Oracle Fusion Applications : Frequently Asked Questions

zz:http://www.oracleappshub.com/fusion/fusion-application/oracle-fusion-applications-frequently-asked-questions/

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 previous 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.