Intro to Oracle E-Biz

Ever since the inception of mankind, continuous improvement has been a key factor. Innovative thinking and the attitude of experiment has guided us to what we are today. It’s the willingness to find something new, and doing things in a better way that has led Homo sapiens thus far. The path of technical advancement had been similar.

Information Technology had been the answer to a lot of complicated and repetitive issues lately. With the advent of software engineering, we have been trying to eliminate the human intervention from the complex processes and automate them, and so far we have been very successful. If we reopen the history of Information technology, we will find a lot of pioneering products that has changed the way things worked before its introduction. ERP is one such product.

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. This is a software application that enables the flow if information between different streams of business, like Finance, Manufacturing, Sales, Human resources etc. An enterprise uses ERP systems to support its daily business transactional needs and reporting capabilities based on the transactions made.

This chapter talks about:

• ERP, and its usage in today’s world
• History of ERP and Oracle’s role
• Oracle E-Business Suite as an ERP and competition
• Architecture of E-Business Suite
• How to use Oracle E-Business Suite and navigation tips
• Self service HR as a Module

After reading this chapter, one should be able to:

• Understand the concept of ERP
• Explain Oracle’s role in ERP world
• Understand the elements of technical architecture and the file systems of E-Business Suite
• Navigate and use the Oracle E-Business Suite Products
• Appreciate Self Service HR as a module

back to top

This section describes the basics of E-Biz Architecture. Although there are a lot attached to the Oracle apps architecture, we will discuss the concepts that will help us in understanding the functionality better. Oracle E-Biz runs with three tier architecture. See Figure 1.1 – Architecture.

(Figure 1.1 – Architecture)

Desktop Tier

This is the client facing or user facing interface. It runs HTML based Java applets to pop up forms and web based applications, for the user access. This tier accepts our log in authentication credentials and keeps them for further usage. So once logged in, we can use oracle applications as well as other tools embedded within. The Oracle forms are brought in with a Forms client applet which in turn is a collection of Java Archive files (JAR files). When we log in for the first time, the Forms client applet and frequently used JAR files are downloaded to our machine and cached. Later less frequently used JARs get downloaded based on necessity.