Oracle
Fusion Applications are currently available under an early adopter program.
That means Oracle is not pushing to existing clients to replace their
applications with Oracle Fusion Applications, but will instead its trying to
build a reference base through their early adopter program.This post is series
of Q&A, that everyone wants to know.
1. When Fusion was announced by Oracle ?
Last
year during Oracle OpenWorld in September 2010, Oracle made several product
announcements. Importantly, one of these was the announcement of Oracle Fusion
Applications, the new set of Oracle Applications.
2. What is Oracle Fusion Applications?
Oracle
Fusion Applications is the next generation of applications from Oracle. The
entire product is based on experiences acquired with previous Oracle
Applications offerings such as: Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's Siebel CRM,
Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise, and others, this new product was developed from
scratch and written using the Java . The design and functionality used input
from Oracle customers that provide input via the Customer Council for this
product.
3. When will Oracle Fusion Applications be available?
Earlier
Oracle announced that Fusion Apps will be available in 4Q2010 (fourth quarter
of calendar year 2010) for a limited set of customers. This would be part of
the early adopter program for this offering. Oracle Fusion Applications are
finally nearing GA (General Availability), but not confirmed yet.
4 .What are choices recommended as far as adopting Fusion
Applications?
GA date
is not available for Fusion yet, therefore Oracle recommends these three
options to customer:
·
Augmentation: for
those existing customers will implement modules from the Oracle Fusion
Applications suite to augment their existing Oracle Applications Unlimited
implementations. An example of augmentation is an existing Oracle E-Business
Suite (EBS) financials and HCM user implementing the talent management
functionality from Oracle Fusion Applications alongside the existing EBS implementation.
·
Replacement:
Customers will replace some or all of their Applications Unlimited
implementation with one or more of the Oracle Fusion Applications
"pillars" For example, an organization with EBS Financials and HCM
might decide to replace HCM with Oracle Fusion Applications HCM in the short
term and replace the financial modules later.
·
Complete
Adoption.Customers looking to replace existing legacy systems can move
to a complete Fusion Applications environment. Companies operating globally
have to make sure product must have offering for local requirement in first
place.
5. What are the major components of Oracle Fusion Applications?
Fusion
V1.0 currently, the major components are Customer Relationship Management
(CRM), Financial Management (FM), Human Capital Management (HCM), Procurement,
Project Portfolio Management, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Governance, Risk
and Compliance (GRC).
The
scope of the Phase 1 release is shown in the graphic below.
6. How is Oracle Fusion Applications Architecture ?
Fusion
application have three major components in there Architecture as fig below. you
can check the details in next post.
7. Are Oracle Fusion Applications a replacement for the existing
Oracle Applications, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise,
Oracle's JD Edwards Applications and Siebel CRM?
No, Not
At all. Oracle Fusion Apps is a new set of applications. It uses many concepts
from previous applications. For example, the ERP concepts are taken from Oracle
E-Business Suite. The CRM concept is taken from Siebel. However, the
architecture of Fusion Apps is different from previous offerings. By design,
there is a great symbiosis between Fusion Apps and Oracle Fusion Middleware.
Considering the challenges that customer may face in pursuing a migration to
Fusion Apps, Oracle is well recommending a "coexistence" approach
that helps existing customers of a specific Oracle application.
8. What is Oracle Fusion Middleware?
Oracle
Fusion Middleware 11g provides the underlying infrastructure to run and manage
all your software and hardware architectures. Middleware is the key to driving
efficiencies and should be considered a business imperative. Fusion Middleware
includes Development Tools; User Interaction; Enterprise Performance
Management; Business Intelligence; Content Management; SOA & Process Management,
Application Grid, Enterprise Management and Identity Management.
9.Are Oracle Fusion Applications Available for Purchase?
Yes.
Oracle Fusion Applications are available. These fusion application came under
seven product families are available for customers to purchase, or to upgrade
to if they have a current maintenance agreement. However, Oracle has stated
that organizations purchasing or upgrading to Oracle Fusion Applications can
only do so under an early adopter program, and that all such purchases/migrations
must be approved by Oracle's executive management. These executives have to
review and approve contracts to make sure customers have business requirements
that can be addressed by the product in its initial release.
10.Did any one Deployed Fusion, and how Exactly Are They Doing?
Till
date very limited information. Few month back Oracle press released announced one successful announcement , this may be part of early adopter program.There is only one
live customer that has implemented some Oracle Fusion Applications
functionality in an augmentation scenario.
11. What are different avaiable deployment options are available
for Fusion?
Oracle
Fusion Applications is offered with the following deployment options:[Adopted www.oracle.com]
·
On premise, hosted by the
enterprise
·
Public cloud (available
to the general public), hosted over the Internet by Oracle, software as a
service (SaaS), or Oracle business partners offering business process
outsourcing (BPO) solutions
·
Private cloud (available
internally behind a firewall), hosted as a SaaS or BPO offering
·
Hybrid, an implementation
of both on premise and cloud
12. What is Early Adopter of Oracle Fusion Applications?
The
Oracle Fusion Applications Early Adopter Customer Program (EAP) is by invitation only and enables strategic customers to get
direct hands-on access to the next-generation Fusion Applications software
before general availability.
Oracle
Highlighted the following services as part of its early adopter program:
·
Oracle
Product Development monitoring of service requests: Users
service requests will be Monitored by development
·
Special
training of system integrator and enterprise resources:
Development will hosts a kickoff meeting for the project, and is directly
involved in training customer and system integrator resources.
·
Oracle
Product Development vetting of customer use cases:
Oracle development resources will be directly involved in reviewing the
customer's envisioned use of Oracle Fusion Applications to ensure that the
customer's requirements can be met.
·
Customers
have direct input to Oracle Product Development - as customers go through the implementation, they may find some
functionality does not meet their specific requirements, and they are able to
have direct input back to product development to address these issues. However,
this is more suited to detailed functional issues, not major functional areas.
·
Oracle
Product Development monitors customer
system both before and after go-live.
13. What Are the Licensing Requirement of Oracle Fusion
Applications?
Recently
Oracle has published pricing information for its long-awaited Fusion
Applications.The official pricing is available at Oracle website.
The
list gives pricing information major Fusion Applications modules like
financials, procurement, PPM (project portfolio management), HCM (human capital
management), SCM (supply chain management), CRM, PRM (partner relationship
management) and GRC (governance, risk and compliance).
If you
are aware existing pricing for EBS then you cann't not find any major
difference in pricing for example, Fusion Financials and E-Business Suite
Financials are priced the same, at US$4,595 per application user license.
14. How is security for Oracle Fusion Application?
Oracle
Fusion Applications is highly secured, is of tightly coordinating the following
security concerns and Features.
·
Role-based
access control (RBAC)
·
Function
security
·
Data
security
·
Privacy
·
Access
provisioning and identity management :The
Oracle Fusion Applications installation process creates an initial user and
provisions that user with the administration roles necessary for initial setup.
Oracle IM is available in Oracle Fusion Applications through integration with
Oracle Fusion Middleware. Identity management in Oracle Fusion Applications
involves creating and managing user identities, creating and linking user
accounts, managing user access control through user role assignment, managing
enterprise roles, and managing OIM workflow approvals and delegated
administration.
·
Segregation
of duties policies:Segregation of duties (SOD) separates activities such as
approving, recording, processing, and reconciling results so an enterprise can
more easily prevent or detect unintentional errors and willful fraud
·
Enforcement across tools,
technologies, data transformations, and access methods
·
Enforcement across the
information life cycle
15. How about the Data Model for fusion?
Oracle
Fusion Applications uses a unified data model, which is a superset of
E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel entities and attributes.
You can extend this data model while maintaining consistent semantics.
·
Logical data striping
offers flexible enterprise structures for global organizations.
·
Reference data sets
enable business units to share reference data. Reference data is managed by
sets.
·
Transactional data is
managed or striped by business units.
You can
assign sets of codes to each business unit.
Oracle
Fusion Applications uses Trees, a hierarchy model that offers flexible hierarchies for cross
line of business processes.
16. Does FusionApplication have flexfleld feature?
Yes,
similar to EBS, fusion application have flex feild concept. Fusion is supporting
mainly three types of flexfields
·
Descriptive flexfields
·
Extensible flexfields
·
Key flexfields
These
flexfield enables enable implementers to configure application features without
programming and fully supported within Oracle Fusion Applications.
17. What is so special for Fusion User interface?
Comparing
to other Oracle application, Fusion user interface is consider to be best of
breed. It is customer-driven have intuitive design of the applications which
results in large productivity gains.
The user
interface design of Oracle Fusion Applications is:
·
Role-based, which
enables pervasive delivery in multiple modes, devices, and channels
·
Configurable
and extensible supported enhancing
the Productivity for individual users and groups of users
·
Composite
and contextual, providing integrated information in the context of process
·
Built-in user communities
and workspace, Web 2.0 information distribution, and embedded social computing
to improve collaborative work
Some of
good feature for Fusion UI are
·
Role-based dashboards
that you can configure to your business needs
·
Unified worklist
·
Guided Business
Processes, which are organized sets of tasks that help you get your work done
more efficiently
·
Embedded analytics that
provides the necessary information for completing a task
·
Contextual help that
provides conceptual and procedural reference information
·
Oracle Fusion
Applications Search, which provides a seamless search experience for easily
locating and taking action on relevant data
·
Tagging, which enables you
to associate keywords with objects so they can be easily located
·
Instant collaboration
that provides the contact information for persons related to your tasks
18. Is this avaiable for download?
Yes,
Beta version is avaiable for download from Oracle E-Delivery . Check it out the
details at fteter blog(see
blogroll).
19. What about the Business Process Design for Fusion?
Oracle
Fusion Applications uses a declarative business process design that leverages
Oracle SOA Suite.
That
means all SOA related features include approval management flows, human
workflows, Oracle Business Process Management Worklist (Oracle BPM Worklist),
business rules, activity guides, and process configuration customization tools
(Oracle SOA Composer).
Business
Process design is done bt heavy usage of two languages 1) Business Process
Execution Language (BPEL) and 2) Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN).
20. How about the Approval Management in Fusion Application?
In
Fusion, AMX serves as a sophisticated assignment manager within human workflow
allowing you to model complex approval patterns based on business rules.
21. How about audit feature in Fusion application?
Fusion
Application implement Oracle Fusion Middleware Audit Framework to handle all
.In other word as typical audit feature like providing a measure of
accountability and answers the "who has done what and when" types of
questions.
This
framework cover several key audit features driven by compliance, monitoring,
and analytics requirements.
22. What are the other replacement feature in fusion that makes
a differnce to EBS user?
Yes
there are couple of them , here are few:
- Identity
Manager in Fusion apps replaces FND User
- Business
Units is replaced Operating Units
- Access
Control Governor replaces OICM
- Date
Effectivity replaces DateTrack
23. What is Replacement of processing like Concurrent program or
concurrent manager similar to EBS in Fusion?
Oracle Enterprise Scheduler provides
the ability to define, schedule, and run different types of jobs. You can run
jobs on demand, or schedule them to run in the future.
24. What are major footprints in Fusion Financial Management ?
Fusion Financial Management component
of the Oracle Fusion Applications suite, itsrevolutionizes productivity and
information access with native, real-time intelligence.Current offering is with
these foo- prints.
- General
Ledger
- Accounts
Payable
- Accounts
Receivable
- Asset
Management
- Payments
and Collections
- Cash
and Expense Management
25. What are major benifits for EBS Financials Users
- They
can see Graphical hierarchies (trees)
- Shared
reference data (SetId)
- Open
item reconciliation processing
- Rules-based
engine for AP matching
- Comprehensive
budgetary controls
- Centralized
inter-unit setup and processing
- Multi-level,
flexible cash positioning
- Travel
authorizations and cash advances
26. What are major benifits for PSFT Financials Users?
- Subledger
Accounting
- BI
Publisher (including eText)
- Cash
basis accounting
- Bill
Presentment Architecture
- Credit
Management
- Advanced
Collections
- credit
card processor integrations
27. Where I can get more information on fusion?
You can
Find more information at Oracle.com in Oracle Fusion page for
any information, white paper, podcast , and data sheet. You can also keep
updated by reading fteter's
and Debra's blog.I love reading both blogs.
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