What is ORACLE?
Oracle's E-Business Suite (also known as Applications/Apps or
EB-Suite/EBS) consists of a collection of enterprise resource planning (ERP),
customer relationship management (CRM), and supply-chain management (SCM) computer applications either
developed or acquired by Oracle.
What is Oracle Apps (ERP)?
(Also
known as e-business suite)
Let’s take an example. Suppose you are running
a small grocery shop named Janata Grocery, so the typical operation as a shop
owner is you basically buy groceries from some big seller and stock
it in your shop. Now people come to your shop for day-to-day needs
and buy stuff from your shop at a slightly higher price than
what you originally bought and stocked it in your shop.
Occasionally you may
not be carrying items or run out of stock that people ask for so you make a
note of it and promise the person to come back tomorrow and they will get their
item. So far so good, now let’s name some entities before we proceed and things
get complicated. The big seller from whom you buy stock is
called as Vendor, the people who come to your shop to buy things
are known as customers, the stock in your shop is known as inventory.
So far we have identified few
entities that play an active role in your day-to-day operations. As time goes
by, your business expands and now you take orders over the
phone and provide service to deliver the items to your
customers, so you hire people to help you out in maintaining
the inventory, do the delivery part and all the necessary stuff to keep the
business running smoothly. The people you hire are known as employees.
So in this small shop, you typically manage
the bookkeeping activities by hand using a notepad or
something similar. Now imagine the same setup on a larger scale where you have
more than 10,000 customers, have more than 1000 vendors, have more than 1000
employees and have a huge warehouse to maintain your inventory. Do you think
you can manage all that information using pen and paper? Absolutely no way!
Your business will come to a sudden stop sign.
To facilitate big
businesses, companies like Oracle Corporation have created huge software known
in the category of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) as Oracle
Applications. Now coming to think of it, Oracle Apps is not one huge
software, instead it is a collection of software known as modules that
are integrated and talk to each other.
Now what is meant by integrated? First let us
identify the modules by entities. For e.g Purchasing and Account
Payables deal with the vendors since you
typically purchase from vendors and eventually have to pay the
dues. Oracle Purchasing handles all the requisitions and purchase orders
to the vendors whereas Oracle Accounts Payables handles all the payments to
the vendors
Similarly Oracle Inventory deals with the items you
maintain in stock, warehouse etc. Dealing with customers is
handled collectively with the help of Oracle Receivables and Oracle
Order Management. Order Management helps you collect all the information
that your customer is ordering over the phone or web store etc whereas
Receivables help you collect the money for the orders that are delivered to the
customers.
Now who maintains the paychecks,
benefits of the 1000 employees? Right! It is managed by Oracle Human Resources.
So you get the idea by now that for each logical function there is a separate
module that helps to execute and maintain that function.
So all the individual functions are being
taken care but how do I know if I am making profit or loss? That’s
where integration comes into play. There is another module known as Oracle
General Ledger. This module receives information from all the different transaction modules and summarizes them in order to help you
create profit and loss statements, reports for paying Taxes etc.
Just to simplify the explanation, when you pay
your employees that payment is reported back to General Ledgers as cost i.e.
money going out, when you purchase inventory items the information is
transferred to GL as money going out, and so is the case when you pay your
vendors. Similarly when you receive items in your inventory it is transferred
to GL as money coming in, when your customer sends payment it is transferred to
GL as money coming in. So all the different transaction modules report to GL
(General Ledger) as either money going in? Or money going out? The net result
will tell you if you are making a profit or loss.
How Oracle does work?
Yes of course oracle is differentiate in three
areas that is 1) functional 2) Technical and 3) administration.
As explained above all the modules are
maintained by functional engineer and functionality of the oracle is developed
by technical developers and finally and but not least one is ORACLE APPLICATION
DATABASE ADMINISTRATOR (Apps DBA), he would maintain the application
consistently running without any interruption to the users and developers. And
moreover he should maintain the data stored in the database.
An Oracle Applications DBA is very different
from a regular Oracle database administrator and requires specialized skills in
business administration and Oracle application server architectures. The
Oracle Applications DBA job role is less compartmentalized than a traditional
Oracle DBA.
Now
we’ll start learning oracle AppsDBA…Let’s start the journey….
Few
terminologies needs to know before we start the course…
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