Introduction

All ERP implementations identify differences between current procedures and those supported out of the box by the new application. While many users are eager to adopt fresh solutions, others want everything to remain the same. In this post, we outline the factors to consider when evaluating requests to customize Cloud ERP.

What Do We Mean by Customization?

Oracle’s Cloud applications are a public cloud offering that delivers a standard service to subscribing customers. As such, Oracle limits modification to its underlying applications, middleware, and database objects. What may appear a disadvantage instead delivers significant benefits because Cloud ERP is upgrade safe. Oracle provisions, maintains, and regularly upgrades the applications on your behalf. You always operate the most stable, modern, and feature rich version of the software.

Customization refers to reports, integrations, and applications that extend Cloud ERP’s standard features. Oracle includes tools such as REST APIs, BI Publisher (BIP), and BI Cloud Connector (BICC) to facilitate their incorporation into a unified solution for your users. Implementers develop customizations using Oracle or external tools. Usually, your IT department assumes responsibility for their maintenance and upgrade.

Contrast customization with configuration. Implementers use standard features to define and control the application’s behavior. Configuration is always upgrade safe and, except for exceptional circumstances, only requires maintenance as business requirements change. For example, when you add a cost center or implement a new feature.

Costs and Risks

Almost all customization entails some additional cost and risk. Consider the following:

Initial Development Effort

Ensure that your cost estimates comprehend the full development cycle: requirements analysis; design; review; coding; testing; user acceptance; documentation; training (end-user and help desk); help text and solution deployment across multiple environments.

Quarterly Testing and Maintenance

Factor in thorough testing of customizations after each quarterly update. Our development teams invest considerable effort to ensure that Cloud ERP’s standard features work consistently across updates. This includes the tools provided to facilitate customization such as REST APIs, personalization, and BICC extracts. Nevertheless, the limited visibility into your customizations raises the risk of unintended impact on them. For more details of quarterly update recommendations, see ERP ACE blog post: Harness the Business Value of Quarterly Updates

Continuous Innovation

Oracle’s continuous innovation may partially or fully obsolete customizations. Oracle introduces many new and enhanced features in every quarterly update. Although backwardly compatible, they may overlap or supercede a customization’s functionality. Your IT department will need to dedicate resources to modify or deprecate the customization and rollout the changes to users. 

Business Agility 

Extensive customization and its corresponding maintenance hamper your ability to react to emerging market and business challenges. Modifying or adding configuration to reflect new or changed business processes is relatively straightforward. The impact of business process change on customizations could be significant. The effort to adapt them to new circumstances and requirements diminishes your enterprise’s business agility.

Employee Skills

Customization introduces a dependency on the technical skills needed to develop and maintain them. You may encounter difficulties to retain employees with the appropriate technical skills and knowledge of the customization. Configuration, on the other hand, offers visibility and control to functional or business users. You can free developers to focus on other priorities.

How to Evaluate Requests to Customize

Cloud ERP addresses business requirements of medium and large enterprises; multiple countries; and diverse industries. In summary, Cloud ERP is highly configurable. Nevertheless, you may encounter current procedures and working practices that differ from those offered by Cloud ERP. 

What factors should you consider when evaluating candidates for customization?

Do Not Lift and Shift Legacy Processes to Cloud

Most likely, today you address business requirements with a combination of legacy applications, customizations, and manual processes. We anticipate that standard Cloud ERP features will replace or improve on the majority of current solutions

In other cases, you will encounter apparent gaps between your current processes and Cloud ERP. Before considering a customization, re-assess the underlying business requirements. Clarify the current feature’s business objectives independently from its implementation. Look for alternate ways to address the same requirements using Cloud ERP’s standard features.

This recommendation also applies to e-Business Suite (EBS). Do not assume that Cloud ERP addresses business requirements in the same way as EBS or any other legacy application. 

Confirm That Gaps Reflect Genuine Business Requirements

Question why today’s business practice differs from other customers and especially, those with a comparable size and industry. In our work with Cloud ERP’s customers, we have encountered striking examples of questionable requirements. These include:

  • Workarounds to legacy application limitations that Cloud ERP addresses out-of-the-box.
  • Procedures that support manual processes that Cloud ERP largely automates. For example, processes derived from manual invoice or journal entry. 
  • Foreign subsidiaries that request outdated “legal” reports or procedures.
  • Procedures whose rationale has been lost in the mists of time.
  • Multiple versions of the same custom report.

Work with a qualified implementation partner with ample Cloud ERP experience and knowledge of your industry and international scope. They will help you identify genuine business requirements.

Customer Connect is a useful resource to collaborate with other customers and learn how they address similar requirements. 

Evaluate the Costs and Benefits of a Customization

Review requests for customization with a critical eye. In addition to the costs and risks listed above, consider:

  • The criticality of the process. How central is it to your finance departments proper functioning?
  • How many users will benefit from the customization? 
  • Is the customization compatible with plans to evolve and grow the enterprise?

Evaluate whether the benefits of adapting to the Cloud ERP standard processes outweigh the customization’s total cost of ownership (TCO). 

Even if the standard process involves a few additional manual steps compared with a legacy customization, on balance, it may consume less resources once you consider the full cost and risks of the customization.

Bear in mind that a modified business process often takes time to demonstrate its benefits while users become accustomed to it. Effective change management is key to successful transition to new procedures and processes.

Upstream Integrations

Incorporate upstream applications. Organizations that have grown by acquisition often have similar or overlapping upstream applications that cater to specific divisions or markets. Often, they generate subledger transactions or GL journals and hence, rely on custom integrations to bring them into Cloud ERP. Common examples include procurement, expenses, and cash management functions.

Investigate whether these applications can be replaced by Cloud ERP standard features. Even if their migration to Cloud is delayed until a subsequent phase (meaning that, in the short term, you must implement an integration to  Cloud ERP), in the medium term support and maintenance costs will be reduced. 

Downstream Integrations

Take advantage of out-of-the-box integration with other Oracle public cloud applications.

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) applications such as Financial Close (FCCS), Enterprise Data Management (EDMCS) and Account Reconciliation. Extract data from Cloud ERP and write back results to Cloud GL when appropriate.

Fusion Data Intelligence (FDI) offers seeded subject areas and standard financial metrics for Cloud ERP data.

Special Considerations for BIP Reports

BI Publisher (BIP) reports represent one of the most common Cloud ERP customizations. Their data models read directly from database tables and views. While we endeavor to offer backward compatibility, bug fixes and new features may change the way Cloud ERP stores transactions and setups. Contrast this with Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) whose subject areas are automatically upgraded by Oracle.

Data Models and Templates

BI Publisher reports consist of a data model and one or more templates that format the output. Many seeded data models contain hidden fields that you can surface using a new template. If you can leverage a seeded data model, then do so because templates are easier to develop and incur less risk.

Performance

Since BIP reports directly access database tables and views, their performance is linked to the way that the SQL is fashioned. Ensure that you have qualified resources to build and tune the reports.

Testing

Future maintenance costs can arise because of changes in quarterly updates or changes in performance as the enterprise grows. Most quarterly updates will not include invasive changes but, we recommend thorough testing of custom BIP reports.

Agility

As the enterprise responds to emerging market and business challenges, it will change Cloud ERP configuration and uptake new features. The additional cost of adapting custom reports to these changes represents a barrier to the agility of your enterprise to react to market and business challenges.

Rationalize

The more BIP reports you build, the greater the exposure to future cost and risk. Endeavor to merge similar reports by controlling their behavior with parameters or profile options.

Guardrail Initiative

In order to guarantee the reliability and consistency of the Cloud ERP service, the guardrail initiative limits the amount of time and resources required to run custom Business Intelligence (BI) reports. This impacts BIP and, to a lesser extent, OTBI.

Custom reports that do not trigger guardrail limits when you first go into production, may do so as the volume of transactions grows over time. If you encounter this issue, you will need to deploy qualified resources to tune them. The more custom reports you build, the more likely tuning will be necessary.

For more details about the guardrail initiative, see My Oracle Support (MOS) note: FA-SAAS SQL Guardrails for Long-Running BI Reports and Queries (Doc ID 2884584.1)

Modifying the User Interface

Cloud ERP offers a range of tools for you to modify the user interface (UI). 

  • Page Composer: configure application page components such as page content and layout.
  • User Interface Text: edit text that appears on multiple pages.
  • Appearance: change the look and feel of the application pages.
  • Page Template Composer: edit the global page template.
  • Navigator: configure the Navigator and the icons on the home page.
  • Announcement: create, edit, and delete announcements displayed on the home page.

The tools and capabilities may vary between Redwood and the classic UI. Although the application enforces guardrails that protect you from the impact of quarterly updates, we recommend that you test the modifications on your stage environments each quarter. For more details, see the Configuring and Extending Applications book.

Ideas, What’s New, and Roadmap Presentations

Try to avoid building a customization that will be superseded by a new or upcoming standard feature. Unfortunately, revenue recognition rules limit Oracle’s ability to publish details of upcoming releases. Nevertheless, you can leverage Customer Connect Ideas, quarterly update’s What’s New, and Applications Roadmap presentations to anticipate our product direction.

If the Benefits Outweigh the Cost

If you determine that the benefits of a customization outweigh its cost and risk, you must decide how to go about it. Oracle Public Cloud protects you from making invasive changes to Cloud ERP.

We provision all Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications environments with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Identity and Access Management (IAM) identity domain. No additional licensing cost is incurred when using the Fusion Applications Identity domain to build extensions in Fusion Applications. For more details, see the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Identity Domain section of the Configuring and Extending Applications book.

REST APIs offer backward compatible mechanisms to perform standard operations on Cloud ERP business entities. Each quarterly updates adds new APIs so make sure to review the latest documentation.

Oracle Visual Builder is a cloud-based software development platform and hosted environment that allows you to create and host web and mobile applications that communicate with Cloud ERP via REST APIs. It offers an Add-in for Excel which allows users to  retrieve, analyze, and edit business data from the REST service. The OCI Identity and Access Management (IAM) identity domain hosts Oracle Visual Builder.

Oracle Integration Cloud offers tools to integrate and orchestrate on-premise applications and cloud ERP.

Interfaces exist for almost all transactions and business entities supported by File Based Data Import (FBDI). You can orchestrate FBDI processing via SOAP web services. For more details, see MOS note: How to Submit ESS Process Using Web Services in Fusion Applications? (Doc ID 2261832.1)

Reporting and extract tools offer a range of options to suit different reporting and data extraction requirements. BI Cloud Connector (BICC) supports full and incremental extracts from Cloud ERP to external data repositories.

Conclusion

Oracle protects Cloud ERP from invasive customization and hence, is upgrade safe. We provide tools to help you extend the application to meet customer specific business requirements and integrations.

In some cases, you must choose between building a customization or adopting standard business processes already supported by Cloud ERP. Be sure to consider the full cost and risk across the customization’s full lifecycle. The more customizations you build, the higher the risk of future issues and the greater cost in terms of testing and remediation.