Oracle launched the latest version of its E-Business Suite, 12.2.11. Oracle’s upgrade regime is consistent with their “Continuous Innovation” release strategy, which delivers ongoing applications and technology stack upgrades without a major upgrade along with Premier Support for EBS 12.2 through at least 2033
This consolidated suite-wide patches comprise new features, regulatory and statutory updates, and security, stability, & performance enhancements. The main features and updates of EBS R12.2.11 have been elucidated below.
New Power-Loaded Features in The Oracle EBS 12.2.11
1. Better Customer Experience & Flexibility in Order Management
Oracle iStore is upgraded with enhanced B2B features like search and filters to quickly find the best products and pricing. Secondly, the Oracle Advanced Pricing Command Center facilitates better pricing maintenance alongside offering greater visibility on pricing using charts, search, and metrics functionalities. Additionally, this command center uses Web Application Desktop Integrator (ADI) to provide selective update of price lists and promotions using Excel spreadsheet.
The Oracle Incentive Compensation Command Center helps enterprises evaluate and track performance through a dashboard. It helps get a bird’s eye view of sales attainment and performance based on roles, periods, and plans, and use comparison metrics to track sales target and completion.
The Order Management Command Center is loaded with customer-focused features to give greater control and boost order flow productivity. In addition, it allows users to act quickly execute order exceptions. To analyze the trends in sales order returns and investigate the root causes for its occurrence, a new Returns Dashboard has been introduced. These features include better visibility for promotional and included items, upload quotes and orders on Excel spreadsheet using Web ADI and allow custom attribute support in rules and frameworks.
2. Increased Efficiency & Throughput in Logistics Management
- Receiving Dashboard: The Oracle Inventory Command Center has added more control on the dashboard to streamline activities such as tracking materials by “Expected Date”, flagging pending inspections, managing overdue put away, prioritizing high value and in-demand products, and notifying back-ordered items that are due for shipping on that day.
- Reservations Dashboard: The Reservations Dashboard and Reservations HTML User Interface (UI) support management of demand-based reservations by enabling more filters for screening ISOs, sales orders, and discrete jobs, flagging back-ordered products and short demand lines, and facilitating creation, update, and transfer of reservations.
- Oracle Warehouse Management (WMS): The Oracle Warehouse Management (WMS) dashboard now supports customer-focused enhancements like selection of related tasks from more document types, optimizing travel routes for increasing efficiency of all picks through the warehouse, and use of nested LPNs to consolidate, ship, and receive materials for multiple projects and tasks.
- User-Defined Activities Dashboard: Oracle Warehouse Management offers better user-centric activities such as allocating and tracking time for non EBS transactions including loading/unloading of trailers, cleaning of equipment, and training.
- Oracle Inventory: Oracle Inventory now features capturing and tracking of on-hand inventory using material classification codes (MCCs) alongside improving warehouse productivity analysis. In the Inventory Management Command Center, users can prioritize activities that are related to material management. A Track and Trace Dashboard has been newly added to identify, investigate, and analyze the root cause of the issues arising in the process of handling the materials and storage.
- Activity Dashboard: The Activity Dashboard in Oracle Inventory Command Center allows better resource utilization and productivity through capabilities such as tracking labor and equipment time per activity, average resource utilization along with comparison, tracking performers and assigning training plans and assignments based on performance, and providing more control over landed cost and item information.
- Items Dashboard: The Items Dashboard in Oracle Inventory Command Center offers better product catalog management through features like search and browse catalog items, compare item transaction attributes, and view approved suppliers, manufacturers, and related items for the filtered products.
- Oracle Landed Cost Management Command Center: This command center provides greater visibility on landed costs to help enterprises make informed procurement decisions and increase product profitability. This is possible by provisioning a comparison of the landed costs by supplier and country and providing transparency on charges and taxes before sourcing. A new Marginal Analysis Dashboard has been offered for enabling crucial analysis and optimization of the sales revenue and calculating the cost of goods sold through Oracle EBS.
3. Greater Control of Procurement & Workforce Sourcing
Oracle iProcurement provides enhanced user experience in procurement by offering comparison flow and auto-suggest features by matching non-catalog requests with catalog items. The Employee Shopping feature in the Oracle Procurement Command Center helps procurement professionals optimize catalog content using search queries, track products and services that are sought for but not available in the catalog and perform advanced search.
The Outsourced Manufacturing Command Center mainly aims at an enhanced and efficient management of outsourcing business. A new Track and Trace Dashboard has been included to keep a proper timely track of all the activities and the issues faced in the outsourced manufacturing supply chain.
The Sourcing Dashboard in the Oracle Procurement Command Center improves sourcing productivity by managing sourcing negotiations, tracking negotiation cycle times and savings, and identifying buyer workload.
The Item Analysis Dashboard in the Oracle Procurement Command Center provides greater insights across the procurement lifecycle through better catalog management of items using parameters like history and performance and allowing comparison based on supply source, agreements, and approved supplier lists.
The Project Buyer and Procurement Plan Dashboards in Oracle Project Procurement helps improve procurement throughput by tweaking supply chain performance based on the project needs, aligning supply contract terms with project cash flow, and facilitating workload management for better prioritization.
4. Optimized Project Costing & Invoicing
Oracle’s Upgraded EBS enables more accuracy in financial management for US Federal Trading Partners through G-Invoicing support. Trading partners can now perform intragovernmental transactions, including processing and integrating with Orders and General Terms & Conditions.
The Oracle Projects Command Center now comes with an improved Budgetary Control Dashboard for more control and efficiency in billing agreements, budgets, capitalization processes, and project costing along with integration of Oracle Project Costing with Oracle Payroll for supplementary payroll runs and addition of an Agreement Approval workflow in Oracle Project Billing. The new Investment Turn dashboard ensures optimized cash flows for project-centric organizations. It facilitates users in finding opportunities to bill customers for the completed tasks, identifying stoppers in the continuous flow of billing and invoicing, and resolving various emerging disputes that can delay cash collection.
5. Improved Tracking & Traceability in Process Manufacturing
The Process Manufacturing Command Center mainly focuses and facilitates users in tracking production operations and improving quality. With the addition of the Genealogy and Trace Dashboard, users can trace and track the product genealogy for the purpose of understanding and root cause analysis.
In the Oracle Process Manufacturing Command Center, Outside Processing Dashboard effectively identifies outside processing delays and expedites operations alongside analyzing and acting on delays of suppliers’ deliveries.
The Oracle Process Manufacturing improves traceability of multi-lot batches by tracking individual ingredient lots to a specific product lot, support continuous manufacturing in regulated industries such as Pharmaceuticals and Food & Beverage.
The MES in the Oracle Process Manufacturing Command Center has been updated to track multiple process parameter readings at different time intervals, especially useful in regulated industries such as Pharmaceuticals and Food & Beverage.
Oracle Discrete Manufacturing provides better control of component availability for timely job completion using features like auto-reserve, manual reserve, and support for non-WMS organizations.
Oracle Quality Command Center facilitates proactive management of products and asset quality by quickly identifying and resolving quality issues, finding ways to increase yield, preventing costly recalls by monitoring quality deviations, tracking under-performing assets for corrective actions, and giving insights to assess business impact. A new Track and Trace dashboard has been introduced to investigate and provide a root cause analysis of the defects in the products.
Oracle Discrete Manufacturing and Oracle Process Manufacturing licenses enable streamlined flow for outsourced manufacturing by consolidating components from a single subcontracting purchase order to one replenishment sales order.
6. Increased Control of Maintenance Activities & Streamline Asset Lifecycle Management
Using the Mobile Maintenance App, managers and technicians can get an overview of the top-priority maintenance work. Oracle Enterprise Asset Management comes with several new capabilities, such as assigning work orders in bulk to employees, notify employees about work order assignments, and create express work order action and view asset route details.
In the Oracle Enterprise Management Command Center, support for descriptive flex field has been added along with additional attributes for refinements and operations data set.
Additionally, the Capitalization Dashboard can streamline the asset tracking capitalization flow by quickly act on pending asset conversion transactions and customize the capitalization process by selecting asset lines based on fixed asset category and using request sets and refinements.
7. Improved Productivity in Service Delivery & Contracts
The Service Command Center helps users streamline service delivery and billing. A new Service History Diagram has been added to provide an effective and efficient resolution of the latest service requests based on historical records.
In the Oracle Field Service Command Center, the Task Summary Dashboard can quickly search for unscheduled and delayed service tasks and take action to prevent missing SLAs. Also, work allocation can be optimized based on task priority.
Oracle Teleservice facilitates quick creation and processing of service requests using templates and enhanced HTML UI, respectively. Additionally, it supports multiple HTML browser tabs.
The Oracle Advanced Scheduler comes with enhanced & new dispatch center HTML UIs, replacing forms UIs along with embedded analytics for schedule quality. Furthermore, Oracle Service Contracts offers improved productivity through rollback terminations, contract follow-up and cascade actions in HTML UI
Along with new metrics and actions in the Oracle Service Contracts Command Center.
Oracle Depot Repair provides root cause and best fixes based on past service orders. While, the Repair Technician Dashboard in Oracle Depot Repair Command Center ensures efficient processing of repair backlog, highlights high priority work, and quicks resolve escalations, holds and aging orders.
The Closed Service Orders Dashboard gives insights on the quality, speed, and past repair costs along with root cause analysis.
8. Better Management of Human Capital
Oracle’s upgraded EBS facilitates more control and visibility for mobile timecards entry and processing for employees based on a time and labor rules evaluation engine. It also features EBS personal sensitive data and EBS Person Data Removal Tool (PDRT) along with API support.
9. Optimized Month-End Processing & Improve Accounting Cycle
The Oracle Payables Command Center and the Oracle Receivables Command Center now has a Period Close Dashboard to get insight on the closures and SLA accounting events, identify potential bottlenecks due to accounting errors and unaccounted events, and rectify source transactions.
The Oracle Lease Contracts Command Center can collect & manage lease information and costs as well as improve lease negotiations. Oracle Property Manager comes with improved control and accuracy of IFRS 16/ ACS 842 compliance.
Oracle Lease and Finance Management Command Center reduces investment in leases, drives revenue-generating activities, and improves efficiency by financing after-market services, simplifying transfers and assumptions, and managing obsolete or sold assets. It ensures scalability and increased throughput meet the requirements of the lease financing business. The latest update now provides a new Lease Cash Flow Dashboard, which improves the cashflow by accelerating the application of cash to the lease invoices. Another feature, Network visualization, allows administrators to manually apply the cash to the invoice lines in situations where cash receipts cannot be automatically matched to the invoice amounts.
10. New configurations on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for EBS
Oracle has invested in automation to help companies run EBS on OCI by provisioning EBS environments on OCI, enabling lift and shift of fully configured, on-prem EBS environments to OCI, and enabling lifecycle management of EBS environments running on OCI. These can be managed using EBS cloud manager.
11. Enhanced User Experience Using Technology Frameworks
Oracle uses technology frameworks to modernize user interfaces. Some of the popular frameworks are ECC framework and Oracle Application Framework (OAF).
In the ECC Framework, IT teams can monitor and customize ECC dashboard usage via Activity Audit Dashboard. Some of the customizations that are enabled in this release include tracking dashboard usage, capturing audit trail of user activities, tuning deployment and ETL processes, monitor search activities, identifying and analyzing user intents and resolve issues in real-time. The latest update includes network diagram enhancements, timeline viewer, pivot tables, dynamic date buckets, and default saved search.
The Oracle Application Framework (OAF) facilitates modern UI interactions for quick actions, which include Worklist Popups in Global Header, saved searches, advanced filtering, querying in tables, and exporting table data to PDF.
12. Better Management of Product Configurations with Bills of Material Command Center
The new Bills of Material Command Center ensure efficient management of product configurations and manufacturing change orders. Before the approval and implementation of the required manufacturing changes, users can see the current and future product configurations with the help of Bills of Material (BOM) network diagram.
The Way Forward to EBS Upgrade
For existing Oracle EBS 12.2.x users, EBS 12.2.11 can be directly applied as an online patch. However, customers on EBS 12.1, the environment needs to be upgraded to 12.2 first and then upgrade to the latest EBS release.
If you are looking to upgrade from Oracle EBS 12.1, leverage the expertise of an Oracle E-business Suite partner. Suneratech is a platinum partner for Oracle that has the best people and optimized processes for Oracle Cloud migration, Oracle EBS Upgrade services, and EBS upgrade on on-premises environment.
Talk to our Oracle Cloud Migration experts today by clicking here.
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