As enterprises shift towards modern architecture and technology innovations, it’s becoming clearer and clearer how important it is to plan ahead not only to prepare your organization but to ensure you take full advantage of new things coming.
For Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), digital initiatives, updates, fixes, new features, and security patches are deployed through new releases that sit on top of the last major upgrade Oracle EBS clients will ever have to make: Release 12.2.
As we enter the year 2022, there are new and exciting things slated in EBS’s roadmap that will make it even more appealing for customers to undertake modernization efforts as soon as possible.
In this blog, we will unpack some of those innovations that you can expect in 2022, highlighting where Oracle is investing more heavily and where your system fits into that.
IT 2022 Trends
According to Gartner, one of the most prominent trends in the IT world is hyperautomation. This key trend is enabled by multiple types of technologies for content ingestion, and the support of an increasingly automated workplace. After the pandemic hit, remote work became inevitable, making organizations and people more interconnected and with a dire need to automate and streamline processes as much as possible.
At the end of 2020, the robotic process automation (RPA) market exploded with more than 50 new market entrants making a splash including the likes of IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and other big hitters. For Oracle, RPA has been a long-standing offering that continues to drive business, which is achieved by the continuous expansion and integration of RPA with other software products, which decreases the need for stand-alone RPA solutions.
Other prominent trends in the world of IT in 2022 are:
- Digital assistants that help ease processes and make them more efficient as assistants answer questions and perform simple tasks.
- Machine learning technologies that can easily detect patterns and reduce the need for human involvement in routine tasks.
- Virtual reality/augmented reality which are frequently used for maintenance application, training, and simulation exercises.
- Distributed enterprises as we continue to move towards a more hybrid/remote work environment, with both employees and customers spread worldwide.
- Blockchain technology that stores data in blocks to meet growing security needs, especially with cryptocurrencies becoming a huge hit.
- Data fabric that helps with complex data management systems so organizations can easily store and share data in a distributed data environment.
- Decision intelligence that leverages both analytics and artificial intelligence to help make decisions faster and smarter.
Oracle EBS Innovations in 2022
UI Modernization
With an easy, browser-based user experience, the re-imaged Oracle EBS now has a modern look and feel that makes it stand out against other Enterprise Resource Planning solutions.
Oracle EBS offers a managerial dashboard that gives upper level management a vantage point to truly assess the past, current, and future state of an organization, making it easy to execute data-driven decisions with robust analytics.
One of the most exciting user experience innovations is Enterprise Command Centers, which we will explain next.
Enterprise Command Centers
Enterprise Command Centers are BI-style views that help management understand, browse, and hone in on actionable insights that can be visualized in graphs and charts for smart decision-making.
Oracle EBS comes with 32 command centers comprising 121 dashboards across the instance. The dashboards are packed with information discovery along with visualization and exploration capabilities embedded within the Oracle EBS user interface so users can create business dashboards across different functional areas.
Oracle EBS users can navigate transactional information using interactive visual components and guided discovery capabilities that enable a more effective and efficient exploratory data analysis.
Also, mobility and responsive design are key to Enterprise Command Centers as all dashboards adjust automatically to provide a better fit for either a desktop or a mobile device. Security is also a big part of Command Centers as they completely and automatically adhere to the existing Oracle EBS security system and the content seen by a user is consistent with Oracle EBS’s context and security.
EBS Infrastructure and EBS Application: Two Separate Entities
Oracle EBS users can now upgrade their Oracle EBS infrastructure without the need to update the application level EBS or the client database. This allows for easier deployment, patching, and back-end maintenance.
Additionally, EBS updates are performed by the product family, meaning users can update only certain modules without having to update the entire system.
Operational and Performance Enhancements
For Oracle EBS clients who are ready to move to the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is the optimal platform, but if you’re still in need to stay on-premises, then it’s critical that you upgrade to Release 12.2 with R12.2.11 being the latest iteration.
The cloud and the latest version of EBS offer new features, more optimization, and better deployment strategies. For example, Oracle EBS Release 12.2.11 includes some of these functional and operational enhancements:
- G-Invoicing for US Federal Program Agencies for both projects and procurement
- Shared Service Procurement functionality to support project-centric purchases
- Budgetary control for labor and non-labor transactions improving cost control with fund checking
- EBS manages and accounts for returns on internal sales orders
- Milestone Billing lets users insert and re-sequence billing milestones with additional info via descriptive flexfields
- Warehouse Management Rules Engine guides putaway and picks operations by classification code
- New Distributed Sampling to define subsets of quality specifications for several product dimensions
- Time entry for discrete manufacturing
- Additional APIs for extensions and integrations, including areas like Inventory, Product Hub, Discrete Manufacturing, Warehouse Management, and more.
- Support for Outbound REST services
- Adoption of Database standards, public APIs, features, and architecture to modernize how EBS takes advantage of the latest database capabilities.
- New EBS system architecture with the EBS System Schema Architecture, optimizing the use of system privilege.
For more information about the Application Technology Innovations of Oracle EBS 12.2.11, we recommend that you download this ebook that includes exclusive information about what you can find in this latest iteration of EBS.
