Everything You Need to Know About UK Oracle Applications Unlimited Day 2024

The Oracle Applications Unlimited Day was held at Oracle’s UK headquarters in Thames Valley Park, Reading, on Thursday 24^th October 2024. This free 1-day conference is aimed at delivering the latest features and functionality being released across the applications unlimited portfolio, and also provides an opportunity for users to speak directly to senior Oracle stakeholders such as:

• Cliff Godwin (Senior Vice President, Applications Development, EBS)
• Nadia Bendjedou (Vice President - Product Strategy)
• David Mihala (Vice President, Applications Unlimited - Western Europe - Board Member Oracle France)
• Phil King (UKIE Application Sales Director)
• Jason Bowers (Chief Operating Officer, Applications Unlimited - Western Europe)
• Terry Walton (EBS Solution Engineering)
• And many more…

I personally think having this many Oracle stakeholders willing to travel and meet with end users in many different geographies reinforces Oracle’s message on genuinely caring, guiding, and supporting all of their customers. Furthermore, it’s always great to see new faces, and old, attend more of these events, it’s almost like the old days!

Oracle EBS – Strategy Roadmap (Continuous Innovation + Long Term Support)

You guessed it, Oracle have once again underpinned their commitment to provide premier support to EBS users through at least 2035 (previously announced in March 24), and this is expected to be extended year on year.

Oracle’s rolling 10-year support initiative provides huge confidence to users knowing they have over a decade of premier support and continuous innovation to support their business applications. Given the majority of the US federal government are still using EBS, along with many other global businesses, I suspect this will continue to be extended for years to come.

If your organisation is running EBS 12.1 and paying for Market Driven Support (MDS), I would strongly recommend you start planning your upgrade or move to Fusion apps. MDS will cease at the end of 2025 leaving your business applications unsupported and vulnerable.

DSP have a wealth of experience upgrading EBS from versions as far back as 11i, so if your business wishes to speak with industry experts about upgrading your Oracle applications, then please do reach out to us for a chat.

Oracle EBS - What’s New?

EBS 12.2.14 was released in September 2024, and we got a breakdown of the variety of new features and functionality across all EBS modules, Enterprise Command Centres (ECC) and mobile apps. And yes, of course AI, Machine Learning (ML), Large Language Models (LLM), Gen AI, and all that jazz was covered! I’ll come onto that later.

But, if you’ve not been living under a rock since 2018 (EBS 12.2.4) you’ll know that modernising and extending the capability of ECC’s has been at the forefront of EBS updates in recent years and as of today, Oracle have 36 command centres with over 145 dashboards across the suite.

These are some of the area’s where major enhancements have been made across EBS in the latest release:

• General Ledger: Improved accounting cycle and visibility of financial results
• Cash Management: Streamline manual bank reconciliation
• Lease Accounting: Available to all financials customer via property manager
• Order Management: Accelerate order flow and quickly act on order expectations
• Inventory: Enhanced capabilities and broader availability
• Warehouse Management: Extend supply chain visibility and automation into yard operations
• Supply Chain Management: Easier to maintain reference and transaction data
• iProcurement: Improve shopping experience for reduced non-catalogue spend
• Oracle Business Network: simplifying connectivity through a centralised trading partner community
• Projects: efficiently manage & control budgets, costing, billing and capitalisation processes
• Process/Discrete Manufacturing: Manage production operations and quality efficiently
• Product Hub: Increased productivity for product managers with interactive HTML UI
• Asset Management: Increased productivity for maintenance schedulers with interactive Gantt HTML UI
• Additional APIs for Extensions and Integrations: easier to maintain reference and transaction data
• Mobile Applications: More efficient operations for mobiles users

Did I mention that these improvements were based on real EBS users voting globally on what they wanted to see in the new update? This is your reminder to use the My Oracle Support (MOS) function to have your say, and vote on other requested features in the next update.

Oracle APEX Enhanced Integration with EBS

For years, users have been developing custom apps in APEX and integrating them with EBS, but now in 12.2.14, you can expect a much richer and enhanced experience. You will now be able to navigate seamlessly from EBS to APEX while maintaining access control via EBS function security authorisation. To achieve this, EBS-configured authentication is used which would either be through SSO (OAM or IDCS), or local authentication.

Users will also be able to register an APEX page as an EBS function type against two supported modes: external or embedded.

Did you know that DSP have one of the largest Oracle development teams in the UK, and has helped many organisations develop custom application to meet specific business needs?

Oracle Generative AI Services now Available on E-Business Suite

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around in some form for many years, but certainly in the last 12-24 months, we have seen these incredibly powerful services become more available to businesses and people round the world.

In my view, AI is one of the most important evolutionary milestones in human history but must be controlled and maintained responsibly … we’ve all seen The Terminator!

By far the most exciting news recently released in the Oracle application space is the introduction of Oracle’s Gen AI services on E-Business Suite. This will revolutionise the way businesses interact with EBS and rapidly expand the applications capability.

Enabling natural language query in EBS is going to be a quick win for many businesses running 12.2 on the Oracle 23ai Database. Users can now ask EBS a question/command in plain English and Oracle’s GenAI will translate this into Oracle SQL language using an APEX UI. Allow me to demonstrate the best I can in a blog environment!

This is achieved by taking natural language semantics and relating it directly to the EBS database schema.

This powerful new capability will save businesses huge amounts of time integrating data and will allow people to make more informed decisions in a quicker time.

Here are some more examples of queries you can ask EBS across different modules:

• How many people worked in my group last month?
• Which are the offers that are yet to be approved?
• Show details of employees reporting to Smith, Jonathan
• Give me a list of Suppliers from Taiwan who have late shipments in the last month
• Which of the Suppliers have payment holds or quality issues?
• Show me the sales orders that have delayed shipments in this week
• Show the reconciliation status based on invoice and payment amounts
• List the top 5 assemblies by their total workorder scrap along with the job details
• What’s the unit cost of an item?
• Has the invoice 1234 been paid?

Security is always at the heart of any new service launch, and that is why Oracle have set out a clear architecture and data flow diagram to show how an AI workflow is executed in EBS.

So, this is all great, but how does your business take advantage of these powerful new tools? Here are the requirements and deployment options available.

In summary, it’s a really exciting time for organisations using EBS and I would encourage everyone to stay up to date with the latest release, and make sure to benefit from all the new features and services being made available.

DSP have a highly experienced team of EBS functional, technical, DBA consultants who are there to support you.