Atlanta OAUG

Tips and Techniques

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Aloha! Most of this is being written at the OAUG conference in Hawaii. The conference facility was great and the presentations very good. Attendance was light (4700 was announced). We suggest you get your reservations in early for San Diego. There is likely to be quite a bit of pent up demand for attendance, and hotel rooms will be difficult to reserve.

On October 29, 1998 the membership on the Atlanta OAUG list server was 305. Thanks for your participation. Encourage your friends to join the server and keep postage costs low. We can’t afford to continue to distribute this newsletter by snail-mail

A list of R11 enhancements is available on the OAUG web page in the Members Only section.

The "Do You Know" advertising campaign by Oracle is based on a separately licensed and priced product called the Oracle Business Intelligence System. It uses Oracle Reports 3.0, Discoverer, Express, and Context.

From: Bryan Hart <BryanH@langeberg.co.za>

Do a search on the web site www.oaug.org for discussions and potential solutions to your problem with F45 Run errors. It would seem that you could minimize on the problem with memory allocation and virtual memory. This will alleviate the problem but not solve it completely.

Q. Is there a way to restrict a printer to specific reports so that no other reports can print to the same printer? For example, we have pre-printed forms (like Purchase Orders) in the printer tray. And we do not want anything else to print to that printer except for Purchase Orders.

From: <Ananta.Narayanan@nike.com> (Ananta Narayanan)

This is one of the many ways to do it.

1. Register the printer in the AOL.

2. Define a print style and a printer driver

3. Assign the printer driver to the registered printer.

4. In the concurrent program definition set the print style to the new print style. Set the 'Style Required' to Yes.

The minimum recommended configuration for NCA application servers is as follows…

NT4.0 needs a 2-processor 400 MHz system with 1 GB of memory to support 80 users. Each active user adds 8 – 12 MB of Memory.

Each Sun 300 MHz processor will support about 40 users and add 6 – 10 MB of memory per active user on UNIX.

Q. Does anyone know where I might find a package provided by Oracle in R10.7 which allows one to check code combinations against cross validation rules and validate other flexfield values?

From: "Sylvie DENEL" <sdenel@auchan.com>

A. The name of the package is fnd_flex_ext. The function is get_combination_id

Customers with support will get a restricted use license of Oracle Developer Server to allow deployment of unmodified Applications in a web environment. Customers with significant modifications or extensions must purchase a full use license of Oracle Developer Server to move the modifications to the web environment. This represents a change of policy and may result in a refund to customers who had purchased a full use license to deploy unmodified applications to the web.

If you need to modify the behavior of a form in SC or NCA, investigate the custom library. This is documented in chapter 12 of the R10.7 Coding Standards Manual or chapter 25 of R11 developers guide. You should be able to accomplish quite a bit without modifying Oracle code, and if you correctly use the custom library, your code will survive an upgrade.

Oracle is developing services and utilities to help customers with multiple installations merge data into a single multi-org installation. Availability is forecasted for 99Q1.

Oracle included new releases of major pieces of functionality at every point release of R10. After R11, the next major functional release will be R11.5.

To achieve Y2K compliance, upgrading to R10.7 is not enough. You must apply several recommended patches and check for new patches periodically (6 problems have been detected and resolved since May 98). For the most recent information and a list of patches refer to www.oracle.com/year2000 and http://support.oracle.com/metalink.

Although R11 will run on a Pentium 133, Oracle suggests a 200+ clock speed and 32 MB of memory will produce much better results. This is especially important if lots of navigation is involved. Evidently, the interpreted JAVA that displays the screen uses lots of desktop CPU.

Oracle announced at the Hawaii conference that it had shipped 700 copies of R11 and 10 customers had gone live. The installed base of Oracle Applications is 5000+.

If you must support Euro transactions under R10.7 there are papers available from Oracle to describe the process. The bottom line is it will work, but make sure you don’t switch currencies in mid transaction. If your PO is in Euro, use Euro all the way through AP just like any other foreign currency. If your customers want to pay in Euro, make sure that OE, AR billing, and AR receipts all use Euro.

From: Nampally_Mohan_at_EC1FNL@ccmial.ae.ge.com

To correct balances for a misclassified account: [Note: GL classifies accounts as Assets, Liabilities, Revenue, Expense, and Owner Equity – ed.]

1. Reopen the last period of your prior fiscal year, if it is closed.

2. Create a journal entry that brings the misclassified account balance to zero for the last period of your prior fiscal year. Use a temporary account such as Suspense for the offsetting amount.

3. Post the journal entry.

4. Verify that the misclassified account balance is zero by reviewing account balances online or in reports.

5. Correct the account type of the misclassified account by changing the segment value qualifiers. General Ledger prevents you from changing the account type unless you first unfreeze all account structures that reference your account segment using the Key Flexfield Segments form.

6. Ask your System Administrator to correct the account type of all accounts referencing the misclassified account by updating the ACCOUNT_TYPE column in the GL_CODE_COMBINATIONS table using SQL*Plus.

7. Restore the misclassified account balance by reversing the journal entry you posted to the last period of your prior fiscal year. Reverse the journal entry into the same period in which it was originally posted.

8. Post the reversing journal entry. The Cash account type is now Asset so when you post the reversing journal entry, General Ledger rolls forward your Cash and Retained Earnings balances into the first period of the new fiscal year.

9. Review the corrected account balances online or in reports.

From: Ken Heckbert kpheckbert@ihis.org

[The GL: FSG Message Detail] option controls how much information is written to the log file when you're running an FSG report. In our experience, it has no impact on performance. You only lose useful information if the report fails with an error, or you don't get the information you thought you should, and the log file might provide a clue as to why. We did have one report that ran very slowly (4 hours), but when we checked the log, we found out the impact that using a content set was having, and we were able to adjust the report. Other than that, we leave it set to None as a default, although some users have it set to Minimal. Setting it to None will definitely save hard disk space, although that's not really an issue if you regularly purge report log files.

From: Paresh Wagh <paresh.wagh@yale.edu>

When you disable a code combination it takes effect IMMEDIATELY. When you end date it, it gets disabled only after the end date so that people can continue using the code combination till the end date.

Q. How do companies handle direct deposit in Oracle AP?

From: MANTOSRIDAR@micron.com

There are few setup steps involved

1. Initiate a contract with your bank for setting up EFT. You should be getting login, bank account #, transmission #, dialing number and other details. Once you got these details, you can dial and connect to bank system. Bank should give a manual to guidance besides tech support.

2. In NavSetupPaymentProgram, Create new format program which will create EFT batch compliance with the Bank’s format. You may have to create a new build program.

3. In NavSetupPaymentFormat, Select EFT from the QuickPick of the name field in Payment Method Zone and enter payment format details including build and format program.

4. Enter proper bank account details including hit GL-account under required branch in \NavSetupBank

5. In the Payment Document Zone, Enter the document name, starting and ending number, format program name and other related details. You need to create one descriptive flexfield to store transmission # assigned by the bank.

6. In the vendor screen, payment goes to vendor site, So enter bank account details at the vendor site level. Payment details at the vendor site level, define payment method as EFT. You need to create one descriptive flexfield for pre noting status.

Once these setups are ready. For an invoice batch, select invoices for payment through EFT, Format the payment (which should have link to payment format). The format payment process will create an EFT batch, which should be sent to the bank through modem and bank interface.

Q. I am trying to use the update utility to update 1099 federally taxable vendors. I have vendors with two sites; one is for taxable income the other is for expense reimbursement. The supplier is set up to have one taxable site, is federally reportable and all that but when I use the utility to update only those invoices that are linked to the taxable site it update every invoice linked to the vendor, regardless of site. Has anyone used it to selectively update invoices and how?

From: <LSCOTT@us.oracle.com>

The 1099 tax reporting status of a supplier is set at the header and not the site. So this utility will update by supplier - there is not a way to distinguish by sites.

You may be confused about the site being taxable since you do mark a site as the one for 1099 reporting. The purpose of this is so that Payables knows which site address to use to print on the forms and pass to the IRS. It does not however distinguish one site as taxable and the others as not.

From: Rajat Agrawal rajat@usinternet.com

At a FA implementation I handled, the county had assets with date-in-service as old as 1887. Setting up calendars & pro-rate conventions would have been laborious so the workaround I followed was:

Under system options define an oldest-date-in-service as 1995 (or something suitable).

Set-up a segment under the asset-additions Descriptive Flexfield & call it as 'Acquisition-date'. During conversion, convert all assets with date-in-service as the 'oldest-date-in-service' (as defined in system options).

From the temporary table (for mass additions), update the FA_ADDITIONS table (using a PL/SQL script) to fill in the 'actual date-in-service' into the DFF segment 'Acquisition-date'.

From: Werner Lutz 100536.3115@compuserve.com

We used the cycle count functionality to simulate a "limited" physical inventory. We only wanted to count items with an on-hand value of $ 400 and greater. You cannot use the Oracle physical inventory for this because it would reset the on hand balances to 0 for all items you do not enter a count for. So here is what we did:

1) Define new cycle count header, set AutoSchedule enabled = "Yes", choose "Days" as cycle count interval and enter the desired date for the count.

2) Under Additional Information - Cycle count class information, enter the count frequency = # of working days as defined in your calendar/exception set. This makes the scheduler to schedule each item every day.

3) Assign all items you want to count to the new cycle count header (we had 1600 items, so we wrote a script to accomplish this task).

4) Run Generate automatic schedule requests

5) Run Generate cycle count requests

6) Run Request cycle count list

7) Perform cycle count as usual

8) Turn AutoSchedule enabled off in the define cycle count screen (so you do not create any more schedules) until you get ready to do the whole thing again.

From: Dkasper1@aol.com

You can not update the price once a receipt is made. You have to reverse the receipt before being able to change the price.

Oracle has a new manufacturing functionality called Flow Manufacturing. Oracle Education may begin teaching classes in these new techniques in December 1998. To find out more investigate the book The Quantum Leap In Speed to Market (ISBN 096 1978309 and check out the John Costanza Institute of Technology.

Oracle Process Manufacturing 4.1 will be patched and certified with R11 in 98Q4. OPM Purchasing in R11 will become Oracle PO but will continue to use the GEMMS receiving system to obtain the process features of OPM (lot and sub lot tracking and dual unit of measure).

Substantial additional functionality will be added to the Front Office suite in 99Q1. Look for this in March 1999.

We need your contributions to keep the content of this newsletter fresh and topical. Please, send me an email to jcrum@sprynet.com or FAX to BOSS Corporation at 770-622-5400. Thanks!

Since this newsletter is a cooperative and joint effort, no one has tried to own (or be responsible for) the material contained in these newsletters. Therefore, the reader is granted a right to copy and distribute these materials for educational use. We ask only that you attribute the Atlanta OAUG as the source. Use these materials at your own risk, and ATLOAUG or the authors make no representation about the suitability of this material at your site.

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Date: Sept 18

Location: Oracle Corp

Presentations will be posted at www.atloaug.org

I. Presentation: "Implementing Oracle Process Manufacturing" Craig Marmon, Deloitte-Touche Consulting

II. Presentation: "Integrating Indus' EMPAC with Oracle INV, PO, and GL" Marc Kilburn, Deloitte-Touche

III. Presentation: "HRMS Job Positions & ORGs" Gary Carter, Ernst & Young

IV. General Business - Brenda Carlton, KPMG

Future Meetings

Nov 20 KPMG Peat Marwick - RSVP bcarlton@sprynet.com

1999 Meetings: Jan 15, Mar 19, Apr 16, Jun 18, Aug 20, Sep 17, Oct 15, Nov 19

Volunteers needed to speak in '99. Send an email to bcarlton@sprynet.com.

SEOUC - Southeast Oracle Users Conference - Feb 18-19

The 1999 Southeast Oracle Users Conference will be Feb 18-19 in Charlotte, North Carolina at the Airport Sheraton. In 1998 there were 250 attendees with three speaker tracks. In 1999 the target is 400 with 5 tracks. There are three tracks for tools and two tracks for Oracle Applications. Cost $125 ($225 after Jan. 9th)

Thanks! Special thanks to Amy Gibbs and Oracle Corp for providing us with a wonderful conference space and refreshments.