Oracle Fusion Cloud: Your Guide to a Smarter, Connected Business Future

Explore how Oracle Fusion Cloud is reshaping the digital landscape, offering businesses the tools they need for efficiency and innovation. Let’s dive into a future where technology and business seamlessly merge.

This article covers Oracle Cloud’s diverse ecosystem of cutting-edge tools and products for your digital transformation journey!

• Integrations

• Extensions

• Customizations

• Process Automation

• Reports, Dashboards & Extracts

• Conversions

• Oracle Infrastructure Cloud (OCI)

In Oracle implementation projects, #CEMLI and #RICEW are two commonly used acronyms that help categorize and manage various types of customizations and extensions. Here’s what each acronym stands for and the key differences between them:

• CEMLI stands for Configuration, Extension, Modification, Localization, and Integration. It is a framework used to categorize and manage customizations and extensions within Oracle applications. They are typically associated with Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and Oracle Cloud Applications (Fusion).

• RICEW stands for Reports, Interfaces, Conversions, Extensions, and Workflows. It is a subset of CEMLI and provides a more focused breakdown of common customization types. RICEW is often used in the context of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) implementations.

Integrations:

Integrations involve connecting Oracle Cloud with other systems to ensure seamless data flow. This can be within Oracle’s suite of products such as ERP, HCM, EBS, Seibel, CPQ, RightNow, NetSuite, PeopleSoft, ATP, ADW, OCI or external systems such as SAP, IBM, PayPal, Amazon, Jira, Concur, eBay, DocuSign, & ServiceNow. Proper integration means data can be shared across systems effortlessly, helping businesses function more cohesively.

Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications has several tools across all pillars (#ERP, #SCM & #HCM) to extract the data and to interface (CRUD) business applications data to #OracleFusion.

The following should be a few of the decision-making points in selecting the right tool or capability for your interface & conversion:

• Inbound or Outbound

• Synchronous or Asynchronous

• Low Volume or High Volume, Single or Batch

• Real Time or Near Real Time, Event Based (business events/Atom Feeds) or Scheduled

• Manual or Automated

• On Premise or Cloud, Object Storage or UCM or FTP, File Based/File Size

• Cost effectiveness, scalability, fault tolerance, resilience, monitoring, error handling, reprocessing and many more.

Unlike in Oracle #EBS, where we have public APIs and access to standard Oracle tables/PLSQL packages, we’ll not have access to Oracle Fusion Cloud’s database rather need to use the tools I listed here to communicate (both ways) with Oracle Fusion Cloud.

• REST APIs

• SOAP Web Services

• File-Based Data Import (#FBDI)

• ADF Desktop Integration ( ADFdi)

• HCM Data Loaders (HDL)

• HCM Spreadsheet Data Loader (HSDL)

• Business Intelligence Cloud Extract (#BICC)

• HCM Extracts

• Standard BI Publisher (BIP) Reports

• Business Events

• HCM #AtomFeeds

In order to make the right decision, I will be sharing the high-level decision tree for selecting the right tool to integrate with the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications

#Oracle Integration Cloud (#OIC) facilitates & simplifies the integrations with prebuilt adapters of business applications (clouds & on-premises), the support for real time/near real time with business events & atom feeds, JavaScript actions, recipes to help you jump start your integration development, dashboard for monitoring/auditing individual transactions and insights to model, collect, and monitor metrics for business processes (end to end) in real time. OIC also comes with the #VBCS for building and hosting web/mobile applications & #PCS (with enterprise edition) for building process automation (workflow) applications. Oracle Data Integrator (#ODI, ETL tool) is an alternate option for moving a very large volume of data.

Read about OIC Integrations billing & message packs here

Apart from above decision-making points, one need to follow the best practices and avoid the integration style pitfalls when designing an OIC Integration.

#OIC #IntegrationStrategy.

Extensions & Customizations:

Extensions allow for the addition of new functionality or features not present in the standard Oracle Cloud. This could be anything from a simple new field in a form to a complex new module that serves a specialized business function.

Unlike extensions which add new features, customizations tailor existing features to better suit a specific business’s needs. It’s about tweaking and modifying the standard settings to align more closely with an organization’s operational requirements.

One Size Does Not Fit All !

Despite Oracle Cloud application support most of the business requirements an organization could have, almost most of the Oracle Cloud Implementations needs application to be extended to best fit specific business or personal needs.

To make application changes and test them without impacting other users in the environment, we create sandbox by adding the tools like application composer, page composer, page template composer, appearance and structure, mostly in general. We do have a Visual Builder Studio with latest release to extend application page components for only certain applications at moment (more to be added in coming releases).

Use these tools and work areas to modify the UI:

• Page Composer: Configure application page components, such as page content, layout, and more for other users.

• Visual Builder Studio: Extend application page components for certain applications.

• Application Composer: Create fields, objects, and relationships between objects.

• User Interface Text: Edit text that appears on multiple pages.

• Appearance: Change the look and feel of the application pages.

• Page Template Composer: Edit global page template.

• Structure: Configure the Navigator and the icons on the home page for navigation.

• Announcement: Create, edit, and delete announcements displayed on the home page.

Though, Oracle provides the migration tool to move sandbox changes from one instance to another, but it has limitation, due to which we make the same changes in PROD instance manually after testing them in TEST instance. (However, it’s not the same with VB Studio, where we can extend the application for the new pages created in Oracle Cloud using VBCS.)

You use the Migration page to create a migration set and export it from the source environment, and then import it into the target environment. A migration set is a JAR file that contains all your configurations across all product families, such as Oracle Metadata Services repository, JEDI, CRM, and BI. Changes you export from the source environment can’t be merged with any changes you manually make in the target environment. As such, you must never configure the target environment directly.

Users with the Administer Sandbox (FND_ADMINISTER_SANDBOX_PRIV) privilege can preview, edit, and publish sandboxes. This privilege is assigned by default to the administrators for product families. Your security administrator can define which users have job roles with this privilege.

Default limit for the maximum number of sandboxes is 20, however you can increase the limit using the Maximum Number of Sandboxes profile option.

VBCS, APEX, Web/Mobile/PWA applications

Oracle Visual Builder Cloud Service (VBCS) and Oracle Application Express (APEX) are both tools that facilitate web and mobile application development, but they have distinct characteristics, target audiences, and use cases, while both VBCS and APEX offer robust low-code development capabilities, the choice between them largely depends on the nature of the application being built, the target audience, team’s skillset, existing infrastructure/licensing, and specific project requirements. If you are on EBS and have custom self service OAF pages, you may want to move them here during Oracle Fusion Cloud migration.

In my next one, I’ll compare APEX and VBCS to help you choose the right tool for your needs, until then you may want to read the below posts on Oracle Visual Builder #OracleVB.

Oracle Visual Builder Tenant Database and Business Objects

Caching Strategy for Oracle Visual Builder Web Applications

Redwood design for Visual Builder Applications

If you’re already using development platforms like React, Angular, or Vue, you might consider building extensions on them as well.

Oracle ATP (Autonomous Transaction Processing) Database self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing database is optimized for high-performance transaction processing and mixed workloads. With features like automatic backups, patching, and updates, it significantly reduces the complexity of database operations, allowing developers to focus on building applications. If you are on EBS and have custom PLSQL packages, you need to move them here.

ORDS (Oracle REST Data Services) makes it easy to develop modern REST interfaces for relational data in the Oracle Database, Oracle Database 18c, and Oracle Database 12c. Essentially, it bridges the gap between traditional relational data and the modern, RESTful web services, allowing developers to interact with Oracle databases using RESTful web services.

Typically, most implementations use ATP as the database for custom objects. They utilize ORDS to present tables, views, and procedures as Rest APIs, which are then integrated into VBCS pages.

Order management extensions

An order management extension is a Groovy script you write that meets your specific business requirements. An extension point is an event that you specify to determine when to run the script.

You can use a flexfield to modify the data model, or Page Composer to modify the user interface, but you can’t use them to programmatically modify logic or modify your Order Management deployment. Instead, you can create an order management extension.

More examples of Order Management Extension are here

If you are interested to know more on extensions and configurations, read it here

Process Automation

Process Automation focuses on minimizing manual interventions in repetitive tasks. By automating certain processes within Oracle Cloud, businesses can boost efficiency, reduce human error, and free up personnel for more value-driven tasks

In the ever-evolving digital transformation of business operations, the demand for dynamic solutions like Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications and Oracle Process Automation is surging. If you’ve struggled with adding outside approvals, adjusting approval chains, or wished for simpler approval emails, you’re at the right spot.

Oracle is putting all efforts to meet the customers diverse expectations. However, as I mentioned before one size doesn’t fit all, as every customer has their own business needs. There are several reasons why people might want to customize or extend SaaS applications:

• Meet specific business needs

• Improve the user experience

• Integrate with other systems

• Improve security

• Add new functionality

Especially in this multi-cloud environment, choosing “best of breed” SaaS applications from multiple cloud vendors, customize, extend and integrating them has become more crucial in the present time.

Customizing and extended the standard approval process is one of these multiple organization needs. We can use BPM worklist to modify or add business approval rules and configure approval groups & notifications, but these customizations are limited.

Use cases:

• Need to take approval from an external approver whose account cannot be setup in Oracle Fusion Cloud.

• Need a dynamic approver hierarchy based on the external data, which is not available in standard BPM task’s payload to configure the business rules.

• Display additional information and editable fields in approval form or email notifications, either from the external system or from another module of Fusion (data not available in standard task’s payload).

• Approvers don’t want to receive hundreds of emails to approve/reject for each individual task but want to mass action them allin a single task/form.

Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) offers Process Automation capabilities (OIC Enterprise Edition) that help business and IT groups within enterprises to implement business process initiatives that aim at automating business transactions and complex BPM capabilities that usually involve people and systems of record.

There are two working environments:

The design-time environment:

Provides business-friendly graphical tools for designing processes, forms, data, decision models, and metrics from scratch. Provides test environments for refining processes before activating them for use in production.

The runtime environment:

Makes it easy for you to view, complete, reassign, and delegate tasks. Lets you stay organized with filters. Provides tools to track process flows, view detailed audit trails, troubleshoot, and fix processes.

Standard approval process needs to be customized to send the notification to the specific assignee (service user setup in Fusion), your scheduled integration will keep polling the tasks assigned to this service user to read the payload and start creating the custom process instances in OIC. Your custom process application can accept the payload with all the information it needed to display to the approver, either in the web form (My Tasks) or in the email notifications. (sample screenshots given below). On final approval (based on Single, Sequence or Parallel), you need to mark the standard task as completed with right outcome (approved or rejected), so the standard process will resume with the rest of the standard business logic.

Below screenshot on how to customize the standard approval process and send it to the specific service user by hardcoding the user details, so we poll all the tasks assigned to this user from the OIC scheduled integration and extend & automate this process in Oracle Process Cloud Service (OIC).

Following is the screenshot of custom web form in Process Application, for approver to take mass action and submit all at once. I have provided the link in reference section on how to create the web forms.

Approvers would like to see the glimpse of all the relevant information before they approve or reject, and attachments are one of many must have for them to review before actioning. Below is the same actionable email notifications with deep links to Fusion application project’s page, Custom VBCS page for attachments and direct access to BI Publisher reports for any information that needs to be displayed from Oracle Fusion tables.

References:

Configuring Approval Rules in BPM Worklist

Using Oracle Process Cloud Service

What Users Can Do in Processes by Role

Process Cloud Rest APIs

Create Process Web Forms

Reports, Dashboards & Extracts

This is all about visualizing and extracting data. Reports provide detailed data insights, dashboards offer an at-a-glance view of key metrics, and extracts allow for data to be pulled out from the system for various purposes, including analysis or integration with other tools, some of them as follows:

1. BI Publisher (BIP)

At the heart of reporting in Oracle Fusion Cloud is the BI Publisher. It’s a solution for creating, managing, and delivering highly formatted documents. A boon for those who require pixel-perfect reports, BIP allows for easy integration with other applications. Its user-friendly interface ensures that creating reports is a breeze even for those without a strong IT background. Plus, with its capabilities to generate reports in multiple formats like PDF, Excel, and Word, you are never restricted in your choices.

2. Business Intelligence Cloud Connector (BICC)

Need to extract data from Oracle Cloud Applications? BICC is your go-to tool. It facilitates the extraction and loading of Oracle Cloud Application data, permitting integration with other systems or analytics tools. It’s an ideal feature for businesses looking to create a data warehouse or analytical model outside of Oracle Cloud.

3. Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI)

For real-time, self-service reporting, you can rely on OTBI. It provides a robust platform to create ad hoc reports, dashboards, and alerts based on live transactional data. What’s more, with its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, even complex queries become manageable. And the best part? No need to burden IT – business users can drive their insights with ease.

4. Fusion Analytics Warehouse (FAW)

Looking for a ready-to-use analytical solution? Enter FAW. It provides out-of-the-box analytics for Oracle Cloud Applications. By leveraging best practices and in-built industry standards, FAW offers actionable insights and a comprehensive view of your organization’s operations. Moreover, it’s not just a passive tool; you can extend and customize it based on your unique requirements.

5. Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC)

OAC is Oracle’s answer to modern analytics. A comprehensive solution, OAC offers everything from self-service visualizations to enterprise reporting. Its machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities provide users with advanced analysis options, ensuring that the data is not just seen but understood and acted upon.

6. HCM Extracts

Specifically tailored for Oracle’s Human Capital Management system, HCM Extracts allow businesses to extract and deliver data efficiently. From payroll to talent management, these extracts ensure data retrieval is no longer a cumbersome process.

7. WMS Web Reports

Warehouse Management System users, rejoice! WMS Web Reports simplify the creation of reports and dashboards. By providing a seamless web-based interface, WMS ensures that you’re always on top of your inventory and supply chain data.

In Conclusion, Oracle Fusion Cloud is not just a tool but an ecosystem. Its vast array of reporting, dashboard, and extraction tools ensure that businesses are not just collecting data but transforming it into actionable insights. As Oracle continues to refine and add to its offerings, one thing is clear: the age of data-driven decisions is here to stay.

Conversions

Conversions refer to the process of migrating data from one system/format into Oracle Cloud. This could be from legacy systems or other platforms. The aim is to ensure data integrity and consistency during the transition.

• FBDI (File-Based Data Import): FBDI is one of the most common tools used for bulk data uploads in Oracle Fusion Cloud. It uses CSV files that are processed using predefined templates. It’s especially useful when dealing with large volumes of data.

• ADFdi (Application Development Framework Desktop Integration): ADFdi offers a seamless way to manage batch data entries. This tool allows users to use familiar Excel interfaces to input data. Once the data is entered, ADFdi helps in integrating it with the Oracle Fusion Cloud. It combines the simplicity of Excel with the power of Oracle Fusion Applications.

• HDL (HCM Data Loader): HDL is tailor-made for Oracle’s Human Capital Management (HCM) solution. It provides an efficient mechanism to bulk-load data into Oracle Fusion HCM. Using HDL, one can insert, update, merge, or delete data. This is particularly useful for large migrations or integrations where Human Resources data needs to be moved between systems.

• HSDL (HCM Spreadsheet Data Loader): HSDL is similar to ADFdi but designed specifically for Oracle HCM. It allows users to leverage Excel spreadsheets for the purpose of loading data into Oracle HCM Cloud. This makes it particularly beneficial for HR professionals who prefer the familiarity of Excel for data entries during conversions.

• OIC3 (Oracle Integration Cloud) and ODI (Oracle Data Integrator) are the integration platforms from Oracle. Known for its high-performance data movement and transformation capabilities. #OIC3

Oracle Infrastructure Cloud (OCI)

OCI is Oracle’s comprehensive cloud computing service. It provides businesses with computing power, storage, and networking capabilities, all on a flexible and scalable platform.

1. Identity At the heart of OCI’s security lies Identity management. This ensures that only authenticated and authorized users can access resources. It’s all about the management of user identities, their privileges, and security policies.

2. Observability & APM Observability provides deep insights into the health and performance of applications and infrastructure. Coupled with Application Performance Monitoring (APM), it helps in detecting and rectifying issues swiftly, ensuring peak performance at all times.

3. Core Services OCI offers robust core services like the API Gateway, which facilitates secure and managed access to applications. The Load Balancer distributes incoming traffic for optimal resource utilization, while Compute offers scalable computing capabilities. Complementing these, the Network service ensures seamless connectivity and communication within and outside the infrastructure.

4. DevOps & CI/CD with VB Studio Facilitating the agile needs of modern software development, OCI’s DevOps tools and practices streamline the development life cycle. By leveraging Visual Builder Studio, one can easily implement Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, ensuring faster and more reliable software releases.

Read more about Automate CI/CD with Oracle Visual Builder Studio — DevOps

5. Autonomous Databases One of OCI’s crown jewels, the Autonomous Databases, is a game-changer. It simplifies database management by automating routine tasks, resulting in higher efficiency, security, and scalability. Businesses can thus focus more on data-driven decisions rather than database maintenance.

Together, these features and services underline OCI’s commitment to providing a robust, secure, and highly efficient cloud infrastructure.

Conclusion

Oracle Fusion Cloud Implementation is more than just a software deployment, it’s the foundation upon which modern enterprises are building their future. Through the diverse and robust set of products and tools within Oracle’s ecosystem, businesses are equipped not just to integrate but to innovate.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, Oracle Fusion Cloud helps businesses move towards a smarter and more connected future.

I hope you liked the article, please leave your thoughts in comments.

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