Oracle EBS

Because Oracle EBS can hold the keys to your enterprise’s success, it’s crucial that you understand the issues with Oracle EBS, learn how to leverage the application to its fullest, and find opportunities to be both more efficient and intelligent with your ERP solution.

Why should you care about the impact of Oracle EBS on your enterprise?

Your Oracle EBS application records thousands of real-time data entries and transactions at every level of your enterprise.

So, whether you’re the head HR, director of IT, or manage operations, you need to be able to make informed and strategic decisions based on data from your Oracle EBS. You need a solution that can help you translate ERP numbers into actions that positively impact your enterprise’s performance.

When your Oracle EBS application is working for your enterprise, you will see:

Of course, this is issue that impacts enterprises. There are other drawbacks to your Oracle EBS ERP, which we describe in detail later in this guide, as well as potential solutions to these problems.

Who will benefit from this Oracle EBS business guide?

We’ve established that Oracle EBS can potentially touch every department of an enterprise. That’s why this guide could be useful for anyone in the both the line of business and IT. Let’s consider some likely scenarios.

And just who is an EBS Customer? E-Business Suite is intended to be a one-stop software and operations shop for large scale enterprises. Large organizations have many common business processes and areas of concern, such as accounting, human resources, logistics, and order management. Rather than implement a patchwork of different applications from different vendors to fulfill these needs, Oracle offers E-Business Suite and its many applications to cover these functions and more:

After all, Oracle is in the business of helping businesses run with EBS, and should be well-positioned to be the experts of your system. This keeps you from managing a heavy contact book with many service vendors, application developers and suppliers who each add a different piece of your architecture, and who can’t be relied on as a group for your overall enterprise software environment.

With E-Business Suite, you have one expert partner for it all. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Who Uses EBS?

EBS was assembled with a diverse enterprise user base in mind. This includes a variety of business units:

What are the Benefits of EBS?

The Value of an ERP

As you can see, Oracle E-Business Suite is no small application. It’s an Enterprise Resource Planner (ERP) that integrates and orchestrates many common facets large-scale enterprise operations. It may seem like an ordeal to encompass so many features, users, processes, and requirements under the heading of one suite of systems. Yet this all-in approach has its benefits.

Variety in EBS Services

Paid Support

Oracle EBS is supported by Oracle with paid Premier and Extended Support options. This means that they’re providing updates, new features, bug fixes, and quality of life improvements to their license holders.

Oracle has also announced an upcoming major update to the Oracle E-Business Suite roadmap. Their goal is to add a future release after the current 12.2 release. While they have not yet announced a date for the big EBS release, they have committed to providing Premier level support for this release through at least 2030.

Upgrade Services

If your enterprise is operating on an older version of E-Business Suite or your looking to adopt upcoming new features, it’s a good idea to seek EBS upgrade services starting right now. Learn more about how PITSS can help your enterprise here.

Customizations are prevalent in many E-Business Suite shops. This makes sense as Oracle has focused on adding host of personalization features over the years. These features allow you to add branding, logos, and corporate colors to your EBS screens, as well as other customizations.

These types of personalization are metadata-driven. They’re persistent. This is the primary benefit of using the standard EBS personalization features—changes remain if the underlying screens are patched later.

However, your enterprise might have a unique service, process, or product that requires a non-traditional method of data capture, integration, or workflow. In fact, this type of customization may differ from how EBS developers intend the application to function.

To accomplish your new business need, you may need to deploy Oracle EBS in a new architecture, system configuration, or even apply a service layer. Though E-Business Suite’s personalization features are very useful on the surface, they simply won’t be able to meet these types of specialized, in-depth business requirements.

Understand Impacts of Customization

It’s important to consider all of the potential implications of a customized Oracle EBS ERP. Whenever Oracle issues a new release, patch, or, feature, your ERP may be at risk. That’s why it’s crucial to begin with a sound infrastructure, as well as employ the help of expert architects.

Before embarking on an Oracle EBS customization project, take the time to fully analyze the advantages, disadvantages, and possible outcomes of customizing your the E-Business Suite to incorporate your specific business needs. There are many options to customize or extend your EBS environment including:

Migration and Integration: A Primer

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EBS Migration Options

Understanding the complexity of your code will help an EBS project succeed; it will be easier to develop new functionalities on a clean surface than trying to deal with the bulk of your EBS code and customizations all at once.

The first step and the quickest way to get a clear picture of your Oracle EBS code is to perform a legacy code analysis. The right tool will provide visualizations for:

An effective code analysis tool will look for dead or unused code code, focusing on clusters of functionality. This allows application re-engineering to happen naturally; developers can easily see where code can be consolidated with low effort and high return.

The Prioritization Matrix

With a clear picture of your EBS code, dependencies, and functionalities, now you can begin plotting on a prioritization matrix.

So what is a code prioritization matrix? In short, it’s a simple graph that helps sort applications or business processes by order of value and importance. In this case, this prioritization matrix shows where business value relates to the effort of modernizing those applications or processes.

Retention Zone

Applications in this quadrant meet both the business and IT department needs, but may be subject to different opportunity. With little effort, this code can be easily modernized or transformed to accomplish new goals.

Re-Prioritization Zone

These are applications with higher than desired maintenance or operations costs, but are aligned with business value. They’re necessary to the business, but perhaps there are ways to make them more efficient.

Determine Feature Value

It’s important to determine the value of new or updated features in your Oracle EBS system. After all, what’s the point in having working ERP software if it doesn’t necessarily benefit your enterprise or end users?

Determining if your software is working or not is the simpler part; it can be measured by tasks done, bugs fixed, or the absence of issue reports. However, determining feature value can be a little more difficult.

Value should first and foremost be determined and agreed to by both your business executives and IT directors. It can really be anything that matters to your enterprise, as long as these metrics are clearly defined, established, and measured. Here are several popular metrics enterprises can use to determine the value of your EBS features:

Determine Opportunity

Even your monolithic Oracle EBS application can offer countless new opportunities for your enterprise. All it takes is a little creativity, some clearly defined business objectives, and a capable team to deliver the solutions.

One excellent example of turning your EBS application into an opportunity is to make an internally facing application into a revenue generating, customer-facing service. For instance, you can create an external self-service portal by transforming your EBS workflow that helps employees track hours or sick days. When you can realize operating efficiencies by turning more control over to your employees, and they frequently find value in the rapid communication and efficiency opportunities that such an approach gives them.

EBS Integration Options

Fortunately for business leaders looking to find new opportunities within their EBS application, Oracle E-Business Suite offers integration points and a variety of technologies. Oracle has made it easier to integrate new applications and technologies with EBS, including SOA and REST services, Oracle products, and other options. While a specific integration point is possible through these other technologies and products, it’s in your best interest to analyze the costs, challenges, and risks before you begin an integration project.

Listed below are the 3 most common strategies for EBS customers looking to extend their EBS into new consuming systems.

Database API

A direct connection into your database, allowing outside systems to query and transact directly against your EBS.

As you can guess, there are lots of people and red tape involved, making direct database connections cumbersome to set up. That’s why they are usually reserved for high-trust communication between applications that you host on your own servers. You only set them up a handful of times to connect your database to a few specific applications that you know everything about.

This makes Database API integration a great choice if your API consumers are limited to applications you control and users you trust. However, this approach is a poor choice and maybe not even an option for API consumers you don’t control or trust, such as customers, PaaS, SaaS, and mobile applications.

Lastly, a database API puts a big requirement on your consumers: they have to understand your database. This goes against good API design, because good APIs should be like contracts. They proclaim what your database can do for consumers without explaining how it all works. A database API requires consumers to write queries in PL/SQL (or use code libraries to do this for them) to get data and make callable statements. In other words, they still need to know how it all works. And without significant work, the little “gotchas” and workarounds that make your EBS tick won’t be contained behind your API the way they should.

This means consumers have to write DB-specific code to get information from your EBS’s database API. This DB-specific code may need to be updated if you upgrade your database version, or if you change the internal layout of your EBS database, or your security model, or, or … the list goes on. Ultimately, your consumers are at risk to become tightly coupled to your EBS database architecture, and may become a monolithic extension of your ERP. For long-term maintainability, that’s a big negative.

Flat File Data Export and Import

A process of scheduled, bulk data exports from your EBS to consuming systems in the form of flat files.

There are times when you simply can’t beat the tried-and-true flat file export. It’s nothing sophisticated: Oracle’s built-in APIs let you export your EBS data in a variety of common formats (most notably CSV). Then it’s up to your developers to airdrop them to the systems you want to receive your data. These exports can be automated, run on a schedule, and sent to consumers through a well-understood transport such as a shared network drive or SFTP server. In clever implementations, you can import bulk flat files from your consumers (a reversal in the provider/consumer roles). This effectively creates two-way communication between servers, allowing them to interpret and do with the flat file data whatever they want. The sky’s the limit.

Alas, the simplicity of this approach is also its shortcoming. The only data you expose this way is the data you choose to export. This is different from both Database and REST APIs, who by their nature expose large and varied sections of your database. This means that flat file integration is extremely purpose-specific, rather than a general use API you can set up once and employ anywhere.

Ironically, this approach is also relatively insecure: flat files are a form of “data at rest” with no expiration date. Direct database connections (and to a lesser extent, REST services) send information instantly, over protocols with high security standards. By contrast, flat files can live forever if you don’t delete them, and can be sent in unencrypted clear text if you aren’t careful. This is a major issue when dealing with sensitive data: you really have to trust the parties who receive your data to delete it when they’re done.

This method is not real time, which can be problematic. Consumers have to wait for the flat file to be created and delivered, rather than calling an API and getting a response in real-time. You can set up your file transfer jobs on any schedule you like, but the more frequently you generate files, the more hardware resources your EBS database uses for these jobs.

Hence the next issue: this method is inefficient with system resources. This trade-off between conserving hardware cycles and providing consumers with fresh data takes fine tuning, and in a cloud hosting situation, you’ll pay for those extra clock cycles. Regardless of how often you send the data out, your consumers know they aren’t working with up-to-the-second information, and are similarly burdened with re-importing and re-processing your exports to find the data they need.

Data Export

A modern, HTTP-based method of providing access to specific data and transactions in your EBS for a wide variety of high- and low-trust consumers.

The main downside of REST is the cost and effort involved. On their own, database APIs and raw data exports generally don’t require new hosting infrastructure. REST services generally do. This means buying significant new horsepower in your data center to host your REST API and handle the traffic you expect.

Ultimately, the API strategies you choose revolve around your goals. If you want to support customer-facing mobile applications, you need a REST API. Period. But if you only need to update your resale partners once a day with your inventory numbers, a flat data file export could serve just fine. If you are like many enterprises out there, the evolutionary architecture of your EBS will eventually encompass all three of these approaches.

The Future Of Your EBS Matters

Oracle’s most recent EBS release was Oracle E-Business Suite R12.2. They also made some changes to their support timelines for earlier releases of EBS. These changes make now the perfect time to evaluate your EBS strategy.

To stay on target for this year and to ensure that your strategy is ready to move to the next level, we recommend that at the very least Oracle EBS customers:

Migration Options and Challenges

Oracle EBS Cloud Hosting

Cloud is a particularly important step to take when re-considering your EBS options.

According to Oracle’s website, “With an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute or Compute Classic subscription and our automation tools, you can quickly provision new instances of Oracle E-Business Suite as well as lift and shift your existing Oracle E-Business Suite instances from on-premises to Oracle Cloud.”

Learn more about the keys to a successful EBS to cloud migration.

Hybrid Architecture

Hybrid cloud architecture means that you blend and manage both cloud and on-premises environments together in one EBS architecture.

According to Oracle, “Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite (AMS) uses Enterprise Manager to provide a central console that you can use to manage and monitor your Oracle E-Business Suite environments.” Their suite include tools that help you to manage and monitor a blended cloud and on-premises EBS environment.

Configuration Migration Challenges

Many enterprise will deal with numerous challenges migrating their EBS applications to the cloud and other technologies. For instance, custom EBS setups can be so large and cumbersome that one of the migration options enterprises have chosen is to physically ship hardware to their cloud carrier. This sounds crazy, right? It’s more common than you think.

From complex data needs, to years of technical debt, to customizations that may take developers years to untangle, enterprises need to assess all of their options to tackle these challenges. This section may help you identify those challenges before they become a huge problem

Oracle will undoubtedly speak to this need to adapt your EBS to an evolving world. They will, no doubt, describe product roadmap for EBS and a future in which the technology stays relevant. Oracle’s new cloud hosting for EBS is a step in the right direction – but it’s not enough. A cloud migration is not the sort of innovation that puts you ahead of the curve, nor is it the architectural transformation you need to help your innovators thrive.

Make no mistake, the choices you make in upgrading and migrating your EBS have everything to do with your ability to keep up. The right technical architecture around your EBS can turn it into a center of innovation, enable business units to creatively pursue new revenue opportunities, and even help you mine your data for insights that only your data can tell you. Without this forward-looking perspective on your EBS, though, you may not see the value in transforming. You might not see the urgency.

If you don’t make the big changes, you won’t be ready to make the fast ones. The agility gap between you and the competition will only get wider.