Thalasar Ventures

The Oracle ebusiness suite has grown to become a most preferred application for many ebusinesses. This is because it ably addresses all the functions that online enterprises need for effective sustained operation.

The fields considered include financials, and which includes order management, product lifecycle management, service, sales, and contracts; logistics which features manufacturing, maintenance and transportation management; supply chain issues including planning, management and execution plus procurement; customer relationship management which involves customer self service portals; and human resources. In essence, Oracle ecommerce suites are all about providing business intelligence so as to promote corporate performance, ease customer data management, and to reduce the learning curve of the enterprise.

Despite having all these functionalities there is often need to customize the Oracle ebusiness framework so as to suit the unique needs of our organizations. Customizations in the Oracle environment are realized in two main ways i.e. extensions and modifications. Oracle’s ecommerce suite, through its development features, allows users to create extensions or components that will help to address special needs but which are separate from its standard components. Modifications on the other hand are the changes that are made to the main code via Oracle’s database trigger. Modifications are very sensitive in that they become part and parcel of the code and so it will almost be impossible to implement any future upgrades as they will not recognize the altered code.

The many customizations that the market has to offer for the Oracle ebusiness suite are the extensions and they have come to be referred to as workbenches. They are created with the goal of increasing productivity by making the suite easy to use. The workbenches work to consolidate all the information that one may need to a single screen, and hence you can navigate the entire Oracle environment from such a workbench.

Some of the extensions for Oracle that the market has include the item workbench which consolidates the inventory, sales, price lists, item catalog, purchasing and customer service functions; the supply-demand workbench which gives you a comprehensive supply and demand summary by bringing up-close the supporting transactions and the what-if calculations for stock planning adjustments; a supplier workbench to quickly find suppliers and their related information including quotes, payments, requisitions, receipts, invoices, purchase orders and history queries; and the customer workbench to help find customers information including their credit profiles, customer models and relationships, contact details, past orders, shipping details, leads, quotes, dunning letters, and so forth.

As we can see, Oracle ebusiness suite and the accompanying workbenches/extensions can easily reduce the time and resources needed to bring along and improve overall business effectiveness.