Just a few weeks before Oracle OpenWorld 2019, Oracle announced the availability of an upgrade option to Oracle EBS R12.2.9. The announcement made last August 16th mentions many new features, corrections , and some statutory and regulatory requirements and updates that this new release presents. Some of these updates came through by the requests customers did in Oracle E-Business Suite Communities on My Oracle Support. Other updates just reflect the continued development of themes introduced in earlier 12.2 releases.
According to our CTO, Gustavo Gonzalez, who has been evaluating all of the different new features, R12.2.9 introduces more than a hundred updates overall in E-Business Suite. Forty-seven new features are on the Applications Technology side only!
Oracle EBS R12.2.9 Features
These are some of the most important new features and enhancements available if you choose to upgrade your E-Business Suite:
- Financials:
- Oracle Property Manager improves support for IFRS16 and ASC842 from an accounting and operational perspective.
- Processing of bookings, terminations, and accrual transactions is now more flexible, with bookings and terminations supported retrospectively.
- Oracle Lease and Finance Management improves end-to-end throughput for the organization.
- Order Management:
- Oracle Order Management extends its support for recurring payment streams with a usage-based billing option to automatically generate invoices based on customer usage.
- A new entity called Customer Service Representative (CSR) was added and will be particularly helpful for the organizations who have two different functions for Salesperson and Customer Service Representative
- Logistics:
- Oracle Inventory Management adds workflow-driven cycle count approvals with the Approvals Management Engine (AME.)
- Oracle Mobile Supply Chain Applications (MSCA) introduces multi-field barcodes, which simplifies data entry and provides better compliance with the new FDA (GS1) and European (PPN) specifications.
- Procurement:
- With Oracle Purchasing, organizations can define and capture additional business attributes in purchase order documents to communicate unique procurement needs to suppliers.
- Oracle Procurement Contracts and Oracle Sourcing enable supplier and buyer legal teams to conduct online negotiation of contract terms.
- Approvals Management Engine (AME) workflows are integrated with Oracle Sourcing and Oracle Supplier Lifecycle Management to enable approvals by multiple users and teams
- Oracle iProcurement increases control and reduces errors by requiring requesters to enter the outstanding quantity to be received.
- Projects:
- Oracle Project Billing provides bill groups for flexible categorization of transactions to meet the unique billing needs of a project.
- Project Costing uses the same budget for project funds check as for corporate (GL) funds check.
- Manufacturing:
- Oracle Process Manufacturing provides serialization support for industries such as life sciences, chemicals, and consumer goods that require traceability of the supply chain.
- Oracle Discrete Manufacturing provides increased visibility and improved production controls.
- Asset Lifecycle Management:
- Oracle Enterprise Asset Management enhances work request approvals using AME.
- Service:
- Oracle Service supports charges integration with Oracle Advanced Pricing to allow item charges, such as for replacement parts, to be priced using Advanced Pricing rules.
- With a new prescriptive recommendation capability, Oracle Depot Repair proposes root causes and recommends best fixes based on past service orders.
- Human Capital Management:
- Oracle Time and Labor offer mass upload of employee time card entries along with an enhanced time card retrieval dashboard to save administrator and line manager effort.
- Administrators can now choose to provide access to online payslips and W-2 forms via Self-Service to employees after termination and retirement.
- Applications Technology:
- A user can now run multiple Forms sessions of the same Oracle E-Business Suite environment concurrently on the client using Java Web Start.
- Enhancements to the Oracle Application Framework (OAF) improve the user experience of HTML UIs.
- Oracle Workflow user interface pages now display date and time values in the user’s preferred time zone.
- Look-ahead search is now enabled for key flexfield combinations.
- The layout of the simplified home page is now responsive and will change according to the available viewport on different devices, providing a better user experience
- New “list search” functionality simplifies table searches in many high-use HTML pages. With a list search, users can view saved table searches as infotiles.
For more details regarding the EBS 2019 innovations, see:
How to Upgrade to Oracle EBS 12.2.9?
Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.9 is available on My Oracle Support as Patch 28840850. As with previous releases, 12.2.9 is cumulative and includes new updates as well as updates made available in one-off patches on 11.5.10, 12.0, 12.1.3 and prior 12.2 releases. The 12.2.9 patch must be applied on top of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2. For detailed instructions for downloading and applying the patch, see: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.9 Readme, Doc ID 2495027.1.
Archive: Oracle EBS R12.2.8: Everything You Need to Know
So Should you Upgrade to EBS R12.2.9 or Migrate to Oracle Cloud?
Oracle E-Business Suite customers are going through a challenging maze. While organizations have a mandate to move to Cloud-based solutions, this is not the only pressure they face. IT Leaders also have to address the need for new and better features, keep their operations functioning, and stay in support.
Companies need to be clear about their reasons for change, the effort it would take them and also the fit for their operations to be able to focus on innovating where it matters.
About Our Technology Advisory Services
ITC can help you sort this out. We provide unbiased advice to define the best roadmap for you, taking into account your current business processes, IT footprint and areas of opportunity for innovation.
Request our assessment below and take your technology roadmap at your own pace.
Questions You Might Have About The Oracle EBS R12.2.9 Upgrade
Q: Is there a direct upgrade path from EBS 12.2.x to 12.2.9?
A: Yes, customers on EBS 12.2.x can apply 12.2.9 directly to their environments. Since EBS R 12.2.9 is an online patch, it can be applied while an existing Release 12.2 system is running.
Q: Is there a direct upgrade path from EBS R12.1 to R12.2.9?
A: No, customers on EBS R12.1 need to upgrade to 12.2 first, then they could apply 12.2.9.
Q: Is there a direct upgrade path from EBS R12.0 to R12.2.9?
A: No, customers on EBS R12.0 need to upgrade to Release 12.2 first, then they could apply 12.2.9.
Q: Is there a direct upgrade path from EBS 11i to 12.2.9?
A: No, customers on Release 11i need to upgrade to upgrade to Release 12.2 first, then they could apply 12.2.9.