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What is Oracle Applications
This article is intended for beginner's who have been initiated to Oracle applications and are finding their way through. I remember I was extremely curious on my first job when I was given the domain of Oracle Applications and was disheartened looking at all the forms as to whether my job would involve just data entry in forms! It couldn't be more farther than the truth.
Before I delve deeper into Oracle Applications, Lets develop some background knowledge. Oracle Corporation, co-founded by its CEO Larry Ellison, is among the top three software corporations in the world along with Microsoft and IBM. Oracle is most popularly known for its RDBMS, current release being 11g, and most of us would have had some experience writing SQL, PL/SQL code in oracle database. However, oracle has a gamut of products at Database, middleware and applications levels. Oracle applications therefore, figures at the application level, aiming to provide an industry wide software solution.
Before getting into the details, let us develop an analogy. Let us forget whatever concepts and ideas we might have about oracle applications and consider a simple case where you want to purchase a new bike!
The first thing you have to do is express your interest (RFQ) to bike sellers whom you visit and get quotations from them. Once you have an idea of market prices and products, you tell your requirement to your dad (Purchase Requisition). Your dad either approves it, or disapproves it. If he approves it you go to your chosen vendor and place an order (Purchase Order). Next the vendor delivers the bike which you receive after inspection that everything is fine, you accept it (Receipt) and tell your dad to pay him (Invoice). Your dad on getting your signal goes ahead and pays (payment) the bike vendor. At the end of the month (or whenever, he does it), your dad goes over the expenses of this month (GL processing) which includes the payment for your bike.
Now, let’s come back to “what is oracle applications”.
Did you notice how the above process represented a flow from one process to another (workflow)? You couldn’t possibly perform one action before having completed the previous. Like for instance, you wouldn’t pay the vendor before he delivers. Or it wouldn’t be wise to go to your dad before knowing the price of bike you want to buy. So a simple scenario of you having to purchase a bike requires you to perform actions in a particular sequence.
Now consider the situation for large industries and their various processes. That is, Purchasing, Manufacturing, Order Management, Sales, Payments, Account Maintenance etc. Obviously control has to be forced on all industry-wide processes, so that an individual operation is performed at the right time and in the best possible way.
This is exactly what Oracle Applications does. It forces a work-flow on every industry process. In a nut shell, Oracle Applications is an Enterprise Resource Planning Software, which is run by large industries to control their industry-wide operations. This software involves separate segments known as modules for separate business processes. Each module is basically a collection of forms (with some data displaying reports) where at each stage of the business process, data needs to be entered. The forms enforce industry best-practices controls on data input and process flow.
The above bike example is typically how a Purchase to Pay business process would flow in Oracle applications involving the modules of Oracle Purchasing, Oracle Inventory, Oracle Payables and Oracle General Ledger.
So that is a very simplistic introduction to Oracle Applications,
In Part –II I will discuss the technical architecture for better understanding of how Oracle Applications works.
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