Oracle EBS Asset Model and Reporting

EBS FA is an old model and the application is widely deployed in most of EBS sites.

Almost all companies has assets and need to report their assets in their accounting reports.

While many people, including Oracle, has provide some reporting solutions for EBS FA, I think that doing it right in a most optimal way is often.  It affects the time required for monthly or year end period closing and a reporting solution that allows the deploying company to quickly see the change they made and continue working is essential for their business.

Historical Information

EBS FA stores asset historical information. 

EBS EAM Resource Model

EBS EAM uses "WIP job" to model the service requests.
Each job can be done with a series of tasks that are modeled in the operation table.

The resources who are assigned to work on the jobs are stored in BOM RESOURCE.

BOM RESOURCE is not necessary in capturing the individuals.

WIP model was designed for Manufacturing, and was reused in EAM later.  EAM was added to Oracle E-Business Suite much later.

BOM Resources could labor or equipment.  When a BOM resource is created for labor, it can be created as a bucket.  The key is that the resources could be a constraint resource that you need to

• Identify the needs, in term of the skill requirements
• Estimate the demands, in term of labor efforts (hours)
• Measure whether you can sufficient resources to work on the jobs in the pipeline.

To identify the individual person who is part of the resource pool.  BOM RESOURCE EMPLOYEE can be used.  It links to the people records created in HR person table (PER_ALL_PEOPLE_F)

Graph Database for modeling the Party Relationship

The network of trading partner seems fitting into the graph database perfectly.

When we designed TCA model for EBS, at that time, we had no choice but store the data in a relational database. The immediate limitation is that the foreign key is directional. When we want to simply query the related parties, we have to query twice.

We cannot do much but showing the directly related parties. How can we answer the question like Linkedin does - showing how two people are linked via the indirect relationship?

Why are there so many People tables in the apps?

When I design the data warehouse model, I found a difficulty to conform the employee or person data from various apps.

Human Resource need to capture the employee information:

• Payroll application needs to include a list if employees in order to pay them. They are the people my receive paycheck or direct deposit from the deploying company.
• Benefit application also extends the list of people to include beneficiary who the people can receive the benefits if the employee himself cannot take the benefits.
• Benefit application also cover the dependents who can be covered in the benefit program.
• Employee assignments fulfill the organization planning

There are people which you can assign work to them. The examples are

• buyers in purchasing applications
• collectors in the account receivables applications
• credit manager in the credit management application
• salesperson who may be assigned to take care of an sales opportunity
• service representatives who may be assigned to work on a service request

If these applications are separately developed or separately deployed, you will find that a single person defined multiple times in different system. However, in an integrated suite, you may also find that the entries are created and maintained separately and no integration exist among these module. The possible reasons are

Centralizing the data modeling in development?

Data modeling is a critical piece in the system analysis and design process. At least this is what is being taught in the System Analysis and Design class when I was in college. You can use the data model to represent the user requirements and you can use data model to represent the your system design. A data model is a communication tool to allow you to use diagram to explain the complex data relationship. The data modeling is a critical piece but we also know that it is not everything. A lot of things cannot be communicated by the data modeling tools. Many design aspects cannot be considered if you only do data modeling.

I learned that many people with the various roles can use the data modeling techniques. However, if we talk about the application development process design or talking about the development organization design, should we centralize the data modeling work to a "Data Modeling" group?

Effective Dated Records in PeopleSoft

PeopleSoft application supports a the effective dated records throughout the system. PeopleTool provides the built-in functions to enable this feature for the selected records. They make the effective dated records very easy for developers to implement.

Effective dated records have the EFFDT field. The EFFDT field allows the user to enter a data ahead of time. For example, the GL accounts in PeopleSoft is effective dated. The user can design the GL accounts and create them in the system and make them not effective until next year. This is very useful since you do not want the users to rush to get the data into the system right before the next year.

The EFFDT column is part of the composite key for those tables.

Date Effectivity Requirements

Many software requires tracking the effectivity of the data over periods of time. I have run into it several times in the application design. It makes sense to establish the design patterns to address the software data model / architecture design.

Here are the common requirements I have seen: