labour shortfall. In addition, 27% of employers that employ EU nationals say they do not know how many they employ, so reporting and management of resources is going to become a real challenge.

Rachel’s key take aways for HR professionals around resourcing were:

Hiring EEA migrant workers is set to get harder and more costly; there is potential for labour shortages
Industries most reliant on migrant workers will be most affected – e.g. finance, agriculture
Know your workforce – who are the EU nationals that you employ?
Communicate with your workforce – it is unlikely that EU nationals will be told to ‘go home’ but there are no guarantees as of yet.
It strengthens the case for investing in your existing workforce.

Rachel then went onto to discuss another key issue affecting HR professionals- the differences between EU and UK law, which can be seen below:

UK	EU
Minimum wage	Equal pay
Stat min notice	TUPE
Unfair dismissal	Working time/ annual hols
Flexible working	Anti discrimination law
Shared parental leave	Atypical working
Statutory redundancy pay	Collective redundancies
Unlawful deductions wages	Information and consultation
Adoption leave and pay	European works councils

To round up the event our speakers formed a panel to answer specific topic questions. It offered a great opportunity for the audience to discuss with industry leaders what disruption and change could mean for the future and how to best to prepare for the unknown.

There is one significant learning to take from the day’s proceedings- It is crucial to be adaptable and to plan for change. Strategies need to be considered for workforce planning, retention and upskilling as these will only become ever more important. Whether you are planning for Gender Pay Reporting, migration to the Cloud or Brexit, picking the right partner and one which you can trust is important in guiding you through your transformation.

Make sure you don’t miss out on our next event by joining our mailing list.

If you have any questions and if you would like to know more, please get in touch.

-#SignOffAB#-

Save

Oracle Database 12cR2 Released

Tue, 7 Mar 2017 10:13:41 GMT

Oracle Database 12cR2 Released

To commemorate Oracle’s second major release of their flagship 12c database, I thought I’d take a moment to go over some of the new features and where they might be useful in the real world!

The new release, 12cR2 is not yet certified for use with Oracle e-Business Suite, but I would expect it is only a matter of time before this changes, and I’ve attached a full description of the new features here.

I’d also like to mention that as of 12cR1, the idea of a “standard”, non-multitenant database is deprecated – that is not to say unsupported, but it is likely that any further new features Oracle release will only be relevant/available for multitenant deployments of the database. It is not clear yet when the “standard” deployment of Oracle Databases will become de-supported.

Dataguard improvements

There are some general improvements to Oracle Dataguard as part of 12cR2, small tweaks to allow features that were available in some architectures but not others are now included. Immediate examples of this include fast-start failover now being possible when running in maximum protection mode, and support for LOBS and other datatypes when using database links across PDBs (Pluggable databases) – essentially plugging some holes left behind when these features were introduced as part of 12cR1. More specific, detailed examples include:

Database Compare

The “Database Compare” feature allows the DBA to compare the Dataguard instance at a block level to the primary instance. This can be especially useful when identifying issues within the standby database where the data may have become corrupt, but logically remains “correct” and as such would not be picked up by more traditional tools such as DBVERIFY.

This also presents the opportunity for customers to reduce the need to run quite so many intensive DR tests. If the DR environment can be verified accurately and regularly, then a degree of comfort over its “usability” can be obtained without requiring as many time-consuming tests. The tests will still be required to prove the PROCESS of failing over to DR, but the integrity of the DR environment is now all but ensured.

Subset Standby

Subset Standby takes the idea of multitenant databases a step further, and allows the DBA to replicate individual pluggable databases for standby rather than having to replicate the entire container database. This leads to, in qualifying environments, for smaller overhead in maintaining DR and reduced cost of ownership of the solution - a very cost-effective enhancement!

Database Sharding

A new feature for 12cR2 that we haven’t seen before is Database Sharding. Building on the idea of pluggable databases, Sharding allows you to effectively run single applications supported by multiple back-end databases.

This is a similar concept to running an instance with RAC (Real Application Clusters) in that you allow for high performance in splitting the application load across multiple instances of the database. However, the concept of Sharding is subtly different – it’s specifically intended for use in custom OLTP systems that have been designed to benefit from this technology. It can be used to separate partitions of data across geographies for legislative reasons and to bolster performance of OLTP transactions.

Deployment of Oracle Sharding comes with automatic configuration of Oracle Dataguard or Goldengate to manage replication between the shards which collectively make up the database presented to the application.

I find this feature interesting as I can’t think of many current scenarios that would benefit from this architecture, but it does present some very interesting possibilities going forward as to how databases can be managed an arranged in the future, adding to the wealth of options currently available with RAC and pluggable databases.

General Improvements

As you’d imagine, any new release of a database is always accompanied by various database improvements and bug fixes. In addition:

RMAN has been improved to allow more features in terms of cross platform migrations, and some syntax enhancements.

The upgrade process has been refreshed, allowing seamless rolling upgrades in certain architectures.

Some DBA maintenance tasks have now been updated to allow on-line manipulation, such as table moves and various partitioning tasks.

There is also now the ability to split redo application between nodes of a RAC instance for extra manageability in those complex architectures.

In Summary

In summary, another new release of Oracle’s flagship database product and pretty much what we would expect – some nice new features, some nice to have features and a whole raft of new bug fixes and minor improvements.

Overall, it’s a solid release from Oracle but nothing ground breaking. However, there are a few nods to the future with features such as Oracle Sharding, which may become a much larger topic for discussion in later releases of the database.

-#SignOffMS#-

RiverStone Case Study Video

Tue, 28 Feb 2017 10:05:43 GMT

RiverStone is part of the insurance and reinsurance operations of Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited, Canada. The company specialises in the acquisition and management of legacy insurance books from other insurance companies.

RiverStone needed a future-proofed, stable platform that ensured efficient reporting and supported future growth. As RiverStone’s trusted Oracle partner, Claremont was selected to implement Oracle ERP Cloud.

Following the successful go live in Summer 2016, the following video was commissioned to demonstrate the value experienced by RiverStone:

“Moving our ERP system to the cloud is showing early signs of being one of the best decisions we’ve made. Claremont provided experienced consultants who not only understood our business but explained everything in advance and delivered against those explanations making the six-month process pain-free. The result is a delivered system already satisfying our requirements, that’s cheaper to maintain, gives us the latest technology as it’s released and provides a higher quality of service for our business.”

Dave Tyrrell Finance Manager, RiverStone

RiverStone have experienced significant business benefits from implementation:

Within six months, RiverStone’s ERP operations had moved from Oracle E-Business Suite to a new, future-proofed, robust and scalable, cloud-based system architecture.
Moving to Oracle ERP Cloud has reduced ongoing system maintenance costs and the disruption of periodic upgrades.
The new system will reduce the month-end closing cycle and improve group reporting by replacing many Excel activities for statutory and internal.

If you would like to know more or to arrange a face to face meeting to discuss your Cloud requirements, please email mark.vivian@claremont.co.uk.

If you're not at the table, are you on the menu?

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 15:06:43 GMT

If you're not at the table, are you on the menu?

Having spent my career working in IT, and most if it working with Oracle software, I can safely say that I’ve never seen the market go through such a period of change and uncertainty as it is now.

After talking to senior executives at our customers, all of whom are current users of Oracle technology, several consistent themes have emerged…

The Oracle Cloud Applications Journey

It’s clear that Oracle’s next generation of enterprise applications (Oracle Cloud Applications) are here and proven with early adopter customers. Oracle is pushing them hard, something demonstrated by the impressive attendance at the successful Oracle London Modern Business Experience (MBX) earlier this month. Talking about the adoption of Cloud in her keynote at the event, Oracle’s CEO, Safra Catz, said “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu”. Is she right?

From speaking to our customers, it’s clear that things have certainly moved quickly in the last year or so. Some of the key concerns raised against deploying critical business systems in the Cloud – namely data security and data sovereignty - have been overcome in the minds of most. In fact, many have come to realise that data security is often improved by moving to the Cloud!

Many customers willing to embark on business transformation projects and adopt best practice business processes are choosing to move to Oracle Cloud Applications. What’s not clear at this point is how Oracle’s recent acquisition of Netsuite will play out and how it will be positioned relative to the Cloud Applications suite.

Choices for Oracle E-Business Customers

Something that is clear to anyone who has any dealings with Oracle is that all the sales and marketing efforts are going into selling their Cloud products; which based on the last set of published results have now grown to account for circa 10% of revenues. At the same time, Oracle has announced that Release 12.3 of Oracle E-Business is likely to be released in 2019, resetting the support clock, and meaning that these systems have an ever-increasing lifespan.

The challenge that our existing Oracle E-Business customers face is the need to get a return on their existing investment in on premise Oracle E-Business systems. Barring major business changing events (such as acquisitions and mergers), in most cases it makes sense for them to wait until nearer to the end of their current support horizon before considering a wholesale change.

Given that this isn’t for another 4-6 years, depending on whether a customer is currently on Release 12.1 or 12.2, they have time to consider their next step, and three choices to make when they get there:

Upgrade to Oracle E-Business 12.3 when the time is right for them.
Migrate to Oracle Cloud Applications and take advantage of the maturing functionality.
Consider a competitive product.

The last option is obviously one that Oracle and partners in the Oracle ecosystem want to avoid.

Faced with this situation, whilst a early adopters have moved to Oracle Applications Cloud, I am seeing many organisations take the “do nothing” approach in the short term, as they “sweat their assets”. To ensure a seat “at the table”, some are considering a hybrid approach to Cloud going forward. Many CIOs are looking to deploy some new SaaS “edge” products in the Cloud, or even considering moving the hosting of their existing Oracle E-Business system to realise some of the benefits from Cloud in the medium term.

A year is a long time in politics

It’s become impossible to pick-up a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch the news feeds, and not be hit from all sides by headlines surrounding the current political climate of uncertainty and “false news”, as the repercussions of the Brexit vote and a Donald Trump presidency begin to unfold.

There’s nothing that businesses like less than an era of uncertainty, it makes it hard to make investment decisions with any degree of certainty. Speaking to our clients, the effects of this are being felt in several different ways, both now and potentially in the future, including: The availability of finance, exchange rate movement impact, restrictions to future movement of labour and changes in customer behaviours. It all adds up to some deferred or changed decision making on IT spend.

Better short term outlook for the UK economy?

You’d be right to take any economic forecasts with a large pinch of salt, particularly with the winds of change blowing, but the current consensus shared by the Bank of England and the CBI is that the UK economy is due to steadily grow by around 2% per annum for the next two years.

What does this mean for the Oracle Applications Market? If the forecasts turn out to be true, then the overall macro-economic climate is one of growth. Whilst this is positive, businesses are still challenged by individual factors discussed above.

Falling numbers of skilled UK resources

Many leading companies have Oracle E-Business underpinning critical business processes and I can see problems ahead. The Oracle market is currently operated by an aging workforce, and there is a lack of skilled young professionals coming through. The moves to using offshore providers over the last couple of decades has largely contributed to a dearth of young UK talent coming through the ranks.

Many businesses still prefer a face-to-face, UK based relationship with their specialist Oracle service provider. However, a vicious circle has been created: The aging (and more expensive) UK workforce is placing a premium on UK based services and pushing the price beyond the affordable range of some businesses, thereby breathing more fire into the off-shoring industry.

The need for a focus, as an industry, on getting better at training and developing new UK talent has never been clearer.

Growing need for fast return on IT investment

It has long been the case that circa 80% of all IT expenditure is on the support and maintenance of existing systems, leaving just 20% to spend on the innovation that will drive true business value. As businesses wrestle with how to maximise the opportunities afforded by Cloud, Mobile and IoT, IT spend has been placed under a tougher level of scrutiny than ever before.

Whilst business justifications have typically been required at some level, I am seeing an ever-increasing trend towards more rigorous return on investment calculations to ensure that money is being wisely spent. The timeframes for seeing a return on investment for IT spend are also shortening, driving enterprises down the route of shorter, incremental IT projects.

Of course, a redeployment of on premise systems to the Cloud is a potential opportunity to make some much needed savings in those support and maintenance costs in the medium to long term.

Growing expectations of customer service

In a Gartner survey of business leaders conducted last year, 89% predicted that customer experience would be their primary basis for competitive differentiation by 2017. Great customer service is now expected in every engagement, and in some cases, is now more important than the actual product.

As the Oracle market moves towards Cloud and subscription models, to secure the all-important renewals, both Oracle and its partners face increasing pressure to deliver great service to help to differentiate against the competition.

IT departments are also under pressure themselves to deliver excellent customer service to both their internal and external customers. Working with a service provider with the right service excellence ethos and track record can help them to achieve this.

Bringing it together:

It’s clear from the above topics that the IT market in general, and the Oracle Applications market specifically, are going through some seismic changes.

Speaking at the recent Oracle MBX event, “Dragon’s Den” star, Deborah Meaden, urged businesses struggling to deal with these challenges to “Get match fit. We don’t know what lies ahead.” She is spot on.

The first step to avoid “being on the menu” is to gain an understanding of the factors in play and to formulate a strategy to move your organisation forwards, one that embraces the current changes.

What do you think? I’d be particularly interested to hear thoughts and opinions from IT and Business function heads on how you see the marketplace, and what your plans are for the coming year.

-#SignOffMV#-

Embracing Change and Innovation in HR

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 14:19:12 GMT

Join us for our annual Oracle HCM & Payroll event this Spring.

Across all industries HR professionals will be faced with significant change and challenges in the coming months, including new gender pay legislations, continuing digital transformation, plus the unknown effects of Brexit. These changes will bring with them potential business challenges but also some major opportunities.

The event offers an opportunity for industry leaders to discuss what all of this could mean for your business and how to capitalise on the change...

When & Where

Wednesday March 1st, Chandos House, 12.30pm -17.00pm (Register here)

Why attend?

Explore the latest evolutions in HR and Payroll
What will Brexit mean for your organisation? Hear from the CIPD
Gain valuable insights and learn how to tackle new challenges in HR and Payroll
Discuss with business leaders ways to adapt your organisation in the face of change
Hear from leading organisations about how they have transformed their HR and Payroll capabilities to deliver real business value

This event is free to attend, but places are limited. Register here for our event.

Timing	Duration (minutes)	Activity
12.30	0:45	Lunch and informal networking
13.15	0:05	Open and welcome by Claremont
13.20	0:30	Julian Ford, Claremont – Women know your place
13.50	0:30	Bob Darby and Michele Barritt, Barnardos HR Transformation
14.20	0:15	Tea and coffee break
14.35	0:30	Tony Hatton, Oracle – Ten Top Tips to ensure Customer Success in the Cloud
15.05	0:40	Rachel Suff, CIPD - Future Proof your organisation in the face of Brexit
15.45	0:35	Panel
16.20	0:10	Summary and wrap up from the day
16.30		Networking, drinks and 1:1 discussions

Speakers

Rachel Suff - Public Policy Adviser (Employment Relations) CIPD
Joined the CIPD as a policy adviser in 2014 to increase the CIPD’s public policy profile and engage with politicians, civil servants, policy-makers and commentators to champion better work and working lives. An important part of her role is to ensure that the views of the profession inform CIPD policy thinking on issues such as health and well-being, employee engagement and employment relations. As well as conducting research on UK employment issues, she helps guide the CIPD’s thinking in relation to European developments affecting the world of work. Rachel’s prior roles include working as a researcher for XpertHR and as a senior policy adviser at Acas.
Rachel will outline the potential impact on HR due to the Brexit referendum. Setting out her view of the industry in this time of substantial uncertainty, she will discuss managing change in the workplace, recruitment and immigration and what this could mean for an organisation’s workforce. Presenting results from the most recent CIPD Survey, Rachel will discuss shaping the organisation based on first- hand research.

Julian Ford – HCM Sales Solution Representative at Claremont
Julian has extensive experience of Oracle Consulting Sales, he has the responsibility of working closely with clients to turn complex business problems in to technology driven solutions, delivering value and helping organisations shape their enterprise applications road-map.

He will highlight the significant changes faced by the political issue of gender pay legislation. It is a topic which resonates with so many and one which can no longer be avoided. Julian will discuss how an organisation is to ensure meaningful change from the new legislation and how to best implement successful pay reporting for an effective workforce.

Michele Barritt- I.S Department Principal, Transform Project at Barnardo’s
Michele has worked for Barnardo’s for over 25 years and has significant experience in transformation project delivery in both HCM and ERP. Her main role focuses on fit for purpose solutions that meet future business needs.

Bob Darby- IT Director, Barnardo’s
Bob joined Barnardo’s in 2006 and since then he has led and ensured the development and implementation of effective strategies. Bob’s significant experience in the industry enables him to understand the needs of the business, by guaranteeing the execution and delivery of excellent- value IT operations and services, Barnardos is able to focus on its primary goal of transforming children’s lives.

Both with significant experience in transformation and large scale change management, they are well placed to share their insights into the process and highlight the significant business benefits of Oracle solutions on the workforce. They will share their experience in improving bottom line results through implementation.

Tony Hatton - Senior Customer Success Manager at Oracle
Tony joined Oracle in 2010, he focuses on enabling customers to achieve the highest business value and profit from investment in Oracle Cloud. With the goal of empowering customers to gain the most out of Cloud technology, Tony ensures that the right expertise, experience and enthusiasm are shared to best help customers on their Cloud Journey.

He will offer his 10 Top Tips to ensure customer success in the Cloud. By understanding customers, their business goals and having the expertise and experience in Cloud implementation, Tony will discuss how to enable business value from Cloud investment. Agility, visibility and empowerment are just a few benefits to be seen from Cloud technology, Tony’s talk will outline how HR professionals are to successfully realise these benefits within their organisation.

If you require any further information please don’t hesitate to get in touch at info@claremont.co.uk

Save

UKOUG Applications Journey to Cloud 2017

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 16:20:02 GMT

We are pleased to announce that Claremont will be attending the UKOUG Applications’ Journey to Cloud 2017, on 8th March at Holiday Inn Hotel Kensington.

The event is aimed at those looking to implement the Cloud but want to first find out the pro’s and con’s before making the move…

Patrick Hopkins, our ERP capability lead, will be running a session where he will share his knowledge and expertise of implementing ERP in the Cloud. Having successfully implemented two ERP Cloud projects, Patrick will be discussing the realities of an implementation in Oracle’s Cloud and elaborates on what is required for any successful Cloud programme. Patrick will also highlight the benefits of moving and discuss how such a journey differs from a traditional E-Business Suite implementation, explaining how, why and when any organisation should best consider that leap.

Patrick is not the only Claremont representative at the event, as we are also exhibiting. We will be showcasing our recent projects, as well as providing information and advice for both HCM and ERP Cloud.

It’s a fantastic opportunity to understand a little more about what we do and also for us to meet you. Plus, we have some exciting giveaways for you, so do come and say “hi”.

The full event agenda can be found here, and this is where you will need to register. If you would like to arrange a face to face meeting to discuss your Cloud requirements, please email Mark Vivian on mark.vivian@claremont.co.uk

-#SignOffMV#-

Women know your place!

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 16:11:11 GMT

Women know your place!

In December 2016 I presented “The Gender Pay Gap – what is it and who cares”- to HR Directors at the Oracle User Group. Since the presentation, I have put together this article, complete with slides from the event (but sadly not my thrilling voiceover) for those who didn’t manage to attend and as a re-cap for those that did.

Women should know their place and understand "women's work".

Deliberately provocative opener, but only then can we grasp some valid reasons why women get paid less than men, 14% less at the last count! More importantly, I want them to grasp the invalid, illegal, bigoted biases (both conscious and unconscious) and blatant sexism to why a man gets paid more than them.

In the last 6 months a lot's happened, Hilary nearly broke the ultimate glass ceiling and we had Equal Pay Day, Thursday 10th November, the day of the year after which women on average are "working for free" compared to their male colleagues. The full-time gender pay gap is currently 13.9%, and whilst it's great to see this closing rapidly in the lower age bands, Deloitte reckon it’s still at least 50 years till we achieve parity. (I'm also a fan of data visualisation in action - compare your own role at the Office for national Statistics website.)

Whilst I reiterated the difference between gender pay and equal pay during my presentation (and recommended everyone watch the movie "Made in Dagenham") it's really interesting that related topics just keep coming up in the news. From female staff at Asda looking to collectively recover more than £100 million in back pay, to Fat Cat Wednesday, with top earners (men) growing richer and richer; less than one in five of the top 1% earners are women. With my HCM friends at Barnardo's and National Trust, we discussed the research that shows a tendency for hiring managers to recruit in their own image; a key example of unconscious bias that can lead to greater inequality in the workplace if not overseen by a diligent HR professional! Explore this topic and more at your own leisure through the presentation slide found below.

The Gender Pay Gap: What is it & Who cares?

Save

As a good comment on my last blog put it, "the less time clarifying data, the more opportunity for meaningful change". The new UK legislation for companies to report gender pay gaps is a year away, but if you're a forward thinking HR professional, shouldn't this be a strategic objective for 2017? To go beyond these new statutory reporting requirements, and to get some meaningful value and insight from that new expensive Cloud HR system you've bought (not to mention reducing the risk of lawsuits and audit.)

Lets use 2017 to show women where their place in the workplace is - as a valued and equally rewarded part of the team.

14% in 2016 - Where do you think the gap will be in 2020? And do you think more reporting legislation will follow?

-#SignOffJF#-

Save

Save

Keeping on top of techstack patching with eBusiness Suite

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 17:09:52 GMT

Keeping on top of techstack patching with eBusiness Suite

Once an eBusiness Suite environment is installed, configured and up and running, patches will typically be applied in the following circumstances:

To fix a specific bug or a problem

Mandatory patches for legislative or legal reasons

To keep the system meeting minimum required support levels

Security patching

To activate new features or modules

Planned upgrade

These are all to one degree or another reactive patching exercises in response to a customer’s explicitly stated requirements.

However, all good Apps DBAs should also be recommending and performing proactive patching on the technology stack components of eBusiness Suite. This keeps the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the system up-to-date with all of the latest features and bug fixes.

Whenever there is a planned patching exercise or other maintenance activities on a system, I always check to see whether there are new techstack patches that can or should be included as well. I then present my findings to the customer with my recommendations and rationale.

If the customer approves, then the additional patches are applied and are tested along with the planned patches

(Or) If the customer wants to only apply a specific fix for a specific issue and does not want to widen the scope, then that is fine too!

Identifying new technology stack patches

The sort of patches we are interested in are not those that directly impact the functionality of the application. Oracle release family pack updates, minipacks, rollup patches and Recommended Patch Collections (RPCs) for the ‘transactional’ modules but those sorts of updates require careful planning and are not something that can just be tagged on to something else.

What we are interested in are the techstack patches and there are some useful notes on My Oracle Support that I keep as favourites and check, I have outlined these below for you:

eBusiness Suite 12.1

Question Oracle Note to check
What is the latest Applications DBA (AD) minipack and do I already have that? <have to search for the latest readme>
What is the latest Oracle Applications Manager (ADO) minipack and so I have that? Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 11i and 12.x: Required Updates for Patch Wizard (Doc ID 1267768.1)
What is the latest Framework (FWK) minipack and do I already have that? Oracle Application Framework Release Notes for Release 12.1 RUP Patchsets (Doc ID 1931412.1)
Do I have the latest recommended patches for my 10.1.2 Oracle Home? Upgrading OracleAS 10g Forms and Reports in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Doc ID 437878.1)
Do I have the latest recommended patches for my 10.1.3 Oracle Home? Upgrading to the Latest OracleAS 10g 10.1.3.x Patch Set in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Doc ID 454811.1)
Have I got the latest recommended patches for AutoConfig? Using AutoConfig to Manage System Configurations in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Doc ID 387859.1)
Have I got the latest recommended patches for RapidClone? Cloning Oracle Applications Release 12 with Rapid Clone (Doc ID 406982.1)
Are there are new critical 12c databases patches recommended? Interoperability Notes EBS 12.0 or 12.1 with RDBMS 12cR1 (Doc ID 1524398.1)
Am I on the latest Patchset version of the database? Quick Reference to Patch Numbers for Database PSU, SPU(CPU), Bundle Patches and Patchsets (Doc ID 1454618.1)

Do I have the latest Java server-side patches? Using JDK 7.0 Latest Update with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.0 and 12.1 (Doc ID 1467892.1)
Am I on the latest version of the JRE Plugin and are there any new interoperability patches to apply? Deploying JRE (Native Plug-in) for Windows Clients in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Doc ID 393931.1)
Do I have all of the recommended interoperability patches for the latest internet browser versions? Recommended Browsers for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Doc ID 389422.1)

eBusiness Suite 12.2

Happily, this exercise is much easier for eBusiness Suite 12.2 as Oracle bundle up this information into a single note:

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2: Consolidated List of Patches and Technology Bug Fixes (Doc ID 1594274.1).

Within Oracle eBusiness Suite itself, the Patch Wizard can be used to list the latest recommended patches for the core technology products and transactional modules, however this only lists eBusiness Suite application patches and not those for the database or application server.

The first time going through all of these Notes can take some time and the list of patches to apply can be quite large - but take heart! After the first iteration, proactively checking these Notes on a periodic basis will mean that you won’t fall too far behind with these patches in future and catching up with the latest ones becomes a doddle with only one or two to do (and sometimes there are no new ones to do).

Why apply these patches at all?

There are several advantages to applying these patches on a periodic, proactive ad hoc basis:

Known Oracle bugs in the current version are fixed

Easier to get Oracle Support to respond on Service Requests, only if it can be proven that the system already has all of the recommended technology stack patches applied to it

Uptake of the latest security fixes for the technology stack

Uptake of the latest performance fixes for the technology stack

Ensures that the system is already compliant with any client-side rollouts of later versions of Windows operating systems, Java versions, Office versions or Internet Explorer versions

Proactively applied technology stack patches that will one day be mandatory pre-requisites for future functional patches – this is especially true for HCM RUP patches

Looks great to auditors!

Reduces the effort and downtime of future upgrade projects by starting from a later point on the current environment

Even if the customer is particularly risk-adverse and only wants to apply patches to fix specific problems in a reactive way, the effort is still not wasted and the ‘missing’ techstack patches can be documented for the future!

Of course introducing any sort of change carries risk and there could be new bugs introduced into the system that were not there before. However, a robust testing strategy should be able to capture these before they make it to the live environment – and if the system is being tested anyway for some planned patches, there is no additional testing effort that is required!

At Claremont we pride ourselves on our proactivity and implement this process as a matter of course; as a result we achieve stable systems and happy customers (as evidenced by our customer satisfaction scores!)
-#SignOffKB#-

Save

Fixing poorly performing SQL after a database upgrade with SQL Plan Baselines

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 11:21:57 GMT

Fixing poorly performing SQL after a database upgrade with SQL Plan Baselines

On each new version of the database, Oracle introduces new features and bug fixes to make the core engine of the optimizer smarter and more efficient than it was in the previous version.

In the latest 12c version of the database there is an array of these new features available, all with the goal of making sure that for any SQL statement the optimizer chooses the fastest execution plan it can. It does while making sure that it does not take too long in working out what that plan should be in the first place. Adaptive Execution Plans, Dynamic Plans, Automatic Re-optimization and Statistics Feedback are a few of the 12c features in this area.

Having performed more database upgrades in my 16 year Oracle career than I care to mention, I can say from experience that no matter how intelligent the optimizer gets, there will still be occasions when it just gets it plan wrong!

One common feature of the half dozen or so 12c database upgrades that I have performed for various customers over the last few months is that most pieces of SQL after the upgrade will run in the same time as before, however there are those few that run a little faster or a little slower, and the handful that run significantly faster or significantly slower.

It is the “significantly slower” ones that are important to identify and fix as part of the development and testing process of the upgrade. By “significantly slower” I mean a runtime pre-upgrade of a few seconds or minutes which after the upgrade has degraded to a few hours (or days!).

There has always been at least one such case in each of the 12c upgrades I have performed so far, but never more than five in total for any one system, so this is the ballpark figure you can expect.

Identifying regressed SQL

Oracle provide some feature-rich and intuitive tools that can help you to identify any SQL that regresses in performance following an upgrade, such as Database Replay and Real Application User Testing.

These are unfortunately often extra cost options that require additional Oracle licences (if your system is on premise) or at least the ‘High Performance’ offering for Oracle Database Cloud customers.

If your business already holds the necessary licenses then certainly use these tools to get your value for money, but if can be a very expensive option to purchase these packs from Oracle for an upgrade project when there might only be one piece of SQL that is a problem post-upgrade that needs fixing

In the absence of these tools often the only way to find these problem SQL’s is to test it manually – either with the use of third party performance testing and benchmarking tools, or users just following a test plan in the application.

What is important at this stage is to make sure that when you are testing and finding something running much slower after the upgrade that other possible contributing factors are ruled out.

Do this by performing an initial baseline performance test of the non-production environment before it is upgraded and then performing exactly the same test again afterwards in the same conditions

For example: don’t clone the environment between the tests; don’t change the memory configuration of the database or server; don’t try to compare the performance of a non-prod environment post-upgrade with your production environment pre-upgrade, since chances are you are not comparing like-for-like.

In my case I used Flashback Database and Guaranteed Restore points to make the dataset identical between each test run:

Enable flashback database

Take a guaranteed restore point

Carry out initial baseline performance testing

Restore database to restore point

Upgrade database

Carry out post-upgrade performance testing

It is clearly impossible to test every single piece of SQL that the database may have to service in these tests; instead target the testing on business-critical functions. Examples’s include, how long Payroll takes to run in an HCM system, or Create Accounting in a Financials system; overnight batch jobs which must complete by a certain time; any programs which are already known to be long-running; or the response time of a query on a website or a Form.

Fixing regressed SQL

Oracle again provide an array of tools that can be used to force a piece of SQL to use a particular execution plan – some are extra cost options, some are included in Enterprise Edition licences.

For the rest of this article I will be concentrating on SQL Plan Baselines which is one of the features that does not require additional licenses!

Generate SQL Plan Baselines to fix poor SQL performance

SQL Plan Management has been around since version 11g of the database. It is a feature that enables the system to automatically control SQL plan evolution by maintaining baselines.

STEP 1: Verify the culprit!

You have found a piece of SQL that runs much slower after the upgrade than it did before.

You think that the database upgrade has caused this, but you want to prove that.

This can be done easily by toggling the database initialisation parameter OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE back to the previous database version.

This is one of those nice parameters that can be changed dynamically without a database bounce and can be done at system or session level.

Run the program/query/SQL in the upgraded environment with trace enabled. If running from SQL*Plus this can be done at session level; if running from within an application like eBusiness Suite this can be done from within the front-end (enable trace on concurrent program definition, or turn on trace in OA Framework), or even do this at database level.

Let the program/query/SQL run and then tkprof the trace file.

Check the tkprof trace file and what the most expensive SQL is – note the SQL_ID, elapsed time and execution plan.

Now set the optimizer features back to the previous database version (11.2.0.4 in this example).

sqlplus / as sysdba alter system set optimizer_features_enable='11.2.0.4';

Run the program/query/SQL again, with trace enabled.

If the process now finishes in acceptable runtimes again, this proves that the problem is the new version of the database optimizer choosing a non-performant plan for this SQL.

Compare the new trace file with the first trace file – you should see a different execution plan with a radically improved elapsed time.

STEP 2: Generate a SQL Plan Baseline

We now want to force the database to treat this particular SQL as it did before the upgrade by using the plan it generated in the previous version.

The first step is to configure the database to capture SQL Plan Baselines – by default this is turned off.

sqlplus / as sysdba alter system set OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE='11.2.0.4'; alter database set OPTIMIZER_CAPTURE_SQL_PLAN_BASELINES=TRUE;

Only repeatable statements are captured as SQL Plan Baselines, so now run the problem SQL twice with this configration.

When complete, put the initialisation parameters back to their previous values.

sqlplus / as sysdbaalter system set OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE='12.1.0.2';alter database set OPTIMIZER_CAPTURE_SQL_PLAN_BASELINES=FALSE;

STEP 3: Test it is fixed

There should now be a SQL Plan baseline created for the problem SQL using the ‘good’ version of the execution plan.

You check this by querying the data dictionary view DBA_SQL_PLAN_BASELINES. Your particular SQL you can find either by the SQL_ID noted from the trace files or just by the SQL_TEXT.

If you run the SQL again now with the 12c version of the optimiser it will use the execution plan stored in the SQL Plan Baseline – the ‘good’ plan generated under the previous version – and runtime will return to pre-upgrade levels. All other SQL will continue to use the new plans generated by the 12c optimiser.

NOTE: this only works if initialisation parameter OPTIMIZER_USE_SQL_PLAN_BASELINES is set to TRUE (which is the default).

STEP 4: Migrate fix to other environments

Great, you have now fixed the problem SQL in your dev environment! But how do you propagate this fix to other instances, including production? One way would be to repeat the above steps on all databases as they are upgraded, but this is a laborious process and also runs the risk in Prod that SQL statements that you do not want to generate Plan Baselines with the previous version of the optimiser will be created when you have set OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE and OPTIMIZER_CAPTURE_SQL_PLAN_BASELINES at system level.

Instead, you can pack up the SQL Plan Baseline(s) created in your dev environment, export them out, import them to your next database and then unpack them. The import/unpack process can then be performed on subsequent iterations of the upgrade, including go-live as a post-upgrade step before the application is restarted – that way, the problem SQL will have the ‘good’ plan available to it the first time it is run!

1) In the fixed dev environment, pack up the SQL Plan Baseline:

sqlplus system exec DBMS_SPM.CREATE_STGTAB_BASELINE('STGTAB', user); var x number; begin :x := DBMS_SPM.PACK_STGTAB_BASELINE('STGTAB', user, sql_handle => 'SQL_<SQLID>'); end; /

2) DataPump export the new stage table from the dev environment:

sqlplus / as sysdba SQL> create or replace directory DATA_PUMP_DIR as '<PATH>'; Directory created. expdp system/<psswd> tables=STGTAB directory=DATA_PUMP_DIR dumpfile=<NAME>.dmp

3) When the next database is upgraded, copy the export file to a place where it can get it and import it:

sqlplus / as sysdba SQL> create or replace DATA_PUMP_DIR as '<PATH>'; impdp system/<psswd> tables=STGTAB directory=DATA_PUMP_DIR dumpfile=<NAME>.dmp

4) Then unpack the SQL Plan Baseline:

sqlplus system var x number; :x := DBMS_SPM.UNPACK_STGTAB_BASELINE('STGTAB', user); end; /

And that’s it! You’ve now imported the SQL Plan Baseline from your first instance into your next database and have fixed the problem SQL before it was run.

Concluding Thoughts

This is just one method amongst many available in your toolset to fix poorly performing SQL after a database upgrade.

It is particularly suited to instances where there is a small number of SQL to deal with, there are no licenses held for some of the more advanced Oracle options, and there is a robust test plan in place that is able to identify any critical problem SQL as early as possible in the upgrade project.

I myself have made successful use of this method on a number of occasions in the ‘real world’ and can attest to its effectiveness!

-#SignOffKB#-

Claremont on social media

Fri, 2 Dec 2016 17:46:41 GMT

Over the past few years, Claremont have really embraced social media and social selling as a way of creating conversations with our customers, prospects, partners and other audiences. This is why we were pleased to be recognised at a recent Oracle partner event as doing a great job by Oracle marketing folks.

Our business is all about the people, and at Claremont we have some of the best Oracle experts in the market…It’s their stories, insights and expertise that stands us apart from others. Great content, creates social media engagement.

Not only do we generate a regular stream of unique and expert content, we also collate the best in news stories from the most influential publications and individuals. This great combination, makes our social media feed a one stop shop for the latest in Oracle, Cloud and other interesting news.

One of things we actively try to do, is engage with teams at Oracle… So if you are active on social media it would be great to connect…

Don’t just connect with our company feeds, Mark Vivian, Claremont’s CEO is also very active on both Twitter and LinkedIn and generates lots of interesting content and opinions.

So, if you’re looking for a way to increase your social media engagement, then connect with Claremont.

Twitter – @ClaremontOracle
LinkedIn – Claremont- Oracle Professional Services

Claremont at the 2016 UKOUG Apps conference

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 11:34:16 GMT

Claremont at the 2016 UKOUG Apps conference – half a dozen reasons to attend

The annual UKOUG Apps conference and exhibition returns to the ICC in Birmingham in December, with the Claremont team out in force. The conference is the largest gathering of Oracle professionals in the UK, and represents the yearly get together for the industry.

This year not only is Claremont a key sponsor, but six of our consultants are delivering presentations. Make sure you register to book your place at the conference and look at the agenda to ensure you don’t miss out. Here is a quick synopsis of our six talks:

Cloud BI ERP at RiverStone (Monday 5th, 13:10)

Claremont recently completed an Oracle ERP implementation at global insurance company, RiverStone. One of RiverStone’s key requirements was that existing Oracle Discoverer reports needed to be recreated in the Fusion Cloud BI reporting tools. Delivered by Tim Dickinson, Senior BI Consultant, we will outline the benefits and pitfalls of working with Fusion BI reporting tools in the Cloud and tips to ensuring successful reporting with Oracle Cloud ERP.

From Stately Homes to Mobile Phones: The National Trust’s Mobile HCM Journey (Tuesday 6th, 10:05)

The National Trust is the largest membership organisation in the country. Due to the structure of workforce being varied, complex and distributed, they realised the need for a solution that maintained engagement and supported the organisation into the future. Working in collaboration with National Trust, Claremont rolled out mobile HCM throughout the organisation. Adrian Biddulph, leading expert in HCM, will discuss the challenges faced, the benefits experienced and the outcome of this transformation.

Mobile Absence Management (Tuesday 6th, 14:05)

Jo Protherough brings extensive experience in HCM and Payroll through understanding strategic HR and creating value in organisations. She will discuss approaches driving cost savings by using Oracle E-Business to manage the reduction of unplanned absence and the effectiveness of an engaging interface in allowing better data collection.

Carry on Room Booking (Tuesday 6th, 16:40)

Unite Students and Claremont have developed a booking solution using Oracle E-Business that includes accommodation booking capabilities, reactive and planned maintenance activities and integration with back-office core financials. Unite Student’s Head of IT and Digital, Ashley Hewson and Claremont’s Senior Solution Architect, Ian Monaghan will discuss how the solution brings greater functionality and integration to the room booking cycle and the benefits it has brought to Unite Students.

How underpaid are women in your company? (Wednesday 7th, 12:55)

Gender equality and transparency in pay is a political issue, and we will shortly have new legislation: In less than a year, every UK enterprise will be required to publish how much (more) their men earn compared to their female counterparts. Julian Ford, Solution Sales Representive and HR expert will discuss how to go about gathering statistics from your HCM system and how to bridge that gap.

Using Oracle E-Business Suite & the 12c Database In-Memory Option – How Unite Students Improved OLTP Performance. (Wednesday 7th, 15:10)

Michael Lane, Claremont’s Technology Capability Lead, and Mansun Stevens from Unite Students, discuss how they used the Oracle Database 11gR2 in-memory option to tune performance of an integrated Oracle E-Business and Java front-end solution. They discuss the challenges faced, how the solution was implemented, and the benefits of the solution based on their first-hand experience.

Keep an eye out for the Claremont team at the event and of course on social media. If you’re passing through and would like to meet up, please get in touch.

Have a great conference.

-#SignOffMV#-

Save

Save

Save

Ten Top Tips to a Successful Cloud ERP Implementation

Wed, 9 Nov 2016 11:47:00 GMT

In September 2016, I presented at Claremont’s breakfast briefing – “Oracle ERP Cloud: Lessons Learnt from Trailblazers”. As Claremont’s ERP Capability Lead and having completed two successful Cloud ERP projects (both referenceable), I offered my “Insider’s Top 10 Tips to Successful Cloud ERP Implementation”.

Since this presentation, I have put together this article for those who didn’t see my presentation and as a re-cap for those that did:

1.    COTS… is King:

COTS = “Commercial off the Shelf” – aka “vanilla” or “Out of the Box” (OOTB)

A key benefit of Oracle’s Cloud ERP, is that it’s a SaaS offering and for any customer this means employing configuration rather than customisation to shape their new system.

You know I like a good analogy. The best way to describe your Cloud Journey is to think of it like a train journey. You arrive at the station and board the train as a passenger, not as the train driver; that is Oracle’s job. Oracle have the system development experience and have made a significant investment in Cloud as their strategic destination.

With Cloud, there is very limited customisation available. I know this can take some time for people to get their heads around but there are significant benefits to such an approach. These benefits include an easier implementation, much easier upgrades and reduced system costs given Oracle take care of the hardware and associated maintenance within your monthly subscription.

2.   Do your homework:

As with any IT implementation it’s important that all your stakeholder’s really understand the new system and how it will work for your business. In the “New World” of Cloud, this is much easier than it is in EBS.

Gone are the days of having to trawl through a huge library of PDF docs for every release. With Cloud all documentation is available on-line. Having web based resources means that all content is current, updated and accessible. Therefore, there’s no excuse for not swotting up on these critical resources:

MOS
Oracle Docs
OER
Oracle’s website

Insider's Top 10 Tips to a Successful Cloud ERP Implementation

Save

3.   Planning and Communication:

As with any project, planning and communication is key to success. However, my experience implementing Oracle SaaS projects has taught me that there are two key factors which help determine that Cloud success;

(a) Having a designated solution architect / lead consultant who understands the business, the Cloud technology and the approach to the implementation.

(b) Both Cloud ERP projects, I’ve been involved in, have had very strong client side leads. These individuals have been able to drive through the business and process changes that need to happen for a SaaS project to be successful.

Also, remember to maintain a realistic expectation of what is possible within the time frame and the project scope.

4.   Change Management:

Managing change and customer expectations when implementing any project like is vital to its success. However, the “elephant in the room” for Cloud projects is that Cloud is always a re-implementation.

Re-Implementing means that you can keep the “good bits” pre Cloud ERP, however, it’s a great opportunity to look again at previous architectural decisions, to cleanse the data and have a fresh start. The baby doesn’t have to exit with the bath water and the customer doesn’t necessarily have to have been on EBS!

5.   Working with Oracle (not against):

As with any relationship, treat everyone else as you wish to be treated. A cliché I know but it’s important to keep promises and keep Oracle “on side” to position your project to make best progress. Oracle are there to help you succeed but you need to play by the “Oracle rules” and be easy to deal with, so take time to understand the Oracle support processes and how best to engage with them.

In the “new world of Cloud” Oracle have created a number of new roles designed to ensure the long term success of Cloud projects. These new roles include Implementation Success Managers (ISM’s) and Customer Success Managers (CSM’s). It’s essential to engage with your ISM early and throughout the whole project to ensure that you have the best support from Oracle. Personally, I had a call with mine every Monday morning and used them as a point of escalation when necessary.

In addition, when it comes to getting your project live and across the line the Critical Accounts Management service is very useful and someone again who you need to request and get to know. They are an invaluable point of contact for progressing issues and making things happen. Again, I used this service in both of my Cloud projects.

6.   SR Management:

For me, this was one of the biggest learnings from my projects.
Service requests (SR’s) are raised through MOS (My Oracle Support) and are your primary method of communication with Oracle’s technical teams. It’s important to ensure that you have a robust process in place to ensure SR’s are managed correctly and efficiently. Having lots isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just means they take significant time to manage.

Closely monitor your SR’s daily, it should be morning and night if you want everything to move efficiently. Don’t be that person who says ‘Well… in EBS it … works that way’. This isn’t EBS and I can promise you, you’ll do little for your cause if this is how you approach Cloud SRs.

7.   This isn’t EBS (but that experience isn’t wasted)

The product isn’t EBS.

Cloud Apps vs the next EBS release are, of course, very different products. EBS supports customisation but the expanding functionality and modular footprint in Cloud offers a different way of meeting a business’ functional requirements.

8.   A Rapid Implementation, but don’t take shortcuts:

Cloud has a much shorter implementation cycle than a traditional EBS project. Remember, that train analogy… minimising customisation options and adoption of leading business processes available allows for time and money savings. Improvement in functionality “just happens” when Oracle upgrades your pods!

Now you’re a Cloud customer, quarterly patches will be a big part of your life as patching has just moved to a quarterly calendar. Plan for these and make sure you take advantage of new and improved functionality when it comes out either in the quarterly patches or, more likely, in the release upgrades twice a year. It won’t configure itself so you need to make provision to implement new functionality.

9.   The Importance of a Great Team:

TThe implementation team is made up of both

(a) Client side resources, and
(b) Consulting team resources

It’s critical that the client’s Subject Matter Expert (SME’s) are embedded within the project throughout and empowered to make decisions if you want to achieve that shorter implementation.

As I’ve mentioned before, the regular patches and upgrades will continue and need to be managed post go-live. Its key that you think about who and how these will be managed… perhaps look at whether your implementation partner can become your support partner on-going?

10.   Pod Management

For your Pods (think environments), you need to consider: how many, what for, who uses them, when do I need more/less, etc…. Make sure you establish the necessary processes and procedures to support this.

Obviously it’s difficult to manage a number of competing activities happening in the same environment. On my latest project I used x3 pods, two staging pods where one was used for FP1 and the other for FP2 & UAT and one Prod pod.

The “good old days’ of x10+ on-premise test environments on a large ERP project are gone, unless of course you need them and if you do Oracle will be happy to spin them up (but obviously not FoC).

•   To sum up

Oracle Cloud ERP supports modern businesses requirements. Although there are lots of similarities with EBS, remember that Cloud is a different product and requires a new approach where customisation is possible but discouraged. It requires a new mind-set.

Opening communication amongst the project team is critical to your success. It’s important to adopt a realistic timeframe and maintain realistic expectations throughout the duration of the project.

However, it’s not just about the implementation. it’s not just you and Oracle, but rather, you, Oracle and an implementation partner able to work with you beyond “go-live” to exploit the continually improving functionality and expanding footprint of Cloud ERP. After all, you want to take advantage of this as that’s why you went Cloud in the first place!

Here at Claremont we have that experience, the knowledge to support your Oracle Cloud ERP project beyond the initial implementation and to support your Oracle Cloud journey long term.

-#SignOffPH#-

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Developing mobile applications for ERP systems

Tue, 18 Oct 2016 17:33:26 GMT

Developing mobile applications for ERP systems

At Claremont we work with many of our clients to develop mobile applications for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS).

Over the last year, we’ve looked at the best way to develop these mobile apps, which has prompted a few questions on best-practice.

Why are Mobile Apps for ERP Systems different from others?

Mobile apps, which are intended to extend the features of an ERP system, are subtly different beasts from the collection of apps you probably have on your phone or tablet right now.

A stand-alone app on your phone is essentially a separate piece of software, which carries all of its features within the app. User interface (UI) control, logic and data – these are all encapsulated within the app on your device.

However, an app which extends ERP features to a mobile employee is doing something slightly different.

Although an ERP app works on a mobile platform, the majority of the app’s functionality resides in the main ERP application – not on the device itself.

That being said, the app must have enough of its own features and business logic to make it usable. This is especially true when the app is designed to function even when disconnected from the main ERP application.

Less is more: developing a mobile feature set

The apps that Claremont are developing have a small set of features in the mobile platform itself – but just enough to ensure the app is functional and most efficient (when both connected to and disconnected from the main ERP application).

We’ve seen that other mobile ERP apps have a tendency to try and replicate large parts of the ERP application. They attempt to transition all the ERP functionality onto the mobile platform, which can make the app unwieldy.

Choosing a technical platform is also key to developing the best ERP app possible.

But it’s really easy to get carried away with what you could put into an app, when you’re faced with a platform’s capabilities.

If we developed apps in iOS, for example, then we could call on all of the iOS features and come up with something Steve Jobs would have admired. But this isn’t what we’re trying to do.

We’re not in the business of saddling our clients with lots of new – but superfluous – technologies.

No, we’ve developed our ERP mobile apps so that our clients can easily access their ERP application remotely – but we treat these apps as an extension of the ERP system itself, rather than an autonomous technical solution, with additional but unnecessary features, as this would only require extra time and support.

This means that our mobile apps are designed to complement the existing technology Oracle stack. They work to deliver real business benefits – remote access, cost savings, improved efficiency – but without the need for any significant additional support and/or staff training to use the mobile ERP apps effectively.

When selecting mobile technologies, one of the main aims is to complement the existing technology stack (Oracle) as far as possible. At Claremont we are always aware of the time and effort a customer will need to put into supporting these solutions. Choosing a complimentary technology is key to ensuring that the mobile apps are not a burden on the enterprise.

Choosing the right technology

Before getting into the nuts and bolts of building an app, there are some fairly basic choices to be made about which software to use.

There are plenty of choices available. But in order to make the right decision you will also need to consider which devices the apps are going to run on (Android, Apple or Windows).

Here are the pros and cons of a couple of approaches that you may want to consider:
•   Native device development:

In order to get the most out of your device, your best bet is to develop your apps natively in the language supported for that device i.e.
o   Android: Java
o   iOS: Objective C & Swift (Apple's Xcode integrated development environment (IDE)).
o   Windows: C#, C++, Javascript

Advantages: you’re using the language in which your device’s operating system is written. This means that access to device specific features, libraries etc. will be more straightforward.

If you put the time and effort into this approach, you are going to end up with a highly polished app.

Disadvantages: you’ll need to know the specific language required for each type of device that your organisation supports. Then you’ll need to develop the same app in each different language.

The advent of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) in the workplace in recent years has magnified this problem. The alternative is to PSE (Pay Someone Else) and get an external firm to develop your native apps for you. You don’t need the skills in house to follow this path – although obviously outsourcing may be more expensive. It’s also important to bear in mind how you will support these technologies after they are delivered.

•   Device agnostic development:

This option involves developing the app inside a development framework. The app is developed once in whatever language your chosen framework uses. The framework (an app in its own right) then takes care of running your app on various different platforms.
Examples of this technology include Xamarin and Oracle’s own MAF (Mobile Application Framework).

Advantages: You only build the app once, but can still deploy to multiple mobile platforms. This lowers the cost of development and the need for on-going support. It also means you can develop an app that covers multiple platforms in less time (compared with building native apps for each platform).

Disadvantages: This is the ‘lowest common denominator’ approach, which means that in order for the container to work across multiple platforms, some of the more niche or advanced features of Android/iOS/Windows may not be available to you.

Claremont’s approach to mobile app development

At Claremont, we use the device agnostic approach, coupled with Oracle’s MAF framework, to develop our ERP mobile apps.

For us, this approach makes most sense, since we’re developing apps with little or no prior knowledge of what devices or platforms our clients might run the apps on. It also allows us to treat the apps as extensions of the ERP system itself, and ensure the apps work seamlessly with existing Oracle technology.

If you want to know more about Oracle’s MAF framework, there is plenty of information (including downloads) here

The third defining strand of our approach, is to treat these mobile extensions in a similar way as we would treat CEMLIs.

A CEMLI (Configuration, Extension, Migration, Localisation, or Interface to the uninitiated) is a custom extension built onto the standard code base in an ERP application. They are built to satisfy a specific requirement where the standard application does not provide some required functionality.

Our mobile apps work in a comparable way – plugging specific gaps in your wider ERP system and making that functionality accessible out in the field.

They are also designed to be supported by the same people who would support the main ERP application and existing CEMLIs.

ERP mobile apps are increasingly important for any business looking to get the most from their Oracle E-Business Suite. That’s why, at Claremont, we are always working to develop new ERP apps for, and with, clients.

In my next blog I outline our latest venture into mobile ERP – the Mobile Engineer – which started life as a proof of concept and is now being developed for one of our clients in the student accommodation sector.

Get in touch with Claremont to find out how mobile ERP apps could save your team time and help you to improve efficiency across the business.

-#SignOffML#-

Triple Silver Award Success

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 13:57:33 GMT

We are enormously proud to announce that Claremont has won 3 Silver Awards in the UKOUG Partner of the Year Awards 2016/17.

The awards were in the extremely hard fought main categories of E-Business, Database and Managed Services. The spread of these awards affirms the breadth of services that Claremont provide.

These awards are voted for by customers and we are immensely grateful to all of the Claremont customers who voted for us, it is much appreciated.

It's really fantastic for the whole Claremont team to achieve this accolade, and for all of their hard work over the last year to be recognised.

-#SignOffMV#-

Save

Save

Save

Oracle In A Cloud? Avoid the Licensing & Support Pitfalls

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 14:35:31 GMT

All Clouds are the same, right? Not with Oracle. Your choice of Cloud affects Oracle’s support and licensing terms which, as Mars discovered, can prove very expensive. Amazon, Microsoft Azure and VMWare-power Clouds are amongst those affected. Read on to find out how to avoid the pitfalls.

We often speak of the Cloud, as if it is a single, homogenous “entity” providing all sorts of computing resources to the public and, increasingly, businesses. While we know there are many different Clouds, it is convenient for suppliers and customers to think of Cloud as an abstract, homogenous concept. This allows us to focus on the business challenges that drive us to a Cloud and the services being offered by the Cloud provider. That’s generally a good thing: moving the conversation from technical minutiae to service and “value add” is in everyone’s interests.

However, at some stage anyone considering moving the hosting of business applications to a Cloud must ask some fundamental questions as part of their due diligence. Concerns around where data will be stored and what data security exists are commonplace. But anyone hosting Oracle software in a Cloud should ask additional questions, yet these are often overlooked.

Most Oracle software is licensed by processor, although the required number of processor licenses usually doesn’t equate to the number of processors or cores running the software. But that takes us in to Oracle licensing, which we’ll leave for another day! This becomes more complicated in a Cloud, or indeed any virtualized environment.

By default, Oracle requires customers to license all physical CPU cores on the server(s) hosting the Cloud’s virtual servers running your Oracle software. That could be a big number, very big; of course, that assumes your Cloud provider can and will tell you.

Only if the Cloud provider adheres to Hard Partitioning rules or is an “Authorized Cloud Environment” can you license Oracle software based on the number of virtual CPUs(“vCPU”) provided by your Cloud servers.

And there’s the catch. Most Cloud and virtualization platforms don’t Hard Partition. For example, no Cloud using VMWare can Hard Partition because Oracle specifically states that VMWare doesn’t Hard Partition. In fact, Oracle only certifies a handful of platforms as Hard Partitioning. Even their own Oracle VM platform must be configured according to certain rules to achieve this certification.

This issue has been known about for some time but Oracle is now exercising this restriction as part of its audit work. Mars recently fell foul of this and was hit with a claim by Oracle conservatively estimated at $100m; the two companies eventually settled out of court.

Lesson One:

If not using an Authorized Cloud Environment, check your Cloud provider uses Hard Partitioning as specified by Oracle. If they don’t then walk away.

Oracle has certified Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Microsoft’s Windows Azure, and only these two Clouds, as “Authorized Cloud Environments”. As such, a vCPU counts as a physical core for Oracle licensing. Thus, hosting on these Clouds is, for the purposes of counting CPU cores, treated in the same way as if you hosted on your own physical servers or on Hard Partitioned Clouds.

But there’s a catch here too because special, i.e. more restrictive, Oracle license terms apply on these platforms. For example, whereas Oracle’s Standard Edition 2 database may ordinarily be licensed on up to 2 CPUs with an unlimited number of CPU cores (although the database will only use 16 threads simultaneously) Oracle states a Standard 2 database “may only be licensed on Authorized Cloud Environment instances up to 8 virtual cores”. Furthermore, a CPU license must be purchased for every 4 virtual cores. No such restriction exists with other hosting options where you can take advantage of the high number of cores available on today’s CPUs.

This means you would require 2 licenses to run Oracle Standard Edition 2 on 8 vCPUs at Amazon EC2 or Azure, whereas only 1 license may be required to benefit from 16 threads elsewhere. Given that Oracle licenses are generally a bigger investment than the cost of commodity Cloud hosting, it could be a mistake to use a Cloud that both limits Oracle’s performance, because the number of permitted CPU cores is limited, and increases licensing costs.

Lesson Two:

Before choosing an Authorized Cloud Environment, make sure the licensing rules won’t cause you to face a choice between non-compliance, purchasing additional Oracle licenses or throttling the performance of your Oracle system.

Having ensured your Oracle systems comply with Oracle’s licensing, you next need to check the choice of Cloud won’t affect Oracle’s support for your system. This is a subtle issue and might not be a risk for you, but it must be considered. This affects VMWare, which underpins many Cloud offerings. Although Oracle does support their products on VMWare, they are not certified and as such “Oracle will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running on VMware” (My Oracle Support Doc ID 249212.1). Oracle’s support note continues, “If the problem is determined not to be a known Oracle issue, we will refer the customer to VMware for support.   When the customer can demonstrate that the issue occurs when running on the native OS, Oracle will resume support”. Similarly, if Oracle’s fix for a known issue doesn’t work then the assumption is that the problem is caused by VMWare until the “customer can demonstrate” it also occurs on the “native OS”.

Thus, Oracle Support may require you to “demonstrate” a problem’s not a VMWare issue before further support is provided. This will require time and resources (both people and IT infrastructure) to replicate the problem outside of VMWare. That can be a distraction for your business and cost time that delays the resolution of an incident. Many may decide the risk of Oracle Support requiring you to do this is outweighed by the benefits of using VMWare, but it’s vital that you understand the support terms. This is particularly true when trusting critical systems to a VMWare-powered Cloud.

Lesson Three:

Understand and accept the support requirements of running of Oracle on VMWare before moving to a VMWare-based Cloud.

Claremont’s approach to Cloud hosting for Oracle systems was to develop the Claremont Cloud. Built using Oracle VM and Oracle Linux, and configured to meet Oracle’s standards for Hard Partitioning, the Claremont Cloud avoids the licensing and support pitfalls. Furthermore, the Claremont Cloud’s pure Oracle technology stack provides a platform designed, built and tuned for running Oracle systems. In addition to the public Claremont Cloud we run private Claremont Clouds for customers and, thus, also offer hybrid solutions. These are all hosted in our UK data centres, all of which exceed the Tier III data centre benchmark and are certified compliant with key standards such as ISO-27001 for security.

Our Cloud hosting is delivered within Claremont’s proven, ITIL-based Managed Service framework. We don’t just provide raw hosting, we provide a service. This can include whatever additional services our customers require, from operating system administration and Oracle DBA support to specialist skills proactively supporting Oracle Payroll with Oracle E-Business Suite.

“Unique” is an over-used and abused word. But the Claremont Cloud really is unique in delivering UK-based, Oracle VM private and public Clouds as part of flexible and high quality Managed Services.

-#SignOffJS#-

Save

Oracle Cloud ERP: Lessons Learned from Trailblazers breakfast briefing

Wed, 5 Oct 2016 10:41:06 GMT

Last week, we hosted our “Oracle Cloud ERP: Lessons Learned from Trailblazers” event at Oracle’s City Office. This breakfast briefing was aimed at providing an opportunity for attendees to understand the reality of some real-life journeys of moving an ERP system to Oracle Cloud. The event was well supported, with 40 delegates representing many industries in attendance.

David Hobson, a Business Development Director from Oracle, kicked off proceedings by providing an interesting overview of the current state of the IT marketplace. He set out how Oracle’s offerings meet some of the challenges faced by organisations today and provided examples of customers, both big and not-so-big, who have already made the journey to Oracle Cloud ERP.

David Tyrrell, Finance Manager from RiverStone was next up. RiverStone are part of the global Fairfax group, and deliver insurance and re-insurance services to their customers. David provided the rationale behind his company’s decision to move to Oracle Cloud ERP, which went live earlier this year. He shared some valuable insights into why they chose Orcale, the lessons learned from the implementation project with Claremont, and outlined some of the business benefits accrued from implementing Oracle Cloud ERP.

Patrick Hopkins, Claremont’s ERP Capability Lead, finished off by presenting his “Insider’s Top 10 Tips to a Successful Cloud ERP Implementation”, drawing from his experience of successfully helping customers, including RiverStone, go-live on Oracle Cloud ERP. By popular demand, this is going to be featured in a future blog – watch this space… here's a sneek preview of tip #1.

The panel of speakers was then put through their paces with a lively Q&A session, which provided attendees the opportunity to delve deeper on a number of topics. The event finished with a networking session that went on past the scheduled end time! Make sure you don't miss out on our next event by joining our mailing list.

If you'd like to view the full material from the breakfast event, please get in touch.

Save

Save

Claremont Company Away Day

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 16:50:00 GMT

Last week, Claremont held its annual Company Away Day at the Belfry...

Most of our consultants are home based (which provides a good geographic coverage of the UK for our clients), and so this is one of the rare occasions in the calendar when everyone assembles in the same place. Looking at the increase in the number of attendees in the room each year has become a real yardstick of our progress, with the size of the team swelling again over the past year to support the growth of our business. It’s a great opportunity for everyone to get together face-to-face, share experiences and ideas, and to help to build team cohesion.

The morning activities kicked off with a round of presentations on the progress of the business, customer success stories and discussions about the marketplace. It also included the now traditional Claremont Quiz and the Leadership Team were put through their paces by employees with a Q&A session. In the afternoon, we ventured outdoors for a set of team building activities, which comprised of a number of mental and physical challenges. For the finale, the teams were required to construct catapults out of sticks and rubber bands to see who could fire an egg the furthest distance. Thankfully, implementing and supporting Oracle technology is a little easier!

Onto the evening activities, and after a meal it was time for the annual Claremont Awards, which included a number of light-hearted nominations before moving onto the serious business of announcing the winners of Employee of the Year, as voted for by employees. Some carried on and partied late into the night, taking advantage of the onsite night club.

From a personal point of view, I was hugely inspired by the event. It’s great to step back and take stock of the tremendous progress that we have made. I also reflected what an incredibly talented and committed group of people that work for Claremont, servicing our customers on a day-to-day basis. I can’t wait to see what the next year brings!

-#SignOffMV#-

Oracle HCM RUP9 Analysis and Commentary

Tue, 6 Sep 2016 13:44:39 GMT

With RUP9 (Doc ID 2113189.1) released in May 2016, September always feels like the right month to start planning for the next big release. P60 and P11D are done and dusted, and a quiet(ish) few weeks over the summer have provided time to look ahead.

For those on Oracle Payroll, the latest RUP is a necessity for the next legislative patch. For non-Payroll HCM users, while we would always recommend being on the latest patch level, it may be considered more of a ‘nice to have’ based on what new functionality is being delivered. For our 12.1 customers this year, and increasingly over the last few years, it’s not so much the case of what’s in the patch, but what isn’t.

Historically, RUP has been an opportunity within the Oracle HCM product community for Oracle to not only baseline code, but to reinvigorate the product with enhancement requests and new functionality… but for 12.1 customers, there is little for us to shout about. It’s not quite the same story for 12.2 where we can see at least 5 additional HCM features. From a payroll perspective we see the introduction of:

Bank Account Number Verification in SSHR (12.2 only)

Analyse and Review RetroPay Entries using New Interface (12.2 only)

Manage Assignment Set using Web ADI (12.1 addition)

This leaves us wondering if this is as good as it will ever get now for ‘old faithful’ eBiz 12.1.3 whilst 12.2, underpinned by the HCM Cloud tech stack, offers great scope for Oracle to backport Cloud functionality and introduce more of that eye catching new look and feel.

Future decision making for Oracle payroll customers.

In the main, we believe UK/IE Payroll customers will remain Oracle eBusiness customers for many years to come. Especially considering the latest Primary Support extension to 2021 (Doc ID 1495337.1), but it does plant the seeds of wonder as to how much longer 12.1 is the right choice for customers over an upgrade to 12.2, or onto the Cloud where an annual release will be a distant memory. There is now more choice than ever in the Oracle market, something our CEO Mark Vivian has recently blogged about.

If you’d like to know more about upgrading to R12.2 and your own personal Oracle road map, or understand how you can receive a detailed patch analysis on RUP and TYE via a Managed Services support contract, do not hesitate to give us a call … we’d be happy to help.

Oracle Human Resources Management Systems Readme, HRMS Release Update Pack 9 for Release 12.1 –
https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=2113189.1

ANNOUNCEMENTS: E-Business Suite 12.1 Premier Support Now Through Dec. 2021 and 11.5.10 Sustaining Support Exception Updates –
https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=1495337.1

-#SignOffGP#-

MSPs: To switch or not to switch?

Mon, 5 Sep 2016 10:02:22 GMT

Switching Service Providers

Have you, like me, been with the same bank since you were at school? Have you politely declined those calls from energy providers offering a switch to lower tariffs because of the hassle of moving? Or perhaps, in your corporate life, you’re sticking with your existing IT Managed Services Provider (MSP) because it’s in the “too hard” box with everything else on your plate at work?

Let’s examine these three situations in a bit more detail:

Changing Banks

Traditionally, like me, people signed up with a bank when they were at school and then stuck with it. Over the years, perhaps they have tolerated a sub-standard service at times, as changing your account is seen as complicated, time-consuming, and risks getting you into real difficulty if it goes wrong.

In 2013, the UK government introduced legislation that guarantees a switch of accounts between banks in 7 days, and the customer is fully protected against any financial loss in the event a problem occurs during the switch.

Has the scheme worked? Based on recent government data, just over one million bank accounts were switched in the UK over the last year. Given that there are approximately 65 million accounts in the UK, this movement is actually fairly minimal (1.5% annualised), and in fact was down by nearly 5% on the previous year. This is despite the banks offering generous incentives for moving, preferential interest rates and promises of a better service.

Switching Utility Supplier

The supply of energy is very much a commodity service, and price comparison sites provide easy access to the best tariffs in the marketplace. Personally, I’ve also noticed a recent upturn in cold calls, attempting to persuade me to change utility supplier.

I’ve moved homes a few times in recent years, and so have first-hand experience of a number of utilities suppliers. It’s surprised me how cumbersome and time consuming the process of changing gas and electricity suppliers between addresses has been. Equally, the quality of the ongoing service provided by some suppliers has been below reasonable expectations even struggling with the simple act of timely and accurate billing!

Based on government figures, in the first quarter of 2016, 1.1m electricity consumers and 850,000 gas consumers in the UK switched suppliers. Looking at the previous year, it’s actually 13% of all energy consumers. Of course, a proportion of this is down to switches as a result of moving home, but a significant proportion of customers have chosen to make a switch in search of better tariffs and service. Looking at prior years, there is actually a downward trend in the number of switches overall.

Managed Services Provider

There is a parallel between banks and utility suppliers in our personal lives, and IT Managed Services Providers in the corporate world: There is a similar inertia to stick with the current provider. Of course, this could just be that the customer is happy with the service that the MSP is providing. It is also partly because of the perceived cost and hassle of making the change. Added to this, traditionally customers have been tied into annual or multi-year agreements with their managed service provider, further reducing the likelihood of change.

The truth is that there is a large spectrum of service quality and pricing with MSPs. There are surveys showing that a significant proportion of customers admit that the service provision by their MSP is actually more expensive than planned.

There is also evidence to suggest that a switch to the right MSP could result in some very significant cost reductions, and also result in a much better service provision that delivers greater value back to the business. An independent survey of our own managed service customers in the Oracle E-Business space, conducted earlier this year, provides some support to this claim.

Perhaps the traditional tender process to choose a new MSP is also a barrier to changing, as these processes can be cumbersome, time consuming and costly. With the growing availability of information on-line, as with banks and utilities providers, the buyer of IT Managed Services can do a great deal of research for themselves. In doing so, it’s possible to short circuit the tender process by compiling a short shortlist of potentially compatible MSPs, thereby at least bypassing the RFI stage of such a process.

With the increasing adoption of Cloud services, contracts are changing too, with more flexibility being provided in contract durations.

There may not be a 7-day guarantee in place for switching MSPs, but the process can often be done far less painlessly, more cheaply and faster than you might imagine.

Bringing it together

The evidence suggests a relatively small proportion of customers opt to make a change in their bank account or energy supplier, and if anything, these numbers are falling over time. Competition is fierce, and there is no shortage of information about the respective services of alternative suppliers. However, the benefits of changing are typically small when compared to the time and hassle involved in making the change, and hence people stay put.

The same could be said about IT Managed Services providers, but I would suggest that the potential benefits of moving could be sufficiently material to outweigh the costs of moving, and at least warrant some closer investigation into alternative options when it comes around to renewal.

-#SignOffMV#-

Sun shining on Claremont at the Lulworth Castle 10K run

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 09:37:09 GMT

We had a fantastic time sponsoring the Lulworth Castle 10K run on Sunday 14th August, raising money for Coombe Keynes Trust.

The sun was shining for us on race day, the heat and the hills made the course particularly challenging, however the beautiful scenery made it an enjoyable race for everyone involved.

There was a brilliant turn out with over 300 runners competing this year, the event growing in size and popularity. Team Claremont put their running shoes on for the day with Adrian Biddulph leading the way over the finish line for the team.

The winning runner broke last year’s record by around 4 minutes and came home in a very impressive time of 37mins, 21 secs.

Thank you to all that competed, donated and contributed to this fantastic event, which we are proud to support.

UKOUG finalists at Partner of the Year Awards 2016

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 13:52:59 GMT

We’ve been nominated for three UKOUG Partner of the Year Awards…and we need your votes!

The UKOUG Partner of the Year Awards celebrate the role of Oracle Partners in delivering an outstanding customer experience. The awards recognise those vendors that are excelling within the Oracle landscape.

Claremont is delighted to have been nominated in three categories-

UKOUG Managed Services Partner of the Year

UKOUG Database Partner of the Year

UKOUG Oracle E-Business Suite Partner of the Year

Each of these nominations reflects the high quality of service that we deliver and we are thrilled to have been selected for our technical excellence and expertise, and our first-rate customer service and support.

But we wouldn’t be here without you! We are pleased to have worked with so many outstanding organisations who continue to support and inspire us.

We need your vote! Please click here and make sure you vote Gold for Claremont!

Thank you.

Claremont Sponsoring Lulworth Castle 10k Run

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 11:17:44 GMT

Claremont are pleased to be sponsoring the Lulworth Castle 10K run, 2016. This popular Dorset-based trail race, which takes place on 14th August 2016, raises funds for the Coombe Keynes Trust charity.

The race begins in the village of Coombe Keynes, and follows a scenic route through some of south Dorset’s prettiest villages.

It’s a great opportunity to get involved whether you are a fun-runner or club racer. Of course, the Claremont running team will be out in force, raring to go. If you too fancy a rural run through some of Britain’s prettiest scenes, then sign up here to get involved.

Look out for our logo on the race t-shirts and of course you can follow our team’s progress on the day on Twitter link here for updates! And, for more information on the event please visit here.

It’s a fantastic event for a great cause, which we are proud to support.

-#SignOffJS#-

Steve Anderson joins Claremont as a Non-Executive Director

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Steve Anderson joins Claremont as a Non-Executive Director

Claremont is delighted to announce that Steve Anderson has joined the Board as a Non-Executive Director.

Steve’s role will be to provide support to Claremont’s leadership team and help the business continue to grow and be successful.

Steve has a wealth of experience within the Oracle landscape. Originally a Senior Manager within Oracle Corporation, he co-founded Fulcrum Solutions and Edenbrook, both of which grew and were subsequently acquired. Steve also became non-executive director for Mokum in 2012, helping the company to more than double in size in two years. It was then acquired by PwC in March 2014.

“I am delighted to join Claremont and work with an already successful leadership team”, Steve comments, “they are passionate about providing an excellent service to their customers.”

Mark Vivian, CEO: “On behalf of the whole team at Claremont, I’d like to welcome Steve. Having known Steve for a number of years, I’m excited to work with him again. He has a wealth of experience which will prove invaluable to Claremont as we enter our next phase of growth.”

As the Claremont team continues to grow, the business goes from strength to strength. Claremont has one of the most experienced and strongest teams in Europe, and looks forward to its future success.

State of the Oracle Enterprise Applications Market

Thu, 14 Jul 2016 16:30:00 GMT

State of the Oracle Enterprise Applications Market

It's an interesting time in the marketplace for mainstream Oracle enterprise applications. You will, of course, have heard about Oracle's Cloud Applications, the very latest in enterprise application software, deployed in Oracle's Cloud. There is also a large and very established set of customers using Oracle E-Business as their enterprise applications backbone.

Looking at another dimension, customers are demanding better service from their software vendors and managed services providers, to help them achieve the most out of their investments in technology. A recent piece from Gartner asserted that "service&" is often missing from Software as a Service: “To deliver is not to serve. Services makes delivery meaningful. Passive capability provision is not enough!”.

As an established Oracle Partner, we're working with a growing portfolio of Oracle customers. Each customer has their own unique set of drivers and challenges, but the overall landscape that we're seeing currently emerging breaks down into 3 broad parts:

Those Jumping to Oracle Cloud Applications

Many organisations have already decided to make the leap to Oracle Cloud Applications and enjoy the benefits of the very latest in enterprise applications software across CRM, HCM and more recently ERP. Firstly, you inherit the generic benefits of moving to a subscription, Cloud based solution, so there are no up-front licence costs. Contrary to many misconceptions about the Cloud, your data is secure; Oracle has invested significantly in ensuring that their customer's data is secure. Being a modern enterprise application, Oracle Cloud Applications also benefits from a contemporary user interface. A further strength is that Oracle's offering is multi-pillar, that is to say that you can have Finance, HCM and CRM together in a single application, as distinct from some of the niche single-pillar cloud offerings.

The ability to customise is more limited though, and therefore those that have moved to the Oracle Applications Cloud have implemented "vanilla" business processes, which means that there is often a business change element to deployments, and this should not to be underestimated. Be prepared for implementation projects to take 3-6 months as a result of this, as it's often not just about the configuration of the software. Perhaps something to bear in mind as well is that not everything previously implemented in the breadth of Oracle E-Business has made it into the Oracle Applications Cloud product set yet, but Oracle has stated that anything that exists in Oracle E-Business today will be replicated over the fullness of time. In the interim, there are options to adopt a co-existence approach with a mixture of Oracle E-Business and Cloud Applications modules integrated together.

Another benefit of being on the Oracle Cloud platform is that you will be patched every month and upgraded every 6 months as a matter of course, so that your application will be at the latest release, and will therefore never become outdated. You will need a services partner, not only to help you implement the solution, but also to assist with ongoing support of the Oracle Cloud Applications. The regular patching and patching cadence across your pods (Cloud environments) means that you will need someone to help you understand and implement the functionality coming down the tracks in future releases, and you may also need assistance with testing those releases.

Those Optimising Oracle E-Business R12

There are many organisations who have made an investment in Oracle E-Business and are looking for it to underpin their business for the foreseeable future. With Release 12.2 in Premier Support until at least 2023 and Release 12.3 already mooted on Oracle's roadmap, there is plenty of life in it yet! Oracle is committed to continuing to develop and support the product. An example is that a number of the user interface features available with Oracle Cloud Applications are being included in the latest releases of the product.

Often, Oracle E-Business implementations are heavily customised in order to support company-specific business requirements, and are therefore not ripe to re-implement in the Cloud where standard functionality and optimised business processes are key. Many have spent time and money upgrading Oracle E-Business (and these customisations) to Release 12 in the last few years. There are a group that are also in the process of expanding their footprint to implement additional modules in the suite (modules not currently available in Oracle Cloud) to support business growth (e.g. Service Contracts, Enterprise Asset Management and Property Management). Some are investigating and embarking on a co-existence strategy, which means that new Cloud Applications modules (e.g. Taleo for Talent Management) are implemented alongside and integrated with existing Oracle E-Business installations.

What we're also seeing is that organisations are using 3rd party products to help them leverage more value from their existing Oracle E-Business investment. We have helped a number of our customers to implement Applaud (www.applaudsolutions.com), a modern user front end for Oracle E-Business HCM, and these customers have benefitted from improved user engagement and the consequent improvement in data quality. Applaud projects are also seeing a good return on investment in terms of the elimination of labour intensive manual processes, and savings made from proper absence management as examples.

In the search for greater insight from the data in their systems, we've also seen customers implementing a range of 3rd party business analytics tools, which include Splash BI (www.splashbi.com) and Hubble (www.gohubble.com).

What is clear though, is that users of Oracle E-Business can benefit from the services of a good Managed Services Provider; not just to help them "keep the lights on", but also to work proactively with them to help maximise their investment in Oracle E-Business technology and aid them to develop a future roadmap that is correct for their business.

Those Continuing on 11i: Sweating the Assets

There are a third group of organisations who have implemented Oracle E-Business on releases prior to Release 12 who are currently on Release 11i, and have made a conscious decision to stay there for a variety of reasons. Typically, these are enterprises with a stable business model, which means that they are therefore not looking to make any changes to their systems in the foreseeable future.

Some of these customers have taken the decision not to continue with the Oracle support & maintenance, making cost savings by moving to a 3rd party Managed Service Provider to deliver the support service instead. It's not a decision to take lightly as once taken, you will not have access to new versions of software, patches or Oracle support, and it is expensive to reinstate at a subsequent date.

The benefits provided by the 3rd party add-ons to help businesses get value out of E-Business, such as Applaud, Splash BI & Hubble mentioned above, all work against this earlier release of the product.

In many cases, these old software releases are on similarly old versions of hardware. Some companies are therefore taking the opportunity to migrate these systems into Oracle's PaaS Cloud or to 3rd party hosting provider.

Customers who are sweating the assets are not just looking to cut the costs of the ongoing support of their applications, they are typically seeking to improve levels of service at the same time to help guide them and effect this change.

Bringing it together

This is a complex landscape and no one size fits all in terms of product fit, particularly for those that need to see further value out of their existing Oracle E-Business version before considering what the next technology refresh looks like.

There are only a small number of Oracle service providers that can help you wherever you are on the journey. There are fewer still that truly have the in-depth product knowledge and service excellence ethos to provide what you need throughout that lifecycle.

-#SignOffMV#-

EiS Technologies and Claremont Announce Strategic UK Alliance

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 11:47:55 GMT

EiS Technologies and Claremont Announce Strategic UK Alliance

Duluth, GA and Guildford, Surrey, UK 11 July, 2016 – EiS Technologies and Claremont today announced a formal partnership that teams EiS’ On-Demand Reporting solutions with Claremont’s Oracle E-Business Suite and Cloud services expertise.

With the strategic partnership announcement, organizations throughout the UK have access to a one-stop Oracle shop. From Cloud Services, to E-Business Suite Solutions, which now includes World-Class On-Demand Reporting; the Claremont/EiS Technologies alliance delivers powerful integrated solutions for the Oracle space.

“We have had tremendous success throughout the UK with organizations like Oxford University and DHL”, says Naveen Miglani, CEO of EiS Technologies. “By partnering with an Oracle Gold Partner like Claremont, we will be able to share our stories and successes more so throughout the UK. Our mutual clients will enjoy our BI expertise and access to local Claremont resources while taking full advantage of our Ad-Hoc reporting capabilities on mobile devices and laptops/PCs. The end result is tremendous ROI for our clients as they realize the full potential of their Oracle investment. Timing is perfect as organizations globally are dealing with the sunset of Discoverer. Those organizations are looking to industry experts for possible solutions. By teaming with Claremont, we can now offer companies in the UK various Discoverer migration and conversion options.”

Claremont provides Oracle professional services to UK FTSE 250 companies who need trusted advisors to help them meet the dual challenges of on premise systems and digitization of their business.

Tim Dickinson, Senior Business Intelligence Consulant states:

“EiS Technologies and Claremont share a common philosophy: Client success is the top priority. By assisting in all phases of a company’s technological journey, organizations will receive maximum ROI and efficiencies in their Oracle investments. The result is a fully integrated enterprise with systems delivering as intended, immediate visual access to BI, better business decisions, and cost-savings throughout the entire process.”

About EiS Technologies:

EiS Technologies is an Oracle Platinum Partner and its products have attained Validated Integration Status. It creates tangible value for clients by providing powerful and cost effective solutions that enable efficiencies throughout the organization. From Reporting and BI, to integrations, implementations, and upgrades, EiS stands by their clients as partners, trusted advisors, and friends.

Website: www.eistech.com

About Claremont:

Claremont is the UK’s leading independent provider of Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Business Cloud services. We lead our customers on a journey to help them maximize their investment in Oracle technology and deliver real benefit.

Website: www.claremont.co.uk

Press Contacts:

EiS Technologies:
Marc.Ramos@EiSTech.com

Claremont:
tim.casey@claremont.co.uk

Claremont support Barnardo's by competing in special Tube Challenge

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 11:06:45 GMT

Claremont support Barnardo’s by competing in special Tube Challenge

2016 marks 150 years since Thomas Barnardo founded the charity. Since then, Barnardo's have helped hundreds of thousands of children to grow up healthy and happy.

As part of this milestone celebration there are various events taking place throughout the country. Events range from golf days to the prestigious Royal Garden party that we attended in May.

The next event that we will be supporting is taking place on Thursday 30th June , where "The Claremont Burrowers" will be going subterranean for the day and undertaking a special Barnardo's version of the Tube Challenge.

The aim of the challenge is to visit 150 tube stations, in the fastest possible time, using all of the 11 recognised Tube Lines and ending the journey at Barkingside Tube Station where the Barnardo's Headquarters are located.

Julian Ford, Business Development Manager at Claremont said "it’s a fantastic opportunity to not only do something different, but to support a valued client of ours in their success".

We'll be live tweeting throughout the day so follow our progress at @claremont_oracle or using #ClaremontTubeChallenge

Claremont are proud to work with Barnardo’s and excited to be involved in their Tube adventure. If you'd like to get involved in an event then please visit here or make a donation here.

-#SignOffAB#-

Tips for cloning Oracle eBusiness Suite

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 10:09:18 GMT

Tips for cloning Oracle eBusiness Suite

Cloning an Oracle eBusiness Suite environment from one instance to another is one of the most common tasks required of an Oracle Apps DBA.

The basic process is documented in Oracle Note Cloning Oracle Applications Release 12 with Rapid Clone (Doc ID 406982.1), but the actual steps required can be surprisingly different from system to system. It can depend on factors such as the size of the database; the backup method being used; whether there is direct connectivity between the source and target environments; whether there are any snapshot technologies available at storage level; what filesystem is in use and so on.

Nevertheless, there are some common tips and tasks that apply to all systems, which are not often documented by Oracle, but an experienced Apps DBA will always tend to include.

The list below is hardly exhaustive, but provides a flavour of the sort of thing a good Apps DBA should be doing as a standard for your business!

Run Pre- Clone as a nightly scheduled task

The first step of any clone is to run “perl adpreclone.pl” on the database tier and each application tier to prepare the source system for cloning.

If you are therefore planning on performing a clone based on last night’s backup, you will have had to manually run pre-clone at some point before the backup started. But, what if the clone request has come through as an emergency and you didn’t know this had to be done?

One option, is to run pre-clone on your source environment and then take a new backup of the appsutil directories on database tier and each application tier, however this adds an unnecessary manual step to the clone.

Instead, schedule a job to automatically run pre-clone on each tier on the source environment as a nightly job, either as a standalone task or as part of the backup itself.

You can then be confident that any backup you use as the source of your clone will already have had pre-clone run against it.

The script to do this can be very simple – on UNIX something like this would do the job nicely (with some appropriate logging around it)

. <APPL_TOP>/APPS<SID>_<server>.env cd $INST_TOP/admin/scripts perl adpreclone.pl appsTier

This can then be scheduled to run in the crontab.

Use a Physical Standby database as the clone source

If you have a Dataguard-managed DR database, chances are that this will either be on the same server – or at the very least in the same datacentre –where your non-production environments are hosted.

You can therefore save considerable time and network bandwidth by cloning from DR to Non-Prod as opposed, to Prod to Non-prod. You can temporarily shut down your DR environment and perform a simple cold copy of the datafiles to their new location, or use a backup of your DR environment as the clone source.

Check and correct soft links

Once you backup, copy and extract the database and application tier filesystems to the target environment, there will be a number of soft links which will potentially point to a production file path which is not a valid location on the target.

On UNIX, the following command can be run to list all soft links which are present in the current directory and downwards:

find . -type l -ls -exec ls -lrt {} \;

Typically, you will find some in your CUST_TOP/bin directory if your business has developed some bespoke shell script code called via a concurrent request. These will vary from site to site, although there are also always some more to be found in the standard eBusiness Suite filesystem.

Usually the application will work perfectly fine with these pointing to invalid paths, however it can become an issue when you try to patch or relink the technology stack components on the target environment. So, I usually always try to correct these as a standard post-clone step.

On eBusiness Suite 12.1 application tier:

cd <10.1.2_ORACLE_HOME> cd bin ln -sf <10.1.2_ORACLE_HOME>/webcache/bin/webcachectl/webcachectl webcachectl ln -sf <10.1.2_ORACLE_HOME>/nls/lbuilder/lbuilder lbuilder cd ../webcache/examples ln -sf <10.1.2_ORACLE_HOME>/webcache/docs/readme.examples.html readme.examples.html cd ../../sysman/webapps/emd/WEB-INF/lib ln -sf <10.1.2_ORACLE_HOME>/sysman/jlib/log4j-core.jar log4j-core.jar cd <10.1.3_ORACLE_HOME> cd bin ln -sf <10.1.3_ORACLE_HOME>/nls/lbuilder/lbuilder lbuilder

Database tier:

cd <ORACLE_HOME> cd lib ln -sf <ORACLE_HOME>/lib/libclntsh.so libclntsh.so.10.1 cd ../bin ln -sf <ORACLE_HOME>/nls/lbuilder/lbuilder lbuilder

Correct paths for oraInventories

Chances are the $ORACLE_HOME/oraInst.loc file in each Oracle Home on the extracted filesystem will point to a location which is not valid for the target environment.

The clone process will still work fine and the application will come up normally, but you may find that opatch complains about inventory problems, if you try to later apply a database or application server patch onto a cloned environment.

My trick to avoid this is to always have a step to correct the paths to the oraInventories before you run adcfgclone.pl

On the database tier: vi <ORACLE_HOME>/oraInst.loc inventory_loc=<ORACLE_HOME>/oraInventory inst_group=dba mkdir -p <ORACLE_HOME>/oraInventoryOn the application tier: vi <10.1.3_ORACLE_HOME>/oraInst.loc inventory_loc=<10.1.3_ORACLE_HOME>/oraInventory inst_group=dba vi <10.1.2_ORACLE_HOME>/oraInst.loc inventory_loc=<10.1.2_ORACLE_HOME>/oraInventory inst_group=dba mkdir -p <10.1.3_ORACLE_HOME>/oraInventory mkdir -p <10.1.2_ORACLE_HOME>/oraInventory

Update paths in DBA_DIRECTORIES

There will almost certainly be a number of standard and custom directories defined on your source environment and these may point to paths that are not valid for the target instance.

As a post-clone step, always check to see if there are any that should be updated:

SELECT directory_name, directory_path FROM dba_directories; CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECORY <name> as <new_path>;

Update paths in UTL_FILE_DIR

Your application may have additional, custom paths defined in UTL_FILE_DIR and these paths may not be valid for the target instance.

As a post-clone step, always check to see if there are any that should be updated.

In addition, by default the first entry in UTL_FILE_DIR will be /usr/tmp on a UNIX system and the application will use this to create temporary files for concurrent requests (the $APPLPTMP directory). This can lead to problems with permissions on files in that, if there is more than one environment hosted on the same server and all environments are using the same location. As a best practice in that situation I would always change the first entry in UTL_FILE_DIR to be /usr/tmp/<TARGET_ENV> and set $APPLPTMP on the application tier to this directory (making sure to create this directory first of course!)

Check and Update Profile Options

Most standard Oracle profile options will be corrected on the target environment when AutoConfig is run. However, there are usually some that don’t get updated, plus whatever custom profile options you may have defined which have to be manually updated.

The following script can be run to quickly list all profile options which may point to production paths, names or ports and which may need to be corrected

select   decode(pov.level_id, '10001', 'SITE',                            '10002', 'APPLICATION',                            '10003', 'RESPONSIBILITY',                            '10004', 'USER',                '10005', 'SERVER',                '10007', 'SERVRESP',                'Undefined') SET_AT_LEVEL,        decode(pov.level_id, '10002', fa.application_short_name,                              '10003', frt.responsibility_name,                            '10004', fu.user_name,                '10005', fn.node_name,                '10006', org.name,                '10007', 'Serv/resp',                            pov.level_value) ASSIGNED_TO,        po.profile_option_name,        pot.user_profile_option_name,        pov.profile_option_value,     po.profile_option_id from     applsys.fnd_profile_options po,        applsys.fnd_profile_options_tl pot,        applsys.fnd_profile_option_values pov,        applsys.fnd_responsibility_tl frt,        applsys.fnd_user fu,        applsys.fnd_application fa,     applsys.fnd_nodes fn,     hr_operating_units org where    po.profile_option_id = pov.profile_option_id and       po.profile_option_name = pot.profile_option_name and       pov.level_value = frt.responsibility_id (+) and       pov.level_value = fu.user_id (+) and       pov.level_value = fa.application_id (+) and     pov.profile_option_value like '%prod%' and    fn.node_id (+) = pov.level_value and    org.organization_id (+) = pov.level_value order by 3,1,2

Change the highlighted text to what is appropriate for your environment – run the script a few times to check for the source database name, server names and ports.

Once you have identified that some profile options need to be changed, this can either be done in the front-end or more quickly can be done via a script – this also saves having to start the application, change the profile options and then bouncing the application again.

This script will look something like this:

DECLARE value1 Boolean; value2 Boolean; BEGIN value1 := fnd_profile.save('<PROFILE_OPTION1>','<VALUE>','SITE'); value2 := fnd_profile.save('<PROFILE_OPTION2>','<VALUE>','SITE'); END; / commit;

I would also generally recommend always changing these profile options:

Site Name – set it to the name of the target environment, and the date on which it was cloned so that users can easily see this information every time they log in.

Java Color Scheme – set this to something other than blue so that it is immediately obvious when you are in the production system and when you are not; this helps to avoid users making changes in live when they thought they were in non-prod!

Reduce ADR Retention Policies

At database level (11gR1 and later), alert logs, trace files and dump files are stored in the Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR) and are then purged from the system at defined intervals.

It is not usually required to retain these files on non-production environment for as long as it would be on the live system, so disk space can be saved by reducing the ADR retention policies on the non-production environments.

Diagnostic data Purging in ADR is controlled by two attributes:

SHORTP_POLICY which is used for automatically purging short-lived files, i.e. dump files, expressed in hours and defaults to 30 days.

LONGP_POLICY which is used for automatically purging long-lived files, i.e. incidents, expressed in hours and defaults to 1 year.

I usually reduce these to 6 days and 36 days respectively with the ADRCI command line utility as follows:

adrci adrci> show homes ADR Homes: diag/rdbms/<env>/<ENV> diag/tnslsnr/<server>/<env> adrci> set homepath diag/rdbms/<env>/<ENV> adrci> set control (SHORTP_POLICY = 360) adrci> set control (LONGP_POLICY = 2160) adrci> set homepath diag/tnslsnr/<server>/<env> adrci> set control (SHORTP_POLICY = 360) adrci> set control (LONGP_POLICY = 2160)

Check Database Memory allocations

By default you will get a 1GB SGA and 1GB PGA in a cloned environment.

This might be sufficient, but for a pre-prod environment you should try and match production values; I also generally see better stability if I provide an SGA of at least 2GB.

Workflow Mailer

Always define a test/override email address on cloned environment to prevent spurious emails being sent out to users, employees and suppliers – this will ensure that any emails that are sent out will all go to a ‘bucket’ email address instead.

This can be set in a 12.1 environment by running script $FND_TOP/sql/afsvcpup.sql

Also check and correct the Workflow-related section of the AutoConfig $CONTEXT_FILE (the section tagged ) so that the values for SMTP server, IMAP server, usernames and Reply To address are valid for the target environment.

If you are using an IMAP server for Workflow inbound processing, define a separate mailbox for each environment in your estate. This prevents locking issues with too many Workflow Mailers trying to poll the same mailbox at the same time, or emails valid for one environment being moved to the DISCARD folder by the Mailer for another environment.

Change Passwords

As good practice always change the passwords in your cloned environment so that they are something different from the source environment, especially when cloning from production.

Typically, change the following passwords:

SYS (via an ALTER USER command)

SYSTEM (via an ALTER USER command)

APPS (via FNDPCASS)

Schema passwords (via FNDCPASS with the ALLORACLE option)

SYSADMIN password (via FNDCPASS)

Reduce Concurrent Manager Workshifts

The number of workshifts defined for each of your concurrent Managers will be optimised for the production environment. But, this may not be appropriate for a cloned, non-production environment which may be running on a server with fewer hardware resources and which will never expect the same workload as the live environment.

In consultation with the expected users of the environment (developers, testers etc) see whether any concurrent Managers can have their workshifts reduced to lessen the impact on the server.

Cancel non-required scheduled concurrent requests

There may be a number of overnight batch jobs scheduled to run the live environment. Are all of these also required on the non-production systems? If not – again in consultation with the expected users of the target environment – see whether any pending requests can be cancelled or on the cloned environment to reduce overnight server utilisation on the non-production servers.

Switch to NOARCHIVELOGMODE

There’s a couple of questions to ask yourself before doing this:

Are you regularly backing up your non-production environments?

In the event of a failure, would you want to restore your non-prod environments from backup or would you just re-clone them from live?

If you have no requirements to backup/restore your non-prod environments then it makes no sense for them to be in ARCHIVELOGMODE – therefore reduce server disk space utilisation by putting the target environment into NOARCHIVELOGMODE as a post-clone step.

Reduce JVMs

Your production server will have been optimised to run with X amount of parallel JVM threads in the oacore, forms and oafm groups as appropriate for the expected user workload and hardware capacity on the production servers.

These values will be inherited by the cloned environments but will probably be over-powered on a development environment, so should be reduced in the $CONTEXT_FILE and AutoConfig re-run e.g. s_oacore_nprocs to eliminate unnecessary CPU and memory consumption on the non-production server.

Check any CUST_TOP variables

If you have a CUSTOM_TOP defined in a custom environment file in your APPL_TOP, then make sure that the file exists on the target environment with the correct name and pointing to the correct paths and directories.

Continual improvement

Always look for ways to improve or speed up the clone process on each iteration:

Are there any manual steps that could be achieved quicker via a script?

Are there changes that could be made to the $CONTEXT_FILE to prevent having to perform manual updates?

Is there a more sensible way to copy across the backups from source to live?

Document, document, document!

And finally the most important tip of all – clearly document the clone process in detail and keep the document up to date!

Always write the document such that another DBA would be able to follow the process for the first time; create the sort of document that you would like if you were having to perform a clone on a new system.

-#SignOffKB#-

How best practice system usage can help management of unplanned absence

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 17:08:23 GMT

How best practice system usage can help management of unplanned absence

My favourite statistic at the moment illustrates the bottom line benefit from good HR management…

The CIPD Absence Management report 2015 identifies the average number of days lost through absence per year per employee across all sectors as a mean 8.3 days with a median cost of £554.

So .... if you can reduce that by half a day per employee for an organisation of 5,000 employees you can save £167,000 a year.

Let that sink in. £167,000 a year. For a half day reduction in absence!

Managing Unplanned Absence

So how can you go about reducing absence, by half a day? If it was that easy everyone would be doing it surely?

Management of unplanned absence - long and short term sickness, for example - can both reduce the incidence and duration of absence, however it is often said that "you can't manage what you can't measure"…

This is where system usage comes in…I am currently implementing a second phase of an Applaud HR Self Service project - adding mobile, tablet and desktop absence management to the existing person, assignment and hierarchy functionality.

Applaud sits on top of an existing Oracle HCM EBS implementation and allows absence data to be captured and viewed through an engaging and straightforward user interface. Any absence captured through Applaud will be interfaced to core Oracle HCM and, if you use Oracle payroll, the correct statutory and occupational payments and deductions calculated.

Enabling good HR Management

Common approaches to managing short term absence, taken from the CIPD Absence Management 2015 report, which are being enabled by the implementation include:

Return to work interviews. We are enabling managers and employees to complete these online through desktops, tablets or mobiles and view them for follow up actions

Trigger mechanisms to review attendance - accurate data recording allows alerts and reports to be developed to identify hotspots and triggers

Sickness absence information is given to line managers in an easy to use format available through mobile, tablet and desktop. This includes both absence details, absence summaries, and an absence calendar to provide an "at a glance" view of team availability

Line managers receive approval requests for absence through desktop, tablet or mobile and take primary responsibility for absence management

The most effective absence management requires a combination of organisation culture, absence policies and processes, data capture and data analysis to be aligned. Systems alone will not bring about the change, however a system that allows managers and employees to easily follow the organisation processes and policies is a key enabler to effective absence management.

For more information about Applaud, and to see some further testimonials, click here

-#SignOffJP#-

Claremont in attendance at UKOUG Applications' Journey to Cloud 2016

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:54:38 GMT

Claremont in attendance at UKOUG Applications’ Journey to Cloud 2016

We are pleased to announce that Claremont will be attending the UKOUG Applications’ Journey to Cloud 2016, on 7th July at Kensington Close Hotel.

The event is aimed at those looking to implement the Cloud but want to first find out the pro’s and con’s before making the move…

Patrick Hopkins, our ERP capability lead, will be running a session where he will share his knowledge and expertise of implementing ERP in the Cloud. Having successfully implemented two ERP Cloud projects, Patrick will be discussing the realities of an implementation in Oracle’s Cloud and elaborates on what is required for any successful Cloud programme.Patrick will also highlight the benefits of moving and discuss how such a journey differs from a traditional E-Business Suite implementation, explaining how, why and when any organisation should best consider that leap.

Patrick is not the only Claremont representative at the event, as we are also exhibiting. We will be showcasing our recent projects, as well as providing information and advice for both HCM and ERP Cloud.

It’s a fantastic opportunity to understand a little more about what we do and also for us to meet you. Plus, we have some exciting giveaways for you, so do come and say “hi”.

The full event agenda can be found here, and this is where you will need to register. If you would like to arrange a face to face meeting to discuss your Cloud requirements, please email Mark Vivian on mark.vivian@claremont.co.uk

-#SignOffMV#-

Using a Content Server with Oracle Learning Management 12.1

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 15:09:48 GMT

Using a Content Server with Oracle Learning Management 12.1

People are your greatest asset, and one of the best ways of retaining and fostering their talent is learning. It is crucial to the success of any organisation, it builds understanding, develops full potential and creates a collaborative and positive environment.

However, with all the best intentions, its imperative to have the right learning platform in place. Without it, employees won’t get the most out of their Learning & Development, they lose interest and the organisation wastes both time and money.

With this in mind, you’ve made the sensible decision by implementing Oracle Learning Management System with eBusiness Suite. Now, you need to work out how your users will access your online learning content. The answer is- by installing and configuring a Content Server. Here’s my simple guide to this process, let’s start with the obvious question-

What is a Content Server?

My Oracle Support Note Utilizing gives a great definition of this:

“A content server, in simplest terms, is a computer with a web server that stores online learning content files. Learning objects that exist within OLM point to online learning content stored on a content server. When a learner accesses online learning content through the OLM player, the content server delivers the content to the learner's browser”

There are two types of Content Server are available:

OLM Content Server

External Content Server

If you have an existing content server in your organisation - or an arrangement with a third party that already provides this for you - an external content server would probably be most sensible, so that you can re-use your existing investment. But, if you are installing this for the first time then installing a new OLM Content Server would be the more logical choice.

The main difference being that an OLM Content Server allows learning administrators to upload online learning content to the content server via eBusiness Suite screens.

Paul Bird, the Learning Technologies Manager at the National Trust states the benefits they have found from our implementation of their content server:

“Here at the National Trust we would be hard-pressed to provide our 12,000 staff and 70,000 volunteers with version controlled digital content if it wasn’t for our content server. In the last year alone it enabled over 14,000 hours of learning to be delivered to our people. Being able to host any format of content we want, when we want, with only a few clicks of a mouse mean it’s a crucial part of our learning technologies strategy.”

The Requirements for installing an OLM Content Server

Technology

It’s worth noting that Oracle eBusiness Suite 12.1 comes with two 10.1 application servers – these, however, cannot be used to also act as the OLM Content Server.

“An OLM content server cannot be set up and configured on any middle tier application server running the Oracle eBusiness Suite. It must be set up and configured on a separate machine outside the eBusiness Suite middle tier application servers”- Oracle

Although, this does not necessarily mean a completely separate server, it means that the OLM Content Server must be installed in its own Oracle Home, separate from eBusiness Suite (just in the same way as Discoverer 10g/11g must be installed).

There are a number of possible technology options for a server to act as an OLM Content Server, but all of them are for products that are de-supported by Oracle so it only really makes sense to install Weblogic.

Server Specifications

The amount of CPU, memory and disk space the new OLM Content Server needs depends on a few factors:

How many users can you expect to be accessing online learning?

How many of them at the same time?

How many courses will be available in the catalogue?

As a general guide based on my example:

2 CPU cores

8GB memory

50GB disk space (for the Middleware install and content store)

Firewall requirements

The eBusiness Suite middle tier needs to be able talk to the OLM Content Server on the port on which it is running (7003 in my case).

Weblogic OLM Content Server

The steps for this are documented in Oracle Learning Management Content Server Installation & Configuration on WebLogic Server - Release 12.1 and 12.2 Doc ID 2016176.1.

However, I have summarised it for you here:

Install Java7

Install Weblogic server 10.3.6

Create a Weblogic domain (‘olm_domain’)

Define an Administration server (under port 7001)

Define a Managed Server (under port 7003)

Create content and contentstorage directory structure

Copy various XML and class files from eBusiness Suite

Deploy content application

Deploy contentstorage application

Install SCORM adapters

Amend configuration to accept connections from eBusiness Suite middle tiers

Start it all up

Define Content Servers in eBusiness Suite to point to new OLM Content Server

Define SCORM adapters in eBusiness Suite

The only deviation I had from the Oracle note was that it was not really necessary to install all components of Weblogic; so a tip to reduce the footprint of the server, a minimal install with these modules worked fine:

•   Core Application Server
•   Administration Console
•   Configuration Wizard
•   Weblogic SCA

What about SSL?

HTTPS is currently not supported as a connection method to an OLM Content Server – only HTTP requests are accepted.

This can be mitigated somewhat by hosting the OLM Content Server behind a reverse proxy server.

What about DR?

I set this up quite simply – I installed a second Weblogic server on my DR machine and then defined a daily rsync script which made sure that the DR server was kept up-to-date with changes to the content store on my live server.

What about Cloning?

When you clone your eBusiness Suite environment to test instances, the OLM configuration will still point to the live OLM Content Store. This might be adequate and consequently not need to be changed, but if your learning administrators want to be able to test uploads/updates to courses before they are made live, you will need to install a non-production OLM Content Server, then have a post-clone step to re-point the environment to this instance.

Anyhow, this is a simple change:

•   Learning Administrator > Learning Administration > Setup Administration
•   Content > Content Servers
•   Click Update
•   Change the Host value
•   Setup > SCORM Adapters
•   Update the URLs

Can an OLM Content Server Be Available on the Internet?

Yes – in this case you would want to deploy your OLM Content Server in a network demilitarized zone (DMZ).

In eBusiness Suite you can then define the OLM Content Server to point to the URL of the reverse proxy server or hardware load balancer, and then implement rewrite rules will re-direct the traffic down to the OLM Content Server on port 7003.

Example re-write rules if using an Apache reverse proxy server:

<VirtualHost *:80>     ServerAdmin root@<EXTERNAL_HOST>.<DOMAIN>     DocumentRoot "/usr/local/apache/docs/learning.<DOMAIN>"     ServerName <EXTERNAL_HOST>.<DOMAIN>     ServerAlias www.<EXTERNAL_HOST>.<DOMAIN>     ErrorLog "logs/<EXTERNAL_HOST>.<DOMAIN>-error_log"     CustomLog "logs/<EXTERNAL_HOST>.<DOMAIN>-access_log" common     # Set access permission     <Directory />       Require all granted     </Directory>     # Reverse proxy server section     RewriteEngine on     ProxyPass / http://INTERNAL_SERVER.<DOMAIN>:7003/ retry=0     ProxyPassReverse / http://INTERNAL_SERVER.<DOMAIN>:7003/ </VirtualHost>

In this setup the users will need access to the external host; the reverse proxy server/load balancer will need access to the OLM Content Server; the eBusiness Suite middle tier will need access to the external host and the OLM Content Server.

What about licences?

It’s a bit of a grey area on whether licences for the Weblogic OLM Content Server are required or not if using it for OLM.

Oracle Note Does Oracle Learning Management Content Server Need License ? (Doc ID 1293821.1) states:

“you MAY need additional license for using any of the Oracle products involved. To find out whether you really need to buy a separate license or not , kindly please contact your sales liaison consultant who manages your support licenses. They would be able to provide your more detailed information on licenses”

Any gotchas?

•   If you need to make any changes to the definition of the OLM Content server, always do an Update on an existing row rather than trying to create a New one and Delete the old one. If you do the latter, any URLs for existing courses do not get updated and will still point to the old server and you will need to do a SQL update on OTA_LEARNING_OBJECTS; if you perform an Update it to automatically update this table.
•   We found that trying to upload zip files of a certain size (10’s of MB) via eBusiness Suite would not work. There is an Oracle eBusiness Suite patch for this 20320811 ('Unable to Import SCORM 2004 file (size 91.1 MB) to WLS Content Server') but applying the patch on its own does not fix the problem. This is not mentioned in the readme of the patch but if you have eagle-eyed DBAs they will notice that the files delivered by the patch are the same ones that are copied from eBus to the OLM Content Server as part of the initial build. So, the new versions of these files need to be copied over and the Weblogic server restarted. If starting from scratch this duplicate step could be avoiding by applying patch 20320811 at the start.

So, here’s my step by step guide to using a Content Server with Oracle Learning Management 12.1, to improve delivery of learning to your employees. Hopefully you will find the process simple and easy, if not you know where we are.

-#SignOffKB#-

Managed Services Survey

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 15:08:30 GMT

Research Survey Report: Can your current Managed Services provider say that…

As a leading provider of Oracle Managed Services, we know that quality of service is key to our customers. To really understand whether our service is delivering as it should, and to see how we could improve, we engaged an independent company to survey our Managed Service customers.

Of course, this was on top of the usual monthly service reviews undertaken by our Service Managers. At Claremont we know that customer feedback is essential to client satisfaction.

To view the findings, please download the infographic on the right hand side of this page.

Key findings include:

Cost Savings: On average our clients saved 51%* when moving their Oracle Managed Services to Claremont

100% of our customers would recommend Claremont to other companies

Reliable, Friendly and Technical. These were the three words used most often to describe our team.

What did our customers say about us?:

“Claremont are good at responding to us and have a quick turnaround when it comes to fixing any issues. The team is very knowledgeable.”

“We feel like we are a priority for our account manager who always keeps in touch with us.”

“Attention to detail, their prompt actions, their knowledge of the system, always helpful and friendly."

“Breadth of knowledge. They have a huge amount of knowledge within their team of consultants, who are very approachable.”

“Very approachable, very customer focused. They respond well and in the time frame they commit to."

"Technical ability and consistency of that technical ability. Doesn’t matter who I speak to, I will get someone who will give me a sensible answer."

Further reading: Our Managed Services Director, Jonathan Stuart, discusses whether proactive is the holy grail of support, click here

If you’d like to discuss the detailed findings of this survey or find out how you can save on your current managed service with a member of the Claremont team, contact us.

*based on 6 clients. Cost saving versus either providing equivalent services in-house or compared to previous support provider. For the former, the cost saving only includes staff costs and not costs of office space, etc.

Is Proactivity the Holy Grail of Oracle Support?

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 12:40:43 GMT

Is Proactivity the Holy Grail of Oracle Support?

New customers often make the same comments about their previous Oracle Managed Service provider: over-reliance on key individuals; not feeling valued; poor service yet SLAs attained; and a lack of proactivity. These complaints have changed little over the 15 years I have been involved with Oracle Managed Service delivery and have helped shape Claremont’s approach: we understand the traps we must avoid.

Proactivity vs Reactivity

We regard proactivity as particularly important. The holy grail of support is surely adding value beyond reactive services and not just “keeping the lights on”. We want to help customers improve their systems, prevent issues and work to a clear Oracle roadmap. Our use of experienced UK-based consultants, the assignment of Primary consultants to customers and our Sentinel and problem management processes all support this. By definition there’s always more we can do, but I know we do a pretty good job and deliver far more than our competitors.

“We feel like we are a priority for our account manager who always keeps in touch we us.”
HR Manager Leading Insurance Company

Yet when we conducted an anonymous survey of our Managed Services customers only 75% said we were proactive; the other 25% said we are a reactive organisation. I was disappointed and surprised at this result. But, as ever, the real story lay behind the statistics.

I assumed being described as “reactive” was pejorative feedback from customers that aspire to a more proactive service. However, the details revealed that those 25% of customers are delighted with the service. The nature of their businesses and their Oracle systems mean they value a reactive service where they know expert support will be delivered soon after an incident is identified. To them, this is more important than a proactive service although they still like to receive the proactive services.

Going beyond the SLA

Bearing in mind the common complaint about poor service despite SLAs adherence, they value that Claremont’s team does not just work to our SLAs. Of course, we have comprehensive SLAs – I believe they’re the best available – but we don’t reward consultants for SLA adherence; we reward them for customers’ satisfaction. And our monthly service reporting shows how much of an SLA was consumed before it was closed, not just raw adherence rates. These reports almost always reveal we consume far less than 50% of the time available under our SLAs. This demonstrates the quality of our reactive services and that we’re not working to SLAs.

“Doesn’t matter who I speak to, I will get someone who will give me a sensible answer.”
IT Manager Leading Engineering Company

I never doubted that our reactive services are excellent. But the focus – for us and customers – is so often on proactivity that it is easy to under-value the reactive side and forget that for some customers this is the priority.

The perfect blend of reactive and proactive services

The lesson is clearly that a successful Managed Service provider must excel at both reactive and proactive services. Furthermore, their Service Management approach must be flexible and engaging enough to understand each customer’s unique needs and priorities. This survey was a useful reminder of this but it was particularly pleasing to see that we do deliver against each customer’s requirements, hence why 100% also said they were satisfied with our services.

Please click here to view the full breakdown of the results from our recent customer survey.

-#SignOffJS#-

What makes a good DBA

Thu, 2 Jun 2016 10:10:02 GMT

What makes a good DBA?

We DBAs are a funny old bunch (“Really?!?” I hear you cry – Yes! Really!) – I’m sure we can seem to the untrained outsider somewhat Forest Gumpy (box of chocolates and all that). There are many conflicting traits that could be considered beneficial for a DBA to have – although a lot of the time these can be quite paradoxical traits and ultimately it’s hard for a DBA to know HOW to act (is it any wonder that a great deal of us seem to have personality disorders?).

Approachable Techie

For example – A DBA must be technically clever. Of course! Databases are complex pieces of software and are ever evolving with new features and all sorts of complicated mechanisms of working. However, a DBA must also be human enough (as opposed to android) to translate the complex nature of databases to those uninitiated people such as users – no mean feat!

Cooperative Control Freak

Your data is of ultimate importance to your business – so, a DBA must be paranoid in their approach to protecting the database - they shouldn’t let ANYTHING jeopardise the valuable data. However, someone who is paranoid can come across very negative or lacking in confidence – this can be a big turn off to users and managers!

Balanced Achiever

A DBA needs to have patience. It’s common for a DBA to need to prove their working via experimentation before being let loose on production systems- a task that can often be trying and seem unnecessary, but, often absolutely vital to take proper precautions before releasing fixes to live environments. Still, sometimes in the interests of getting things done, the DBA also needs to be assertive when the time comes, to force the issue through so as not to allow for unnecessary delays in correcting faults.

Practical Ground Breaker

A DBA needs to be imaginative – yes, we need a DBA that comes up with great new ideas, innovative solutions to problems and inventive ways of working. However, a DBA also needs to know when to be boring – i.e. when to just go with the tried and tested “easy fix”.

Modest Businessman

In the light of all this – I would have to say that the two greatest facets a DBA can have are those of pragmatism and humility. Pragmatism to know how to balance and taper their approach to a particular scenario – as described above situations can require quite conflicting stances. Also, given the minefield of issues and situations – not least to say that we are often dealing with business critical issues that have a habit of raising emotions. It is therefore vital for a DBA to have humility to understand that they won’t always get it right, that sometimes a better idea will come along and not to take this too much to heart.

How a DBA can keep moving with the times?

I’ve recently read a number of articles about the future of the DBA role in the new world of Cloud Computing, Bi-Modal IT and whatever else you want to call it. Ultimately there is a whole host of worry mongering going on about what happens to DBAs when all DBA work is automated by some whizzy piece of software that does it all for you.

Yes, I agree that some of the day-to-day tasks of the DBA will diminish – a lot of this is being automated, or at least set up in such a way that it can be easily managed via Enterprise Manager or some other GUI based tool that all but makes the DBA “day job” redundant. However, there is a lot more to it than that.

Understanding and Dependability

Integration will play a huge part in IT going forward – It does seem strange saying that since when I started in IT around 15 years ago – it was a key business driver to diversify solutions such that single points of failure could be eliminated! Seems we have come full circle! Anyway, cloud systems are all well and good – but they all have to integrate with one another, single sign on solutions, reporting solutions, data warehousing solutions – these things will not simply disappear in the new world and they all need to talk to one another and play nicely together. DBAs are quite unique in that their knowledge stretches across pretty much all areas of IT systems (from hardware, to networking, to operating systems, to databases, to applications and to user experience). Who else is better to talk to about architecting a solution to integrate IT solutions than our friendly neighbourhood DBA?

Trust and Security

Also security – these systems all integrated together – they need to remain secure. Again, the DBA already knows about data security, already knows about how the systems are plugged together and hence knows about the entry/exit points which makes them ideally placed to keep a handle on system security.

Versatility

In addition to all this – the same “complicated” activities that DBAs perform will still be there – performance tuning for one. Whilst systems in the cloud are designed to be a “one size fits all” – and as such the database and applications are tuned for that solution (think of how well games run on a dedicated PlayStation machine as opposed to a PC – it’s been written and optimised for PlayStation hardware!) – there are always going be certain customers that have customisations and specific requirements. Also, Oracle are now allowing “in house” cloud builds on Exalogic hardware – how long before this restriction is lifted and you can have “in house” cloud on anything? Who, then will be tuning your systems?

Why DBA’s are a necessary asset

I see the model we have here at Claremont working very well in this brave new world – given the lack of necessity to have DBAs performing much of the day to day “grunt work” of a DBA. It may be financially unnecessary for many Oracle houses to employ dedicated DBAs, yet there is still a requirement for consultation on subjects such as integration, security, performance and more (these are just the examples I used here). A managed service with Claremont could be just the ticket – regular systems health checks, regular access to trained, experienced professionals with all the personality disorders you would expect from a DBA on your side.

So whilst there is a lot of scare mongering going on in the world of the DBA – I see this not as a situation where a DBA should be worried about the future, but one where the DBA Is actually encouraged by the future. There’s a lot of exciting things happening, and actually the likelihood is that the DBA job will evolve in such a way as to remove the tedious boring maintenance stuff and become a more pure technically challenging world.

The future is bright! The future is Claremont DBAs!

-#SignOffMS#-

How much are you currently underpaying women?

Fri, 27 May 2016 14:12:29 GMT

Gender equality and transparency in pay is a political issue, and we will shortly have new legislation. In less than a year, every UK enterprise will be required to publish how much (more) their men earn compared to their female counterparts.

How straightforward is it for your organisation to obtain that data?

What I love most about new legislation in the HR world, are the faces made by HR directors when I ask that question. They range from the statuesque, the chewing of a wasp, the contorted face of someone struggling with the a Times Friday Sudoku, and finally, there is the cheery face that I'll return to later.

I'm fortunate that the overlap between people, technology and analytics is always strong in HR; it makes my life more varied and ensures that follow-up questions come thick and fast.

The prominent questions are: What defines pay? How do I split my employee base in to earning quartiles? How up to date does the snapshot need to be?

You can glean an understanding of how progressive an HR department is by assessing to whom these questions are being asked. Is the HR Director asking their team, an IT specialist, a systems support team or even a third party salary benchmarking company? Of course, I am focusing on the mere practicalities of reporting the data here (I am a mathematician after all), but naturally the HR Director has even more pressing questions around The Equality Act 2010 Regulations 2016. I fully support the equality issues behind the legislation (are you watching Muirfield?) and efforts to close these gaps should certainly be top of the to-do list. But, returning to the original question, how straightforward is it to actually obtain this data?

The gender pay reporting regulations will require all enterprises to divide their pay distribution into four bands and work out the number of men and women in each quartile. This is a fantastic test for your payroll service, whether in-house or outsourced. If you have an ERP system like Oracle Payroll, then this should be a simple exercise! You should have a balance that reflects the Office for National Statistics (ONS) definition of ‘Pay’, and slicing this into quartiles should be simple whether using any of the modern technologies - from Discoverer, to Qlik, Hubble, Splash and OBIEE (There are a lot to choose from today, and please read a related blog here). NB. I’m assuming no-one still attempts these things in a spreadsheet?

So, here are my 3 top tips to this process:

1. Ensure that you have a clear understanding of defined pay per contracted hour before starting anything else.

The definition of such “pay” includes basic pay, paid leave, maternity pay, sick pay, area allowances, shift premium pay, bonus pay and other pay (including the following: car allowances paid through the payroll, on call and standby allowances, clothing, first aider or fire warden allowances). It does not include overtime pay, expenses, the value of salary sacrifice schemes, benefits in kind, redundancy pay, arrears of pay and tax credits. Employers will need to calculate an hourly pay rate for each relevant employee, based on the period of 12 months preceding the relevant date.

2. Challenge your data supplier now.

From the in-house team, to 3rd party payroll provider. How and when will they be giving you this information - and how confident are you in the data quality and are they proactively driving these conversations? The rules are expected to come into force on 1st October 2016. This will give employers six months before they have to take their first snapshot in April 2017.

3. Plan what you want to do next.

Are you looking to meet the statutory minimum reporting, or to interrogate this data to discover transformational findings? Which departments have the biggest gap, how does length-of-service, geography or age impact the analysis? What is the trend on the gap over time? In short, what data do you need to help you close this gap? (Another time we can discuss predictive analytics and the introduction of the National Living Wage impact.)

So going back to the cheery face - naturally that is the HR Director with Oracle Payroll and Claremont's Payroll Control Centre. Happily, sat using a tablet to visually interrogate the data over and above the minimum requirements - to achieve the insight they need - from real-time data, without having to ask anyone else to prepare their statistics.

We know men are paid more, now we need to know by how much and why. In my mind, this single reporting dashboard will soon be every HR Director's new corporate KPI – and they will be measured in their success in reducing this gap. As the Prime Minister has said, you cannot have true opportunity without real equality. From my side, you can’t have true analysis without ‘real analytics’. Hopefully these come from inside your organisation or your incumbent provider. If not, you know where I am.

-#SignOffJF#-

Barnardo's continue to embrace change as they celebrate 150 years transforming the lives of children

Tue, 17 May 2016 11:56:22 GMT

Barnardo’s, the UK’s leading children’s charity celebrates its 150th anniversary this year. Since Thomas Barnardo founded the charity they have transformed the lives of thousands of children. Last year alone they worked with 240,000 children, young people and families.

When Thomas Barnardo first arrived to London in 1866, he was appalled to witness the suffering of the street children. It was the catalyst that triggered Thomas to open the first Barnardos children’s home, a place where they would be fed, cared for and given an education.

It takes a huge amount of hard work, dedication and vision for an organisation to grow, thrive and impact individuals lives such as Barnardo’s has over the last 150 years. Although the challenges that children face may have changed dramatically, Barnardo’s promise to protect the UK’s children remains unbroken.

Having witnessed a huge amount of change and transformation over the years, Barnardo’s are now embracing digital transformation right across the organisation.

Working alongside Barnardo’s, we recently completed the next phase of their Oracle HCM Transformation, with a significant roll-out of mobile self- service using Applaud Solutions enhanced Oracle Self-Service.

The intuitive user interface has empowered managers and employees to be responsible for their own data, dramatically improving data quality – with employees and managers correcting historical inaccuracies and booking future holidays quickly and easily. The level of holidays captured without any administrative overhead has significantly increased in the first month AND the number of employees amending their personal information in the first month was higher than made in previous equivalent periods

After a period of careful planning and a transformation of the Oracle E-Business infrastructure, Barnardo’s are now starting to reap the rewards and have plans for further significant improvements over the coming months and years.

We at Claremont are proud to support Barnardo’s in both its HCM transformation programme, and in celebrating its 150th anniversary. We’re thrilled to be taking part in a themed ‘Tube Challenge’ – where the aim is to travel through 150 tube stations as quickly as possible. We end at Barkingside on the Central Line, where Barnardo’s headquarters are located.

I’m also extremely fortunate to be invited to a Royal Garden Party at Buckingham Palace, alongside past and present employees, volunteers and children.

At Claremont we are proud to have been working with Barnardo’s for the past 3 years, to play our small part in helping them continue their success and remarkable journey.

To find out more about the work we've done with Barnado's, have a look at the case study.

-#SignOffAB#-

Benefits of moving your Oracle ERP system to the cloud... a view from the inside

Thu, 5 May 2016 16:40:49 GMT

While early adopters of Cloud initially focused on migrating HCM applications, those in the process, or with plans to move, had their sights set higher; on transitioning their ERP systems to Cloud.

This reveals that many businesses do have a long term strategy to move their more complex back-office systems to the Cloud; often following on from the successful implementations of other systems. Having embarked on a journey to the Cloud with some of their Oracle solutions (or watching others’ make that move) they were now ready to consider bringing their bigger, heavier systems to the Cloud.

This got me thinking about what actual benefits these Cloud users are seeing: What is the competitive advantage that these early adopters are enjoying that is making that move to Cloud so appealing to other businesses?

Having successfully implemented two ERP Cloud projects to date – I wanted to further investigate the benefits these organisations have realised.

Cost savings

For organisations looking to change their ERP strategy, the promise of cost savings is often a primary driving force. In 2014 it was proved that moving ERP to the Cloud could save an organisation money. I implemented Cloud ERP for Reading Borough Council and the organisation was able to save in excess of 30% of their annual IT spend. That in itself is a compelling reason for any organisation to evaluate whether it should consider moving system(s) to the Cloud.

In my experience, many organisations are unaware of the size of the significant savings that can be made with a move to Cloud.

Our recent Claremont Cloud survey revealed that 41% of organisations, who have not yet moved to Cloud, considered the financial cost of switching to be a considerable barrier. Of course, making changes in any business often involves initial costs – both in time and money. However, the financial benefits are there to be reaped further down the line. Moving your systems to the Cloud is a fundamental change to how/where you run your business and is much more than a nod to playing the long game. It’s about making year on year savings versus the increased costs of maintaining expensive and often aging on-premise systems.

Again, the same Claremont survey states 75% of organisations who have migrated their ERP to Cloud reported that a reduction in operating costs had proved to be a major advantage. There may be some inevitable up-front costs associated with making the move, but the long term financial savings to be made more than offset that initial expenditure.

Critically, one of the most obvious areas of saving, when moving ERP to Cloud, comes from the ability to divest any on-going IT investment and turn it from a Capex to an OpEx spend as you move to a SaaS model. In essence, it’s like renting the systems from Oracle rather than buying the tin and doing it all yourself. So you can avoid the purchase of the latest kit as well as the team of people who are necessary to maintain not just that kit but all of the systems that reside there.

My colleague, Adrian Biddulph has further elaborated on this and you can read his musings herebut it’s more than just a change in how you pay for something; crucially it’s about maximising your return on that rather significant IT investment.

Regular updates to the system

In times gone by, upgrading your ERP system meant:

Expensive projects with associated downtime

The running up of project teams to undertake and manage what is a complex exercise

The associated removal of those key individuals from the business for periods of time

For many organisations this was a truth; albeit an unpalatable one. The resulting behaviours were that upgrades and patching was often postponed until a more convenient time, which never really happened. Rather, a compelling event such as a hardware upgrade, a regulatory update or a bug fix left companies playing catch-up when time was of the essence and /or production systems were down.

A bi-product of this “leave it until it breaks approach” is that staff are frequently left using Oracle technology at an older release or patch-set. This means you’re not extracting maximum value from your and Oracle’s investments in its own products. Often a cottage industry of temporary work-arounds is created as issues are encountered; we all know there are few things as permanent as a temporary work-around….. irrespective of any good intention at the time.

Paying full price for a product but running sub-optimally using half of its functionality.

My experience is that most organisations only ever upgrade their systems when they have little choice due to other external factors. It’s that compelling event only when something is no longer supported or problems are experienced where they start to think about grasping that prickly thorn of improvement and updating.

Moving to the Cloud has changed this. By hosting Oracle ERP in the Cloud and having this exercise undertaken by Oracle, all Cloud customers receive automatic updates every month. These updates include the introduction new features and bug fixes to support the optimisation of your business processes.

In addition, twice a year, customers receive an upgrade to the next release of the Cloud products. Usually this comes with the introduction of new features as well as significant improvements to the existing functionality. This perpetual updating and upgrading ensures that companies are always running the latest (and greatest) technology, and, put simply, improves operational efficiency and performance. No longer do you need to resource project teams and/or pay contractors to undertake that exercise; the upgrades are undertaken by Oracle and Oracle do this for thousands of customers. Some of these customers are small to medium enterprises (SME’s), some are MUCH larger and household names.

Of course with continual improvement, it’s important to work with an experienced partner to ensure that your ERP updates and upgrades in the Cloud are implemented seamlessly, tested efficiently and that any new functionality introduced is implemented effectively. After all, your ERP system is the beating heart of your organisation and its vital that it functions optimally.

The Oracle ERP landscape is changing

These are the primary benefits I’ve seen so far on both my Cloud ERP implementations but organisations do see other benefits, including: improved security, performance enhancements and greater scalability. They are renting their Oracle real estate from Oracle who are expert in the running of that estate and can provide extra real estate as and when required; it’s just an elastic supply model.

It’s clear to me that the Oracle ERP landscape is changing. More and more organisations are waking up to the benefits of the Cloud.

For some this comes from reaping the rewards of having moved other systems to the Cloud. For others, they’ve simply seen their peers and competitors benefit from Cloud and want to do the same.

They see things like the frequency of those Cloud ERP releases and the continuing improvement in functionality and want the ability to run Oracle’s most up-to-date tech for their business. They understand that this will add real value. The cost benefits, which Reading BC and the respondents to our survey have illustrated, is just one such area of benefit.

Moving to the Cloud doesn’t mean you are giving up control of your IT landscape; rather you are taking that control back!

If you enjoyed this article, here is a link to an article I wrote for Oracle Scene titled
“Top Travel Tips for your Cloud ERP Implementation”

-#SignOffGP#-

Move or Improve: Why managing your Oracle HCM system is like doing up your house?

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 10:54:14 GMT

Any of you who have heard me talk at Claremont’s HCM events over the last few years will know I love a good analogy. (If you remember my “Mind The Gap” presentation at the London Transport museum or, more recently, my “Move or Improve” talk at our event in March, you’ll be nodding your head right now.)

I’ve now adapted the Move or Improve metaphor further, to fit with the time of year….

In Britain it is said we have an obsession with DIY and home improvements. As we move into spring time, our TV schedule is full of programmes dedicated to moving, improving and transforming your house, or even your life (if only it were that simple).

These programmes are thought-provoking, with their myriad of options and all that latent potential... You could choose to do nothing to your property and simply make some necessary changes, like fixing the guttering or the boiler (like you promised the wife you would do over the Christmas break).

But you could go a step further with a lick of paint, replace the bathroom or re-tile the kitchen. New windows? Give the garden a makeover in time for the first buds of spring…. All this could make a real difference to the appeal (and value!) of your house. These changes will effect how you spend time in your house. The 60-minute makeover, if you will…

Want to go a step further? You could build an extension, in keeping with the style of your current property, like a conservatory.

Love them or hate them, your next option is to call on Phil and Kirstie. You could look to move completely, if your current house no longer fits your needs. There will be other properties out there that do.

Finally, you could sell up and rent somewhere. Make the maintenance, the improvements, the security etc, the problem of a landlord. (Have someone else looking out for the health of your boiler.)

The way I see it, we are in a similar position in the Oracle HCM market. Now, more than ever, we have real choice when it comes to our Oracle technologies…

One option is to Improve what we’ve got. Oracle themselves are still investing in Oracle E-Business suite, and, while it may not have had the marketing fanfare of Cloud, it is still being used and worked on. For example, many of our clients have benefitted from our partnership with Applaud solutions who work to enhance Oracle E-Business suite with contemporary user experience and mobile support.

We have the option to extend. You could choose to deploy new processes or pillars of functionality into the Oracle Cloud, using a Hybrid Approach. There are some significant benefits to this, including:

Extending the value of your E-Business Suite

Protecting your investment in E-Business Suite

Embracing new innovation with rapid deployment of Oracle Cloud Solutions

Finally there is the option to move completely, to Oracle HCM Cloud. In the Cloud world, Oracle automatically updates your system every month; fixing bugs and rolling out new features. Then, twice a year you get an upgrade, delivering significant new functionality. This is a SaaS model, like renting a house – you don’t face a big one off cost, but pay monthly subscription fees.

This means you will always have the latest and greatest technology. Its a bit like someone coming to your house every month to fix any issues. Then, every six months, someone coming to give your bathroom a makeover or install a new state-of-the-art TV.

The issue for many customers at the moment is the plethora of choice surrounding the HCM product – there are many (often contradicting) stories of benefits and risks of the different approaches. They are simultaneously facing demands from the business to innovate. Every organisation, like any property, is different. Every strategy and roadmap will, therefore, be unique. The decision to move or improve is personal and should be based on individual business requirements.

Claremont are ideally placed to support you through this decision making process. As the UK’s leading independent provider of Oracle E-Business Services and Oracle Cloud Applications services – we have the experience and expertise to help organisations make the right decision for them. If you would like some further advice and support, then please get in touch.

-#SignOffAB#-

Oracle Cloud Fusion Financials and Business Intelligence - First Steps

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 10:33:04 GMT

As an established Senior Consultant with over 15 year’s BI experience, I have been working in the relatively new space of Fusion Financials Cloud. In this article I will demonstrate the first step required to initiate the Fusion Financials BI tools reporting data.

A newly provisioned pod from Oracle will typically not have this step completed so it’s useful to understand the dependency on the Fusion reporting tools.

The Cube the whole Cube and nothing but the Cube!

The Essbase cube is the central component to Fusion BI reporting and is accessed by the Application Account Monitor & Inspector, Smart View and OTBI. Without the cube being present no data will be returned by the application or BI. For example Account Inspector will fail to run and give errors unless there is a balance cube created e-g inquire on detail balances option in Financial Reporting Centre gives GL-GL_HYP_COA_NO_CUBE. Likewise if you inquire on an OTBI subject area such as General Ledger - Balances Real Time then no data will be returned.

The screenshot is taken from Smart View after a connection has been made and there is no cube below the main Essbase cluster.

Before you attempt to create the cube make sure the accounting configuration is complete or as near complete as possible. Make sure hierarchy trees are published as draft hierarchies will not be reflected in the cube.

To create balances cube go to scheduled process and submit new process = ‘Create Balances Cube’ – and ensure this completes successfully.

Once the process completes connect Smart View again and the Cube should now be available. As screenshot below has the COAInstance cube.

If you now connect to Smart View you can start to build a report. In Account Monitor in the application set up a group account where you know data exists in the application and set as the default, so you can check balances appear (the report group will also be reflected in the Account Inspector) In OTBI the real time subject areas for GL will return data and you can access the out of the box reports or start to create your own.

Next time I will be discussing steps for customising OTBI to reflect the application chart of accounts, issues that can occur, and how to resolve them.

-#SignOffTD#-

A real life journey into the cloud

Fri, 26 Feb 2016 10:26:53 GMT

In November 2015, you might recall that Claremont launched a survey into the Future of Oracle-Based Applications. One lucky respondent, Paul Toates, a Systems Architect at Domino Printing Sciences, became the winner of a brand new Apple watch, gift-wrapped and sent over before Christmas!

The company that Paul works for, Domino Printing Sciences, operates in the Manufacturing and Engineering sector, employing 2,300 people worldwide and selling to over 120 countries. Domino Printing Sciences currently uses Oracle Financials and Manufacturing applications but, like 74% of Oracle users (according to the results of our survey), are yet to migrate these applications to the cloud.

Responsible for the design of roll out eBiz 11.5.10 over the next 18 months across the group, Paul’s role includes looking into the Domino environment to decide on the best way to migrate their Oracle applications to the cloud. Like 30% of companies yet to migrate, Domino Printing Sciences are considering the move and estimate doing so in the next 6-12 months.

"At Domino we are looking to continue our journey
into the Cloud… Our next step is to work with
Claremont to assess the Cloud readiness of our
Oracle-based applications"

Paul Toates
Systems Archiect, Domino Printing Services

Already experienced in Cloud solutions, Paul is well-versed in the benefits. Consistent with 75% of respondents that had already migrated their Oracle-based applications, Paul considers reduced operating costs to be the main benefit of the Cloud. He also highly values access to around the clock support and the ability to remove the need to maintain specialist skills in-house.

In agreement with 41% of respondents yet to migrate, Paul considers the financial cost of switching as the company’s primary concern. Although 38% Cloud users do report that initial costs can be high, 75% of respondents feel the resulting reduction in operating costs has proved a major advantage.

Paul also ranked loss of flexibility and control as a perceived risk of the move; supported by only 13% of those that are currently using Oracle Cloud-hosting services.

To find out more about the perceived and actual benefits of moving your Oracle-based applications to the Cloud, download our report.

Move or Improve? Architecting the future of Oracle HCM and Payroll

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 16:18:14 GMT

Join us for our Oracle HCM & Payroll event this Spring: Thursday March 3^rd 1pm – 5pm, in London, at the spectacular RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects).

This is the third in a series of Adrian Biddulph's Oracle HCM and Payroll events, which brings together senior business leaders to examine the latest developments in HR and Payroll.

Speakers from Oracle, The National Trust, Applaud Solutions, and more, will present on new ways that HR and Payroll are being transformed – and what this means for your business.

Why Attend?

Explore the latest evolutions in HR and Payroll

Discover how to prepare for a Cloud-focused future

Learn what’s best for you? Should you move to Cloud or improve your on-premise system?

Discuss ways to overcome new challenges in HR and Payroll

Hear from leading brands on how they have embraced change to transform HR and Payroll capabilities

Agenda
12:30 Lunch and informal networking
13:15 Open and welcome by Claremont
13:20 Steve Jarvis, Oracle – HR Digital Transformation
14:05 Ivan Harding, Applaud Solutions – Finally achieve your Oracle and HR Self Service Business Case with User Experience Solutions from Applaud
14:35 Tea and coffee break
14:50 Tracey Dyer, National Trust – HR Transformation in Practice
15:35 Adrian Biddulph, Claremont – Claremont Cloud
16:00 Edward Houghton, CIPD – Future Trends In HR: How Organisations Will Better Value Their Talent
16:45
Summary and wrap up from the day
17:00

Networking, drinks and 1:1 discussions (optional)

Speakers from Oracle ,The National Trust, Applaud Solutions

Tracey Dyer, Head of People Services,
National Trust

Tracey has over 20 years’ experience within Outsourcing services, HR Shared Services, Hospitality and Event Management. Providing all aspects of generalist, and strategic HR within both public and private sectors, she has specialist experience in employee relations, HR Shared Services employment law and business partnering. Currently Tracey is Head of People Services at The National Trust, working to deliver large scale change management programmes across the business.

Adrian Biddulph, Oracle HCM & Payroll Specialist,
Claremont

Adrian is a leading expert in the implementation and on-going support of complex Human Capital Management solutions, with over 16 years of global consultancy experience. For the past 8 years Adrian has had sole responsibility for developing and delivering the Oracle HCM & Payroll Managed Service capability for Edenbrook / Hitachi Consulting.

Previously Adrian worked as an HR & Payroll Functional Consultant forOracle Corporation UK. During this time Adrian has been involved in over 40 implementations of Oracle’s E-Business Suite across a variety of business sectors.

Ivan Harding, Managing Director,
Applaud Solutions

Ivan is Co-Founder of Applaud Solutions and has over 16 years experience working with Oracle HCM. Ivan joined the Oracle HR development team in 1997 as a software engineer. By 2005, he had reached the position of Development Director responsible for the Oracle Core HR product with teams reporting to him in the UK, US and India.

After leaving Oracle in 2006, Ivan worked on a variety of client projects before co-founding Applaud Solutions in 2009. Ivan has been a regular presenter at many Oracle HR events across the world. Ivan is a regular at prestigious Oracle HR User Group (OHUG) – the world’s largest conference dedicated to Oracle HR - presenting in Florida during OHUG 2011, Las Vegas during OHUG 2012 and OHUG 2013 in Dallas.

Edward Houghton, Research Advisor, Human Capital Metrics and Standards,
CIPD

Edward is responsible for leading the organisation's human capital research work stream exploring various aspects of human capital management, theory and practice; including the measurement and evaluation of the skills and knowledge of the workforce. He has a particular interest in the role of human capital in driving economic productivity, innovation and corporate social responsibility. Before joining the CIPD in 2013 Edward completed a number of research roles in government and higher education. His research covers business culture, corporate social responsibility and community investment.

Steve Jarvis, Application Consultant, HCM,
Oracle

Steve has over 30 years experience in the HR & Payroll arena, having initially, worked in both public and commercial organisations, and for the last 18 years he has worked as a business consultant for various software organisations. Currently, Steve is a business consultant for Oracle, and his role is to help customers understand how to get the most out of the HR & Payroll solutions Oracle offer.

UKOUG 2015: A Claremont Review

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

So, another annual UKOUG conference is over and yet another conference bag has been added to the growing collection from conferences past! Apps15 returned to its "spiritual" home at the ICC in Birmingham last week and it felt like the good old days. Well done to the UKOUG for orchestrating such a great show. It was great to see the Claremont logo all over the conference!

The Future is Cloud

During the event, Claremont published our latest Research Survey Report: The Future of Oracle-based Applications. This report shows that three quarters of respondents have not yet started the journey to the Cloud for any of their Oracle-based systems. Our report also shows that there is a marked difference between the perceived benefits and risks of those that have not moved versus the actual benefits and risks experienced by those that have.

The mood of the conference reflected this. The "cloud hype" was perhaps a little more muted this year, as some of the realism from early adopters was accessible during the event. Cloud is definitely the future. There are some real benefits to be had, and the pace of adoption will accelerate, but it is not for everyone right now.

There appeared to be more of a focus on E-Business, with session content and providers focused on those servicing those customers on 11i and 12. Included in this was Cliff Godwin's keynote, which talked extensively about the future product roadmap for release 12.3. From our own experience, many customers are seeking to optimise the use of their current investment in Oracle enterprise applications in the medium term rather than jumping to the Cloud.

The Growing Importance of User Experience and Business Analytics

User experience was also something that featured, and was the subject of Jeremy Ashley's keynote on Tuesday. It's high on the agenda of some of our customers too, as they seek to engage their employees and customers. We've seen some great results this year from some of the HCM Optimisation work that we've done to improve the user experience of E-Business and drive real business benefit.

Interesting too, was the proliferation of niche business analytics product providers exhibiting at conference. There is clearly a thirst for the insight and value that these products can deliver to organisations, as we have seen from some of our customers.

It's a really exciting time in our marketplace, as customers wrestle with the nature and timing of how they tackle these issues of Cloud, User Experience and Analytics amongst other things. I'm looking forward to Apps16 already, and the opportunity to checkpoint where we have all got to on that journey.

Mark Vivian

Proud Sponsors of UKOUG Apps 15 Event

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 16:54:06 GMT

Claremont is proud to be one of the key sponsors for this year’s UKOUG Applications annual conference and exhibition. The conference, which runs from 7-9 December, finds itself back in the familiar surroundings of the International Convention Centre (ICC) in central Birmingham. It promises to be a great event, with attendance levels predicted to be up by over 50% compared to last year.

Journey to The Cloud

Since last year’s conference we’ve seen a shift. Having seen early adopters make the move, more organisations have started their journey to migrate their Oracle Applications to the Cloud. In that time we’ve been talking with some of our own clients, who have been seeking advice on what it would mean for them. Is it the right thing to do? Why should they move to the cloud? What does it mean in practice?

Some have seen the benefits and have embarked on implementation projects to take them to the Cloud. The time is not right for others. We recently conducted a survey that reached out to organisations in the Oracle economy to find out about their plans for and perceptions of the Cloud. Look out for some interesting and insightful findings from this survey that will be published during the conference.

Maximise Your Oracle Investment

We’ve seen another subset of customers looking to maximise their existing Oracle investment by optimising their use of Oracle E-Business. A number of customers have realised some significant business benefits by implementing the Applaud Self Service. This delivers a modern and fresh new user interface to employees and managers, which is complemented by native mobile and tablet applications.

Payroll Round Table – Join Us!

We’ve also helped Payroll Managers to gain greater insight into their Payroll data with our BI tool: Payroll Control Centre. Join us for a round table discussion at the conference, on Tuesday afternoon, to explore these advancements in BI and Payroll. Hosted by Adrian Biddulph, discussions will focus on practical examples of how Payroll Control Centre has solved real business problems with smart technology.

To Speak to Us…

The Claremont team will be on hand at the conference and exhibition each day. If you’d like to discuss these or any other Oracle topics with one of the team, please hit the Call Back button to arrange a meeting.

Mark Vivian

How software user experience can play a key role in employee engagement

Fri, 13 Nov 2015 15:37:34 GMT

One of the key themes at this year’s CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition was employee engagement and experience.

Employee engagement is complex. It spans factors such as reward, wellbeing, collaboration, communication, personal fulfilment, ownership and relationships. ADP, Impact Consulting Psychologists and Peter English all presented statistics about how employee happiness at work significantly impacts the bottom-line, it’s nice to see such academic rigour.

From a technology point of view, a number of presentations given by HCM software vendors also showed a move toward employee engagement, with particular focus on user experience.

I don't think I'd ever join or leave an organisation based on how engaging their HCM system was - but I do think that engaging technology can play a positive role in any organisation. It can help facilitate communication, collaboration and a number of other key components of true employee engagement.

Cloud HCM products and Oracle

It's great to see that so many system providers are now putting user experience and employee engagement at the heart of the new generation of HCM products. Oracle has invested heavily in usability and user experience in HCM Cloud. Many others - including Workday, BrightHR and Selima - all have wonderful looking consumer-grade self-service applications. In a recent survey, 33%* of respondents thinking of moving to the Cloud said that they were doing so for a better user experience. (*How Modern is HR, Oracle)

But, do you really need to invest in a new generation cloud solution to get better user experience? Is it possible to increase employee engagement with Oracle e-Business suite HCM?

Proven advances in user experience with Oracle e-Business suite HCM

Over the past 12 months, we’ve been working with the National Trust and Unite Students to make their implementations of Oracle HCM Self Service more engaging - with some remarkable results.

We used Applaud Self Service to deliver a new, modern and fresh user interface to employees and managers, complemented by native mobile and tablet applications available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry.

The intuitive user interface has encouraged managers and employees to become responsible for their own data. The result: dramatically improved data quality – with employees and managers correcting past absence inaccuracies and booking future holidays quickly and easily. The number of holidays booked without any administrative overhead doubled in the first month AND the amount of employees amending their personal information in the first week alone was higher than those made in the entire previous year!

“The new version (Applaud Self Service) is a different word – already getting great feedback from the team.”
Hilary McGrady, Director of Operations and Consulatcny, National trust

The National Trust now have a clear 360 degree view of employee absence data - but more importantly, they are able to produce accurate business intelligence (BI) to improve operations, boost employee engagement and reduce absenteeism.

If you are an Oracle e-Business suite user who has recently upgraded to R12 – and the cloud is still a while away, there is an alternative! You can provide your employees with an engaging self-service application. Applaud Self Service has been developed to meet the needs and demands of modern HR users. It helps maximize your existing Oracle investment by re-using your existing setup with no upgrades, no interfaces and no disruption – just a great user experience.

If you’d like to know more about working with Claremont and Applaud Solutions - and the smarter approach to self-service HR - then please get in touch.

Adrian Biddulph

New Oracle Vulnerability and the Cost of Security Breaches

Wed, 11 Nov 2015 15:09:30 GMT

On the day TalkTalk announced the high cost of their recent website attack Oracle has announced a severe security vulnerability in its WebLogic software.

Oracle has issued an advisory of a severe vulnerability (CVE-2015-4852 – http://goo.gl/JMOv1H) in its WebLogic server. This can allow the remote execution of code, i.e. over a network, on a server without the need for a username and password. This vulnerability affects Oracle’s WebLogic Server, which is their strategic web and application server. At present a patch is not available but Oracle has published “mitigation recommendations”. Claremont recommends that all WebLogic users check as a matter of urgency whether their systems are affected, and prioritise Internet-facing servers.

Coincidentally, TalkTalk today announced the recent cyber-attack on their website, which resulted in the theft of confidential customer data, will cost the company between £30m and £35m. This cost includes TalkTalk’s response to the incident, the incremental calls into their call centres, additional IT and technology costs and lost revenue through reduced sales. However, TalkTalk’s CEO admits it is still "too early to tell" what the longer-term impact will be.

This is a timely reminder of the significant financial and reputational damage caused by security breaches and the importance of maintaining up-to-date and secure systems. Thus, it is important that all Oracle customers review their WebLogic servers.

Claremont’s services to all our Managed Services customers includes proactive advice and guidance for all relevant patches and updates, including security announcements like today’s regarding WebLogic. Through this Sentinel process, our customers receive timely communications advising whether their Oracle systems are affected and, where they are, what mitigation Claremont recommends and any potential side-effects of that mitigation.

Given concerns about IT security, one of our Oracle hosting customers recent engaged a third party to perform penetration testing on their key IT systems. Thanks to Claremont’s proactive maintenance and advice, those systems hosted and supported by the Claremont were the only ones not breached. Are yours as robust?!

Please contact us if you would like to discuss how Claremont could help with your Oracle systems’ security and maintenance.

Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.5 Released

Thu, 22 Oct 2015 15:08:47 GMT

Oracle has announced the release of version 12.2.5 of Oracle E-Business Suite. This demonstrates Oracle’s continued commitment to Oracle E-Business Suite’s longevity alongside Oracle’s Business Cloud.

Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.X continues to represent a good “stepping stone” to the Oracle Cloud, because both applications share the same middleware configuration. This means any future upgrades, coexistence or re-implementation initiatives should be easier, whilst also providing an amount of comfort and control by remaining on the well understood and familiar E-Business Suite platform.

Upgrading to 12.2.5

Upgrading to 12.2.5 is only possible from release 12.2.X – 12.2.5 is a cumulative patch on top of Release 12.2 but it can be applied online, i.e. without downtime. However, for customers currently on 12.1.3 or lower, an upgrade to 12.2 would be required before applying 12.2.5.

What’s new in 12.2.5?

In addition to multiple bug fixes, key changes introduced by Oracle include the following.

For the Finance User

Some changes in Procurement to improve efficiency and usability, such as the ability to share smart forms amongst operating units, the ability to set AME approval at Document Type/operating unit level and one time addresses are now stored so they can be re-used if needed.

Projects now has extra flexibility, allowing changes to un-costed expenditure batches and to PA periods if they have been entered incorrectly.

For the HCM User

Self Service HR now includes Simplified User Interface (UI) Menus, and the ability for Managers to view and perform actions for multiple assignments via Org Chart or Talent Profile.

Enhancements to the Payroll Dashboard introduce monitoring and payroll analytics, providing a deeper view of employee payroll data. Performance improvements aid efficient and accurate payroll processing resulting in reduced time and cost. New Costing of Payment reports detail payment costing in the form of summary, details, or cost code level breakdown over a date range or specified costing process.

OTL Integration with HR Absences has been extended to include those with OTLR features enabled.

For the DBA

Enhancements to the Applications DBA Online Patching (“adop”) tool provide an enhanced interface that eases the use of the tool for the DBA. In addition, Oracle has added an “adopmon” facility that can monitor the patching process and enable the DBA to delve into the workings of a patch in more detail. Finally, a “–validate” flag has been added to adop to verify a system’s “readiness” for patch application before a patch is applied.

Weblogic Performance Improvements – Weblogic has been furnished with a number of additional performance configuration parameters such as “DserverType” and “deploy_portlet” which configure the environment for specific workloads and faster start-up times.

Dual filesystem mode in cloning – previously it was necessary to clone the patch and run filesystems independently, but in 12.2.5 it has now become a standard clone process to configure the two areas in a single clone process.

Central EBS Inventory – it is now possible to register multiple E-Business Suite instances with a central, global inventory which minimizes administration effort when managing multiple development/test instances.

In Conclusion

Oracle is continuing development of the E-Business Suite stack and is providing new functionality in this area. As such Oracle E-Business Suite remains a viable alternative to a full migration to the Oracle Business Cloud or may be used as part of a long term co-existence strategy.

Jonathan Stuart

Claremont Service Management

Fri, 14 Aug 2015 14:46:31 GMT

When taking about Managed Services, it’s easy to focus on the Oracle product experts who deliver the support. Service Management can fall somewhere between a necessary evil and a nice to have! However, when properly delivered, it adds to the Oracle support services, improving value for customers and ensuring the quick and effective delivery of support. For those reasons Claremont employs dedicated Service Managers, separate from the Account Management team, and they work continually to improve and adapt service management to meet and exceed customers' expectations.

Monitoring our services

For example, every month our Service Managers ask their customers about their satisfaction with our services. We’re pleased to say we score very highly, but it’s important to measure this and know where we can improve. In 2015, Claremont changed the customer satisfaction approach and questionnaire. The aim was to prevent this becoming routine, where we risk not capturing customers’ perception of our services.

We changed the questions and the emphasis moved to getting feedback on areas of improvement important to the customer. In short, Claremont recognised that not all customers have the same expectations and requirements. Thus, providing one list of questions to fit all customers would not help our long term aims for continuous improvement and increasing customer satisfaction.

Improving further

There are further activities planned to improve our services. These include changes to service reporting, with the aim of tailoring reports to customers’ specific needs and interests. Our aim has never been just to provide a list of statistics and contractual KPI's, but to provide recommendations, feedback of service performance and engage further in areas where longer term solutions can improve the service as a whole. This includes proactive work to reduce the number of incidents.

Some of these activities have and will in the future lead to process re-engineering and tuning to ensure that we do not stagnate and always look at business as well as operational processes to improve our services to our customers. In the coming months the new reports will be rolled out to our customers and the aim is to review our internal metrics to ensure that we maintain our focus on customer service improvement.

What does it all mean for you?

This may not be an obvious priority for our customers, but in our experience, customers want meaningful information, proactive advice and recommendations for long term improvements. This is on top of the Incident-led support service that should be taken for granted. Effective service management and service reporting is key to delivering these benefits to customers.

Braam Slabbert

Your First Cloud ERP or Fusion Implementation

Thu, 30 Jul 2015 15:38:44 GMT

Let’s take a hypothetical scenario: You’re called into your manager’s office and told you are implementing Oracle Fusion on a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The contracts have been signed, the environment is on order and you are booked on Cloud training starting Monday.

Training passes and before you know it you receive your first email entitled “Welcome to Oracle Cloud” from Oracle Cloud Admin.

Things have gotten very real, very quickly.

So …. what next?

You check your inbox and already you have a second email from Oracle Cloud Admin, almost identical to the first ….. but now you’ve got your second environment.

You may have implemented Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) before so understand the process and the AIM documentation underpinning it. After your Cloud training you understand that the terminology has also moved on. Fusion SaaS has become Cloud ERP or HCM Cloud depending on your implementation footprint; perhaps you’re doing both and now you use Oracle Unified Method (OUM).

Let’s take a step back and understand what the reality of this situation you now face is….

Oracle Cloud is a hosted environment, although in this case, it is hosted by Oracle. You can implement Fusion in the Cloud or on premise, but the vast majority of projects are Cloud-based.

Commercially you are looking at contracts using the terminology of “Subscriptions” rather than “Licenses”. That’s where the significant savings (Op Ex vs Cap Ex) and reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comes from. My first Fusion client delivered a saving of approximately 30% in their annual IT spend by moving their ERP to the Cloud.

Already you have two Cloud environments, one is defined as “Stage” and the other as “Production” and in the world of Cloud, they are no longer referred to as environments, they’re “Pods”. My client’s subscription was for the standard Oracle packaged offering of x2 Pods – Staging and Production.

In addition, you plan to run a number of Conference Room Pilots (CRP’s); which are now referred to as Functional Prototypes (FP’s). Again just some terminology revisions, nothing you shouldn’t be able to handle.

… but have you really thought this through?

What follows is “the benefit of hindsight view” of how my client went live on Cloud ERP with Financials and Procurement, as an early adopter, and how we managed our Pods to support this significant accomplishment.

The implementation was based upon an iterative approach utilising the Cloud business flows published by Oracle which we intended to run through in FP1. Out of FP1 we would record and progress any concerns with a view to running FP2 just four weeks later. The client had agreed to adopt the Fusion business processes and to revise their business processes to fit with the Cloud software where necessary. Customisation was not to be entertained; remember this was December 2013 so before of the opportunities of Oracle’s PaaS were available.

Our initial build and FP’s took place in our Staging Pod. I wanted to keep our Production Pod completely clean until such times as we had confirmed all the set-ups and were ready to commence the production build.

I undertook my initial build using a shared Financials and Procurement Business Unit (BU). As one might imagine, in any early implementation issues were encountered, alternate configuration options were built, matters were tested and solutions evaluated. Some issues required SR’s with Oracle Support and investigation and resolution activities ensued. All with a view to the successful testing of our initial configuration at FP1.

FP1 ran with lots of discussions, possible revisions noted and some SR’s were raised. SR’s not just with regard to the operation of the software, but also for clarifications of what was and wasn’t allowed in an Oracle Cloud environment.

Out of FP1 came a number of additional activities undertaken in our Staging Pod as we looked at potential alternate configurations, investigated issues, clarified functionality and readied ourselves for FP2.

FP2 was also to be run in our Staging Pod so, post FP1, some housekeeping was required in order to isolate our FP2 activities and data from the myriad of activities associated with FP1.

If I was to list the activities undertaken in our Staging pod, at a high level by the end of FP2, they would look like:

Sandpit/Play area as we tested the Cloud functionality

Alternate configurations assessed in a number of areas – e.g. procurement approval hierarchies within AMX

As issues were identified SR’s were raised, investigated and resolved – as an SR test environment

For the execution of FP1 (CRP1)

For the execution of FP2 (CRP2)

In addition, the environment was also used for data load and migration activities:

Supplier loading activities

Open Invoice load testing

Open PO load testing

GL history load activities

As well as the development and testing of our reporting solution utilising the new reporting tools of OTBI, Account Monitor, etc …. So, it was also used for:

Report development and testing

In addition, given the complexities of the activities above, we wanted a robust documentation of the ensuing solution given there was now significant redundant configuration/data in our Staging Pod so the options around copying Cloud environments/configuration, whilst of interest, were ill suited to this particular scenario.

Once our Financials and Procurement solution was fully documented, I wanted to mitigate any risk of potential error in this documentation impacting our Production build so created another shared Financials/Procurement BU using our configuration documentation as the primary basis for that build. Again, all in the Staging Pod.

Whilst following such a risk averse approach, a purist might wish to point out that my initial build was for a single shared BU whereas now I had two. Such a criticism is fair as my multiple BU approach now resulted in the occasional SR where the behaviours of the system differed with single or multiple BU’s. SR’s were raised, matters resolved but the risk of any documentation error sullying our production build was mitigated.

In addition, in the run-up to go-live, we also ran the following activities in our Staging Pod:

Build revisions/additional BU’s using our set-up documentation in preparation for the production build

UAT

User training

Interface Testing

Data Conversion Testing

Patching

With Cloud, your environment is patched every month by Oracle. Staging is patched over the first weekend of the month and Production on the third weekend. As such, you have a two week window of opportunity in which to identify any possible issues caused by the patch application before the same patch is applied (again by Oracle) to your Production pod. Remember, this activity happens every month of the project, not just when you go-live so you need to schedule your activities accordingly and plan for the loss of system access on the patching weekend and the ensuing regression testing activity. So staging was also used for:

Patch application and regression testing activities

As you can imagine, doing all of the above in a single environment created a number of challenges and required a resourceful approach to the resolution of each. Nothing detailed above was insurmountable, but planning for and procuring additional Pods, albeit for short periods, might have eased the process. A point for consideration here is that there is a trade-off between the potential benefits of additional Pods, even for limited periods of time, versus any attached costs. Pods are not free.

There were periods when performing a number of activities in the same environment was challenging but with clear communication across the project team any ensuing issues were kept to a minimum and were carefully managed as and when they occurred.

In August 2014, we successfully went live of R7 Cloud ERP.

Lessons learned?

Having successfully made the transition from running Oracle EBS to running Cloud ERP, there are a number of matters you need to carefully consider to ensure that successful outcome:

Cloud is a re-implementation. Cloud ERP is NOT EBS but your EBS experience is just as applicable with the new product as it was for EBS. Remember Cloud may be a new product but you are still implementing an ERP.

With Cloud, you are looking at minimal or no customisation and the adoption of standard processes.

Enhancement Requests (ER’s) can result in changes to standard Oracle product. During our implementation we raised some and they were included in the Oracle product in a matter of months (and before go-live). Each ER needed a strong business case in support of it but the overhead of creating that is minimal when measured against the improved functionality achieved.

Where you have a number of competing activities happening in the same environment – this will naturally create some tension across the implementation team, and here costing for and securing additional Pods might mitigate issues encountered. However, having a single staging pod DID drive project communication and collaborative behaviours, albeit out of necessity but the global team pulled together successfully.

Ultimately, our Production build was clean and robustly documented but primarily it worked.

Nothing above constitutes “rocket science”, it’s merely the application of existing ERP experience to the world of Cloud ERP resulting in a successful go-live and ultimately a referencable client.

Job done!

Next Steps …. With Claremont

All of this experience is now reflected in the approach and services offered by Claremont’s team and our associated Managed Service. Our unique approach isn’t just for the Cloud implementation, but carries forward into the all-important realms of production running where we can provide a comprehensive support service. For example, we can help you to identify and adopt new features in the regular product releases, provide training for these features, support the monthly regression testing required of Cloud, and much more to help you maximise your investment in Oracle technology. We can do this on your behalf thereby freeing your Finance and IT staff to concentrate on adding value to your business rather than looking after the provision of your ERP.

Unlike many other organisations, Claremont has real world experience of successful implementation of Cloud ERP and HCM Cloud, and an impressive service-focused heritage in supporting a portfolio of Oracle managed services clients. You are not alone.

Patrick Hopkins.

A (less than direct) journey from Discoverer to Analytics in the Cloud with Oracle

Fri, 12 Jun 2015 15:41:25 GMT

How many changes would you tolerate on a train journey before you decided it was easier to drive?

To develop the analogy, Oracle has over the last 15 years developed many stations, but none of them are directly connected. Acquisitions of Hyperion, Siebel Analytics, Endeca, Inquira and others, as well as the development of appliances and Cloud solutions have created a complex landscape, made even more confusing with third party managed stations from, for instance Insight Software, and the development of add-ons such as Claremont's own Payroll Control Centre and Oracle's Analytic Applications. And finally, can I get to the Cloud ... by train?

The context for this blog is that Oracle has de-supported Discoverer. In practice, you could continue using Discoverer, but you are unlikely to save any support money, as the tool was probably free in the first place. You will also have to deal with a small business risk, especially as you upgrade the technical environments on which Discoverer sits. But most organisations want to change anyway because they recognise that Oracle is no longer investing in the technology, so it will become harder to do business critical things with the tool.

At this point, I could list all the technology options and explain what they do, but you could just as easily go to Oracle.com and read for yourself.

Instead, I'll focus on three business scenarios that relate to the kind of situation that often arises;

You are using Discoverer quite successfully, have good in-house skills and are worried about de-support.

Discoverer is mainly used to extract data into spreadsheets and you don't have anyone who technically understands it. It is not generally liked or used widely.

The business has a strategy to build in the Cloud and cannot afford to employ technical staff to manage reporting.

Scenario 1 - You like Discoverer

Organisations have worked out that Discoverer is not a bad tool, and have invested in making it work for the organisations best interests. They have developed views from E-Business Suite and may even have built Discoverer reports against a data warehouse. The end user layer has been set up to support end user queries and some reports have been developed as dashboards on their preferred intranet site.

Oracle attempted to build some technical upgrade routes for these customers, but very few found them useful, as they demanded too much manual intervention, did not migrate the business areas, didn't work predictably, and didn't allow a confederated view of the data. Funnily enough, it actually worked best where customers had built star schemas on data warehouses. However, that was a very small minority of Oracle customers.

The way to address this could be to utilise the views as data sources in a vanilla OBI setup. Or they could essentially be materialised into a data warehouse, if the organisation is worried about the performance impact on the source environment and wants reports to run appreciably quicker. You could blend (federate) both approaches with OBI, for instance combining trend analysis over the last 3 months (data warehouse) with on-the-day end-of-month analysis for closing invoices (views).

Scenario 2 - We need a change

Scenario 1 is not very common, especially as most Discoverer users have used it as a free tool within E-Business Suite. Organisations have not invested in the tool and may have allowed it to fall into disrepair over time. However, some reports are critical, so you cannot just switch it off.

These organisations tend to already understand they need to do more with the information they have. Typically there is talk of investment in an Analytics tool and some have dabbled with data visualisation tools like Tableau or Qliktech. Some are extending their Microsoft BI capabilities and some have invested heavily in Business Objects or Cognos, with a data warehouse, but have not yet integrated the Discoverer reports.

Oracle has developed a set of Analytic Applications, which can be implemented in 3 months, as they have prebuilt data extraction, transformation and visualisation. No one suggests that these will do everything you want out of the box, but, nearly all organisations who have invested, will admit it does a lot for them and demands less management than a custom data warehouse.

There is a significant cost attached, but this is more than compensated by the savings realised from lower development costs over time, fast access to good quality and robust data, and less time spend building and interpreting out of date spreadsheets.

Much like Cloud Applications, this philosophy provides end users with an end-to-end reporting solution and then asks the question ‘what else do you need?’. Rather than asking them what they want out of the tool.

The costs could also be somewhat less than the market perception, which is currently over £100,000.

Because this scenario assumes the organisation wants a strategic change to reporting, it is no surprise that there is no simple migration from Discoverer. Brave customers tell their end users they are switching off Discoverer and that they should 'find' their reports in the new environment. Others allow both environments (Analytic Applications and Discoverer) and will gradually retire Discoverer.

Scenario 3 - Time for the Cloud

These organisations have decided that they want to remove the costs of infrastructure and IT support from the business by deploying what they can on the Cloud. Applications such as Salesforce and Oracle HCM Cloud are managed by the vendor and end users simply use the tools.

In the Analytics world, this is not simple. Reporting needs to work now against all applications, whether they are in the cloud or on premise. Unless an organisation implements a complete IT solution in the cloud ground up (very rare), data will be held in multiple locations and cannot easily be reported on across data silos without additional tools.

Organisations therefore have two main choices - silo reporting to the application or build a separate data warehouse somewhere which can access data from all sources.

In the Oracle Cloud context, this translates into OTBI (Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence), the modular BI application (largely available now for Cloud Applications) and OTBI-E, which is (will be) a cloud-based Analytic Applications-like data warehouse, which collects data from the source applications.

And if that is a bridge too far, and if your organisation is trying out Tableau or similar, then Oracle has built a version of OBI, which sits in the Oracle Cloud, which allows you to supply data and build Analytics from scratch against any application, without any installation or technical management. You can buy BICS on a subscription basis, so the capital costs are low. Currently, data has to be supplied to BICS in a very manual way, but this is changing fast and will soon allow automated data collection to effect a near real-time experience.

And I haven't even discussed PBCS (Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service) or some of the other prebuilt Hyperion Cloud solutions!

Toby Price

Claremont adds another Oracle badge to its portfolio

Mon, 13 Apr 2015 09:45:49 GMT

Claremont has achieved Oracle Specialization status for Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite 11g. This demonstrates our capability and commitment to delivering high quality Business Intelligence and reporting solutions to their customers.

To be granted the status, Claremont had to demonstrate examples and references of client projects; consultants had to undertake classroom-based and online technical exams as well as provide evidence of completed sales and deployment of relevant Oracle software.

Toby Price, Claremont’s Business Analytics Capability Lead, said, “Our Specialized status now enables potential customers to have complete confidence in our ability to help them in this area, adding significant capability to our high quality E-Business Suite and Managed Services offerings”.

Claremont’s Managing Director, Mark Vivian, added “I am delighted for Toby and the team that we have achieved this accreditation, which is formal recognition from Oracle of our business intelligence credentials.”

Modern Business Summit

Mon, 23 Mar 2015 17:11:32 GMT

Fusion the Alliance further

Mon, 9 Feb 2015 15:33:57 GMT

We’re pleased to announce that The Vertex Fusion Alliance have selected Claremont to become their new Cloud ERP and HCM Cloud partner!

Since joining the Alliance in September 2013 as the Oracle E-Business Suite partner, Claremont has continually proven itself as a committed and trustworthy member of the Alliance. Claremont now provides improved strength and support to Vertex within the Oracle Applications Cloud arena.

Head of Vertex Fusion Alliance, Tony Cook said, “It was an easy decision to make. I can rely on Claremont to deliver on what they promise. They are a valuable and credible part of the Alliance and are proactive in everything that they do.”

Claremont’s Managing Director, Mark Vivian added, “I am delighted to further cement our working relationship with Vertex. For us, being part of the Alliance gives us the opportunity to work with like-minded expert partners and to deliver a wide range of solutions into our customers.”

Ensuring accuracy within Oracle Payroll

Wed, 4 Feb 2015 15:46:47 GMT

Identifying the mistakes in your Payroll

Fri, 23 Jan 2015 09:11:43 GMT

Over the past few years there have been significant changes for payroll teams to absorb, resulting in a squeeze from all sides.

Legislative pressure: RTI and pension auto-enrolment.

Management pressure: Demands for faster processing and lower costs.

HR team pressure: Compensation is key to employee engagement, expanding benefit and total compensation landscape.

Business pressure: Demands for more data, more insight and quicker payroll turnaround.

Payroll teams have had to sometimes work smarter but often work harder to meet these extra requirements.

One area particularly squeezed is the time spent reconciling and checking the payroll run before the BACS and FPS files are sent.

The introduction of RTI has limited or made more complex some of the workarounds that may have been used in the past to rectify incorrect payments.

So today there is less time for the checking of payroll and if something is missed it’s more difficult to put right. Once payroll has been run, identifying problems can be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

That one big overpayment.

That mistake that a manager made via self-service when not completing a transaction properly.

That typo where the decimal point was in the wrong place.

With little time and a tight deadline it can be very difficult to catch all of these, especially the smaller mistakes.

Recovery of money from employees, the accounting of it, and RTI resubmissions are complex. These all add to the payroll team’s burden, leading to a cycle of decline in the quality of the service. More time is spent dealing with over- and underpayments and less time checking and ensuring the quality of the payroll.

The net result is that the payroll team becomes reactive rather than proactive.

There are generally two approaches to ensuring the payroll is correct: auditing all transactions or checking the results of the payroll calculations.

Auditing works fine on a small payroll with entry by a few named HR and payroll individuals. But this approach can begin to break down where self-service is deployed, where there is a complex HR landscape or where the volume of transactions is high and there simply isn’t the manpower to double-check everything.

The second option is a complex checking and reconciliation process or tool. These may be custom reports, a data warehouse may be used or more than likely a combination of things, including standard reports such as gross to net, exception reports (high/low values, variance), employee results summary.

Standard payroll reports come out in a variety of formats, some more difficult to use than others. They are very static, it’s not easy to compare periods or employees, and often the standard reports don’t provide any contextual information.

More than likely Microsoft Excel will be used to stitch these things together, but this requires more time to be spent manipulating data and with the potential introduction of further errors.

The other important factor during any payroll reconciliation is local knowledge. There is so much history, culture, custom and practice in the heads of a payroll team that for a new person into the team it can take an age to truly get up to speed.

How do we share that local knowledge?

How do you ensure consistency?

How do you find the needle in the haystack when the clock is ticking?

How do you save your company money and provide payroll insight to your business?

These are all the questions we looked to answer when developing the Claremont Payroll Control Centre. If you’d like to find out more then please call us on 01483 549 004.

Click here for our Payroll Control Centre datasheet.

Click here to read more about our Payroll Control Centre product.

Adrian Biddulph

Business Analytics - Perception and the Reality (Making the tools work for you)

Wed, 21 Jan 2015 14:25:06 GMT

Organisations hear endlessly about the benefits of Business Analytics software and yet are often frustrated by slow progress with reporting and the perceived high price to implement.

This event will help you to understand practically what is happening across the IT landscape, how you can deliver high value results quickly and affordably, and how you can make best use of all your data in E-Business Suite and across all of your systems.

Deliver high quality information in the right format affordably when it is needed. Do it in weeks and months, not years.

PLUS, we will be demonstrating Claremont's unique Payroll Control Centre: A fast, intuitive tool that gives you confidence that the Payroll is accurate; that legislative obligations are met, and that variances in compensation can be identified quickly.

Payroll Control Centre is an example of how we blend our domain expertise and Business Analytics skills to create technology solutions to solve real business problems.

This event is free to attend and on a first come, first served basis.

This seminar is primarily aimed at Oracle and systems managers responsible for the delivery of reporting solutions.

Agenda
12:30 – 13:30 Buffet lunch and informal networking
13:30 – 13:45 Open and welcome by Claremont
13:45 – 14:15 Speaker: Dai Clegg, Research Analyst:
Realising the Analytics Promise
14:15 – 15:00 Speaker: Mike Hallett, Alliances and Channels Director - Business Intelligence & Enterprise Performance Management, Oracle:
See More, Act Faster
15:00 – 15:20 Tea/Coffee break
15:20 – 15:50 Speaker: Julian Ford, Claremont Payroll Control Centre - an Example of Claremont Added Value
15:50 – 16:20 Speaker: Amy Balmain - Oracle’s BI tools – the pros and cons and the impact on the organisation
16:20 – 17:05 Speaker: Brendan Tierney, Oracle ACE Director:
Advanced Analytics, Mining Gold
17:05 – 17:30 Speaker: Toby Price, Claremont Capability Lead:
Lassoing Eels / Accelerating Benefits
17:30 Close
About the Speakers

Dai Clegg, Research Analyst.
Dai’s research is focused on the application of data analytics to real-world problems. This includes analytic techniques and approaches, from simple aggregations to machine learning, on data at rest and in motion. Dai has worked at large and small technology organisations, including Oracle for many years and IBM and is known to be a charismatic presenter and communicator.

Mike Hallett, Alliances and Channels Director - Business Intelligence & Enterprise Performance Management, Oracle.
Mike drives business development programmes to recruit and enable Partners to resell and implement Oracle solutions in the Business Intelligence & Enterprise Performance Management market in Europe and Middle East, Africa. He has worked with Oracle for 20 years in a variety of roles.

Amy Balmain, formerly Application Architect at John Lewis Partnership and now Business Data Modeller at a Central Government department will be talking about her experiences as a client with Oracle’s BI tools – the pros and cons and the impact on the organisation. Amy has over 18 years of experience in the sector and has presented at a number of conferences. She is interested in the development of good measures, self-service BI for a better informed business and why Agile methods are particularly well suited to BI.

Brendan Tierney, Oracle ACE Director (Oracle Advanced Analytics Option), Data Mining & Data Warehousing.
Brendan lectures on Data Mining at the Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland. He has 21+ years of extensive experience working in the areas of Data Mining and Data Warehousing. He has worked on projects in Ireland, UK, Belgium and USA. Brendan is the editor of the UKOUG Oracle Scene magazine and deputy chair of the OUG Ireland BI SIG. Brendan is a regular speaker at conferences across Europe and the USA.

Toby Price, Analytics Capability Lead, Claremont.
Toby has worked in the Oracle domain for nearly 30 years and has extensive experience with Oracle Analytics, implementing with clients such as Network Rail. He has worked with a number of UK Analytics and E-Business Suite partners and talks strategically at executive level. He is well-known in the Analytics community both inside and outside Oracle and presents regularly at conferences, including UKOUG and Openworld.

Julian Ford, Oracle HCM & Payroll Specialist, Claremont.
Julian has unique experience of working in all areas of the Oracle HCM product set. Having spent many years developing the Payroll product at Oracle, he then moved to Oracle Consulting to implement the E-Business Suite at many leading organisations; performing healthchecks and advising on HCM system strategy. He now specialises in helping clients make the most from their Oracle investments and heads the HCM business development team at Claremont.

Location

Lassoing Eels - Building a Coordinated Oracle Reporting Strategy

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 14:42:22 GMT

Why is it so hard to pull all the Oracle reporting (and non-Oracle) tools together and use them in a coordinated way across all user and organisational requirements?

I would suggest there are four competing forces challenging the IT department, as it tries to unscramble reporting:

Visual/people requirements.

Business architecture.

Technology options.

Investment model.

These forces then lead to the following disconnects:

Can’t ask for investment without understanding what is possible.

Can’t deliver trust without a common understanding.

Can’t get a common understanding with pictures alone.

Must involve the users for buy-in but they need to understand context.

Hard to build a POC and a strategic platform.

-

Ok, so...

Your CIO has just had a visit from Oracle and says that we must implement Exalytics and BI Applications and that he has been told it’s a simple installation.

How much is it going to cost?

When can we be live?

Key users in the strategic planning office have just seen a demo of Tableau or similar and know this is the right solution. They’ve told us we just need a server and we can be up and running. When can we have a server?

We have so many reporting solutions, no one knows which answers to believe! We really need to get a grip!

We’ve spent how much on that Data Warehouse (DW)? You are just going to have to do what you can with this money, otherwise we will need to make some IT staff redundant to pay for this.

It’s key to understand the momentum in your organisation before seeking funds to start a new work package.

Business Architecture – some of you will have come across The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) an appallingly named approach to business design that is really pretty useful – our Enterprise Architects (EAs if we have them) are busy modelling the business and information architectures of the organisation. How do we align what we are doing with their perspectives? Can two projects run in parallel?

And Oracle doesn’t make it easy either.

Given you will have a number of Oracle and partner salespeople on your doorstep selling you the virtues of each, where do you begin?

Should you invest a significant sum for prebuilt content, or can you install Endeca and be up and running in a few hours?

And then there are all the non-Oracle products like EIS and Insight Software, Qlikview and Tableau.

-

Visual/people requirements. Users want reports in minutes. They have seen the demos from Tableau, so they know it's ‘really easy’!

They want them on mobile devices.

Different users want exactly what they had before that they trust and don’t need to do any work to (no filters and slicing – "just give me the numbers I need in a Spreadsheet".

A 3rd group wants to play with data, from both inside and outside the organisation. They’re often a bit technical but they certainly want to uncover interesting new insights. They may be used to complicated predictive modelling or forecasting cubes. Should we force them all down one route for consistency and to cut down on the excel cottage industry, or is there a way we can retain some control and governance, yet still give them what they need to do their jobs?

Technology options. I’ve already listed a myriad of Oracle reporting options and then add in all those non-Oracle options that are used, or liked by your people, and you can see where the title evolved from. How can we control the deployment of the many technology options? How can we visually demonstrate the possible, so people can be inspired, while at the same time managing expectations?

Understand where everything fits together. Research the actual (not perceived costs) including:

Implementation.

Configuration.

Training.

Skills transfer.

-

Where does Cloud Analytics fit?

It's new to market but looks like a good way to start. It's without the fuss of installations and management. It doesn’t include certain elements like BIP, Maps, Essbase and Smartview (Excel) but definitely includes Mobile.

Discoverer is in the departure lounge, but beware the Operating System. Take a look at options for migrating to OBI, it may not be as hard or expensive as you think!

Engineered systems don’t really fit within a user dimension (aside from being fast – always good).

Sometimes the only option you have is to mix and match your reporting tools, usually because you already have some tools in use. Work with what you have; build a coordinated strategy; know strengths and weaknesses; create a timeline to move to a consistent and coordinated environment.

Investment model. Most (perhaps all) organisations say they want better reporting, but it can be very hard persuading a Financial Director of the value of a new investment. Most of this is down to past failures, where reporting projects promised so much and delivered so little. Some of it is down to the constant demand for data, which means there is no time left to think about the data.

What can we do to break the cycle and encourage appropriate investment?

“The need for analytics does not match most organisations’ skill requirements; vendor hype for cloud-based BI is not reflected in revenue and customer adoption; and there is a struggle between centralised and decentralised organisational models of BI delivery.”
Gartner, 2012

What I am suggesting here is not a formal methodology, rather an accumulation of experience and slightly left-field thinking.

I recently heard that a thought leader sometimes needs to dance on his (or her own) for a long time before people join in. Maybe I’m dancing now?

There is no getting away from the need for a solid information architecture. Anyone who has heard me speak in the last couple of years, will know this as my mantra. I do not believe it is possible to deliver a good analytics solution without understanding not only what the business data means, but also where is owned, stored and manipulated.

EAs are often accused of delivering only pictures, and there is a danger, hence we need to build a plan that includes the other 3 dimensions.

Determining the distinct end user communities and speaking to them about their visualisation requirements at a high level will help to formulate a visualisation requirements plan.

Understanding the technology options...

...may be the next step? Definitely before asking for the users' detailed requirements. A series of demonstrations of what might be possible with different options to different user communities.

It is worth explaining the different economic scales for instance between OBI and BI Applications. For the prebuilt BI Apps, don’t demo out of the box! Demonstrate against your data! It will make a big difference to the users. Your partner should be able to do this with around 5 days investment, so not a big ask in the scheme of things.

Next, you need to drill into more detail with the business users about their requirements. Now they have seen the software options. This will determine the scope of their needs and will, in turn, inform the business case on build versus buy.

Taking the case to the decision-makers is the next step, and it is vital to show them what they are getting, with options and phasing. Also, it is important to show them what happens if they don’t go down the strategic route. It may be teaching some of your grannies, but surprising how often reporting does not get to the top table.

You could take two routes from here.

My preferred route would be to build and deploy near-vanilla prebuilt apps, perhaps including Hyperion, as this is the fastest way to business value. If you are brave, and if you have the executive buy-in, buy the Oracle prebuilt apps across the board, so that you have a strong, fully supported and growing platform (with Oracle’s own investment) across your entire organisational spectrum.

Even if you don’t have Oracle apps in some areas, it is much easier to repurpose ETL from a non-Oracle source app, than to build a BI App from scratch if the scope warrants that. Remember that the cost to build out a reasonably thorough Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) Data Warehouse (DW) from Oracle (or non-Oracle) apps could be significant.

One university I have worked with has taken around two years to deploy a reasonably simple custom OBI solution and that’s not down to the skills of the developers.

Ask the users using the solution what bits they would like to extend as a Phase 2 activity. You won’t be able to retire all old reports until P2 has been completed. This is the approach Network Rail took.

An alternative approach, should the business benefits of prebuilt analytics not stack up, would be to design from scratch. To do this DON’T start by designing a data warehouse. Make sure you already have an information arch and then model that as a DW. This will ensure you have full traceability back to the end users. Then you can unleash the DW specialists, who can work with vanilla OBI, to build out a structured DW with a solid presentation layer.

Either way, you get as fast as practical to a part-complete BI solution, with prioritised requirements and timeboxed agile delivery.

Where there is no natural fit between the end users needs and the OBI outputs, for instance with information discovery or predictive analytics, consider the ‘edge’ BI products in the Oracle stack or indeed non-Oracle products.

Where you already have for instance Tableau licences, don’t necessarily throw it away - instead point it at the DW, rather than the individual datasets it would currently use. That way the users keep their beloved tool, but the organisation can still implement a strategic platform.

How easy is that?

Not very, clearly! Get some advice from people who understand projects, not just technology. Don’t underestimate change management; get users involved as early as you can; manage expectations; train frequently whether in classrooms or with easy to use self-study such as UPK; test how people are using the solution continually and keep evolving! As soon as the investment dries up, the solution is bound to fall, over time, into disrepair. But if you’re happy to throw investment into managing your source systems, why not into your reporting systems?

Conclusion

Deploy under the radar and then ask - "What can't you do?"

Get an understanding, in context, of any prebuilt content - 5 days Proof Of Concept.

Don't believe all the hype, see for yourself!

Build for 'perpetual beta', productionise with a business case.

Drive for strategy, deploy in stages.

Toby Price

RMAN Recovery without a Catalog

Mon, 15 Dec 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Normally recovering an Oracle database is a pretty straight forward affair these days when using RMAN, however, what about when you want to recover or clone a copy of a database to a previous date/time when you’re not using a recovery catalog?

A requirement arose recently whereby we needed to duplicate a LIVE database to a point in time that was several days older than the details held in RMAN. Issuing the usual duplicate commands with the “until time” values results in error, as shown below;

RMAN-00571: ========================================================= RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ============== RMAN-00571: ========================================================= RMAN-03002: failure of Duplicate Db command at 30/09/2014 20:10:07 RMAN-05501: aborting duplication of target database RMAN-03015: error occurred in stored script Memory Script RMAN-06026: some targets not found - aborting restore RMAN-06024: no backup or copy of the control file found to restore

The obvious thing to do here is check that a control file for the time and date required for recovery exists in the FRA (Flash Recovery Area), if it doesn’t then restoring it from a previous tape backup along with any necessary archivelogs is required.

So having recovered the necessary controlfile and archivelogs, we try the command again; this results in the exact same error.

One thing you can do is check if the RMAN catalog is aware of the controlfile, so using the command below results in ;

RMAN> list backup of controlfile completed before '30-SEP-2014'; Specification does not match any backup in the repository

This suggests RMAN has nothing in its catalog for the date required, even though you know there is a controlfile there for the correct date/time required.

You can make RMAN read the contents of the FRA and reload into its catalog, using the command;

RMAN> catalog recovery area ;

or

RMAN> catalog controfilecopy ‘<full path and filename>’ ;

Both of these commands will be successful, however, when you try and issue the list backup command again, you get the same message ;

RMAN> list backup of controlfile completed before '30-SEP-2014'; Specification does not match any backup in the repository

So what’s the answer? Well to affect a successful recovery you need to remove any reference to the source database catalog, so on the machine you want to create the new environment/clonetarget machine, complete the following steps;

Step 1

Start up the target environment in a state ready to be duplicated, so we started up the instance using a predefined init.ora file as shown below;

startup nomount pfile=/app/db/tech_st/11.2.0.4/dbs/duplicatedb.ora

The “pfile” should include the “db_file_name_convert” and “db_log_file_name_convert” variables and be set correctly.

Step 2

Next we need to login to “RMAN” but only connect to the auxiliary database, so use the command;

rman auxiliary /

Step 3

Next we run the duplicate command, but specify where it should find the backups and what time we want it restoring back to duplicate database to NEWDB until time "to_date('2014-09-30:03:50:00','YYYY-MM-DD:hh24:mi:ss')" backup location '/backup/fast_recovery_area/DBLIVE'; We picked 3.50am here since the controlfile backup timestamp was 3.49, so 1 minute later RMAN will then start restoring controlfiles and mounting as normal;

Starting restore at 03-OCT-14 allocated channel: ORA_AUX_DISK_1 channel ORA_AUX_DISK_1: SID=506 device type=DISK channel ORA_AUX_DISK_1: restoring control file channel ORA_AUX_DISK_1: restore complete, elapsed time: 00:00:01 output file name=/oradata/DBLIVE/control01.dbf output file name=/redo1/DBLIVE/control02.dbf output file name=/redo2/DBLIVE/control03.dbf Finished restore at 03-OCT-14 database mounted

RMAN will then continue as any other duplicate/restore situation:

channel ORA_AUX_DISK_8: reading from backup piece /backup/fast_recovery_area/DBLIVE/backupset/2014_09_30/o1_mf_nnnd0_FULL_b049k9fq_.bkp channel ORA_AUX_DISK_9: starting datafile backup set restore channel ORA_AUX_DISK_9: specifying datafile(s) to restore from backup set channel ORA_AUX_DISK_9: restoring datafile 00009 to /oradata/NEWDB/odm.dbf channel ORA_AUX_DISK_9: restoring datafile 00010 to /oradata/NEWDB/olap.dbf channel ORA_AUX_DISK_9: restoring datafile 00017 to /oradata/NEWDB/a_int02.dbf channel ORA_AUX_DISK_9: restoring datafile 00024 to /oradata/NEWDB/undotbs2_1.dbf channel ORA_AUX_DISK_9: restoring datafile 00032 to /oradata/NEWDB/a_txn_data10.dbf

So in conclusion, it seems that RMAN whilst using a controlfile rather than a specific catalog, will only store records of the most recent controlfile backup and we have to be more explicit when running a restore to a point in time before that most recent controlfile backup.

Patrick Hopkins joins Claremont!

Mon, 1 Dec 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Today, we are delighted to welcome Patrick Hopkins into the Claremont family as ERP Capability Lead. He was the Financials Lead on the very first UK Cloud ERP and SCM implementation (R7) which culminated in a successful go-live earlier this year.

Patrick joins us from Oracle Consulting Services and brings with him extensive Oracle Financials experience from 10.7SC through to R12 and Fusion, spanning a number of complex implementations in both public and private sector industries.

In his new role, Patrick will help drive our Oracle ERP Cloud capability forwards, enabling us to help customers on their journey to Fusion Applications. We are delighted to have Patrick on board to join our IIP Gold award winning team!

Patrick will be at the UKOUG Apps14 Conference with the Claremont team from December 8th.

GOLD - We've done it again!

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 10:39:30 GMT

Three years after Claremont achieved the Investors in People (IIP) Gold accreditation, we’ve just been awarded it again!

IIP is a national benchmark of best practice in good business and people management excellence, with employers being independently assessed. IIP International operates in more than 70 countries across the globe.

The assessment involves interviews with a cross section of employees from the company, at all levels. To achieve Gold, in addition to the 39 evidence requirements which need to be achieved to meet the IIP standard, a minimum of a further 165 evidence requirements must be achieved.

According to the assessment criteria, “Gold represents the achievement of world class best practice. It shows a truly cutting-edge organisation, operating at the very highest levels of people management practice and using Investors in People to drive the business forward.”

Graeme Mills, IIP specialist and assessor said,

“By retaining their Gold Award for Investors in People, Claremont has demonstrated a culture of high performance and continual improvement. The Gold Award is an aspiration for many businesses and to achieve it with consecutive reviews marks Claremont as an outstanding Investor in People.”

Mark Vivian, MD of Claremont said,

“This really is fantastic news for us! IIP is an industry recognised standard that demonstrates our commitment to employee development. We set the bar extremely high for ourselves when we secured a Gold accreditation three years ago having never before applied for the standard. We’ve been in a period of continuous evolution since we received that accreditation. I’m absolutely delighted for the team!”

Patching and Customisations in Oracle eBusiness Suite Release 12

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 13:59:39 GMT

The ability to easily customise the standard functionality in Oracle eBusiness Suite to suit individual business requirements is one of the product’s more appealing features.

But what happens to that customisation when you need to apply a patch to fix a bug, or as part of general proactive maintenance, part of an upgrade project, or to obtain the latest legislative or tax changes?

Oracle have made a number of significant improvements in eBusiness Suite so that customisations can be automatically preserved through upgrade or patches (for example through Personalisations) but sometimes the only way to make the system work in a way that a business demands is through a direct change to one of the standard Oracle files or database objects (“customisation by modification”). In that case there is always the risk that the customisation will be lost if a patch comes along that delivers a new version of the file which overwrites the customised version; or perhaps the customised version was taken as a copy of the standard object (“customisation by extension”) – in that case the customisation will not be lost, but it will be based on an older, potentially obsolete, version of the standard Oracle code that will not contain any new bug fixes delivered by the new version.

What we really need is to have a tool which will tell us before we apply a patch whether any of the files that we have directly customised or copied and changed will be updated; that way we will know before testing of the patch starts whether any re-development work is required

In Release 12, Oracle Applications Manager has features which – after a bit of initial setup – can do just that

In 11i, customisations could be recorded in a file called applcust.txt and adpatch could be run in “preinstall” mode to assess whether any of these files were going to be overwritten, but this functionality is deprecated in Release 12 and no longer works

This article will detail the steps required to implement this functionality in R12, with some ‘real-world’ hints and tops along the way!

Identify customisations

This is probably the hardest part of the process.

In an ideal world, there will be documentation in place on any piece of standard Oracle code which has been customised, including the name and path of the file and details of what the customisation actually is.

In practice, however, there will be some customisations which are not documented – perhaps the project team that delivered the changes are no longer in the picture, or an emergency fix was rushed through, or a new supplier is running the system as a managed service and the previous incumbent did not provide these details. In this case DBAs, developers and business users will need to work together to try to identify what areas of standard code have been amended, or copied and changed. There may be some which fall through the cracks and which only come to light at a later point, so this may be an iterative process.

With a lack of documentation this can be particularly difficult for those files which have been customised by modification, since the file names and version numbers will be identical to those delivered by Oracle as standard and the only way to identify such customisations is through ‘business memory’ (a user remembers a change being made at some point in the past) or an onerous process of looking for developer comments in database objects.

It is also important that after the initial analysis is completed, that any future development code work is flagged up so that it can be included in the list of customised code.

Any purely bespoke code does not need to be included in this process – any custom code developed from scratch will by definition not be impacted by a standard Oracle eBusiness Suite patch; all we need to know about are the Oracle-supplied files which have been directly changed, or which have been copied and enhanced

Sometimes it is possible to say that a particular object has been changed, but it is not always obvious what physical file on the $APPL_TOP installs that object, and we need to know this file name for the next stage.

•   For a Report or a Form, it’s usually pretty easy – the name of the file will contain the short name of the product, RDF files are always held in <$PRODUCT_TOP>/reports/<language> and FMB/PLL files are always held in $AU_TOP
For example, I if have customised Report PAXTRTRX.rdf and I am using default American/America as a language, then the full file name is $PA_TOP/reports/US/PAXTRTRX.rdf

•   For database packages, procedures and functions can be a little more complicated, but usually the definition of the object in the database will include the file header and the source file will be found in <PRODUCT_TOP>/patch/115/admin/sql
For example, if I have customised PL/SQL package POR_CUSTOM_PKG then the full file name is $POR_TOP/patch/115/sql/PORCUSTB.pls

•   For tables, views, triggers and sequences, the definition of the object in the database will usually not include the file header, and the name of file which installs the object will often bear no relation to the actual object name. In this case, the only way to find the file is to go looking for it – the object name will contain the short name of the product and the installation file will normally be included in <PRODUCT_TOP>/patch/115/admin/odf.

For example: I have customised view PA_COMMITMENTS_V but need to find the file that installs this object
1)   Go to $PA_TOP
2)   Run command find . -type f -exec grep -il "PA_COMMITMENTS_V" {} \;
3)   This tells me that the file that installs this view is $PA_TOP/patch/115/odf/pav1342.odf

•   For Workflows, the source files are in <$PRODUCT_TOP>/115/import/<language>
For example, I have customised the “AP Invoice Approval” but need to find the file that installs this Workflow

1)   Go to $AP_TOP
2)   Run command find . -type f -exec grep -il " AP Invoice Approval" {} \;
3)   This tells me that the file that installs this Workflow is $AP_TOP/patch/115/import/US/apfhanwf.wft

Register Customisations

We should now have a list of all of the standard Oracle files that have been modified (or at least a list based on best endeavours should documentation be lacking!)
The next step is to make the eBusiness Suite application aware of this list – this is done with the Register Flagged Files function in OAM

The following detailed steps are based on a 12.1.3 environment

1)   Logon to eBusiness Suite with the System Administrator responsibility

2)   Navigate to Oracle Applications Manager > Workflow

3)   Click Site Map

4)   Click the Maintenance tab

5)   Click the link for Register Flagged Files

6)   Click Add

7)   In the filter condition, change to File Name

8)   Search for the name of the standard Oracle object which has been customised and click Go e.g. in this example

•   If a file is listed in multiple paths, always choose the one in the patch directory since this is the one that a patch will always update

•   If a file is listed in a language sub-directory (e.g. US), always choose that one rather than the one a level above, since this is the one that a patch will always update. For a multi-language environment, choose all files which have been customised for each territory

•   If a file is listed as an apparent duplicate (same file name, same path) then select *both* (this is because in the AD_FILES table there will be one row for the product name in lower-case and another with the product name in upper-case and both are needed for the next stage to work correctly!)

Example when searching for PAAPINVW.wft; in this case we would choose the second record

9)   Select the checkbox next to the customised file
Click Apply

10)   Enter some meaningful details in the comment section – such as the package name, Workflow name and the customer reference for the customisation

11)   Repeat for all customised files

Patch Analysis

Once all customised code has been registered in the application, you can then perform an analysis of any future patches to see if it will deliver a new version of that file
This step requires no downtime

1)   Logon to eBusiness Suite with the System Administrator responsibility

2)   Navigate to Oracle Applications Manager > Workflow

3)   Click Setup in the top-right

4)   Choose My Oracle Support Credentials in the top-left

5)   Verify that the My Oracle Support login details are correct

6)   Click Site Map

7)   Click the Maintenance tab

8)   Click Patch Wizard

9)   Click the Tasks button on the line for Patch Wizard Preferences

10)   Specify a patch stage location on the server

11)   Click the Tasks button for Recommend/Analyze Patches

12)   Select the Analyse Specific Patches button and paste in the patch number

13)   Click Ok and OK

14)   The Patch Wizard will then download the patch to the designated staging area given above if not already present and then analyse it. If there is no internet access on the server, then the patch can be downloaded manually from My Oracle Support and placed in the expected directory
a.   Applications DBA (AD) patches should be copied to <STAGE_TOP>/ad
b.   Patches for any other product should be copied to <STAGE_TOP>/nonad

15)   Progress can be monitored by clicking on the Job Status button in the Recommend/Analyze Patches line

16)   It will start as Running/Paused while it runs the child requests of the job and will eventually go to Completed. The larger the patch, the longer this process will take but generally only takes a few minutes

17)   To view the results when complete go to the main Patch Wizard page and click the Details button on the appropriate patch line at the bottom of the page e.g.

18)   Then click the Impact button

19)   To see what customised files the patch will overwrite click the number next to the Flagged Filed Changed line

Now we know what customised standard code that the patch will impact, and we can line up developers to see what to do about it - whether the customisation should be re-applied on top of the new version of the standard code, or perhaps the customisation is now obsolete if new functionality delivered by the patch supersedes it

But the point is that we can make sure that the customisation is ‘fixed’ as a post-patch step before handing the system over to the users for testing and proactively avoids a defect being raised as a result of the patch being applied which can negatively impact business confidence in that patch

References

Some useful Oracle Notes on My Oracle Support and on the web:

•   Patching Best Practices And Reducing Downtime (Doc ID 225165.1)
•   Oracle E-Business Suite Patching FAQ for Release 11i and Release 12 (Doc ID 1325930.1)
•   Oracle Applications Patching Procedures - http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B34956_01/current/acrobat/oa_patching_r12.pdf
•   Adpatch Doesn't Report Customized Seeded Oracle Files In R12 (Doc ID 1532347.1)
•   R12 : Register Flagged Files tool , Autopatch Does Not Review Ad_files Table To Check Customizations, Why ? .Is this "applcust.txt" still be used in R12? (Doc ID 1330615.1)
•   Flagged File are not recognized by Patch Wizard (Doc ID 1616392.1)
•   Patchwizard - Analyze Specific Patches Fails In 12.1.3 (Doc ID 1352605.1)

K.Behan
Nov 2014

Part 2 - Oracle's own solution for Cloud Analytics

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Following on from my blog about Cloud Analytics generally, it might be helpful to understand a little more about Oracle’s plans. Oracle has thrown all its eggs in the Cloud basket in the last 2 years, so a strategy for Analytics in the Cloud was always approaching.

Its early attempts were clumsy. A customer implementing Fusion (Cloud) HCM could purchase HCM Cloud Analytics (based on Oracle Business Intelligence [OBI] and OBI Applications), but would have little control over the Cloud Analytics environment. For instance, a user could change reports in Answers and could change Dashboards, but they could not change the way a metric was calculated in the OBI repository. Introducing new data sources and additional user-defined fields from Fusion HCM could also be very awkward. Customers using On Demand services rarely went beyond operational reporting within the On Demand service.

Oracle has recently introduced Hyperion Planning and Budgeting in the Cloud (PBCS) and is now looking to extend this to broader BI initiatives. Oracle does intend to release a version of OBI Applications which is more flexible for organisations, but has not set a date yet.

In the meantime, Oracle has released Business Intelligence Cloud Service (BICS) - https://cloud.oracle.com/business_intelligence. As far as I can glean, the following is true, but there is always change in the air with Oracle!

Although the product uses OBI in the Cloud, as you might expect, it does have a new lighter weight UI with new skin & style called “Skyros”. This skin utilises the database schema and Apex, rather than OBI Answers or BI Dashboards (or BI Mobile Developer). The skin will be supposedly be rolled out in future releases of OBIEE. The BI Administration tool is also replaced and uses an online repository editor providing a reasonably strong subset of the full BI Administration tool functionality. This version will only read data from the connected Oracle Cloud database (Oracle Database Schema Service), which could be a constraint for many organisations. Although you have online access to Answers and Dashboards, you do not have access to Agents, Scorecards, BI Publisher or Essbase.

It is less expensive than buying Oracle BI Foundation, even though you are also buying the management of the tools. The former is listed as c£150 per user per month, making a 50 user licence over 3 years cost £90,000. The equivalent price for OBIEE is approximately £3,000 per user for a perpetual licence. With support costs, the total for 50 users over 3 years would be £210,000, albeit you may have some room for price negotiation. Oracle BI Foundation does also include Essbase, so you may also choose to build a financial case for OBI Enterprise Edition and the Mobile option, which would be closer to £125,000 for 3 years (on a Perpetual basis). It is worth considering the onward costs beyond 3 years, since there is only a support cost for the latter, rather than a subscription cost.

Who will use BICS? Traditional consultancies and large Oracle customers will probably continue to use BI on-premise for some years, while smaller customers may switch to BICS, especially if they have little Oracle expertise in-house. The other market for BICS will be ISVs, who will want to build reporting front-ends for their Cloud applications, to enhance the capabilities and sell more software. They will not be familiar with the OBIEE stack, and this will be much easier for them to maintain and enhance.

Oracle undoubtedly has excellent software on the market – with prebuilt BI Applications, even more so. But it has confused its own BI story again, just when people had started to understand the stack. I would ask Oracle to clarify its positioning with regard to OBI, Endeca, BI Applications and Cloud BI, so that customers can have confidence in the Oracle choices they make, especially as they move towards Cloud Applications.

Toby Price

Cloud Analytics - the story so far...

Wed, 5 Nov 2014 15:33:28 GMT

If you thought that the Hype curve was steep when it comes to Analytics, watch it spike now with Cloud Analytics! The marketeers must be delighted to be able to merge two of the most hyped IT concepts. Now, if only they could bring in a third, like Big Data ….. oh, wait...!

Organisations are beginning to get to grips with Analytics, by taking time to understand their key information before investing heavily in tools. They have learnt lessons from sometimes horrific datawarehousing projects, which have often delivered little at significant cost.

Yet there is still a need to deploy agile solutions to the business, which offer rapid ROI, without either significant capital outlay or long deployment timelines.

Software companies like Qlikview and Tableau have capitalised from this need. They are creditworthy tools and may just have nudged the big players enough to make some smart moves.

Oracle purchased Endeca some time ago and now positions this as a rapid start Analytics tool. IBM promises much with Watson and the messaging coming out of the SAP has changed recently with the introduction and rollout of HANA to many of its ERP and non-ERP customers. Salesforce has also recently made a play, by introducing the imaginatively named Wave, ‘a beautiful user interface designed to make interpreting and using business data easier and more intuitive than ever before’.

So what is the Cloud Analytics story, how will it affect organisations in the near and far-term and where is Oracle playing?

Cloud Analytics is of course described differently by each vendor to suit its own strengths, but essentially boils down to a Cloud-based deployment of Analytics tools, a data warehouse or both. It is typically purchased on a subscription basis, so has a low capital outlay and it is managed by the vendor (or partner), so there is no need to employ expensive technical skills. End users can then have full access to the data, in a way they understand and they can then build and deploy complex reports very quickly.

The downside for organisations could be that:

The tools in the Cloud may be cut down or non-standard versions of the on-premise tools.

There is little evidence yet of this approach working.

An organisation’s data may need to be held in the Cloud, with its consequent security and privacy concerns and

They may have little control about how the data is transformed in the Cloud, for instance adding new fields into the warehouse or changing the way a metric is calculated.

A lack of IT involvement may lead to a lack of governance around the data, as each departmental fiefdom loads and interprets data in its own way.

It is therefore clear that an organisation should consider carefully what it wants to do about Cloud Analytics. There is nothing remarkably new about the technology, so the risk is not great. The subscription model may be attractive, along with the time to deploy. However, much of the proposition can be implemented with existing tools on premise, possibly using a different, more agile approach.

[For more about how Oracle is playing in this area, please see my next blog.]

My feeling is that Analytics will be the very last thing organisations deploy in the Cloud. It contains much of their competitive advantage, it needs to be massaged and manipulated in a way Cloud providers rarely offer and, as business requirements change and visualisation capabilities improve, organisations need the option to utilise different tools against a consistent well designed information model. The promise for Cloud Analytics is clear, but organisations will certainly benefit from evaluating their current state before embarking on a journey with any Analytics tool, let alone Cloud Analytics.

Toby Price

An announcement from Mark Vivian

Thu, 25 Sep 2014 14:02:53 GMT

Dear All,

I’m very excited to be able to announce the launch of our new website today, during 2014, our tenth year in business. The launch also coincides with Oracle Open World, Oracle’s showcase annual conference in San Francisco which begins this weekend.

Until now, Claremont has been a bit of a well-kept secret to many. We’ve developed a new look and feel to our brand; not losing sight of our roots, but confidently stepping out into the light in the marketplace.

Not only does our new website, www.claremont.co.uk, reflect how Claremont has evolved and grown, but we’ve expanded our service line offerings to include Strategy and Hosting, as we’re continuing to listen and develop to meet market demand.

Our service offerings also include Oracle Business Cloud, the deployment of Oracle Fusion Applications. We’re ready to help our customers with this next step in their Oracle enterprise applications journey.

As with any services business, the people delivering those services are the key to its success and we’re bringing our capabilities to the fore. They’re who we are.

Our key messages going forwards are:

We're dedicated to providing better quality, more cost effective and innovative Oracle solutions to our customers.

We have a broad range of capabilities in Oracle E-Business, Fusion Applications and associated technologies, and are therefore best placed to be your trusted Oracle advisors.

We truly live and breathe delivery excellence, and our customers fully back up that claim.

As Managing Director, I’m extremely proud of what we’re achieving; that we are challenging convention and doing things our own way. We’re not following the crowd. We’re leading the field.

Contact us to see how we can help you maximise the value you get from your investment in Oracle technology.

Yours faithfully,

Mark Vivian
Managing Director.

Lucky number 7

Tue, 23 Sep 2014 15:08:28 GMT

This month we had our monthly service review with one of our largest Managed Services customers. They operate one of the UK’s largest and most complex Oracle E-Business Suite R12 systems and Claremont provides the hosting and support services.

These monthly service review meetings do just that, and give our customers a forum for discussion and feedback about how we perform against their requirements. They are also an important part of our forward planning with customers.

During these meetings, the customer completes a short survey of questions and ranks us from 1 – 7 (1 low – 7 high) on a range of elements: incident management, proactive support, change management, system stewardship (an overall look at the service we deliver), communications and value for money. This feedback is vital for understanding customers’ views on the quality of our delivery and provides far more insight than can be gained from service statistics such as SLA compliance.

For this customer, August is a crucial time of the year because it is one of their peak trading seasons and the business cannot afford any system performance or availability issues as it affects their customers directly. However, when Claremont took-on this service, the system had been dogged by numerous performance issues and other incidents. After significant effort from our Oracle E-Business Suite DBAs to stabilise and tune the system and improve systems management, August saw the fewest number of support issues of any month. Not only have incident numbers continued to fall but there are now no open performance incidents or problem records, both of which reflect the effectiveness and value of our problem management approach.

During this review, the customer, who had previously been adamant that on principle they would never give top marks, gave us 4 perfect 7s out of 6 questions and requested that we INCREASE one score to reflect that we’re even better than we think we are! Even where we didn’t score a 7 we were awarded 6.5 so our quality is consistent across the service.

Managed Services Director, Jonathan Stuart, commented,

“We are delighted to continue to go above and beyond customer expectation and receive such positive feedback during a monthly review. Our star is continuing to rise in the market, and we are very proud of the hard work and dedication of the Managed Services team.”

Click here to find out about our Managed Services

Doing the basics (well) makes a big difference

Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:00:00 GMT

I’m going to start this story with a confession, this happened nearly two years ago. The reason we didn’t make a song and dance about this at the time is: this is just what we do; we’re presented with a problem, have a think about it for a bit, come up with a solution and move on to the next one. It wasn’t until recently that I was thinking about this particular assignment on a return trip to the same client and it occurred to me that doing a bit of thinking, executing the basics really well and checking your results really makes a difference.

And if you think all this sounds a bit nebulous, you’d be right so let me tell you what happened.

Claremont had placed a team of five consultants on-site with this client to augment their current support resources. The current resources in question being a mixture of their own staff, local contractors and a team from their (then) hosting partner. Members of the team would individually pick up defects from the HPQC system, work on them, submit them to the test team and move on. Fairly bog-standard support work really.

One of my colleagues and I had started to notice a number of defects around the production of letters (this client prints and sends thousands of letters each day to its customers). Letters were created using BI Publisher and sent to a 3rd party printing facility. We searched HPQC for similar issues and collected them all together (oddly enough, people didn’t seem to mind us taking defects off of their plates). The number wasn’t huge but it presented enough of a problem that the client didn’t have enough confidence to print these letters and send them straight out of the door. Instead it was the job of six people to check the content of these letters before they were posted (did I mention they print thousands of these things every day? Good). Some of these letters contained bank account information so they were right to be concerned about them.
So having collected the problems together, gone and had a chat with the support staff who deal with the letters to sort out priorities, we got down to fixing the issues. This in itself was not difficult (we are talking about doing the basics well here folks), however pulling these problems together and dealing with them together made the difference. One by one the issues disappeared and so did the people who checked the letters eventually. I’m told they’re doing something a bit more interesting elsewhere in the organisation (we didn’t get them cast out onto the street or anything like that).

The point is (and this is what occurred to me recently) we just thought about the problem slightly differently, worked out the scale of the problem, did some decent fixing and testing and things got better.

It really isn’t rocket science. A bit of head-scratching time, work out what you’re really looking at and get on with it. It’s just what we do.

And I must remember to make more noise about that in future.

Michael Lane, Managing Consultant

Back to School RUP

Mon, 1 Sep 2014 09:41:41 GMT

The summer holidays are drawing to a close and it’s back to school for those of you with E-Business HCM/Payroll. This term we tend to focus on planning and applying the annual Oracle HCM roll-up patch!

RUP 7 for release 12.1 was released by Oracle at the end of May 2014 and as ever contains a series of bug fixes, legislative changes and some real functional innovation.

Oracle continues to listen to client requirements and enhance the current applications whilst also developing the next generation Fusion applications. (The HCM Cloud has quarterly major release cycles so being efficient in planning, testing and uptake of enhancements is a key requirement for us Managed Service providers) Back in E-Business, the lifetime support policy provides extended support for 12.1 until December 2019 and 12.2 until September 2021.

A couple of my personal favourites from this RUP are the Payroll Dashboard which I can see adding real value to Payroll Managers; and the Self Service Transaction Monitor which will hopefully end the rummaging around in Workflow Status Monitor to determine exactly where a particular workflow or approval has got to.

The Payroll Dashboard

The Payroll Dashboard consists of two core components Payroll Readiness and Process Monitor.

Process Monitor enables a user to monitor the progress of payroll related process, rollback and retry payroll processes, review assignments in error and payroll messages, it also provides a graphical representation of the number of processes completed, a handy one-stop shop to see where you are in the payroll cycle.

Payroll Readiness enables an administrator to define a series of pre-payroll checks that can be validated prior to running the payroll. These checks could be against particular pre-requisite payroll processes e.g. BEE, OTL time Transfer or Retro a set of concurrent request or a specifically defined custom validation function. This area also provides a quick glance area to monitor assignment statuses.

Self Service Transaction Monitor

The Transaction Monitor feature enables HR professionals, managers and employees to view details of all pending or completed transactions. They can navigate to the details page of the transaction to view approval history, comments and attachments.

As the list of all self-service transactions is available on a single-page, users can efficiently track the status of their transactions.

A busy term for us will see us roll both these features to our client-base, as well as some usability enhancement work, mobile applications and some HCM Cloud to E-Business Financials integration. As ever, a busy time, but hopefully I’ll get an update on some of these great new features in half-term.

Author: Adrian Biddulph

If you would like further information, or a copy of our impact assessment, please get in touch

If you would like further details about our Future of Payroll event on the 2nd October, please click here

Configuring Huge Pages For Databases on Oracle Linux

Fri, 29 Aug 2014 09:00:00 GMT

What are huge pages anyway?

To answer this question we can take the dictionary definition (well, Wikipedia!) for a memory page:

“A page, memory page, or virtual page is a fixed-length contiguous block of virtual memory, described by a single entry in the page table. It is the smallest unit of data for memory allocation performed by the operating system on behalf of a program, and for transfers between the main memory and any other auxiliary store, such as a hard disk drive.”

And so what is a “huge page” – well, it’s a page…. that is huge.

By default, when a database is allocated memory within which to store its SGA (System Global Area) Oracle Linux will chop up the allocated memory (or RAM) into a bunch of 4k pages. So if we think of a pretty ordinary database with a 4Gb SGA, we’re talking 1048756 individual pages – the problem being that the Linux kernel has to do some legwork in managing and maintain each page as memory is written and read.

In addition to this, linux will store a “page table” – that is used similar to a database index to rapidly access the required memory pages. The larger the number of pages we have, the more memory this page table will require to store a record for each page, and similarly the longer it will take to sift through the list of pages to find the one we want.

When configuring huge pages, the page size jumps from 4k up to 2Mb (and can be configured up to 1Gb if the hardware is capable, but let’s take 2Mb here as an example). This means that our 4Gb SGA is now comprised of only 2048 individual pages – clearly less work for the linux kernel to do!

In addition to this, the way linux handles huge pages means that they are “pinned” into the server memory, so under load the database SGA will never be “aged out” so any swapping activity on the server should have a minimal impact on the database itself.

Great! So how do I set it up?

Well, fortunately Oracle provide a handy script (search for hugepages_setting.sh) that can be used to work out what huge pages settings you have, so let’s start here:

#!/bin/bash
#
# hugepages_settings.sh
#
# Linux bash script to compute values for the
# recommended HugePages/HugeTLB configuration
#
# Note: This script does calculation for all shared memory
# segments available when the script is run, no matter it
# is an Oracle RDBMS shared memory segment or not.
# Check for the kernel version
KERN=`uname -r | awk -F. '{ printf("%d.%d\n",$1,$2); }'`
# Find out the HugePage size
HPG_SZ=`grep Hugepagesize /proc/meminfo | awk {'print $2'}`
# Start from 1 pages to be on the safe side and guarantee 1 free HugePage
NUM_PG=1
# Cumulative number of pages required to handle the running shared memory segments
for SEG_BYTES in `ipcs -m | awk {'print $5'} | grep "[0-9][0-9]*"`
do
   MIN_PG=`echo "$SEG_BYTES/($HPG_SZ*1024)" | bc -q`
   if [ $MIN_PG -gt 0 ]; then
      NUM_PG=`echo "$NUM_PG+$MIN_PG+1" | bc -q`
   fi
done
# Finish with results
case $KERN in
   '2.4') HUGETLB_POOL=`echo "$NUM_PG*$HPG_SZ/1024" | bc -q`;
          echo "Recommended setting: vm.hugetlb_pool = $HUGETLB_POOL" ;;
   '2.6' | '3.8') echo "Recommended setting: vm.nr_hugepages = $NUM_PG" ;;
    *) echo "Unrecognized kernel version $KERN. Exiting." ;;
esac
# End

So, we take this script and run it against our system with all the oracle services running:

[root@claremont~]# ./hugepages_settings.sh
Recommended setting: vm.nr_hugepages = 64006

So we should do as it says and configure 64006 huge pages in order to store the current memory requirements of the system in huge pages. This is set by adding an additional line “vm.nr_hugepages=64006” to the /etc/sysctl.conf file and flushing the config through by running “sysctl –p”.

At this point we will see that the huge pages have been configured ready for use but are not actually being used. This is because we need to configure the memory limits on the server to allow for their use and also bounce the database so that it can detect that huge pages are there to be used. So first we update /etc/security/limits.conf to add the following:

* soft memlock 131084288
* hard memlock 131084288

The value here can be set to any amount up to the maximum available memory on the server, but as a minimum must be set to the size of memory that your huge pages configuration will use – ie, number of huge pages multiplied by huge page size – in this case 64006*2048. Next we bounce the database so that it can make use of the huge pages and now we can verify that huge pages are actually in use (ie the number of free pages is fewer than the total number of pages!) with:

[root@claremont ~]# cat /proc/meminfo | grep Huge
HugePages_Total: 64006
HugePages_Free: 1548
HugePages_Rsvd: 1538
HugePages_Surp: 0
Hugepagesize: 2048 kB

Is that it?

Well, not entirely… there are some other things to consider:

If there are insufficient huge pages to house the entire Oracle SGA, Oracle will not use ANY huge pages at all. This can be combatted by setting the database parameter “use_large_pages=only” – with this parameter set, the database will fail to start up if it is unable to allocate huge pages.

You cannot use AMM (ie, MEMORY_TARGET) with huge pages – you are limited to the use of SGA_TARGET

Linux 6 variants use “Transparent Huge pages” which is a mechanism of allocating huge pages at runtime rather than pre-allocating at system boot (and hence reserving them) – Oracle is unable to make good use of this and suffers performance issues – so transparent huge pages should be disabled in a Linux 6 environment (see MOS note 1557478.1 for more details)

If you modify the “memory landscape” on the server – the SGA size or the total amount of memory available to the server (quite common in a virtual environment) – you will need to recalculate and reconfigure huge pages – a recent scenario on a customer system saw us reduce the memory allocation to a virtual machine, leaving huge pages at their existing setting meant that the server reserved a large portion of the memory for huge pages, leaving very little for non-huge pages processes (eg application tiers) – this caused large amounts of swapping activity and severe performance issues.

By Mike Sowerbutts

HCM - When Experience Counts

Fri, 1 Aug 2014 12:10:15 GMT

We’ve recently resolved a couple of HCM issues for our clients that we think really demonstrate why experience counts when it comes to managed services.

With our wealth of HCM / Payroll expertise and superior technical capabilities, underpinned by a pedigree for Managed Services delivery, our Support team are able to leverage years of experience working within the Oracle Support framework, to drive your issue forward.
If you want to know what we can do to help you, drop us a line.

P60 Issue

There's never a good time for a product bug, but when it affects your ability to meet a legal reporting obligation for P60 generation, it’s reassuring to know your Claremont Managed Services team are on hand. Within 5 days we resolved a major issue that could have resulted in financial penalties from HMRC.

We identified a unique data scenario resulting in a failure of the production in P60’s for 25,000 employees

Provided focused input to My Oracle Support, identifying the exact line of seeded code causing the issue

Worked within the My Oracle Support Framework to ensure a standalone patch was available

Liaised with Oracle development to ensure the patch would fix the issue

Had an alternative “worst case scenario fix” if an Oracle fix was unavailable within the legislative timeline

Patched a test environment

Guided the client through testing, patched production and supported the client through the production of P60’s

Alert Issue

A client had been developing an Alert internally, alongside their previous Managed Service provider, for five months. They had hit an issue where the text contained in the Alert was not as expected. An SR was raised with Oracle; the internal team triaged and attempted to resolve for 5 months.

With little progress being made Claremont was asked to look at the issue as part of their Managed Service Transition. Within eleven minutes the issue was identified and a resolution provided.

The Alert text contained special Microsoft characters for “, - and ‘ resulting in the Alert failing.
Our experienced consultants had seen this issue previously, identified a fix and passed this knowledge to the internal team.

So how do you drive a core Product bug to resolution within 5 working days?

Step 1: Qualify the Issue

Conduct a functional review, understanding user expectation and documented functionality vs. actual system results. Where core product does not conform...

Step 2: Engaging with Oracle Support

As the source of any formal resolution, it’s vital to log the issue as soon as it has been qualified.

Step 3: Do the ‘Leg Work’

Provide as much supporting collateral as possible. The more that can be provided now, the less time is lost finding it later

Check MyOracleSupport (MOS) for known issues and potential resolutions. Search variations of your problem description for a wider search area. Don’t be afraid to confirm possible solution already tried, that have NOT been successful.

Anticipate requests for information, uploading HCM Technical Analyzer (1562530.1) & Application Diagnostics output to confirm Product Set, Patch Levels etc. Provide Concurrent Program Output/Log files (where appropriate) for issue specifics.

Provide compelling evidence of the issue. Give clear, consist replication steps include responsibilities, navigation paths and screen shots.

Give a clear state of impact including employees affected, business impact with cost and/or implications of failure, as well as any deadlines. A support analyst should be in no doubt that your issue is both urgent and important, requiring swift and sustained response.

Step 4: Keep Investigating

Conduct a technical walk through of code in/around the issue. Whilst this may duplicate some effort, you may also uncover something Oracle Support haven’t seen yet.

Step 5: Be Prepared

With time of the essence, preparation is the key, whether it be for

A resolution, which can be tested, approved and transitioned through into Production

A contingency, documenting a case to negotiate for more time and/or creating a temporary workaround

In our case, a technical walkthrough of associated packages and the execution of individual queries confirmed the existence of a bug. Our findings were then documented back to Support, cross-checked and progressed through to Oracle Development for a resolution.

With dependencies still with Oracle Development to meet our deadline, we continued to finalise contingency plans for technical and manual workarounds … though fortunately, neither were ultimately required.

By Martin O'Rourke and Adrian Biddulph

UKOUG E-Business Suite Partner of the Year Award

Tue, 22 Jul 2014 16:06:12 GMT

UK Oracle User Group has revealed its nominations for this year’s Partner of the Year Awards - which includes 18 award categories.

We are pleased to announce that Claremont has been shortlisted for the UKOUG E-Business Suite Partner of the Year Award.

The announcement follows an initial round of nomination judging by a team of adjudicators formed of UKOUG’s end-user members. Over 45 entries were considered and the long list of companies was whittled down to create a final shortlist of six Partners per category. These finalists will now compete for these prestigious awards.

Claremont has been nominated for its breadth of skills and services and its innovative delivery of Oracle E-Business Suite solutions.

At Claremont we pride ourselves on our ability to think beyond boundaries and strive for the highest levels of customer satisfaction. Our team of experts know Oracle E-Business suite inside and out, and have the expertise and the passion to deliver true business value through the use of this technology. We are delighted to have been shortlisted for this award which acts as recognition that our approach is working. To turn this nomination into an award we need to have your vote!

Please click here to cast your vote for Claremont.

Thank you for your support.

Managed Services and Hosting Event a Resounding Success

Mon, 16 Jun 2014 13:23:06 GMT

This year’s Managed Services and Hosting Event was a resounding success. The occasion brought together senior decision makers to discuss the use of Claremont’s Managed Services and Hosting for Oracle E-Business. It took place in the Churchill War Rooms, a fascinating venue which formed the perfect backdrop to this thought-provoking event.

Two highly-valued clients spoke: Sarah Flannigan, CIO at The National Trust, explained why she chose to move her Oracle DBA & Hosting to Claremont and the improvement in service that the Trust has experienced since the move. Barry Reynolds, Head of IT Services at PPL, revealed the 50% cost savings and service benefits that he gained by engaging Claremont to host his Oracle e-business suite.

Darren Hilton, Director of Partner Services at Timico, gave a presentation on the Claremont and Timico Partnership. He drew our attention to the rewards that this union brings and looked forward to the exciting road ahead. Claremont’s Mark Vivian wrapped up the event by highlighting the features that make Claremont stand out from the crowd in the provision of Oracle Managed Services and Hosting, and allow Claremont to deliver twice the service for half the cost of competitor MSPs.

Customer service - it's not rocket science

Wed, 28 May 2014 10:50:02 GMT

We've all experienced and been frustrated by poor customer service in our every day lives: Individuals in large organisations whether they be banks, insurance companies, government bodies etc., all so shackled with process that they often fail to deliver a satisfactory service to the customer who ultimately pays their wages. People serving in restaurants or shops that clearly don't want to be there, make no secret of it and therefore don't provide a good service. What a difference it makes when you come across someone who genuinely cares and goes the extra mile to help you.

The IT services industry is not immune from this malaise. The stakes are higher in our industry though than in many, and we've all seen the press articles about large failed IT programmes with eye watering sums of money attached to them.

At Claremont, we are different. It's not rocket science. We do what we say we are going to do. Everyone we recruit into our business is an expert in their field, has a genuine passion for what they do and a drive to make a real difference. We all thrive on providing a first-class customer service, finding creative solutions to our customers' problems, and following through and delivering on our promises. Through this, we build long term "win-win" partnerships with our customers. It's simple.

It's easy for me to say, but the facts speak for themselves: more and more customers are moving to Claremont every month from competitor organisations. Conversely, we don't lose customers to them. So why not explore a refreshing alternative to the status quo yourself and contact Claremont to find out how you can benefit from improved customer service in the Oracle services arena?

By Mark Vivian

First Vertex Fusion Alliance event a success!

Thu, 22 May 2014 13:02:38 GMT

The very first Vertex Fusion Alliance event was a success in bringing together the network of Oracle E-Business Suite specialists under one umbrella as a one-stop shop for companies needing support and guidance around upgrading their Oracle systems. It helped a number of organisations gain an understanding around what options and support are available to those heading towards the Oracle 11i desupport date.

With an option to view the Crown Jewels afterwards, a variety of organisations attended the interactive afternoon at the Tower of London. Feedback following the event rated it as ‘excellent’ and a useful forum for delegates to get answers to their questions from the experts during a live panel debate and a series of smaller roundtable discussions.

Tony Cook, The Vertex Fusion Alliance Managing Director said, “We are all really pleased with how our first Vertex Fusion Alliance event went. We wanted to showcase our strength as an Alliance which means clients can tap into the expertise in one place and not ask multiple, disparate organisations for support. The Alliance can also act as a measure of review against SIs and can regulate and provide a benchmark of quality, supporting companies embarking on an upgrade. ”

Achieving excellent SLA compliance

Mon, 19 May 2014 14:29:42 GMT

Achieving excellent SLA compliance in a managed service is always important but compliance stats don’t tell the whole story.

For example, what are the SLAs actually for and how close to breaching was the managed service provider? I’ve just come out of a monthly service review meeting with one of our larger managed services customers and we were able to report 100% SLA compliance for the 74 incidents raised last month. But two underlying factors make that really impressive.

First, Claremont is highly unusual in providing SLAs for incident resolution times and not just the usual response times. Meeting incident response guarantees is difficult, and realistically, the nature of Oracle support means we can’t always hit 100% compliance, but that’s not a reason not to offer resolution SLAs. So it’s really satisfying to achieve 100% compliance over a large number of incidents.

The second measurement to check with SLA compliance is how much of the allowed time was consumed before the SLA was closed. Compliance is less impressive, and less useful to the customer, if incident responses and resolutions are completed just before the SLA would be breached. That is always a clear sign that the managed services provider is just working to the SLAs rather than delivering the best possible service. Claremont’s 100% compliance was achieved while consuming just 12% of the time permitted by the SLAs.

Naturally the customer is very happy and this is a great demonstration of the quality of support delivered by Claremont’s managed services team.

By Jonathan Stuart

Claremont featured in the Sunday Telegraph

Mon, 12 May 2014 00:10:02 GMT

Yesterday saw Claremont featured in the Sunday Telegraph’s Outsourcing – Industry View supplement. This reported how Claremont is shaking up the Managed Services Provider market and helping businesses realise the benefits of outsourcing some or all of their Oracle E-Business System requirements by switching to Claremont’s Managed Services practice.

Read the full article here

Sarah Flannigan, CIO of the National Trust, chose Claremont to host and support their mission critical Oracle E-Business Suite membership system, replacing an incumbent supplier, and has not been disappointed with the results. Sarah told the Sunday Telegraph:

“Selecting Claremont to support our Oracle CRM system has turned out to be one of the best procurement decisions we have made in recent times. It employs good people and has been completely committed to our mutual success.”

Sarah is one of the excellent speakers at our Managed Services and Hosting event, “Difficulties Mastered are Opportunities Won”, at the Churchill War Rooms, London on 11th June.

For the full event agenda and to register, please click here.

Read our Managed Services datasheet

Re-lease business benefit through Lease 100

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 10:00:27 GMT

Claremont has an enviable reputation in the market place for Oracle leasing excellence and has become a go-to partner for Oracle Corporation UK having been involved in complex leasing projects in some of the world’s major leasing and manufacturing organisations.

Working within these companies has enabled Claremont to identify and develop a product that could potentially drive tangible business benefit directly into the heart of these organisations.

The Lease 100 solution is a fixed-scope, fixed price and fixed timeline implementation of Oracle Lease Management which provides organisations with the technology to support an in-house leasing capability within 100 days.

It builds upon existing Oracle E-Business Suite functionality and enables companies to have an in-house leasing capability that underpins the process of leasing products directly to the consumer, effectively cutting out third-party agents and adding an additional revenue stream to their business.

The benefits of having an in-house leasing capability include:

A new P&L centre for the finance revenue.

The opportunity to re-lease returned equipment to consumers who would prefer to lease at a cheaper rate.

A consistent revenue stream from fixed term contracts and payment instalments.

The ability to maintain and manage customer relationships and contracts in-house, protecting the organisation and the customer from the threat of competitors.

Contracts are managed directly and not through a third party lessor.

Building the relationship with the customer providing upselling opportunities where appropriate.

Additional revenues generated directly from products such as asset protection, warranties, maintenance and other fees.

Our Lease 100 datasheet provides more detail about the Lease 100 solution, outlining in more detail the benefits of leasing products directly and how this can be achieved.

"By building on an Oracle E-Business Suite foundation, our Lease 100 offering enables organisations to generate additional revenue streams without the need to recruit additional sales personnel."Richard MacInnes-Manby - Director, Claremont

Please contact us to discuss further if the Lease 100 product could be relevant to your organisation.

Using an Old School Scripted Standby

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 16:01:58 GMT

Recently, Claremont were challenged by a client:

Produce a replicated environment to support real-time BI – without incurring the prohibitive cost of the “best in breed” replication technologies.

Without the easy answers of Oracle GoldenGate, Oracle DataGuard and Oracle Logical Standby, the solution required a bit more creative design.

Claremont designed a scripted standby database architecture where the standby database is opened read-only periodically. Reports were produced automatically whilst up and closed down in between times such that archive logs could be copied from production and applied. In this way the data could be kept fresh, report frequency and data accuracy were optimised and most importantly – the high licensing fees of DataGuard, GoldenGate or Logical Standby were averted. The customer was able to reap the benefits of offloading heavy duty reporting from their production system, whilst also adding an element of business continuity to their estate.

Summarised Architecture

In recent times, Database Administrators (DBAs) have become accustomed to managing standby databases by mechanisms such as DataGuard and RMAN and these have become powerful tools in the DBA toolbox. However sometimes we need to go back to our roots and remember what it was like in the world of Oracle 8i! When using a scripted standby there are a number of areas that need special attention, not least, ensuring the production environment is running in “force logging” mode. There is a need to ensure logging operations for batch loading of data and other such heavy IO processing are captured in the archivelog stream and therefore applied to the standby environment. This prevents corruptions and data loss in that standby environment.

Of course, with no tools to fall back on, you have to be ready for troubleshooting. One issue that recently occurred was the scenario where a datafile was added to the production database as part of standard maintenance. An oversight on initial configuration had set the initialization parameter (or rather, failed to modify from the default) standby_file_management=manual on the standby database. This meant that, even though the db_file_name_convert parameters had been configured correctly, the standby database was unable to create an equivalent file to match that which had been added to production. The standby environment hung and reported numerous errors such as:

ORA-01111: name for data file 14 is unknown - rename to correct file
ORA-01110: data file 10:'/app/oracle/11.2.0/dbs/UNNAMED00010'
ORA-01157: cannot identify/lock data file 10 - see DBWR trace file

In this scenario, the standby environment has created the file at /app/oracle/11.2.0/dbs but has not processed any data transactions within the file. To correct this we need to rename the datafile to a new location that matches the general database structure. The command for this is:

ALTER DATABASE CREATE DATAFILE ‘/app/oracle/11.2.0/dbs/UNNAMEDnnnn' as '/oradata/PROD_STBY/system04.dbf';

(Obviously the specific path file name would need to be updated for the environment at hand). This command copies the file from the dbs directory to the correct location and as such will take an amount of time depending on IO speed and file size. Once complete, we can verify the existence of the new file and continue media recovery as normal.

To future proof this scenario we can add standby_file_management=AUTO as an initialisation parameter, in this case the standby environment will build the file in an appropriate location as dictated by the standard db_file_name_convert parameter.

Now the reporting environment is mature, the reporting load is off Production, the complexity is totally hidden from the users and the client’s challenge is met. Now on to the next…

The Insider's Blog - Resistance isn't Futile

Mon, 17 Feb 2014 10:37:45 GMT

So another Oracle specialist gets assimilated by the Borg; and the gradual process to becoming a fully paid-up drone to the Collective begins. I can just imagine how the amiable breakfast negotiations went:

"We are your future. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

"That's OK, just sign the cheque and pass the marmalade".

Now let's be clear (as per legal advice), global Systems Integrators have an important role to play in global business; I've worked for a few and some of the benefits for employees and clients have been compelling.

There are times when you need one-hundred identi-kit-soldiers; there are junctures of ERP programs where having local resource in a myriad of global locations is vital - and when you need an interwoven mesh of different 'practices' (from change to testing, Oracle to Microsoft) - a single core supplier is a real crutch to lean on. But please, if you think the average mid-sized UK-based client can expect better Oracle ERP service from this then that's just illogical.

OK - enough with the Star Trek (I've always preferred Star Wars) but the clue, of course, is in the title 'Global System Integrator' - is that really what you want, or need? If you asked clients of the acquired Experts (Compel, Rocela, Sysao, Velos IT, Edenbrook, Mokum...) what compelling story they bought in to - I'm not convinced that is the same story they'll be getting now - no matter how good the 'cultural fit' that will undoubtedly be rolled-out in client briefings. (Do the newly-signed consultants get to hold up the new kit shirt for the gathered journalists whilst doing a few keepy-ups?).

My own experience, for what it's worth having recently escaped the Borg to work for smaller, friendlier, more agile company, is that a detailed review of customer profiling will take place and unless your organisation fits the new target model, then over time you will inevitably become less important as a client and service levels will drop.

I have no axe to grind with Global SIs, indeed I still owe them a bob or two for the free beers during university Milkrounds, it's just that the whole ethos and philosophic heart of a technology line-of-business cannot be the same in the independent specialist when compared to the Global provider.

I tried to describe this fundamental difference to my mum last week and failed miserably after she pointed out just how good they were at doing her company's accounts around the globe even though she'd never spoken to them. But that's just it, I can't argue about the ability of the large provider to deliver value in particular areas, but certainly in outsourced IT, the types of organisation they want to deal with have a totally different outlook and organisational culture. Therefore the way of engaging as a team is inherently different. In my experience of the UK ERP space, the nature of successful Consulting engagements and end-user-based Managed Services, is in the definition:

Consultant n.
i. One who gives expert or professional advice.
ii. One who consults another

If you want a Systems Integrator, that's ok, I know a few good ones - and some are 'Global', but if you bought in to a contract with an Oracle expert, a company who lives and dies on their abilities in the Oracle space alone, whose reputation is built on delivering a 100% positive customer experience, who believe passionately in getting the most out of ERP and who genuinely want to "consult" and work with their clients, then take a second to consider the type of organisation you want to deal with, and perhaps a couple more seconds to review the contractual small-print around 'Change of Ownership'.

Live long and prosper.

Author: Julian Ford

Claremont Celebrates Oracle E-Business Suite Tuning Successes

Wed, 22 Jan 2014 16:20:46 GMT

Yet again the value of experienced consultants is demonstrated as Claremont’s Managed Services DBAs improve online performance for a customer by up to 60%.

Oracle E-Business Suite is a complex system and Claremont’s Managed Services division hosts and supports one of the UK’s largest and most complex instances. With rising transaction volumes and transaction processing unavoidably clashing with batch jobs to meet business requirements, performance on this 3.5TB database had began to suffer.

After an extensive investigation Claremont’s DBA team has found and fixed the underlying problem such that storage performance improved by up to 90% and performance for users and batch processing improved by up to 60%. A number of other improvements were also identified during this work and have further helped system performance. The customer is naturally delighted that Claremont fixed this through systematic tuning and problem resolution rather than attempting to workaround the issue through hardware upgrades.

Read the full story of how this issue was resolved in Claremont’s blog.

This was an extremely unusual and esoteric problem that related to the filesystem configuration.

Jonathan Stuart, Claremont’s Managed Services Director, observed “No administration or analysis tools could have identified this issue and Oracle themselves were stumped! It took a structured investigation by one of our DBAs to solve the problem. This again demonstrates why we use highly experienced, permanent consultants for Managed Services – time and time again they deliver high quality solutions within tight timescales and the value customers gain from their experience is huge. I genuinely believe we are unique in being able to guarantee to customers the quality and experience of all our Managed Services consultants.”

Claremont delivers comprehensive Oracle hosting as part of our Managed Services and we are unrivalled in being able to offer credible and proven enterprise Oracle hosting services outside of the Tier 1 consulting firms and system integrators. For more information about our Oracle Managed Services please take a look at our Managed Services page or contact us.

Performance Tuning - Don't Forget the Filesystem

Wed, 22 Jan 2014 11:37:54 GMT

Claremont’s Database Administrators (DBAs) are very familiar with traditional performance tuning, including the Oracle database’s SGA, PGA, SQL profiles and indexing. However, when DBAs step back and look at the architecture the implicit aim is often to bring tuning back into the database – adding additional memory so that we can add more SGA, adding more CPUs so we can increase the level of parallelism, or even increasing the number of disks, or IOPS available from the storage layer, to improve the native speed of I/O.

Thus it is often tempting to purchase new hardware – with low-cost hardware, virtualised platforms and blade centres it’s a relatively small investment simply to upgrade the hardware. However, in many cases we can and should avoid doing this.

Claremont’s DBAs came across an example of this with one of our managed services customers for whom we host and support a 3.5TB Oracle E-Business Suite system. Their system was suffering from occasional poor performance caused by an I/O bottleneck. Rather than purchasing additional storage capacity, we were able to provide a significant boost in performance by employing traditional configuration-based performance tuning.

The Scenario

Our customer was experiencing system slow-downs – to the point of the system hanging when the environment was put under significant load. The problematic load tended to be simultaneous heavy OLTP and batch processing but this was necessary to meet business requirements.

During these periods Claremont’s monitoring detected huge amounts of I/O wait:

This graph shows the I/O wait for a single block read from the database taking upwards of 70ms – this is a huge and unacceptable wait when the generally accepted rule of thumb is that 5ms is excellent, 10ms is satisfactory and above 15ms will likely affect the user experience.

Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) also reported quite striking I/O activity (light blue):

Clearly there was something untoward causing such a drastic I/O problem.

The Fix

After generating a test case where the I/O issues could be reproduced at will in a pre-production environment, Claremont’s DBAs tested various changes in the database and architecture. These included the SGA size, redo log size, SAN caching, Virtualisation mode and more. This extensive and time consuming work identified some useful performance improvements that were subsequently put live, but none addressed the underlying problem. The poor performance persisted and at each stage the EMC SAN reported it was underutilised, responding to I/O requests with low wait times.

It was clear that I/O requests were queuing-up somewhere higher in the infrastructure. But this is a virtualised platform, using Oracle VM, and identifying the bottleneck would be a significant challenge. Was the issue in the database, operating system, virtualisation layer, server hardware or SAN fibre? Only systematic testing and analysis of each layer would reveal the problem. Ultimately it was the write barriers on the ext4 filesystem that proved to be the source of the bottleneck.

The fix was to turn off the write barrier for the ext4 filesystem. This was done by setting the mount option “barrier=0”. The write barriers ensure writes to disk are completed before the I/O operation is marked as complete such that there is no loss of data in the event of a power failure. Essentially the filesystem will write one data block and then apply a barrier which will wait for the first block to be written to the physical storage before allowing the next block write. Should disk power be lost, anything in the storage cache will still also be stored in the filesystem memory and will not be lost. However, our EMC SAN has an internal battery backup in addition to our data centre’s uninterruptable power supply (UPS). Even if the UPS fails and power is lost to the SAN, the internal battery will take over to ensure the cache is flushed to disk before the SAN shuts down. So the data in this instance is safe without the need for write barriers.

In many scenarios using a write barrier is perfectly acceptable, however they will significantly affect I/O efficiency if the storage has a large cache. The barrier waits for the block to be written through the cache to the physical storage and each write effectively causes a flush of the storage cache. At best the cache isn’t being used and at worst it is slowing down I/O operations. Claremont had invested in significant SAN memory cache and 500GB of solid state disk cache for this customer and that was proving counter-productive under high load, which is when it was needed most.

The cache is there to smooth out the “lumps and bumps” in performance that are experienced as I/O load ebbs and flows. However, in this high load scenario the cache was effectively redundant and the server had to wait for the native speed of disk to deal with the I/O. This is fine in the short term, with minimal slow down, but a system under sustained load will stack-up requests in the filesystem because the in-memory operations are always going to be quicker than the disk. A queue develops and the time spent in this queue is what accounts for the drastically high I/O wait times.

Turning off the write barriers allowed the filesystem to consider a write to the storage layer as being “on disk” and as such the cache is not flushed with every write and its efficiency improved. That meant the SAN could do its work in smoothing out the load preventing a queue building up.

The Results

With the write barrier removed our monitoring tools reported the IO waits drastically reduced:

Now I/O waits peak at 17ms as opposed to 74ms and OEM also shows a much healthier picture:

Ultimately, however, the goal here, as with any performance tuning exercise, was not to make the technical figures look good, but to actually improve the users’ experience. The following graph highlights 9 key business transactions and their average runtimes before (purple) and after (pink) the turn off of the wait barriers:

Users saw an average 60% improvement in system performance and that has delivered real business benefit to the customer.

In Conclusion

When tuning a system’s performance it is essential to look at all aspects of the architecture and focus on the root cause of the issue. It is very easy to view hardware upgrades as a quick and easy solution but with many performance issues, as in this case, no amount of hardware can overcome an underlying software issue. This demonstrates that traditional, structured performance tuning, using the DBAs’ experience as much as tuning tools, is very worthwhile and will prove extremely beneficial to customers’ environments.

Read more on Claremont's Oracle E-Business Suite Managed Services.

Claremont NDC - Happy 1st Birthday

Wed, 11 Dec 2013 10:23:06 GMT

This week marks the unofficial first birthday of the Claremont Nearshore Development Centre (‘NDC’) which is located in Varazdin, Croatia.

The operation was set up to enable Claremont to provide better value to customers through access to lower cost Oracle and Oracle E-Business Suite development facilities, whilst still retaining control over the quality of the delivery. To that end, it was formed as a joint venture between Claremont and former employee Peter Hollis who, in early 2013, moved over to Croatia in order to head up the NDC.

“Drawing from previous experiences, we considered that a large number of offshore operations did not provide effective delivery due to a lack of leadership and direction. Given my background in setting up businesses in Croatia and my strong links with Claremont, it felt like a natural step to relocate and head up the NDC.” observed Peter Hollis.

Peter went on to say, “I think the last twelve months have been very much about building a strong foundation from which to grow the NDC as we now have a core team that can deliver a high quality development service. I think the blend of cultures – UK tenacity, Croatian ingenuity, combined with some Kiwi pragmatism – will make for an interesting and dynamic operation which will hopefully break down some of the pre-conceived notions about offshoring.”

Mark Vivian, Claremont's Managing Director, commented, “The Claremont NDC is an important part of our business. Having Peter and the team fully operational allows us to be able to confidently deliver even better value into our customers going forward, using blended UK and nearshore delivery teams.”

Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 and Online Patching

Tue, 10 Dec 2013 14:30:01 GMT

In September 2013, Oracle announced the general release of the latest version of Oracle E-Business Suite, 12.2. The previous 12.1 version was released May 2009 so it has been a long 4 and half year wait!

As with any major product version there are a very large number of technology and functional changes included in 12.2, but here we will focus on one of the more exciting and significant – online patching.

Applying E-Business Suite patches pre-12.2

For all previous versions of eBusiness Suite, applying a patch always meant downtime and the amount of downtime that would be required was directly related to the time it would take to apply the patch.

For small, one-off patches, downtime could be as little as 15 minutes, but for Family Pack upgrades or Maintenance Packs this could last for several hours or even days.

For true 24/7 businesses where little or no downtime can be tolerated this would either result in a loss of revenue for the time period in which the system was unavailable or a general reluctance to apply any patch or upgrade which would incur a significant amount of downtime.

During the testing phase, the prime focus of the Oracle DBA would be to tweak the running order of patches or adjusting various runtime options to make the patches go through as speedily as possible and to make the best use of hardware resources, and project time would have to be allowed for this activity.

Finally, downtime can only normally be arranged outside of normal working hours at evenings and weekends which can incur overtime costs.

Online Patching in 12.2 with (virtually!) no downtime

A paradigm shift occurs with E-Business Suite patching in 12.2. Patches can be applied with the system up and running and as such critical business operations are not interrupted. E-Business Suite will remain available during patching operations (for example: tax year end patches can be applied during a payroll run or expense reports can be entered while a Payables patch is applied).

The only downtime that is required is the time it takes to stop and restart the application tier to propagate the changes and perform cutover – thus whether you are applying an online patch or a major upgrade, the amount of downtime will always be the same. This makes downtime predictable and measureable in minutes rather than hours or days.

Previously where the prime concern when applying a patch was to maximise server resources to allow the patch to complete as quickly as possible, now the prime concern is that the patch does not consume too many resources to impact on the performance of the running application. The new 12.2 online patching tools automatically adjust the number of parallel workers and workload to ensure that this is the case. Patches can therefore be expected to take longer to complete, but this can now be done during the online day with the application up and running.

How does it work?

At Database Level

A new feature was introduced in Oracle Database 11gR2 called Edition-Based Redefinition. This feature is available to any business that has Oracle Database 11gR2 or later (whether they have E-Business Suite or not) but it was commissioned specifically by the Oracle Applications Division to support the online patching feature of 12.2.

In a nutshell, it provides a mechanism that allows for multiple versions (or ‘editions’) of schema objects to exist concurrently in the database, a ‘run’ edition and a ‘patch’ edition.
When an online patch is applied the running application is not affected because the changes are made to a separate ‘edition’ of the database objects and the application will always choose to connect to the ‘run’ edition. The database will automatically manage the copies of these objects during patching. At cutover, the ‘patch’ edition objects are propagated to the ‘run’ edition.

Edition-Based Redefinition is supported for all metadata objects (such as packages, procedures, views, triggers, synonyms and triggers) but not for data objects (such as tables and indexes).

To manage these objects, new “Editioning Views” have been implemented in 12.2 which isolates the running application from changes to the data model, while cross edition triggers ensure that new transactions entered into the system are upgraded in place
In this example, the APPS.WF_ITEMS synonym points to the new WF_ITEMS# Editioning view rather than to the APPLSYS.WF_ITEMS table as it would have done in previous versions.

At Application Level

When 12.2 is installed or an existing system upgraded to 12.2, a second copy of the application filesystem is created. All patches are automatically applied against the secondary copy of the filesystem while the running application continues to point to the non-patched, primary copy.

Two complete filesystems are always present:

The Run copy, used by the current application.

The Patch copy, which is either actively being patched or waiting for the next patching cycle.

Synchronisation between the two filesystem copies is automatically handled by the patching tools.

During cutover, the application is shutdown and pointed to the patched copy which them becomes the primary, so the two file systems are rotated during each patch cycle.

The cutover process can happen at any point after the patches are applied, although certain restrictions mentioned below mean that, in practice, the window between applying an online patch and then performing cutover will probably never be too long.

New Patching Cycle

In addition, patches can be aborted at any point before Cutover – this can be one, some or all of the patches currently in the process of being applied.

Sounds too good to be true – what’s the catch?

There is no such thing as a free lunch of course and there are a number of implications and restrictions with online patching:

Disk Space

Since dual copies of the application filesystem are maintained in 12.2, this means that the storage footprint of the E-Business Suite application tier will be significantly higher than it was in previous versions (35GB for 12.1, 64GB for 12.2 – an 85% increase). This increase overhead is proportional to the number of environments in use at any given site, so for example a 12.1 enterprise with 5 instances (prod, DR, preprod, dev, UAT) would need to budget and plan for an additional 145GB (5 x (64-35)) of disk space on the application tier as part of a 12.2 upgrade project.

At database level, the SYSTEM and SEED tablespaces require double their space allocation to support the Edition Based Redefinition feature (25GB to 50GB for SYSTEM and 5GB to 10GB for SEED).

Database version

Since 12.2 online patching requires the use of the database Edition Based Redefinition feature which is only available in 11gR2, E-Business Suite 12.2 is not certified with any prior database version below 11gR2.

Disaster Recovery considerations

An additional scenario of what would happen when invoking DR when a patch is mid-flight (i.e. applied online but not yet cutover) needs to be allowed for in the DR solution.

Restrictions when a patch is applied but not yet cutover.

Performing a clone of an environment which has a patch mid-flight is strongly discouraged by Oracle.

A small number of certain concurrent programs will not run.

Impact on custom and bespoke code

All custom and third party code must now adhere to the new logical data model of using the APPS synonyms for objects rather than referencing objects directly, otherwise the incorrect ‘edition’ of data or code may be used. This means an audit and potential re-development of non-standard code will be required as part of any 12.2 upgrade project. Oracle have provided tools that can be used to check the database data dictionary and application filesystem for any object that violates the new coding standards.

Do we have to adopt the new online patching method?

Some non-24/7 enterprises that can tolerate downtime may at this point be wondering if there is an option continue to use the old style of patching to avoid the overhead and restrictions mentioned above in 12.2.

An Oracle FAQ answers this best:

Q: Once I upgrade to Release 12.2, can I still apply patches in the traditional way?

A: No. All patches for Release 12.2 will be online patches. The traditional, pre-12.2 method of applying patches will not work.

Conclusion

The benefits of online patching are:

Applications stay online during patching.

Easier to negotiate downtime windows which are now predictable and brief.

The potentially negative implications are:

Increased storage overhead.

Additional complexity for DR.

Certain restrictions on operations which can be performed after patch has been applied but before cutover.

Impact to custom code.

Oracle E-Business Suite 11i to enter Sustaining Support

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 11:26:31 GMT

A key milestone in the support lifecycle of E-Business Suite will arrive in December this year when 11i (11.5.10) moves into Sustaining Support with Oracle.

This has important consequences for those enterprises using this version of the software, particularly those using Oracle Payroll.

Oracle Lifetime Support Policy

First, a brief review. Oracle E-Business Suite (as with most Oracle products) has three stages of support:

Premier Support

Usually lasts for 5 years from the release date of the product version.

The most comprehensive support cover, including all aspects of Oracle support.

Extended Support

Usually lasts for 3 years after the end of Premier Support.

Includes most of the features included with Premier Support, with the exception of certifications with new Oracle/third party products.

Typically adopted by those customers that wish to continue to receive the benefits of Premier Support but who are not yet ready to upgrade to a later version of the software.

Normally needs to be purchased with an uplift on existing support costs, although Oracle will sometimes announce a waiver for Extended Support fees for certain product versions over specified timescales.

Sustaining Support

Lasts from the end of Extended Support indefinitely.

Important restrictions means that key features of Oracle support are not included, such as the latest tax/legislative updates and security fixes.

As of November 2013, the relevant dates for Oracle E-Business Suite are as follows:

The key date here is the end of Extended Support for 11.5.10 in Nov 2013

Sustaining Support Exception

The good news is that Oracle have announced a partial exception for 11.5.10 Sustaining Support. For a period of two years from the start of Sustaining Support (December 2013 – December 2015) Oracle have stated that they will continue to provide:

Severity 1 fixes, critical patch updates

Payroll regulatory tax updates for UK Tax Year April 6, 2013 – April 5, 2014

This is allow customers to maintain stable operations while completing an upgrade to 12.1 or 12.2

Extended Support Baseline

In order to qualify for Extended Support and the exception to Sustaining Support, your 11i system must meet certain minimum criteria:

EBS 11.5.10 with Consolidated Update 2

ATG Rollup Patchset 6 (Patch 5903765)

Database 10.2.0.4 or 11.1.0.7

Forms6i Patchset 19 (Version 6.0.8.28, Patch 6194129)

Oracle HTTP Server MLR Patchset 4393827

Sun Java Runtime Engine (JRE) 1.6.0_03+

EBS patches listed for all licensed and shared products

What does this mean for me?

If you are on 11.5.10 then from December 2013, Oracle will no longer provide new non-Severity 1 bug fixes for this version, although security patches and Severity 1 fixes will still be provided for a period of a further two years.

If you are an Oracle Payroll customer, no new legislative or tax updates will be released after the 5th April 2014 and an upgrade to a later version will be required to continue to run payrolls in future Tax Years.

All 11i customers should consider planning an upgrade to a later version, ideally before Dec 2015 when the exception to Sustaining Support will end, especially for those business that wish to continue to receive the highest level of Oracle support or those who must be on the latest version of security patches for reasons of compliance (e.g. PCI).

A version release upgrade/re-implementation of E-Business Suite is a significant project with timescales typically anywhere between 6 and 18 months depending on the number of modules in use, level of customisations, whether there will be a hardware migration at the same time etc so start planning your upgrade now!

Oracle BI Applications event at The Bloomsbury Hotel

Wed, 9 Oct 2013 11:14:48 GMT

What's Really Happening in My Business? Use Analytical Workspaces to Provide the Answers...

Claremont are hosting Business Intelligence event on the afternoon of Thursday 7th November at The Bloomsbury Hotel, in London. With speakers from Oracle and John Lewis, the event will look at the reporting challenges faced by many organisations and how these can be solved through the use of Oracle BI technology using the Software as a Service (SaaS) deployment of BI Applications.

It will also show how, through the creation and deployment of "Analytical Workspaces", this technology can be deployed in organisations in a flexible, low cost way with BI Apps@Claremont.

Click here to read the full event agenda and details of our speakers.

If you would like to attend, please email stacey.wilkins@claremont.co.uk with your name, company and contact email address or telephone 0191 350 6045.

Join our Oracle R12 upgrade webinar

Fri, 4 Oct 2013 11:17:22 GMT

If your organisation is currently on Oracle E-Business Suite R11, you can't afford to miss our forthcoming webinar:

"Unravelling the Oracle R12 upgrade conundrum".

Wednesday 9th October at 3pm

The webinar addresses the issues and concerns that businesses currently on Oracle E-Business R11 are facing and discusses what options there are to meet Oracle's obligations and make an upgrade work for your business.

This webinar features a question and answer section where you can put your questions directly to our experts in real time. Click here to register for the webinar, find out more details about its content and get an overview of the webinar speakers. If you've any more questions please contact us.

For more information on the R12 upgrade process take a look at our R12 Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade datasheet or watch one of our previous webinars.

Oracle Database 12c New Features

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 11:10:44 GMT

As many of our avid readers will be aware, Oracle's flagship database product has recently moved on to version 12c - a "cloud ready" version of the database we know and love(!). In this article I hope to cover some of the more interesting new features the latest and greatest Oracle database has to offer.

As with any new version of the database, there are a stack of new features and enhancements made within the core functionality of the system. 12c is no different with enhancements to the optimizer, partitioning, advanced compression, advanced security, golden gate, active data guard, RAC, diagnostics, and real applications testing. Many of these products were options included in version 11g (albeit also requiring additional license costs) but have been enhanced in 12c.

Some other titbits for DBAs include the ability to move datafiles online, a new data type, "IDENTITY", and SQL Plan management is now enabled by default. There are also some enhancements to RMAN, including being able to restore individual tables from backup and the ability to restore to an alternative endian format in the event of performing a platform migration.

Oracle's summary of the key new features and how these address the marketplace requirements is as follows:

IT Objectives Oracle Database 12c New Functionality
DB Consolidation and DBaaS Oracle Multitenant (new DB Option)
Big Data, Data Warehouse and Analytics Oracle Advanced Analytics (new DB Option replaces Data Mining), In-Database MapReduce / Pattern Matching, 1/3 Big Data Appliance
Storage Optimization Heat Map, Automatic Data Optimization (Part of Advanced Compression)
High Availability and Data Protection Application Continuity, Far Sync, Global Data Services (Part of Active Data Guard)
Data Security Data Redaction, Privilege Analysis, Data Masking at source, Sensitive Data Discovery (Part of Advanced Security and Data Masking)
Database Manageability Consolidated Replays, Database As A Service, Snap-clone (Part of Enterprise Management, Real Application Testing)
So let's expand on some of these:

Multitenant Databases

This feature takes to the Oracle world the Microsoft SQL Server approach of having one "SQL Server" containing multiple "databases". In the past, you could run multiple databases from a single Oracle Home using a single set of code, but multi-tenancy, or pluggable databases, allows the DBA to structure the system with one "container database" (CDB) which contains any number of pluggable databases (PDBs). In this arrangement, the CDB hosts the core Oracle structures, e.g. SGA, PGA, SYS schema, UNDO and TEMP tablespaces, redo logs, archivelogs and spfile, yet the actual application/user data resides within the PDBs. This provides some obvious advantages for multi-line businesses and gives additional options for those customers heavily reliant on the transportable tablespaces feature, etc. This configuration also allows for rapid provisioning of new databases, rapid cloning between PDBs and could provide some significant time saving at upgrade time given the need only to upgrade the CDB once for all PDBs.

Advanced Analytics

Oracle Advanced Analytics allows a developer to derive business intelligence from the system with much more ease than previously. It provides algorithmic support for common data analysis tasks and some syntactical enhancements to allow the production of data dashboards rapidly. There is also a data mining GUI provided to further humanise and drill into the application data.

Heat Map Data Optimization

Heat map dovetails into advanced compression and implements a data-tiering scenario within the database. This balances the aggressiveness of compression with the overhead required in CPU power in reading the data back based on the "heat" of the data. Effectively, this gives the DBA much greater control over system tuning when advanced compression is deployed, either to reduce IO consumption or overall database data footprint.

Far Sync & Global Data Services

Global Data Services provides some additional integration with products such as Golden Gate and Active Data Guard, enhancing the load balancing and failover potentials inherent to those products.

Far Sync is a light weight Oracle database that is effectively a "Disaster recovery proxy" environment. Customers who have disaster recovery environments at large geographical distance from their live environments often encounter issues where network latency to transmit information to the DR site is untenable. Far Sync addresses this issue by allowing the DBA to create, at one or more intermediary data centres between live and DR, a number of lightweight DR environments to which changes can be applied before forwarding them on to the genuine DR environment. This is a feature very much aimed towards the future "cloud based" infrastructures that are just beginning to emerge in the present day.

Data Redaction

Oracle Data Redaction is an enhancement to database security within the realm of data masking. Data Redaction allows the masking of individual columns or portions of columns (e.g. displaying only the final four digits of a credit card number). It is even possible to deploy redaction on columns if the data within the column matches a particular regular expression. This gives much better control over data masking within a database and goes some way towards appeasing the DBA whilst also catering for the requirements of the PCI auditors!

Consolidated Replay

Consolidated Database Replay is an enhancement to Database Replay in that it allows the DBA to take a snapshot of system load from multiple source databases and play them against a single target database at the same time. This means that any large database consolidation projects can be sized accordingly. There are obvious benefits to having this functionality if a business is considering a migration to a multi-tenant architecture as described earlier.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, Oracle 12c offers quite a melange of exciting new features. Most of these features are options on top of the Standard and Enterprise editions of the database. Where 10g and 11g brought a wealth of features into the fold for small and medium businesses, 12c very much brings to the party a stack of features for the larger enterprise. The focus on some of these areas of the database do show an intent from Oracle to remain the "Rolls Royce" of database products, and the general improvements to the core suite of functionality should ensure the continued widespread benefits that the database can provide to large, medium and small businesses globally.

Mike Sowerbutts
DBA & Service Manager at Claremont

The UK's best Oracle Managed Services Provider?

Mon, 23 Sep 2013 11:52:46 GMT

Claremont's Managed Services strategy is built on delivery excellence: proactivity and swift, high quality reactive support. But why should organisations whose current Oracle support providers aren't failing, but aren’t excelling, switch to Claremont? Is Claremont really any better than the rest?

Now we have impartial statistics that demonstrate the difference. Every month our managed services customers complete 'satisfaction surveys'. These consistently show 100% satisfaction and we're delighted. Our Key Performance Indicators give a clue as to the cause of this satisfaction.

Our hosting customers have enjoyed 100% availability; not just last month but every month since we commenced Oracle hosting.

And, while competitors only guarantee how quickly they will respond to a support incident, we believe that resolution time matters more, so we guarantee that too. Too good to be true? Last month we achieved 98.5% SLA compliance for incident response & resolution times.

Not only do we deliver great services, but our customers have also enjoyed average cost savings of 51% versus alternative in-house & competitor services.

We value all our customers’ business and are committed to delivering excellent Oracle support and forging long term partnerships.

For more information about our Oracle managed services, please take a look at our managed services page, or contact us for further information.

Accelerate Data Conversion with Claremont Migration Framework

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 14:24:05 GMT

How many of us have been through an Upgrade / Implementation project and felt that conversion has been a challenge? Haven't we all wondered if we all have under-estimated the conversion tasks? Are we spending too much time and effort re-writing code from previous similar implementations?

I am sure, we have all asked ourselves the question time and again “what if we had a simple and yet robust tool that could tackle all these issues?"

It's a fact that data conversion is never an easy or a straightforward task. Even with all the Open Interface tables and APIs available to simplify conversion, there is still a considerable amount of effort required before the actual conversion begins.

A typical conversion scenario would involve identifying, cleansing, extracting, transforming and loading the data using Open Interface tables or APIs.

Having worked on a number of conversion projects myself I have realised that this pattern hardly changes. This repetitive nature of the process eats into an already tight schedule allocated for Conversion tasks.

To deal with the above issues and many others, we believe we have an ideal tool in CMF!

So what is CMF?

Claremont Migration Framework (CMF) is essentially an APEX application used for orchestrating and automating data conversion activities from legacy systems to any target system that stores data in database or flat files. It is a tool developed using best practices. The architecture of the tool is such that it makes data conversion very organised and rapid. It gives an instant overview of the status of the data conversion.

Although the tool has been predominantly used in organisations where both the source and target instances are Oracle Database, it has built-in integration capabilities with Peoplesoft, JDE, Siebel etc.

What are the key technical features of CMF?

CMF is built using the using Oracle APEX 4.1 and uses all the native features in APEX

Intuitive web-based user interface

Deployed on a standalone Oracle database and allows for multiple conversion cycles

Talks to source and target instances over database links

Compatible with most contemporary browsers

Has built-in workflow of scripts and checkpoints

Harnesses APEXs interactive reporting

Key skills required: SQL and PLSQL

What does a typical conversion scenario in CMF look like?

Define the project repository

Define the configuration set – to capture instance specific parameters

Define lookups and cross-validation rules

Define the source objects

Define the target objects

Define the transformation for the source objects

Define scripts (includes validation, transformation etc.)

Define an execution scenario (includes all relevant scripts)

CMF Overview:

Figure 1. Typical Conversion to Oracle R12

Case Study:

To give you a quick roundup of what CMF does, here is a case study of a recent Financials upgrade project where we used CMF for AR & OAC, AP, FA and GL Conversions.

For AR conversion, the data to be converted included customers with Open transactions or has had some activity in the last couple of months, Open invoices, credit memos, debit memos, receipts and historical invoices from last few months for rejections processing.

All the candidate data for conversion was extracted from R11 and held in materialized views in the CMF repository. The data was then validated and mapping rules applied. These mapping rules varied from simple to complex. The transformed data which was held in the staging tables were then pushed to the target Open Interface tables or as API parameters via database links.

Further, data in the Open interface tables were processed via the standard Oracle Customer Interface, Autoinvoice or Lockbox.

Built-in reconciliation reporting provided reports for Customers and Addresses (before and after), Customer Profiles and Collectors, Customer Contacts and Phones, Bank Accounts, Payment Methods, Customer and Transaction Balance reporting.

Praveen Nair, Consultant, Claremont.

SEPA - Impact on E-Business Suite

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 16:47:59 GMT

The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) was conceived by the EU to simplify financial transactions between countries trading in Euros. SEPA will introduce a standard payment format (XML based) which will cover 3 transaction types:

SCT – SEPA Credit Transfer

SDD - SEPA Direct Debit

SEPA Cards Framework - Credit/Debit card transactions

In order that payments to and from banks and bank accounts in different European countries are made more efficiently (the aim of SEPA being that intra-country payments/receipts should be as easy as domestic ones) SEPA uses two codes which are effectively equivalents to the account number and sort code that we know and love:

BIC – Bank Identifier Code (aka SWIFT codes) – uniquely identify financial institutions across the globe

IBAN - International Bank Account Number - an internationally recognised format of a bank account number which actually includes the national formatted account number(aka BBAN or Basic Bank Account Number) as well as ISO country code and check digits

Using these codes and a standardised XML payment format SEPA will simplify the way in which Euros and used across the EU, but what does this all mean for the average E-Business Suite user in the EU?

Firstly, and not specifically related to Oracle users, to pay/receive funds in Euros you need to be using the SEPA format by February 2014.

These are the other main areas you need to consider:

Your customer/supplier data. Your customer and supplier bank accounts need an IBAN and your bank branches need a BIC in order to use SEPA. If your volume of distinct bank accounts is relatively low then you simply ask your suppliers and customers to provide the BICs and IBANs. For larger customers you can ask your own bank to do it for you. For very large customers you can engage the services of a 3rd party like APRO who will use their own software to convert your existing national format banking data into the SEPA standards. Once you have this data you need to update your bank branches and bank accounts. Fortunately in R12 there are some handy PL/SQL APIs which will do the job for you. Claremont is working with a variety of different sized organizations faced with this task at the moment. From the technical perspective the solution is one-size-fits-all, its really just a question of how long it takes to get hold of the right data.

Patching. There are patches which implement the different bits of SEPA (credit transfers and direct debits) and then there are, in some cases, other patches required to fix the changes made by the SEPA patches. Get your patch list together earlier and carry out your own internal testing before your payment files get anywhere near your bank.

Testing. You need to engage your own bank to test the SEPA XML files you will generate from E-Business Suite. In some cases this proves to be more of a challenge than it sounds as the resources at your bank to carry out this testing are probably getting busy testing the files of other clients. One of Claremont’s clients has already come under some pressure from their bank to start implementing SEPA so that the bank can guarantee the availability of test resources.

Usage. If you have a large number of customers and suppliers how are you going to operate your pay groups? You may want to consider a specific SEPA pay group bearing in mind that SEPA operates across 31 countries, the BIC & IBAN are required for these payments and SEPA uses a new payment format. There are also a few smaller changes in the way payments are made e.g. a restricted list of characters which can be used in SEPA batch names – including no spaces.

Claremont is already working with SMEs and a multi-national corporation on SEPA implementations, both in R11i and R12 and are happy to talk to you about any requirements your company may have.

Claremont Fuses its Alliance with Vertex

Tue, 2 Jul 2013 13:01:39 GMT

Claremont and Vertex IT Solutions are pleased to announce that Claremont has joined the Vertex Fusion Alliance. The Vertex Fusion Alliance is owned wholly by Vertex IT Solutions Ltd, who has put its 16 years Oracle experience into developing a niche alliance partnership with the experts in the market that can assist customers, no matter what the business or technological need or challenge.

Tony Cook, Director, Vertex said, "For far too long now the Oracle User Community has been provided with sub-standard Consulting, Training, Managed Services, Recruitment and Change Management Solutions. The larger consultancies have over charged and under-delivered. To make this matter worse it is very difficult to identify an alternative Partner who will deliver what they say they will".

All partners, Systems Integrators and Associates considered are fully vetted and most are Oracle Partners whose employees have certified Oracle Accreditation. Their acceptance into the Partnership is based on strict criteria aligning to Vertex Fusion’s values of excellence of customer service, integrity, current and cutting edge knowledge of business and technology across verticals, successful track record of delivery of customer solutions, and the agility to mobilise and adapt to customer needs.

Vertex have built a solution that has been "fused" together by channeling 60+ years combined Oracle Recruitment experience into developing niche alliance partnerships with the experts that have extensive industry knowledge and who can be of most assistance to customers, no matter what the business need or complex technological challenge.

Tony Cook went on to say, "Partnering with Claremont is a natural fit, not only because Claremont put the customer first, they are experts in the Oracle E-Business Suite technology, and they deliver and exceed their customers’ expectations. We are proud to partner with Claremont and are hugely excited about reversing current market trends with their partnership."

Mark Vivian, Managing Director, Claremont added, "We are excited to have joined the Vertex Fusion Alliance, run by a team who understand the Oracle market place inside out. The Alliance allows us to engage other like-minded businesses with diverse capabilities to help fulfil our customers’ requirements. We have already been impressed by the quality and capability of the other partners in the alliance."

About Claremont

Claremont is a leading professional services organisation and Oracle Investment Partner that uses Oracle E-Business software to help businesses to improve processes and performance to achieve competitive advantage. Claremont employs only the most knowledgeable consultants with deep industry and business expertise to work with customers through the full systems lifecycle.

About Vertex IT Solutions

Vertex IT Solutions is an established expert Oracle recruitment solution provider, which has one of the most extensive networks of Oracle consultants across EMEA. Vertex is more than just recruiters; we are Oracle technology, industry and business experts. Based on our clients cultural fit and project budgets we can provide onshore, near shore, landed and offshore consultants both as individuals or 'fully managed' teams.

For more information visit http://www.vertex-fusion.com/

Agility in Oracle

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 14:27:58 GMT

In May 2007 Oracle purchased Agile software, the industry leader in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software. Oracle's Agile PLM solutions help engineers, manufacturing and supply chain professionals and business executives drive the product innovation and introduction process, share product specifications and configurations and collaborate effectively across the supply chain in a variety of industries such as technology, life sciences, manufacturing and consumer packaged goods. The Agile PLM solutions help customers make better product portfolio decisions, accelerate new product introduction, improve manufacturing quality and manage regulatory compliance.

One way to make the best use of the Agile suite is to share it over the internet, collaborating with suppliers. However, this presents some challenges in order to ensure that first of all the application works over the internet, and that it is secure.

This can be achieved by implementing a reverse-proxy in a DMZ. A reverse-proxy is a web server such as Microsoft IIS or the open source Apache, that is configured to translate internal to external web addresses. So for example, an Agile installation running on the internal network may have a URL of:

http://london1.local.com:7777/Agile/PLMServlet

But over the internet, may be:

http://agile.mycompany.com/Agile/PLMServlet

However, the process isn't as simple as configuring the reverse proxy. The application itself needs to know about the external web addresses too. So here's an example of how we do it.

Configure Apache server as a reverse proxy, as per Oracle Support note 1265792.1. An example of a virtual host configuration within Apache would be:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName agile.mycompany.com:80
Include conf/security.conf
ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass /Agile http://london1.local.com:7777/Agile
ProxyPassReverse /Agile http://london1.local.com:7777/Agile
ProxyPass /CoreService http://london1.local.com:7777/CoreService
ProxyPassReverse /CoreService http://london1.local.com:7777/CoreService
ProxyPass /Filemgr http://london1.local.com:8080/Filemgr
ProxyPassReverse /Filemgr http://london1.local.com:8080/Filemgr
</VirtualHost>

Configure the File Manager applications:

Shutdown the internal Tomcat server

Unpack: $AGILE_HOME/agileDomain/applications/webdav.war

Locate: WEB-INF/classes/com/agile/webfs/configuration/server.conf

and change...

file.server.url =http://london1.local.com:8080/Filemgr/services/FileServer

...to...

file.server.url =http://agile.mycompany.com/Filemgr/services/FileServer

Re-pack and replace webdav.war.

This process needs to be repeated for: webfs.war and agile-sso.jar, taking care to backup the files as you go, just in case any errors are introduced.

Finally remove the deployed Filemgr directory: $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/Filemgr and restart the Tomcat server.

When it restarts, verify the catalina.out log file shows that Filemgr has been deployed successfully and that the $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/Filemgr directory is recreated.

The last step is to log into the PLM Java client, eg. http://london1.local.com:7777/JavaClient/start.html

And change any relevant URL's to use the new proxy address:

Mind the Gap - Our HCM event

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 11:25:17 GMT

Last week saw Claremont hold their first Oracle HCM and Payroll event, Mind the Gap, to a packed out room in the London Transport Museum. A range of organisations watched presentations from Oracle, Applaud Solutions and Claremont’s HCM guru, Adrian Biddulph.

The invite-only event, titled “Getting more from Oracle HCM and Payroll: Helping to close the gap between implementation reality, product possibility and user expectation” helped users understand how to make the most out of their Oracle investment.

The roundtable event looked at current Oracle E-Business HCM and Payroll features and capabilities, along with the future direction of the product. The very latest Applaud Solutions user front end was demonstrated on a number of devices, and the business benefits of implementing the product brought to life through a number of real life case studies. The audience were then provided with a raft of golden nudgets, collected over the years, on how to use Oracle HCM and Payroll better.

“A useful session – right content, right length, right level” Jeremy Tomlin, Business Applications Manager, The UNITE Group plc

After the event, all the delegates received free admission into the London Transport Museum and the opportunity to network face-to-face and share user experience.

Mark Vivian, Claremont Managing Director, said “We would like to thank the speakers and delegates for their participation in this event, which is part of our ongoing mission to help users get the very best business value out of their investment in Oracle technology”.

If you would like to attend our next Oracle HCM and Payroll event, please register your interest here info@claremont.co.uk

Monitoring Oracle Tablespaces Effectively

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:06:15 GMT

Most monitoring solutions will provide a mechanism for monitoring tablespace usage. This will normally take the form of checking for the free space in the tablespace and will offer the chance to alert should the tablespace become more than a certain percentage used, or less than a certain percentage free.

Percentages are always subjective, since 1% of a very large tablespace can still constitute a large amount of free space, allowing for considerable growth before segments become unable to extend within the tablespace. Some monitoring tools cater for this by allowing a configurable size in Mb, Gb etc on which to alert.

However this is not the whole story. The amount of free space in the tablespace, measured either by percentage or definitive size of free space does not cater for the potential for tablespaces to automatically extend.

An automatically extensible tablespace is one which has a defined limit up to which it can extend to cater for increased sizes of objects within itself. In this instance 0Mb of free space is acceptable, since the tablespace can simply grow to a larger size to accommodate data growth. So we need to be checking against the “grace space” that the tablespace allows – that is the difference between the maximum size of the tablespace versus its current size.

This can be quite a complex task, since tablespaces can be made up of multiple datafiles and these datafiles can be configured in differing ways with regards to autoextensibility.

The following SQL can be used to return free space in a tablespace in a traditional way, yet excluding those tablespaces that are set to autoextensible (the final line can be included/modified to return just those tablespaces that match a usage criterion):

SELECT f.tablespace_name "TABLESPACE_NAME",
              a.total "TOTAL_MB",
              f.free "FREE_MB",
              round((f.free/a.total)*100, 2) "PCT_FREE"
FROM (select tablespace_name, round(sum(bytes)/1048576,2) total
            from sys.dba_data_files
            where autoextensible='NO'
            group by tablespace_name) a,
            (select tablespace_name, round(sum(bytes)/1048576,2) free
            from sys.dba_free_space group by tablespace_name) f
WHERE a.tablespace_name = f.tablespace_name
--AND (f.free/a.total)*100 <= XXXX

In addition to this, the following SQL can be used to return grace space details on those tablespaces that ARE autoextensible – again the final line in the code can be manipulated to return just those tablespaces that are struggling for space:

select   a.tablespace_name "TABLESPACE_NAME",
             (sum(a.bytes)/1024/1024) "TOTAL_MB",
             (sum(a.maxbytes)/1024/1024 - sum(a.bytes)/1024/1024) "GRACE_MB",
             100/(sum(a.maxbytes)/1024/1024) * (sum(a.maxbytes)/1024/1024 - sum(a.bytes)/1024/1024) as "PCT_GRACE"
FROM dba_data_files a
WHERE autoextensible='YES'
GROUP by tablespace_name
--HAVING (100/(sum(a.maxbytes)/1024/1024) * (sum(a.maxbytes)/1024/1024 - sum(a.bytes)/1024/1024))

Checking both these aspects of tablespaces together is the only sure-fire way of ensuring that all conditions relating to low space in tablespaces are catered for. Obviously underlying filesystem space should also be monitored to ensure space can be grown into in the case of autoextensiblity, but from a pure database perspective, we need to be careful to monitor both sides of tablespace usage.

Off his seat and into the saddle!

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:48:59 GMT

Claremont’s Matt Christie will be getting off his seat and getting into the saddle for charity. He will be raising money for the British Heart Foundation, the nation’s heart charity that saves lives through pioneering research and providing vital information to help people reduce their own heart health risks, campaigning for change and supporting and caring for heart patients.

As one of Claremont’s Managed Services consultants, his role involves long periods of time sitting in front of a monitor. Realising the health risks of his current lifestyle, Matt decided to make some changes, getting fitter, losing weight and look after his own health and well being.

So, on Sunday 19th May, Matt will be cycling 40 miles in the Cotswold Bike Ride - a largely uphill ride around the beautiful countryside of Gloucestershire. Matt is determined to reach his goal of completing the challenge and raising money for this great charity and maybe earn himself a small Scrumpy when he completes his challenge!

Please support Matt by donating: http://www.justgiving.com/Matt-Christie

Authenticating Database Users Securely with Microsoft Active Directory

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:48:08 GMT

Last year one of our clients had a need to authenticate users from a disparate set of databases against Microsoft Active Directory. We configured a high availability solution for them using the Oracle Identity Management suite that allowed them to do this and meet a critical audit requirement at a very low cost.

We returned this year to provide some additional enhancements to their solution and provide additional training for their DBA team and oversee their DR tests. One interesting requirement was to configure SSL authentication between Oracle Virtual Directory (OVD) and the back end Microsoft Active Directory farm.

This was achieved by configuring the AD adapter within OVD, to first of all use the SSL port, and secondly to import the Microsoft Active Directory root CA certificate into the OVD “adapters.jks” java keystore.

First of all, we backup the existing keystore:

cd $ORACLE_INSTANCE/config/OVD/ovd1
cp –r keystores keystores.bak

Then we use the java keytool from within the OVD Oracle home to import the certificate:

$ORACLE_HOME/jdk/jre/bin/keytool -import –trustcacerts -alias "AD_ROOTCA" –file /home/orafmwd/ad_rootca.cer -keystore $ORACLE_INSTANCE/config/OVD/ovd1/keystores/adapters.jks

Once the certificate is in place, we can now go ahead and configure the AD adapter to use the SSL port (636 is the standard AD SSL port), and set the SSL Authentication Mode:

From this point onwards all communication between Oracle Virtual Directory and Microsoft AD will be done securely over SSL.

Managing a Large Oracle Database SGA

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:24:53 GMT

Recently one of our customers experienced a number of performance related issues. These tended to be demonstrated during periods when the customer was running batch-type activities during the working day, clashing with the online user load. Due to business requirements rescheduling the batch work to out of hours was not an option, so a workable solution was required.

The database is Oracle version 11.2.0.3 with a 60Gb System Global Area (“SGA”) and 40GB Program Global Area (“PGA”) running on a virtual server with 16 CPU cores, 128Mb RAM and using the Oracle Linux 5.8 operating system (“OS”). The OS uses huge pages, hence sga_target rather than memory_target is used in Oracle’s initialisation parameters, and the virtualisation platform is Oracle VM.

Initial analysis was performed with Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) and showed the following load profile during an affected period:

On face value, this would look to be a pretty typical storage IO issue, the blue on the above graph being dominant and showing IO to be circa 65% of all wait time in the database. However, the issue only affected online user performance during the periods where we see “red” on the graph. This is related to concurrency waits on blocking locks.

After running some targeted tests set up to replicate the scenario over a sustained period of time, we saw the following:

Eventually under this load the system would get to a state where it ran out of redo space and the infamous “checkpoint incomplete” error message occurred. It was also noted that the blocking locks were sessions waiting on the “ckpt” background process, producing, amongst others, the “enq KO: Fast Object Checkpoint” wait event.

A checkpoint is a point in time, before which all dirty buffers associated with historical SCNs (or System Change Numbers) have been written to the physical data files and the datafile headers and controlfiles are updated to record this SCN. The checkpoint incomplete error occurs when the next redo log group is still awaiting the write of some dirty buffers (those which have changed) associated with the log group’s redo data. The database hangs completely until the redo log group becomes available or until another empty one is added.

In this instance, the system had 25 1Gb redo log groups, so over a period of time 25Gb of redo had been generated before it was able to be written to disk. A slow IO subsystem was looking likely considering the nature of the performance graphs OEM gave us. However, something wasn’t quite stacking up - the time it took to force the database into this state was ample to write this size of data to data files under normal circumstances.

The issue was actually related to a new feature in Oracle 11g – fast object checkpointing. Fast object checkpointing is a mechanism intended to improve performance of direct path reads on data objects. A direct path read can only occur when there are no dirty buffers associated with the data block in memory – otherwise it would be data-inconsistent, or not actually a direct read. Therefore a fast object checkpoint will attempt to checkpoint all changes on an object-by-object basis rather than sequentially through SCN. This is to cut down on unnecessary duplicated writes to disk of buffer changes in the event of direct reads occurring.

We found the redo log groups were remaining active (i.e. the changes stored in them had not been written to datafiles) longer than seemed desirable. The large SGA has the ability to cache large amounts of data and since the database was also large (circa 3.5Tb), this data often pertained to the same object. Therefore a single direct read request on such an object caused the writing of all the blocks for a specific object to disk before completing a checkpoint. We saw contention in buffer cache latches and eventually ran into the dreaded checkpoint incomplete error where the database hangs causing user sessions to timeout and all manner of problems.

The fix was simply to set _db_fast_obj_ckpt=FALSE in the database’s initialisation parameters. This turned off fast object checkpointing and reverted to the old fashioned style of checkpointing, regardless as to object, based on a “first come, first served” basis. This means that the checkpoints completed more quickly, allowing the database to continue processing forwards without hanging on the checkpoint incomplete message. The trade-off here was a degradation of performance in direct reads, but overall system performance was tested and found to have improved to a large degree, for example some batch processes take around 5 times less time to complete. More importantly, the system was then able to outlast sustained periods of load before redo space became a problem.

Claremont Delivers @Claremont Oracle Accelerate Solution for Professional Services based on Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

United Kingdom, March 21, 2013 - Claremont today announced @Claremont an Oracle Accelerate solution for the Professional Services industry. @Claremont provides customers with access to the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 for an affordable, monthly fixed cost. Claremont is an Oracle Accelerate solution provider and a Gold level member in Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN).

The @Claremont Oracle Accelerate solution provides midsize companies with easy, low cost access to the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1. For a fixed- per user/-per month- charge, @Claremont includes licenses for the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1, with a rapid implementation, secure hosting and access to industry leading managed services.

This Oracle Accelerate Solution for Professional Services delivered by Claremont offers adaptive business processes and a high-quality ownership experience to professional services organizations worldwide that rely on Oracle for better business insight and to help them grow. This pre-integrated professional business applications package helps customers retain key talent and tackle complex global projects within their business.

“In today’s tough economic climate, we are confident that @Claremont will help businesses to gain competitive advantage by using the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 in an easily consumable and affordable way. We are delighted that Oracle has reviewed @Claremont as an Oracle Accelerate solution in recognition of this.” said Mark Vivian, Claremont Managing Director.

About Oracle Accelerate
Oracle Accelerate provides simple to deploy, packaged, enterprise-class software solutions to growing midsize organizations through Oracle’s network of expert partners. Created by Oracle's expert partners, Oracle Accelerate solutions are simple to deploy, industry-specific packaged solutions, designed for fast time to benefit, which means getting the right solution in place quickly, inexpensively and with a controlled scope and predictable returns. The best Oracle Accelerate Solutions are based on Oracle Business Accelerators, which are powerful, cloud-based rapid implementation tools developed and maintained by Oracle to get you up and running on a wide range of Oracle Applications, both quickly and reliably. Oracle has more than 290,000 midsize customers who buy Oracle to grow. To find out more, visit www.oracle.com/accelerate.

About Oracle PartnerNetwork
Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized is the latest version of Oracle's partner program that provides partners with tools to better develop, sell and implement Oracle solutions. OPN Specialized offers resources to train and support specialized knowledge of Oracle products and solutions and has evolved to recognize Oracle’s growing product portfolio, partner base and business opportunity. Key to the latest enhancements to OPN is the ability for partners to differentiate through Specializations. Specializations are achieved through competency development, business results, expertise and proven success. To find out more visit http://www.oracle.com/partners.

About Claremont
Claremont is a leading professional services organisation and Oracle Investment Partner that uses Oracle software to help businesses to improve processes and performance to achieve competitive advantage. Claremont employs only the most knowledgeable consultants with deep industry and business expertise to work with customers through the full systems lifecycle. To find out more visit http://www.claremont.co.uk.

###

Trademarks
Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Useful Links:

Oracle for Midsize Companies: www.oracle.com/midsize

Oracle Accelerate: www.oracle.com/accelerate

Oracle Accelerate Solutions: www.oracle.com/accelerate-solutions

Oracle Business Accelerators: www.oracle.com/oba

Midsize.oracle.com: midsize.oracle.com

Oracle Accelerate Media: www.oracle.com/accelerate-media

Oracle PartnerNetwork Knowledge Zone: Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies: www.oracle.com/goto/acceleratepartners/index.html

Oracle Business Accelerators for Partners: www.oracle.com/goto/obapartners

Oracle ERP for Midsize Companies: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/midsize/enterprise-class-erp-1375433.html

Grow Your Business with Oracle Accelerate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO-NhqFW9hM&feature=plcp

We've got Specialized!

Wed, 6 Feb 2013 16:14:10 GMT

Claremont has been awarded the Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) R12.1 Financial Management Specialization by Oracle. The Specialization recognises partner organisations that are proficient in selling, implementing and/or developing Oracle E-Business Suite EBS R12.1 Financial Management modules. Oracle partners who achieve this Specialization are differentiated in the marketplace through proven expertise in Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) R12.1 Financial Management solutions.

“Claremont is a stand out partner in the Oracle economy, demonstrated by their Investment Partner status internally within Oracle. This Specialization is further evidence of their expertise and the great work that they do with their customers”. Tim North, Partner Manager, UK Channels and Alliances, Oracle Corporation.

“We are pleased to receive this Specialization from Oracle in recognition of our capabilities and successful delivery track record around the core Financials components of Oracle E-Business. Our team have a passion for delivery excellence, and it is great for them to receive this certification.” said Mark Vivian, Managing Director, Claremont.

Trust in us pays off!

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 14:41:35 GMT

After 9 months in the planning and execution, Claremont is pleased to announce that they have completed the transition of the National Trust’s Oracle E-Business CRM system into their data centres, and commenced a 5 year managed services contract for DBA Support & Hosting. The transition project was delivered on time and to budget and was completed without a major hitch.

Claremont was selected over a number of Tier 1 Systems Integrators in the procurement process, in particular for its flexible and agile approach to solving problems and delivering business goals for the Trust.

Sarah Flannigan, Chief Information Officer, National Trust commented: “Selecting Claremont to support our CRM system has turned out to be one of the best procurement decisions we have made in recent times: They employ good people and have been completely committed to our mutual success”.

Managing Director of Claremont, Mark Vivian added: “This is another example of how our ethos of employing the very best consultants, maintaining a genuine customer focus, and working collaboratively with our customers delivers great results. We are proud to have the National Trust as a long term customer.”

For more info please view the National Trust Case Study (PDF)

Steve's departure

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 12:30:00 GMT

Claremont can announce that, after a very enjoyable 7.5 years at the helm, current MD Steve Crosby has decided to leave the company. Keen to have more time to pursue a number of other interests Steve leaves with the very best wishes of everyone at Claremont and, to his credit, with the company in excellent health.

From 1st July, Mark Vivian will bring his vast experience, drive and flair to the role of MD and everyone at Claremont is really looking forward to supporting him through the next stage of the company’s development as it consolidates its position as the leading independent Oracle specialist in the UK.

Mark’s time as Claremont’s Operation’s Director gives him a unique insight into every aspect of the Claremont business which, combined with his earlier management and VP roles, makes him the ideal person to take the business forward.

Question	Oracle Note to check
What is the latest Applications DBA (AD) minipack and do I already have that?	<have to search for the latest readme>
What is the latest Oracle Applications Manager (ADO) minipack and so I have that?	Oracle E-Business Suite Releases 11i and 12.x: Required Updates for Patch Wizard (Doc ID 1267768.1)
What is the latest Framework (FWK) minipack and do I already have that?	Oracle Application Framework Release Notes for Release 12.1 RUP Patchsets (Doc ID 1931412.1)
Do I have the latest recommended patches for my 10.1.2 Oracle Home?	Upgrading OracleAS 10g Forms and Reports in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Doc ID 437878.1)
Do I have the latest recommended patches for my 10.1.3 Oracle Home?	Upgrading to the Latest OracleAS 10g 10.1.3.x Patch Set in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Doc ID 454811.1)
Have I got the latest recommended patches for AutoConfig?	Using AutoConfig to Manage System Configurations in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Doc ID 387859.1)
Have I got the latest recommended patches for RapidClone?	Cloning Oracle Applications Release 12 with Rapid Clone (Doc ID 406982.1)
Are there are new critical 12c databases patches recommended?	Interoperability Notes EBS 12.0 or 12.1 with RDBMS 12cR1 (Doc ID 1524398.1)
Am I on the latest Patchset version of the database?	Quick Reference to Patch Numbers for Database PSU, SPU(CPU), Bundle Patches and Patchsets (Doc ID 1454618.1)
Do I have the latest Java server-side patches?	Using JDK 7.0 Latest Update with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.0 and 12.1 (Doc ID 1467892.1)
Am I on the latest version of the JRE Plugin and are there any new interoperability patches to apply?	Deploying JRE (Native Plug-in) for Windows Clients in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Doc ID 393931.1)
Do I have all of the recommended interoperability patches for the latest internet browser versions?	Recommended Browsers for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Doc ID 389422.1)

Agenda
12:30	Lunch and informal networking
13:15	Open and welcome by Claremont
13:20	Steve Jarvis, Oracle – HR Digital Transformation
14:05	Ivan Harding, Applaud Solutions – Finally achieve your Oracle and HR Self Service Business Case with User Experience Solutions from Applaud
14:35	Tea and coffee break
14:50	Tracey Dyer, National Trust – HR Transformation in Practice
15:35	Adrian Biddulph, Claremont – Claremont Cloud
16:00	Edward Houghton, CIPD – Future Trends In HR: How Organisations Will Better Value Their Talent
16:45	Summary and wrap up from the day
17:00	Networking, drinks and 1:1 discussions (optional)

Agenda
12:30 – 13:30	Buffet lunch and informal networking
13:30 – 13:45	Open and welcome by Claremont
13:45 – 14:15	Speaker: Dai Clegg, Research Analyst: Realising the Analytics Promise
14:15 – 15:00	Speaker: Mike Hallett, Alliances and Channels Director - Business Intelligence & Enterprise Performance Management, Oracle: See More, Act Faster
15:00 – 15:20	Tea/Coffee break
15:20 – 15:50	Speaker: Julian Ford, Claremont Payroll Control Centre - an Example of Claremont Added Value
15:50 – 16:20	Speaker: Amy Balmain - Oracle’s BI tools – the pros and cons and the impact on the organisation
16:20 – 17:05	Speaker: Brendan Tierney, Oracle ACE Director: Advanced Analytics, Mining Gold
17:05 – 17:30	Speaker: Toby Price, Claremont Capability Lead: Lassoing Eels / Accelerating Benefits
17:30	Close

[root@claremont ~]# cat /proc/meminfo \| grep Huge
HugePages_Total:	64006
HugePages_Free:	1548
HugePages_Rsvd:	1538
HugePages_Surp:	0
Hugepagesize:	2048 kB

IT Objectives	Oracle Database 12c New Functionality
DB Consolidation and DBaaS	Oracle Multitenant (new DB Option)
Big Data, Data Warehouse and Analytics	Oracle Advanced Analytics (new DB Option replaces Data Mining), In-Database MapReduce / Pattern Matching, 1/3 Big Data Appliance
Storage Optimization	Heat Map, Automatic Data Optimization (Part of Advanced Compression)
High Availability and Data Protection	Application Continuity, Far Sync, Global Data Services (Part of Active Data Guard)
Data Security	Data Redaction, Privilege Analysis, Data Masking at source, Sensitive Data Discovery (Part of Advanced Security and Data Masking)
Database Manageability	Consolidated Replays, Database As A Service, Snap-clone (Part of Enterprise Management, Real Application Testing)