Oracle Applications Pricing: Options And Equivalence

Since 2006/2007 Oracle Applications pricing has majorly been advanced. Not upgraded

Let me try to explain, just a bit of this, for those who wondered what options there are, to match their product license needs. The enhancements were A) A total of 3 new pricing models for all product lines and B) A concept of equivalence across applications product lines. There were other enhancements, but these two are the ones I find are fundamental to understand as a customer or a consultant advicing.

Equivalence. It happened a couple of years back. At that time I was one of those Oracle folks, working across the HRMS/HCM product lines, supplying the pricing folks some detailed answers. Answers they requested from every single product family like Financials, HR, CRM and so forth.

In short: At a high level how Peoplesofts 45 or more HCM products should/could match 15 or so E-Business HRMS products, so they could be said to be of equivalent (like) value.

Of course we had to break each individual product down into pieces. For instance just how do you map

BI Publisher: From reading this to nicely formatted EBS output in 30 minutes

Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (“BI Publisher”, formerly XML Publisher) has some very very nice features for configuring/editing for instance your Oracle E-Business Suite output. It can be used for other product suites as well.

Examples include: Governments complex forms, pay-checks, customer facing invoices and statements, etc. etc. Even output for technical integration, bar-codes for packaging labels, etc. etc.

Also it is extremely fast to get up and running. I used a guide by Oracle, and in less that 30 minutes, I had the software downloaded on my PC and I had a running Customer Balance letter, which produced the concurrent output formatted to my own design.

Frame The Debate: You Do Not Upgrade; You Advance Your [ERP] Investment

I first learned of “Frame the Debate” from Jonathan Vinoskey. There are several examples of this from the US political scene: Tax Relief, Leave No Child Behind Act, Pro-Life, Patriot Act.

It is brilliant and, though it has been cultivated for political reasons, it is still useful for the rest of us …and in a good non-political way.

It is especially useful when discussing ROI justified IT investments so your company can advance further, or when attending a conference to learn from advances being shared, to stand on the shoulders of others’ experiences and to learn how to get more out of IT investments already made. …Do you notice the language? Hard to argue against…

As Linguist George Lakoff puts it (see link to his book below):

“By defining a concept such as tax relief, the right wing of the Republican party not only set the terms of the debate, they seized the high ground. By defining tax cuts as tax relief, the right also defined those who were against tax cuts as essentially bad people.”

Information Overload, nLearning And Who Can I Trust

The Oracle Learning Strategist Jonathan Vinoskey is very analytical and fortunately shares some of his thoughts in his Blog “nLearning”. What I would like to talk about here, are his thoughts related to the Blog title itself – i.e. nLearning.

I will try my best to relate this to the daily challenges, that you or I have in roles, where Oracle products likely is a main tool. I.e. you could be a Miracle customer I am simplifying it – if it is to much then let me know! Of course there aren’t extra challenges, when using Oracle compared to SAP or Microsoft or any other product — Oracle is simply picked for the examples and relating it to most readers of this Blog.

In Jonathan’s post from “Thursday, November 1, 2007″ he writes:

Birth of Double-entry Bookkeeping – So You’ll Never Forget…

One thing is to know the rules of accounting including double-entry bookkeeping -the other is to understand how it came about and use that to never ever again be in doubt.

In my very full-time job, programming Financials systems, there was more to the job that programming and alike. The company was owned by

Oracle Business Accellerators – …cool name, what is it?

…it is all about getting live there fast and well, yet still be on a full enterprise product!

That is: You want to have a ton of capabilities and freedom, but you know that implementing one of these huge ERP products the traditional way could cost you a lot, and you are afraid of the risk, as well as the ongoing “cannot-upgrade and cost-a-lot” customizations.

In my view the worst outcome of an ERP implementation is if you cannot upgrade having just a smaller business case for new functionality. I.e. it will be so costly that a new product or a few new key features won’t convince IT and user management that it is worth the cost. The biggest offer-cost of customizations are not writing them, supporting them but

2008 Oracle Open World: The Race For Excellence – Using Oracle E-Business HRMS

When an Oracle employee wants to present on some key topics the best way to ensure an audience is to bring a great customer story and a customer presenting it along. This ensures the biggest audience count – the most eyeballs – and eyeballs is key to get a presentation slot the next time

I attended the session “Oracle E-Business Suite Human Capital Management Vision and Roadmap. This OOW session had such a great customer story.

Miracle Oracle Open World for Business Applications: 80/80 rule

Ever heard of the 80/80 rule?

This past Thursday and Friday I attended Miracle Oracle Open World – The Business Track. This is where I first heard of the 80/80 rule – which clearly is in violation of the logic behind the 80/20 rule.

Miracle runs two Miracle Open World every year. In the autumn it is for Oracle database and in spring for Microsoft SQL Server. This autumn for the first time we had a Business Applications track alongside the “geek show”. The Business Track had several great presentations and there was networking. I will cover the sessions in separate posts.

Miracles founder Mogens Nørgård opened the event by declaring “this was an 80-80 event. 80% sessions, 80% networking… This adds up only if

“Vision database”, Demos And How Does Oracle Do It

Have you ever wondered who makes the Vision Demo Database, why and so forth?

Every customer or partner that uses Oracle E-Business Suite knows “Vision” by name. It is the “demo and training database” that Oracle supplies with its E-Business Suite software and that all can install. In daily talk the term “Vision Database” will do.

It is very useful when you want to see or learn how features can be configured or used – for instance for demonstration, for training or one’s own investigations. Further it is great for dialogue with Oracle support as then both parts has the same data to work from. The uses are many. I can only recommend getting familiar with it. It comes free but needs to be installed.

With the Vision Database, you do not have to master a functional area, to get a feeling for what it does. Of course seeing one configuration does not tell all a feature can deliver, nor does it highlight the limitations, but it is still a great start.

At OOW 2008 I ran into Richard at the Demo Grounds. Richard is a member of Application Demo Services (ADS)

2008 Oracle Open World: Prepare for Fusion Financials

Oracle Fusion Applications isn’t here yet. And even if V1.0 was then you might not find it has everything so you could migrate. So why even bother?

Well – Oracle is bringing a lot of technology to its many existing application platforms. So there actually is a number of benefits you as an existing Oracle Apps user, e.g. Oracle EBS / Siebel / PSFT, can benefit from.

I attended a great session on how customers of Oracle E-Business Suite Financials could prepare for Fusion.