Oracle's E-Business Suite System

Overview

The purpose of this document is to describe the requirements to upgrade the Financial and Supply Chain Modules of the current E-Business system used at Unisource Energy. The types of applications used and the hardware required to implement them are also described here. One of the most important aspects is who will be using these applications and how will these people will benefit with this upgrade. The employees and staff members are the heart of any organization. The company will greatly benefit from this upgrade because the heart will be more efficient and productive.

Application Systems

The main application is Oracle's E-Business Suite system. Currently Unisource Energy has version 11.5.7. This version is no longer supported by Oracle. This needs to be upgraded to version 12.0.6 simply to have the support and resources of Oracle. As well as the support, version 12 has new features that make the customization of the old version obsolete. In fact, much of the customizations done in prior versions are currently part of the core modules of the application.

This upgrade will affect two main business areas: Financial and Supply Chain. Within these two modules are several areas that will benefit greatly from this upgrade. For the Financial modules, the benefits are:

* E-mail approvals of payment registers improves the efficiency of audits. AP will no longer have to send this e-mail daily. Also resolves Audit concerns with the accrual process.

* The preliminary payment register sent to Treasury will minimize the manual intervention in that process.

* Replace recurring templates with Invoice Import Interface or Quick Invoices. This will allow ease in changing invoice amounts as opposed to deleting the recurring template and creating a brand new one.

* Increases SOX controls around journal entries - approval history and supporting work documents attached online.

* Allows Financial Accounting to spend time on more valuable tasks - saves between 8 and 23 hrs/month (96-276 hrs/year).

* Uses new core application programming interfaces (APIs) instead of custom code.

* Reduces custom business areas and views to obtain GL Transaction Detail.

* Helps ensure a more consistent process.

The benefits of upgrading the Supply Chain modules are:

* Eliminate customizations and use MRP out-of-the-box applications.

* Allows more flexible setting of inventory levels (safety stock) and item information for each location.

* Allows in-transit inventory to be tracked between sites for better control.

* Allow implementation of Lot Control to handle reels of cable.

* Consolidate reel tracking functionality in Oracle instead of duplicating it in Oracle, Receiving Log and Consignment. Saves 600 hours per year.

* Retroactive pricing to allow price updates to PO's and Releases after matching to receipts and invoices. Today receipts and invoices have to be backed out before the updates can occur.

* Debit memos can be automatically created when an RTS is done on a JIT PO

* Allows warehouses more flexibility to count an entire commodity group by eliminating sub-inventory counting.

* The custom reports will eliminate the need for the Excel spreadsheets, manual processes, and Access databases used today for physical inventories.

These benefits will also greatly reduce the current dependence these areas have on IT staff, thus reducing the cost.

Another main application upgrade is the reporting tool, Discoverer from version 3.0 to version 10g. This is a precursor to Oracle's Business Intelligence Tools that is available in future releases and by upgrading to version 10g, the reports will be able to be migrated more effectively when that time comes. In addition to looking toward the future, this new version is a web style application that stores the reports on an Oracle database. This eliminates the current issue of thousands of similar reports stored on users' local drives by allowing the users to load a report from the database. Custom reports can easily be shared to other users eliminating multiple copies scattered all over. In fact, the preliminary review estimates that the current 3000 reports that exist throughout the company can be cut down to 500 common reports usable by multiple employees. Pre-built views from NoetixViews can quickly create reports. These views use the core Oracle E-Business tables efficiently for most reporting requirements. Three IT staff members, certified in Noetix customizations will modify these views if necessary.

Discoverer 10g uses security measures to ensure that only certain users are allowed access to certain reports. This security matches the security in the E-Business application so one central setup can be applied for both applications. This eliminates the need to set up unnecessary and repetitive security profiles for each user.

Hardware/Software

The new application is built on Web technology and therefore the application servers will need to handle the increased memory and processing speed requirements. To accomplish this, the new UNIX server will contain expanded memory and the highest core processing currently available to provide speed and security to the application. Internal use only servers will be using Windows Server 2008. This provides common technology with the current user PCs on Windows XP platforms. The user PCs