August 20, 2012

Oracle Tax Management SIG Presents: Fusion Tax Update/Demo

OAUG and the Oracle Tax Management SIG invites you to an exclusive Webinar on Friday August 24 Webinar with Oracle E-Business Tax Senior Development Director Harsh Takle. Register at https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/897670926.

SPACE is LIMITED.

Title: Oracle Tax Management SIG Presents: Fusion Tax Update/Demo
Date: Friday, August 24, 2012
Time: 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM EDT

Posted by alexfiteni at 3:55 PM | Comments (0)

June 25, 2012

Oracle E-Business Tax Online Training Session launching this WEEK!

Alex Fiteni's extensive knowledge in Release 12 E-Business Tax will be available across the globe and accessible to all by July 2, 2012. Our online video will focus on the Best Practices, the new Architecture Model, and some critical Mitigations for a smooth and reliable Upgrade or Re-Implementation from R11i to R12 E-Business Suite.

Click here to get on our subscriptions list and be the first 100 clients to receive a 10% Discounted Rate!!

Expires July 1, 2012~ Please take a minute to enter your email address here: http://ow.ly/bOSJ3

Select our 'Education' list for your discount!

We have created 3 sections to this Lesson.

Oracle R12 E-Business Tax Upgrade Challenges, Risks and Mitigations will include;

1. E-Business Tax Architecture and the R12 Upgrade
Review eBTax Architecture
Tax Schema Differences
Transaction Schema differences

2. Review Migration Approaches
One to One upgrade with no migration
Legacy upgrade & migration
Integrate with a 3rd party tax service
Why Migrate to Regime to Rate & Rules

3. Key challenges, Risks & Mitigations
Upgrade and migrate
Fresh or Re-Implementation

Posted by nfiteni at 4:32 PM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2007

Oracle Supply Chain Management

The management of complex global supply chains can be challenging. From Planning through Execution, it would be convenient to have a road map from those with expertise in the discipline. The Supply Chain Operations Reference outlines the entire business process. The Overview Booklet is free to download, while you willl have to register to get ont the site for the detailed reference model.

The ideas outlined can be found in the Oracle Supply Chain Solution, which includes not only Advanced Procurement, but also Supply CHain execution, PLM, Advance Plannning, Manufacturing and Transportation Management, among others.

For global manufacturing and distribution companies, an efficient Supply Chain Management proces is a critical success factor to ensuring margins are maintained across complex trade, tariff, tax and regulatory boundaries. The risks inherent in managing a global supply chain are also further complicated by fluctuating foreign exchange, ensuring secure supply lines, managing supplier relationships while recognizing time zones and cultural diffferences.

The consulting SME will review these risks against standard SCM risks matrices, verify secure and efficient electronic transaction processing exchanges follow best practices, while also validating that approproate COSO controls are in place throughout the business process.

Posted by alexfiteni at 1:50 AM | Comments (0)

February 6, 2007

OpenSource Project Management with OpenWorkbench

I downloaded Open WorkBench (OWB) from CA Associates (formerly NIKU) and tried to convert some of my more useful MS-Project (MSP) projects to use in OWB. There is no direct conversion between the two embedded in either product. Each has their own internal format. However, they both use a standard .xml file format so this should have been fairly straightforward. No worries, as the Aussies say. Well, some worries.

It seems that the .xml validation, export and import process that each product uses may differ slightly. I tried a small (< 100 task file) trial and could move materials from MSP to OWB, I tried a larger file of > 500 tasks and > 50 resources, which failed, mostly due to basic validation errors in the file, since I had not cleaned up the file in MSP. OWB did not fail though, and simply said the file was bad. I then saved the smaller file, without any changes in OWB. Now I tried opening this same file in MSP. MSP had a coronary and restarted. Oh, well, so much for supporting even their own de facto standard.

Anyway, I looked though the OWB functions and find them to be quite intuitive or someone raised on MSP. I like the Gantt Chart, it is not too fussy. It seems to be easy to use, and has several views which work in a similar manner to MS-Project.

Unfortunately, I do see lots of enhancement requests, but I do not see any updates to the code since 2005 (v.1.1.4) so getting new functionality may be a pipe dream.

The .XML file format for a Project is based on MSP’s version as a de facto standard. It would be nice if a more robust standard something like the Project Management XML Schema consortium which is maintained and documented as PMXML by Virtual Projects. It should be noted that Primavera does not seem to support PMXML either, but one lives in hope.

Posted by alexfiteni at 8:42 PM | Comments (0)

February 4, 2007

Service Oriented Architecture

This CIO article announcing support for SAPs ESAO in addition to Oracle's SOA launched a year ago validates the growing popularity of software integration services based on Service Oriented Architecture to stitch disparate systems together. SOA may be viewed as a panacea for solving the Best of Breed integration problem. Too often, though, IT organizations will roll out a new methodology to resolve transaction and reference data synchronization issues, without dealing with some of the underlying issues with BoB.

The issue that many organizations face are that the Best of Breed point solution approach is costly. While one has the advantage of simple, easy to use and meets end user exact requirements, the 'behind the scenes' costs of support, integration, software upgrades, end user training, as well as the overhead of managing data access and data quality, ensuring governance and controls are in place for all the applications at the same level, all of which can be quite daunting. Enter Oracle's unique approach 'Applications Unlimited', which uses the Fusion Middleware to integrate all of the Applications Suites (Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Ewards, Peoplesoft Enterprise, and Siebel) together.

Nevertheless, the Best of Breed approach should still be evaluated carefully before embarking on the support and operation of disparate point applications. The investment should cover not only IT initial hardware, software and implementation and customization costs, but also software support fees, IT operations support, ongoing training, skills enhancement as new features are introduced and product knowledge management, integration, and upgrades - often on different technology stacks and on different schedules. On the other hand, the benefits arising from the implementation must be carefully evaluated as well. The direct savings arising from the efficiencies gained from a point solution in one process may likely be offset by the negative as well as positive impacts to one or more other business process efficiencies, which are often unexpected or under-estmated. In any event, a full analysis of the costs and benefits of a BoB implementation should ensure that the true costs and benefits are included in any recommendation.

Posted by alexfiteni at 1:02 PM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2005

XBRL GL 2005

The new XBRL GL 2005 Specification is a key element in the Financial Reporting Supply Chain (FRSC) with the capability of transferring large amounts of transaction related detail between systems.

The XBRL GL 2005 Specification course was hosted by Hitachi in San Francisco was lead by Hugh Wallis, XBRL International Inc., and included presentations and examples by Gianluca Garbellotto of Dyn.Acc.Sys and Nobuyuki Sambuichi of Hitachi Systems and Services, Japan.

Originally, this specification seemed destined for limited usefulness in audits, but with the new spec, some degree of modularity has been introduced. In addition to gl-gen, modules include extensions in the areas of multi-currency (gl-muc), business (gl-bus), tax audit (gl-taf), as well as saxonic accounting (gl-usk). Elements from all of these modules can be assembled through a 'compilation' process.

The key benefits of the new specification appear to be flexibility and ease of understanding based on the new modular approach, while the main drawback from adding the additional modules may be complexity.

Posted by alexfiteni at 6:20 PM | Comments (0)

June 20, 2005

New sub-domain for Fiteni.com

A sub-domain seems to be short hand for a place holder for a new resource area. Since the blogs and journals are more in the nature of a knowledge resource, I thought I would follow other organizations' best practices and place my blogging in its own 'virtual' space. Not as easy as I thought, though! Well, I am always willing to learn new techniques. Greg Sweeney of Nexcess, my intrepid web hostng service, helped me set up a blog sub-domain for fiteni.com and it seems to work well. Now my blogs can be found at blog.fiteni.com which is a little easier to find.

Also, I have added Technorati to the right hand side to show links to me and search capability throughout Technorati.

Later.....

Posted by alexfiteni at 7:44 PM | Comments (0)

June 7, 2005

Has Open Source found a reliable business model?

The 'Silicon Valley Leadership Forum' recently reminded me that networking is still the road to building business and even friendships outside of corporate life. The event held in Mountain View focused on Open Source, a topic that, by some reports, should have the traditional proprietary software makers shaking in their boots. One prediction has the proprietary software vendors seriously challenged to remain profitable within 5 years. This observer finds that hard to believe, since Open Source link has been around for many years and the only serious challenger observed so far appears to be around operating systems – DOS vs Linux.

The promise is certainly there, but as a basis for actually making serious money – ie. A sustainable business model - has yet to be determined. The Linux variants have rolled out under the guise of a 'free' operating system, but technical support inevitably requires some expertise - outsourced or otherwise - to make it all work. Perhaps it is not a free as we would like to believe. Open Source has made a great many promises, yet few have really tested it. We are still at the stage where a 'product champion' will practically write the specification, code, test and then evangelize it to get customers before the software can really take off. There are few domain experts participating in some of the niche areas, and this can inhibit uptake by knowledgeable buyers. Most successes are modest and are bootstrapped.

But the beginning of the end is at hand some say. Yes and No. Yes, there will be a greater push to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and that will impact the amount budgeted for capital and license costs, as it has affected hardware, but inevitably the installation, implementation, support, and maintenance of Open Source software has a cost and the customer is still looking to meet some basic payback goals. A company choosing to use this method must seriously judge its capacity to 'tinker in the back yard'. I still build my own PCs, but would never counsel a large company to do so. Would I risk my corporate knowledge bases or key business flows to OpenSource? Well, some companies are indeed doing so, and very well thank-you. What characterizes these companies? Strangely enough it is that group of companies that believe in owning their own destiny, which really surprised me. These companies have a culture of innovation and/or self-determination, they want to keep their TCO way down, and are willing to fill in the gaps with their own code where needed. The IT organization tends to be agile and responsive, and make decisions based on deep technical understanding of the risks and rewards.

Where is OpenSource headed? By all reports, it is flourishing, with some 70,000 projects and 70 new projects added daily, and a community of over a million participants. This kind of acceptance can be compared with the traditional models amongst software tools vendors, who deemed that a community exceeding a million developers meant a key acceptance threshold has been reached. Witness Sun's drive to get Java passed a million developers as just one example of this trend and the parallels are obvious. The implications, however, differ. This is a highly fractious community, building many competing products, and the winnowing process has barely started. Do we really need 15 varieties of CRM? How do we judge which are fit for prime time? Where do we begin the process of evaluating what products and components we can reliably use from this vast code pool? We can choose based on a popularity contest, or on whether it meets our specific functional requirements, more on User Interface, or solid technical execution. How do you, as an CIO make a decision? Well, there is help coming, and Bernard Golden of Navicasoft is there to make it easier. The author proffered that a structured methodology based on the nominal costs of various buy vs make vs rent scenarios and some weighting would provide a serviceable basis for an evaluation.

OpenSource is here to stay. It has proven itself resilient over time. Various experiments in business models will eventually result in one or more winning formulae to allow such software products to reach the mainstream IT shops. It shops however, must be open to new options for spreading their risk and hedging their bets against the proprietary software models of today.

Posted by alexfiteni at 7:15 AM | Comments (0)