Protecting Reports When Migrating to

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12

By Elliot King

Abstract

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 represents a major upgrade to the Oracle Applications
family of products. Dubbed by Oracle as the "Global Release," it has been designed to be
an important step in Oracle's strategic vision. Migrating to Release 12, however, presents
significant challenges, as Oracle has changed the way the underlying data generated by the
applications is managed internally and these changes can have a major impact on reporting.
Consequently, enterprises have turned to Noetix as a trusted partner to facilitate the migra-
tion process. At the Rochester Institute of Technology, by using NoetixViews, migrating
custom reports during its upgrade to Release 12 went extremely well, allowing the migra-
tion team to focus on more challenging issues.
Protecting Reports When Migrating to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12

©2008 Noetix Corporation

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About Noetix

More than 1,400 customers worldwide use Noetix to quickly and cost-effectively access the
enterprise application data they need to make important business decisions every day. Noetix
provides software that automatically generates metadata from enterprise applications, enabling
immediate access to data. Unlike most business intelligence tools that require weeks of extensive
manual mapping to be set up and maintained, Noetix uses patented technology to automatical-
ly discover and produce metadata based on customers’ specific implementations of Oracle E-
Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, and Siebel CRM applications. Noetix provides this busi-
ness intelligence content with easy search and navigation capability, empowering users to quick-
ly generate the ad hoc, operational reports needed to make critical and timely business deci-
sions. Noetix’s proven technology is being used by industry-leading customers worldwide,
including: Cummins, Motorola, Starbucks, Toshiba, Welch’s, and Visa. The company is head-
quartered in Redmond, Wash., with international operations in London and Hyderabad, India.

Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12-A Step Toward Fusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Release 12 in the Early Stages of Adoption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The Migration Challenge for Reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Case Study: Rochester Institute of Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Noetix: Trusted Partner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Protecting Reports When Migrating to
Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12

Introduction

Unveiled in January 2007, Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 represents a major upgrade to
the Oracle Applications family of products. Dubbed by Oracle as the "Global Release" and
designed to be an important step in Oracle's strategic vision, Release 12 embraces many of the
concepts associated with Oracle Fusionware, Oracle's approach to service oriented architecture
(SOA). The idea behind the release is to provide companies with a unified view of their global
activities by, in part, making information delivery more efficient and timely, allowing man-
agers to analyze and report along any dimension of their worldwide operations.

In general, major upgrades are complex, time-consuming tasks that raise risks of pitfalls and
disappointments. Migrating to Release 12 can be even more challenging because Oracle has
made several significant changes in the way the underlying data generated by the applica-
tions is managed internally. These changes can have a significant impact on reporting.

However, organizations that leverage Noetix software as the foundation for their reporting
needs benefit from streamlined access to Oracle application data, as well as reports that con-
tinue to run without alteration following an upgrade to Oracle Release 12. It is Noetix's
flagship product, NoetixViews® for Oracle E-Business Suite that provides this capability. As
the Rochester Institute of Technology discovered, by using NoetixViews, migrating custom
reports during its upgrade to Release 12 went extremely well, allowing the migration team
to focus on more challenging issues.

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Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12-A Step Toward Fusion

Released in January 2007, Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 is Oracle's latest version of
their business applications and represents a major step in fulfilling Oracle's new strategic
vision of embracing SOA to provide a more flexible and agile technology stack. Release 12
provides an upgrade path to Oracle Fusion Applications. Its core technology stack has been
upgraded to Oracle's Fusion Middleware. Over the next several years, Oracle plans to build
out its Fusion-enabled applications as well as its Fusion middleware technology.

As a pivotal upgrade, Release 12 has several major functional enhancements incorporated

across the entire suite (such as Subledger Accounting), new application modules, and several
significant changes to the architecture and underlying technology.

Among the most significant changes are:

Enhanced User Interface: Release 12 still relies heavily on Oracle Forms, but the
interface has been refined and given a cleaner look. Many of the workflows have
been redesigned, and the steps needed to complete key tasks including searching for
data have changed.

Single Accounting Engine: In the past, different Oracle E-Business Suite application
modules such as Oracle Payables and Oracle Receivables independently processed their
accounting data prior to posting to the general ledger. A new, shared subledger
accounting engine consolidates this processing by storing accounting entries in sub-
ledger tables that are standard across all products. Not only does this approach help
create a "single view of the truth" across a global enterprise, it also provides users flexi-
bility in the level of detail of information posted to the general ledger.

Global Financial Management: Previously users were assigned to a single operating

unit and a single set of financial books associated with that unit. To facilitate global
financial management, in Release 12 users can be assigned to multiple operating
units, and transactions can span operating units. Now, entities have ledgers that can
be combined into ledger sets for consolidated processing. Different ledgers can be
updated by a single posting.

Converged Inventory Module: Before, Oracle Process Manufacturing and Oracle

Discrete Manufacturing had separate inventory systems. The data model for these systems
has been converged in a single model, once again allowing for more consistent data.

2
 Infrastructure Upgrade: Most Release 12 users will upgrade at least to Oracle
Database 10g and some components of Oracle Fusion Middleware (although the
minimum database Release 12 will run on is Oracle Database 9i.)

Extended Business Intelligence: Release 12 offers greater analytic capabilities, with

role-based intelligence dashboards that provide actionable information.

In general, the enhancements and upgrades in Release 12 are largely geared to a single purpose
to offer real time, role-based information with a common data model as a foundation for a
single source of truth across the enterprise. This is an important new release and over time,
Oracle anticipates its user community will embrace and benefit from the technological
advances it contains as, in Oracle's view, the new release offers enterprises significantly more
functionality, a high level of performance, and improved availability and manageability.

Release 12 in the Early Stages of Adoption

Six months after its January 2007 release, Oracle reported that 300 companies had already
selected Release 12 worldwide. In August 2007, a major research group reported that it had
found only six live implementations of Release 12 worldwide (five new implementations
and one upgrade). Even Oracle's own implementation of Release 12 had been delayed.

At the same time, however, Oracle announced that there were 80 early adopters and around
2,800 companies had either downloaded or ordered Release 12. Clearly, interest in the product
is high and has continued to grow. Indeed, as Oracle stops providing necessary patches for
older versions of Oracle E-Business Suite, enterprises will have to decide if they are going to
make the leap to Release 12. Not surprisingly, many sources report interest in Release 12 is
accelerating.

Clearly, Release 12 is still in the early stages of adoption. As an emerging technology, migra-
tion to Release 12 presents many significant challenges. In fact, users have reported that sever-
al of the modules were less mature than they had anticipated. For example, while data securi-
ty in the Oracle Human Resources module is a standard feature, some users found that the
functionality did not work as expected after the upgrade. In other cases, underlying function-
ality anticipated to be tightly integrated was more loosely coupled than expected.

3
The Migration Challenge for Reporting

The impact on reporting is a major issue for organizations migrating from 11i to Release 12.
To achieve the goal of better global decision-making, companies need to be able to generate
the reports they need from the first day they go live with Release 12. To do this successfully,
11i users must modify their existing reports to handle these notable database changes.

The conversion from "sets of books" to "ledgers"

Funds disbursement processing moving from Oracle Payables to the new Oracle
Payments application
Tax calculations centralized in the new Oracle E-Business Tax application
Check and letter processing information now in Oracle BI Publisher tables
Bank and supplier information now in the Trading Community Architecture
(TCA)
Bank setup moving from Oracle Receivables to the Oracle Cash Management
application
Supplier setup moving from Oracle Purchasing to Oracle Payables
Customer correspondence management moving from Oracle Receivables to the
Oracle Advanced Collections application
Accounting data now in the Subledger Accounting (SLA) tables, while historical
data possibly split between legacy 11i tables and SLA
The new common inventory module now used by all manufacturing applica-
tions. Prior to Release 12, Oracle E-Business Suite had two inventory modules-
one for discrete manufacturing and one for process manufacturing.

The preceding list is just a sampling of some of the more visible changes introduced in
Release 12. Whether a given query or report touches on one of these areas or not, users have
no choice but to thoroughly test their reports in Release 12 to assure that the results are com-
plete and accurate. Not a single 11i query or report is assured to be immune from the impact
of Release 12 changes. Some 11i queries and reports will migrate to Release 12 without mod-
ification. Other queries and reports-especially those addressing the application functionality
listed above-will have to be updated to work in Release 12. Still others simply won't migrate
to Release 12 and will have to be completely re-written. Those related to accounting, and
therefore the new SLA and TCA, will demand significant time and attention.

4
Subledger Accounting

In 11i, the accounting model and the transaction model are tightly integrated. In Release 12,
the accounting model has been separated from the transaction model. To accomplish this,
Oracle has introduced Subledger Accounting. SLA is an intermediate step between sub-
ledger products and the Oracle General Ledger and has been used to centralize and stan-
dardize the accounting practices across the suite of applications. Journal entries are created
in SLA and then transferred to Oracle General Ledger. Each subledger transaction that
requires accounting is represented by a complete and balanced subledger journal entry
stored in a common data model.

The SLA engine is used to store the rules for

accounting transactions across Oracle
E-Business Suite. Business users can extend
Tight integration in 11i predefined accounting rules or create their
own rules allowing organizations to react
immediately to change. The SLA engine stores detailed information not needed for a gen-
eral ledger. It also stores post-summarized activity to a general ledger periodically to main-
tain centralized account balances for the company.

The move to SLA repre-

sents a major change. On
the one hand, it eliminates
inconsistencies that were
evident in earlier Oracle
E-Business Suite releases.
Subledger Accounting in Release 12 On the other hand, it has
a significant impact on
analysis and reporting as critical data is now stored by the SLA engine layer, which did not
exist before. Further complicating matters, each organization can decide the amount of his-
torical accounting data to be moved from the 11i tables to SLA in Release 12 during the
migration process. For example, all historical accounting data can be moved, or only a por-
tion moved, such as the last fiscal year. In the latter case, an organization's accounting data
will reside in multiple places. Some historical data will be in the old 11i tables, and other
historical data and all new data will be in the SLA tables. If users want to extract data from
this setup for reporting accurately, they need to understand this new model and the busi-
ness rules that exist within the data.

5
Trading Community Architecture

Introduced in Release 11i as a part of what is called the common application architecture,
the TCA is a flexible architecture that allows users to fully model real world entities within a
trading community and represent the relationships among those entities. It includes a set of
data model components that enable people using the TCA to more accurately represent
reality. At the same time, with TCA, Oracle users are presented with many complex choices
when setting up customer, employee, and prospect data.

In Release 12, Oracle has introduced several new features into the TCA and enhanced sev-
eral existing features. Sixteen business object APIs and events were introduced. A business
object is an abstract grouping of TCA entities to form an operable, logical business unit.
The business object events and APIs allow for easier integration and faster development of
custom code because several TCA entities can be managed with a single call. This feature
also cuts down the need for calls to the database as the TCA API maps calls to the TCA
tables and entities.

Among the other changes to the TCA are the ability to integrate banking and supplier data
and several enhancements to the user interface. Three new supplier-oriented accounts
payable tables with links to the TCA have been created. Once again, the changes can have a
significant impact on analysis and reporting.

These additions that include new tables and added functionality can and likely will have a
critical impact on reporting and analysis during a migration to Release 12. But working
with a trusted partner like Noetix, the challenges involved in migrating reporting and analy-
sis functionality can be minimized.

Case Study: Rochester Institute of Technology

Founded in 1829, the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is an internationally recog-

nized leader in professional and career-oriented education, enrolling approximately 16,000
students in eight colleges. Its 1,300-acre campus in Rochester, New York has 238 buildings.
The school has nearly 2,000 full-time staff and 1,000 full-time faculty members.

During 1998, in anticipation of the Year 2000 crisis, RIT implemented Oracle E-Business
Suite 10.7. "It was our response to Y2K," said Kim Sowers, director, information and tech-
nology services at RIT.

6
The school first implemented all the core financials, followed in 1999 by the human
resources and payroll modules. From that point on, RIT implemented a steady stream of
new functions like employee self service, manager self service, benefits and so on. "We kept
building on our base," Sowers said. In addition, RIT incorporated Oracle Discoverer to
generate reports, along with NoetixViews and Noetix Generator for Oracle Discoverer.
NoetixViews simplifies report development against Oracle enterprise applications by auto-
matically creating easy-to-use business views of the underlying database. Noetix Generator
builds and maintains the Discoverer End User Layer, enabling users to build reports in
Discoverer against the Noetix views in the database.

At RIT, NoetixViews is used in conjunction with Oracle Discover in several different ways.
It is used to generate the data for "canned reports" for staff using the manager self service
module. It is used to produce data for ad hoc reporting in HR. It is used for the develop-
ment of financial reports and it is used by "super users" charged with financial analysis.

In 2002, RIT upgraded to Oracle 11i. Oracle packed Release 11i with numerous new fea-
tures and improved architecture. This release offered extensive e-business capabilities and
the ability to automate the majority of a company's core functions, including enterprise
resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply chain management.

However, like many large enterprise applications, the migration to 11i required a massive
investment in time, resources, and expenses. Release 11i was plagued by numerous bug
fixes, poorly functioning modules, and insufficient training and customer support resources
especially early on during the release cycle.

Most Oracle customers, including RIT, regarded the migration to 11i as a major undertak-
ing. The same features that comprise some of the advantages of 11i affected the very infra-
structure of the application, and thus made for a complex upgrade path.

Even with all the expected hurdles of this major upgrade, RIT found that with the help of
Noetix, the upgrade to 11i went relatively smoothly from the perspective of migrating cus-
tom reports. And more importantly, from the perspective of the user community, the
migration did not have a significant impact.

In terms of the technology, RIT used custom schema names that Oracle planned to use in
the product itself, so those schemas had to be rewritten and those changes had to be prolif-
erated throughout the system. Nevertheless, the institutional memory for the upgrade of
reporting to Release 11i at RIT is that the custom report migration was relatively painless
and flawless because of Noetix.

7
Migrating to Release 12

Some time ago, Oracle notified RIT that it would no longer supply some necessary legisla-
tive payroll patches for Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.9, the version in use at the school at
the time. A decision had to be made. Should RIT move to Release 11.5.10 or jump right
to Release 12? "At the time, we knew that 11.5.10 was going to be de-supported in
November 2009 and we didn't want to do two upgrades in two years," said Sowers, "so we
decided to go to Release 12. We didn't really feel as if we had much of a choice."

In September 2007, RIT engaged with Oracle On Demand, which hosts RIT's implemen-
tation, to begin the migration process. RIT knew that it was upgrading to Release 12
before the technology was fully mature and expected some surprises. And RIT got them.

For example, one of the critical security functions in the human resources application sim-
ply did not work. Employees could not access records to which they should have access.

A host of other major issues emerged during the testing period. The Oracle Payables trial
balance returned incorrect data. There were errors in the Oracle Receivables receipts when
they were imported to Oracle General Ledger. Deposit invoice batches created in Oracle
11i could not be found after the upgrade. In total, the migration team identified almost
200 issues spread across seven Oracle E-Business Suite modules during testing.

Migrating Reporting

However, one aspect of the migration process proceeded seamlessly-custom reporting. "In
the case of all of our Discoverer reports for Human Resources, and for any of the other core
reports that were being used by our finance team; if it didn't touch subledger's specific
information, it was completely seamless," Sowers said.

The appropriate Noetix views regenerated as expected and the reports ran as usual. "We
tested them and made sure they ran correctly. We checked performance and confirmed the
data was accurate," Sowers said, "But the best part of the process was knowing that we
wouldn't need to make any changes because we had Noetix in place. We just walked
through the process of installing the new views, running through the regeneration process
and things took off from there."

The RIT team did have to work on custom reports that did not leverage NoetixViews. And
it also had to modify reports that were compiled from data that Oracle had rewritten for
the new release, particularly the subledger data. But even in those cases, NoetixViews
helped facilitate a smooth process. "NoetixViews hid the complexity (of the significant

8
database changes) from the users," Sowers observed. "The users needed to still learn a few
things. But a lot of the complexity was hidden from them. It was far less effort than it
would have been if we didn't have NoetixViews." In general users were able to regenerate
their reports without any intervention from the migration team.

According to Sowers, without using NoetixViews, it would not have been possible for users
to regenerate their own reports. If they had been trained to query on the Oracle-generated
tables created by 11i, her team would have had to retrain them to work with Release 12 or
completely rewrite their workbooks.

Eliminating the need to rewrite reports significantly accelerated the migration process.
According to Sowers, several hundred people at RIT rely on reports drawing on the data
generated by Oracle Applications. "We have hundreds of people that have the potential to
run the prewritten workbooks through the managers self service functionality," she said. In
addition, there is a healthy community of power users who create their own reports using
Oracle Discoverer that rely on data generated by NoetixViews.

In the final analysis, custom report migration associated with Release 12 was fairly seamless
as a direct result of the underlying data layer for reporting and analysis provided by
NoetixViews. RIT realized three significant benefits.

Power users themselves could recreate their reports without waiting for support
from the IT staff.
People who relied on pre-written reports were not inconvenienced by the upgrade.
The RIT migration team could focus on other critical issues.

"It's a matter of prioritizing what the critical components are to go live," Sowers said. "The
fact that these key reports were working from Day One of the migration was essential for
our overall success. The reports worked as soon as I applied the software. This was especial-
ly critical for HR, which is the community that's most affected."

So while overall the upgrade to Release 12 had several bumps in the road, the custom
reporting part didn't. "The Noetix piece was very efficient and their engineering and sup-
port staff were easy to work with and responsive to issues," Sowers said.

9
Noetix: Trusted Partner

Migrating to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 is a challenging process. That is why

enterprises have turned to Noetix as a trusted partner for reporting and analytics to facilitate
the process.

Noetix plays an important role in any Oracle migration effort because of is commitment to
"upgrade protection". Upgrade protection means that if a view can be enhanced to work
with a new version of Oracle, Noetix guarantees that it will. The result is that the columns
of the views and the data returned will be the same between versions of Oracle. As a result,
reports that were run on older versions of Oracle will run on the newer versions as well.
Consequently, for Release 12, Noetix has implemented many enhancements to its views in
order to accommodate the changes Oracle has made to the underlying database; while at
the same time has expanded its coverage with support for new Release 12 features.
Moreover, it has created new global views for the Oracle Human Resources module and has
improved security in its HR views, even providing custom HR security policies.

When Oracle unveils a major new restructuring of the product, Noetix engineers thorough-
ly investigate all the functional and technical details and make all necessary changes to the
Noetix views to assure the results are correct. In some cases, as with Subledger Accounting
in Release 12, Noetix develops new views so users can access the data for reporting.
"Custom reporting is essential to everyone's success with the Oracle E-Business Suite." said
Paul Winterstein, director of product management at Noetix. "Unfortunately for many,
developing their custom reports is very hard, time consuming, and costly. The good news is
we're Oracle E-Business Suite experts and have a proven track record of making reporting
easier and more cost effective. Our customers know they can leave the heavy lifting to us."

Working with Noetix enables enterprises to both facilitate the migration of their reporting
and analysis applications to Release 12 and to understand the entire new Oracle E-Business
Suite at a more fundamental level. Noetix is a trusted third party equipped to decipher and
explain the changes and their implications to organizations. "Customers appreciate that
someone other than Oracle is talking about Release 12 and its impact on business process-
es," said Winterstein. "It may take years before some organizations fully understand the
fundamental changes that have been incorporated in this major release."

Successfully migrating to Release 12 requires deep product knowledge. For example, in the
SLA engine, various subledger distribution tables feed into four specific tables with an XLA
preface. "Unless you understand what is happening within the data in those four tables and
how they get populated; what happens during the create accounting process; and what hap-
pens during the transfer to GL process-you're never going to be able to extract data there and

10
provide effective reporting," Winterstein said. "The data contained in those XLA tables could
be essential for specific reports and types of analysis. They contain details that are not in the
general ledger. Noetix dug into, investigated, and understood what was going on. Our engi-
neers validated what we found with Oracle prior to actually building our solution for it."

Working with Noetix during a migration to Release 12 provides many advantages. Not
only is the migration process for reporting and analysis facilitated, Noetix technology
shields users from the complexity of the changes Oracle has made to the product. Finally,
Noetix engineers have a deep understanding of Oracle E-Business Suite and enterprises can
capitalize on that knowledge.

Conclusion

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 contains powerful new technology. Geared to facilitate
the global management of enterprises with diverse units, Oracle has incorporated exciting
new changes that will help companies develop a single version of the truth.

Moreover, Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 is an important step along Oracle's product
roadmap to implementing its Fusion vision. There can be no doubt Fusion functionality
will play a critical role in the Oracle community for the foreseeable future.

As could be expected with any major technology initiative, upgrading and migrating can be
challenging. The more innovative the new platform, the more challenging the migration is.

Migrating to Release 12 is complex, but the experience of the Rochester Institute of

Technology demonstrates that one part of the process_report migration_can be relatively
seamless and smooth. Having reports ready for Day One was critical. By using
NoetixViews, migrating reports to Release 12 was handled primarily by the users themselves
enabling the IT migration team to focus on other key migration tasks.

Noetix is regarded as a trusted partner for members of the Oracle community. With its
deep knowledge of Oracle products, the company offers upgrade protection for reports. As
an added bonus, it can objectively educate Oracle users about Oracle technology and help
them reap maximum benefits from their investments.

11