Oracle University Podcast

When you work with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, one of the first steps is to set up a virtual cloud network (VCN) for your cloud resources. In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Rohit Rahi, discuss Oracle’s Virtual Cloud Network, VCN routing, and security.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Kiran BR, Rashmi Panda, David Wright, the OU Podcast Team, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ---------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:  00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started. 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi everyone. We hope you’ve been enjoying these last few weeks as we’ve been revisiting our most popular episodes of the year.  00:47 Lois: Today’s episode is the fourth of six we’ll have in this series and it’s a throwback to a conversation with Rohit Rahi, our Vice President of CSS OU Cloud Delivery, talking about Networking in OCI. We began by asking Rohit to explain what a Virtual Cloud Network is. Let’s listen in. 01:06 Rohit: At its core, it's a private software defined network you create in Oracle Cloud. It's used for secure communication. Whether instances talking to each other, instances talking to on-premises environments, or instances talking to other instances in different regions, you would use Virtual Cloud Network.  It lives in an OCI region. Like we said, it's a regional service. It's highly available, massively scalable, and secure. And we take care of these things for you. So before we dive deep into the VCN and all the characteristics and all the features it has, let's look at some of the basic stuff.  01:44 Rohit: So the first thing is VCN has an address space. In this case, you see this address space is denoted in a CIDR notation. CIDR stands for classless interdomain routing.  The VCN has an IP addressing range. And what that means is you have an address range. You take that range. And you can break it down into smaller networks which are called subnetworks. And these subnetworks are where you would instantiate your compute instances.  02:16 Nikita: And what can you tell us about the different mechanisms that exist inside a VCN?  Rohit: So first, there is a notion of internet gateway. This is a gateway which is massively scalable, highly available, and is used for communication to anything on the internet.  So if you have a web server which wants to talk to other websites on the web being able to be accessed publicly, you would use an internet gateway. So going to the internet and coming back from the internet. You also have this highly available, massively scalable router called NAT gateway. And it is used for providing NAT as a service.  02:53 Rohit: So what this means is the traffic is unidirectional. It can go from your private subnets to the internet. But users from the internet cannot use the NAT gateway to reach your instances running in a private subnet. So the idea with the NAT gateway is to enable outbound communication to the internet, but block inbound communications or connections initiated from the internet.  Then we have another router which is called Service Gateway. And the idea is it lets resources in VCN access public OCI services such as object storage, but without using an internet or NAT gateway. So these are the three scenarios-- Internet gateway for internet, NAT gateway also for internet but unidirectional, and Service gateway for accessing OCI public services, which are available on the internet but accessing them in a secure manner.  And then the other construct is called Dynamic Routing Gateway. This is a virtual router that provides a path for private traffic between your VCN and destinations other than the internet.  04:00 Lois: So what can these destinations be?  Rohit: Well, this can be your on-premises environment. VCN uses route tables to send traffic out of the VCN to the internet, to on-premises networks, or to peered VCN, and we look at each of these scenarios.  Route tables consist of a set of route rules. Each rule specifies a destination CIDR block and a route target. Think about route target as the next hop for the traffic that matches that destination CIDR block.  Now, one thing to keep in mind is traffic within the VCN subnet is automatically handled by the VCN local routing. 04:44 Lois: Want to get the inside scoop on Oracle University? Head on over to the all-new Oracle University Learning Community. Attend exclusive events. Read up on the latest news. Get first-hand access to new products and stay up-to-date with upcoming certification opportunities. If you are already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to join the Community. You will need to log in first. If you have not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started. Join the Community today! 05:20 Nikita: Getting back to our discussion… if you have multiple networks, how do they talk to each other?  Rohit: So there are two scenarios which are possible here. If the networks are within the same OCI region, they can talk to each other through a mechanism called local peering. If the two networks are in two different OCI data center regions, then you have the same concept, a similar concept, but it's a remote peering now. And instead of using local peering, now you're using the Dynamic Routing Gateways. Remember we talked about Dynamic Routing Gateways used for on-premises communication, anything which is not for internet. So this is also a use case for Dynamic Routing Gateway enabling communication between networks in different regions.  06:05 Rohit: So within VCN, you have this concept of security list. Think about security list as firewall rules associated with a subnet and applied to all instances inside the subnet. So what does it look like? The security list consists of rules that specify the type of traffic allowed in or out of the subnet. This applies to a given instance, whether it is talking with another instance in the VCN or a host outside the VCN.  There's also another concept, which is called network security groups, or NSG. These are very similar construct as security list, but the key difference is these apply only to a set of virtual network interface cards in a single VCN. And another big difference here is NSGs can be the source or destination in the rules. Contrast this with the security list rules where you specify a CIDR, only a CIDR, as the source or destination.  07:06 Lois: Thanks for that, Rohit. To learn more about OCI, please visit mylearn.oracle.com, create a profile if you don’t already have one, and get started learning on our free OCI Foundations training.  Nikita: You can also practice what you learn in a safe environment with our hands-on labs, without the anxiety of working in a live environment. 07:27 Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham... Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 07:37 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

12 Dec 20238min

Data breaches occur more often than we’d like them to. As businesses embrace remote work practices, IT resources are more at risk than ever before. Oracle Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an essential tool for protecting enterprise resources against cybersecurity threats. Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Rohit Rahi, as they examine IAM and the key aspects of this service, and discuss how you can control who has access to your resources.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Kiran BR, Rashmi Panda, David Wright, the OU Podcast Team, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started. 00:26 Nikita: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us for this Best of 2023 series, where we’re playing you six of our most popular episodes of the year.   00:47 Nikita: Today’s episode is #3 of 6 and is a throwback to a conversation with Rohit Rahi, Vice President of CSS OU Cloud Delivery, on Identity and Access Management, which is one of OCI’s top security features. So, let’s get straight into it. 01:03 Rohit: IAM stands for Identity and Access Management service. It's also sometimes referred to as fine-grained access control or role-based access control service.  There are two key aspects to this service. The first one is called authentication, or also referred to as AuthN. And the second aspect is referred to as authorization or also referred to as AuthZ. Authentication has to deal with identity or who someone is, while authorization has to deal with permission or what someone is allowed to do.  01:37 Rohit: So basically what the service ensures is making sure that a person is who they claim to be. And as far as authorization is concerned, what the service does is it allows a user to be assigned one or more pre-determined roles, and each roles comes with a set of permissions. Now, there are various concepts which are part of this service or various features which are part of this service, starting with identity domains, principles, groups, dynamic groups, compartments, et cetera. Now identity domains is basically a container for your users and groups. So think about this as a construct which represents a user population in OCI and the associated configurations and security settings.  02:30 Lois: So, how does this work in practice?  Rohit: Well, what we do first is we create an identity domain, and then we create users and groups within that identity domain. And then we write policies against those groups, and policies are scoped to a tenancy, an account, or a compartment. And of course, the resources are available within a compartment. And again, compartment is kind of a logical isolation for resources. So this is how the whole service works. 03:03 Rohit: And users and the groups, authentication is done by common mechanisms like username and password, and policies is basically where you provide this role-based access control. So you put these groups in one of the pre-determined roles, and then you assign some permissions against those roles. So this is how the service works in a nutshell.  Now anything you create in the cloud, all these objects, whether it's a block storage, it's a compute instance, it's a file storage, it's a database, these are all resources. And if these things are resources, there has to be a unique identifier for these resources, else how are you going to operate on these resources? So what OCI does is it provides its own assigned identifier, which is called Oracle Cloud ID, OCID. You don't have to provide this. We do this automatically for all the resources. 04:02 Nikita: Thanks for that rundown, Rohit. Another feature of OCI is compartments, right? Can you tell us a bit about compartments? Rohit: When you open an account in OCI, you get a tenancy. That's another fancy name for an account. And we also give you a Root Compartment. So think of Root Compartment as this logical construct where you can keep all of your cloud resources. And then what you could do is, you could create your own individual compartments. And the idea is, you create these for isolation and controlling access. And you could keep a collection of related resources in specific compartments. So the network resource has-- a network compartment has network resources, and storage compartment has storage resources.  04:46 Rohit: Now, keep in mind, Root Compartment, as I said earlier, can hold all of the cloud resources. So it can be sort of a kitchen sink. You could put everything in there. But the best practice is to create dedicated compartments to isolate resources. You will see why. Let me just explain. So first thing is, each resource you create belongs to a single compartment. So you create a virtual machine, for example. It goes to Compartment A. It cannot go to Compartment B again. You have to move it from Compartment A, or delete, and re-create in Compartment B. Keep in mind, each resource belongs to a single compartment.  05:21 Rohit: Why you use compartments in the first place is for controlling access and isolation. So the way you do that is, you have the resources, let's say in this case a block storage, kept in Compartment A. You don't want those to be used by everyone. You want those to be used only by the compute admins and storage admins.  So you create those admins as users and groups, write these policies, and they can access these resources in this compartment. So it's very important. Do not put all of your resources in the Root Compartment. Create resource-specific compartments, or whichever way you want to divide your tenancies, and put resources accordingly.  06:00 Lois: Now, how do resources interact if they are in different compartments? Do they all have to be in the same compartment?  Rohit: Absolutely not! Resources in one compartment can interact with the resource in another compartment. Here, the Virtual Cloud Network is-- the compute instance uses the Virtual Cloud Network, but these are in two different compartments. So this is absolutely supported. And it keeps your design much cleaner.  Keep in mind that resources can also be moved from one compartment to another. So in this example, Compartment A had a virtual machine. We can move that from Compartment A to Compartment B. Another concept, which is very important to grasp is the compartments are global constructs, like everything in identity. So resources from multiple regions can be in the same compartment. So when you go to Phoenix, you see this compartment existing. You go to Ashburn, you see the same compartment.  06:55 Rohit: Now, you can write policies to prevent users from accessing resources in a specific region. You could do that. But keep in mind, all the compartments you create are global, and they are available in every region you have access to. Compartments can also be nested. So you have up to six levels nesting provided by compartments. You would do this again because this can mimic your current design, whether it's your organizational design or whether it's your ID hierarchy. You could create nested compartments. It just helps keep your design cleaner.  07:32 Rohit: And then, finally, you could set quotas and budgets on compartments. So you could say that, my particular compartment, you cannot create a bare metal machine. Or you cannot create an Exadata resource. So you could control it like that. And then you could also create budgets on compartments. So you could say that, if the usage in a particular compartment goes beyond $1,000, you'd get flagged, and you get notified. So you could do that. So that's compartments for you. It's a very unique feature within OCI. We believe it helps keep your tenancies much better organized. And it really supports your current ID hierarchy and design.  08:12 Boosting your professional reputation is now easier than ever. Oracle University Learning Community is a collaborative, dynamic community that gives you the power to create your own personal brand. Achieve champion levels and acquire badges. Get inducted into the Hall of Fame. Become a thought leader. If you are already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to join the community. You will need to log in first. If you have not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started. 08:53 Nikita: Welcome back! So Rohit, can you tell us a little bit about principals? Rohit: A principal is an IAM entity that is allowed to interact with OCI resources. There are two kinds of principals primarily in OCI. One is your users. Think about people who are logging on to your console or using your CLI or SDKs, users… human beings actually using your cloud resources. And then the resources themselves can be principals. So a good example of a resource principal is an instance principal which is actually an instance which becomes a principal, which means that it can make API calls against other OCI services like storage.  09:34 Rohit: Also, when we talk about principles we have groups. And groups are basically collection of users who have the same type of access requirements to resources. So you can have a storage admin group where you could group all the human beings who are storage administrators and so on and so forth. So let's look at some of the details, starting with authentication. Authentication is sometimes also referred to as AuthN. Authentication is basically figuring out are you who you say you are. And the easiest way to understand this is all of us deal with this on everyday basis. When you go to our website and you provide your username and password to access some of the content, you are being authenticated.  10:15 Rohit: There are other ways to do authentication. The one common for cloud is API Signing Keys. So when you are making API calls, whether you're using the SDK or the CLI, you would use the API Signing Keys which use a public private key pair to sign these APIs calls and authenticate these APIs calls. It uses an RSA key pair, with both a public key and a private key. There is also a third way to do authentication, and that's based on authentication tokens. And these are Oracle-generated token strings. And the idea here is you can authenticate third-party APIs which don't support OCI authentication model.  10:56 Lois: So, then, what are authorizations?  Rohit: So authorization deals with permissions and figuring out what permissions do you have. In OCI, authorization is done through what we call as IAM policies. And policies, think about these as human readable statements to define granular permissions. Remember, policies can be attached to a compartment or they could be attached to a tenancy. If they're attached to a tenancy, it applies to everything within that tenancy. If it's applied to a compartment, it applies to only the resources within that compartment.  11:33 Rohit: The syntax is always you have to start with an allow. Everything is denied by default, so you don't really have to write a deny statement. So you say allow group_name. A group is basically a collection of users. So you cannot write a policy on individual users, you always operate at a group level. To do something, there's a verb. On some resources, there's a resource-type and there's a location.  Location can be a tenancy. Location can be a compartment. And you can make these policies really complex with adding conditions. So just to give you an idea of what the verbs might look like. There are four levels of verb. There is a manage, there's a use, there's a read, and there's a inspect. And as you go down, these become additive.  12:17 Rohit: So manage basically means you can manage your resources, use basically means you can read but you could not do things like update and delete and so on and so forth. And you can read more on the documentation. Resource type basically can be all resources, meaning everything in your account, or it could be compute resources, database resources, whatnot, all the resources you have.  Now, you could operate at a family level, which is meaning all the entities within that resource family, or you could even go very granular. So you could say that in compute, I just want somebody to operate on the instances, but not work on the instance images. So you could actually do that.  So this is how you would write a policy.  12:58 Nikita: For more on OCI, please visit mylearn.oracle.com, create a profile if you don’t already have one, and get started on our free training on OCI Foundations. Taking this training will help you advance and future-proof your career and prepare you for our OCI Foundations Associate exam. Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham... Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 13:27 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

5 Dec 202313min

Oracle’s next-gen cloud platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, has been helping thousands of companies and millions of users run their entire application portfolio in the cloud. Today, the demand for OCI expertise is growing rapidly. Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Rohit Rahi, as they peel back the layers of OCI to discover why it is one of the world's fastest-growing cloud platforms.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Kiran BR, Rashmi Panda, David Wright, the OU Podcast Team, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started. 00:26 Lois: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me today is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi there! You’re listening to our Best of 2023 series, where over the next few weeks, we’ll be revisiting six of our most popular episodes of the year. 00:47 Lois: Today is episode 2 of 6, and we’re throwing it back to our very first episode of the Oracle University Podcast. It was a conversation that Niki and I had with Rohit Rahi, Vice President, CSS OU Cloud Delivery. During this episode, we discussed Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s core coverage on different tiers. Nikita: But we began by asking Rohit to explain what OCI is and tell us about its key components. So, let’s jump right in. 01:14 Rohit: Some of the world's largest enterprises are running their mission-critical workloads on Oracle's next generation cloud platform called Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. To keep things simple, let us break them down into seven major categories: Core Infrastructure, Database Services, Data and AI, Analytics, Governance and Administration, Developer Services, and Application Services.  But first, the foundation of any cloud platform is the global footprint of regions. We have many generally available regions in the world, along with multi-cloud support with Microsoft Azure and a differentiated hybrid offering called Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer.  01:57 Rohit: We have building blocks on top of this global footprint, the seven categories we just mentioned. At the very bottom, we have the core primitives: compute, storage, and networking. Compute services cover virtual machines, bare metal servers, containers, a managed Kubernetes service, and a managed VMWare service.  These services are primarily for performing calculations, executing logic, and running applications. Cloud storage includes disks attached to virtual machines, file storage, object storage, archive storage, and data migration services. 02:35 Lois: That’s quite a wide range of storage services. So Rohit, we all know that networking plays an important role in connecting different services. These days, data is growing in size and complexity, and there is a huge demand for a scalable and secure approach to store data. In this context, can you tell us more about the services available in OCI that are related to networking, database, governance, and administration? 03:01 Rohit: Networking features let you set up software defined private networks in Oracle Cloud. OCI provides the broadest and deepest set of networking services with the highest reliability, most security features, and highest performance.  Then we have database services, we have multiple flavors of database services, both Oracle and open source. We are the only cloud that runs Autonomous Databases and multiple flavors of it, including OLTP, OLAP, and JSON.  And then you can run databases and virtual machines, bare metal servers, or even Exadata in the cloud. You can also run open source databases, such as MySQL and NoSQL in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.  03:45 Rohit: Data and AI Services, we have a managed Apache Spark service called Dataflow, a managed service for tracking data artifacts across OCI called Data Catalog, and a managed service for data ingestion and ETL called Data Integration.  We also have a managed data science platform for machine learning models and training. We also have a managed Apache Kafka service for event streaming use cases.  Then we have Governance and Administration services. These services include security, identity, and observability and management. We have unique features like compartments that make it operationally easier to manage large and complex environments. Security is integrated into every aspect of OCI, whether it's automatic detection or remediation, what we typically refer as Cloud Security Posture Management, robust network protection or encryption by default.  We have an integrated observability and management platform with features like logging, logging analytics, and Application Performance Management and much more.  04:55 Nikita: That’s so fascinating, Rohit. And is there a service that OCI provides to ease the software development process? Rohit: We have a managed low code service called APEX, several other developer services, and a managed Terraform service called Resource Manager.  For analytics, we have a managed analytics service called Oracle Analytics Cloud that integrates with various third-party solutions.  Under Application services, we have a managed serverless offering, call functions, and API gateway and an Events Service to help you create microservices and event driven architectures.  05:35 Rohit: We have a comprehensive connected SaaS suite across your entire business, finance, human resources, supply chain, manufacturing, advertising, sales, customer service, and marketing all running on OCI.  That's a long list. And these seven categories and the services mentioned represent just a small fraction of more than 80 services currently available in OCI.  Fortunately, it is quick and easy to try out a new service using our industry-leading Free Tier account. We are the first cloud to offer a server for just a penny per core hour.  Whether you're starting with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or migrating your entire data set into it, we can support you in your journey to the cloud.   06:28 Have an idea and want a platform to share your technical expertise? Head over to the new Oracle University Learning Community. Drive intellectual, free-flowing conversations with your peers. Listen to experts and learn new skills. If you are already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to join the Community. You will need to log in first. If you have not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started.  Join the conversation today! 07:04 Nikita: Welcome back! Now let’s listen to Rohit explain the core constructs of OCI’s physical architecture, starting with regions. Rohit: Region is a localized geographic area comprising of one or more availability domains.  Availability domains are one or more fault tolerant data centers located within a region, but connected to each other by a low latency, high bandwidth network. Fault domains is a grouping of hardware and infrastructure within an availability domain to provide anti-affinity. So think about these as logical data centers.  Today OCI has a massive geographic footprint around the world with multiple regions across the world. And we also have a multi-cloud partnership with Microsoft Azure. And we have a differentiated hybrid cloud offering called Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer.  08:02 Lois: But before we dive into the physical architecture, can you tell us…how does one actually choose a region?  Rohit: Choosing a region, you choose a region closest to your users for lowest latency and highest performance. So that's a key criteria. The second key criteria is data residency and compliance requirements. Many countries have strict data residency requirements, and you have to comply to them. And so you choose a region based on these compliance requirements.  08:31 Rohit: The third key criteria is service availability. New cloud services are made available based on regional demand at times, regulatory compliance reasons, and resource availability, and several other factors. Keep these three criteria in mind when choosing a region.  So let's look at each of these in a little bit more detail. Availability domain. Availability domains are isolated from each other, fault tolerant, and very unlikely to fail simultaneously. Because availability domains do not share physical infrastructure, such as power or cooling or the internal network, a failure that impacts one availability domain is unlikely to impact the availability of others.  A particular region has three availability domains. One availability domain has some kind of an outage, is not available. But the other two availability domains are still up and running.  09:26 Rohit: We talked about fault domains a little bit earlier. What are fault domains? Think about each availability domain has three fault domains. So think about fault domains as logical data centers within availability domain.  We have three availability domains, and each of them has three fault domains. So the idea is you put the resources in different fault domains, and they don't share a single point of hardware failure, like physical servers, physical rack, top of rack switches, a power distribution unit. You can get high availability by leveraging fault domains.  We also leverage fault domains for our own services. So in any region, resources in at most one fault domain are being actively changed at any point in time. This means that availability problems caused by change procedures are isolated at the fault domain level. And moreover, you can control the placement of your compute or database instances to fault domain at instance launch time. So you can specify which fault domain you want to use.  10:29 Nikita: So then, what’s the general guidance for OCI users?  Rohit: The general guidance is we have these constructs, like fault domains and availability domains to help you avoid single points of failure. We do that on our own. So we make sure that the servers, the top of rack switch, all are redundant. So you don't have hardware failures or we try to minimize those hardware failures as much as possible. You need to do the same when you are designing your own architecture.  So let's look at an example. You have a region. You have an availability domain. And as we said, one AD has three fault domains, so you see those fault domains here.  11:08 Rohit: So first thing you do is when you create an application you create this software-defined virtual network. And then let's say it's a very simple application. You have an application tier. You have a database tier.  So first thing you could do is you could run multiple copies of your application. So you have an application tier which is replicated across fault domains. And then you have a database, which is also replicated across fault domains.  11:34 Lois: What’s the benefit of this replication, Rohit?  Rohit: Well, it gives you that extra layer of redundancy. So something happens to a fault domain, your application is still up and running.  Now, to take it to the next step, you could replicate the same design in another availability domain. So you could have two copies of your application running. And you can have two copies of your database running.  11:57 Now, one thing which will come up is how do you make sure your data is synchronized between these copies? And so you could use various technologies like Oracle Data Guard to make sure that your primary and standby-- the data is kept in sync here. And so that-- you can design your application-- your architectures like these to avoid single points of failure. Even for regions where we have a single availability domain, you could still leverage fault domain construct to achieve high availability and avoid single points of failure.  12:31 Nikita: Thank you, Rohit, for taking us through OCI at a high level.  Lois: For a more detailed explanation of OCI, please visit mylearn.oracle.com, create a profile if you don’t already have one, and get started on our free training on OCI Foundations.  Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham... Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 12:57 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

28 Nov 202313min

Sergio Castro joins Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham to explore multicloud, some of its use cases, and the reasons why many businesses are embracing this strategy.   A-Team Chronicles: https://www.ateam-oracle.com/ Oracle University Blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/oracleuniversity/ Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, the OU Podcast Team, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started. 00:26 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! If you’ve been following along with us, you’ll know we just completed our first three seasons of the Oracle University Podcast. We’ve had such a great time exploring OCI, Data Management, and Cloud Applications business processes. And we’ve had some pretty awesome special guests, too. 00:56 Nikita: Yeah, it’s been so great having them on and so educational so do check out those episodes if you missed any of them.  Lois: As we close out the year, we thought this would be a good time to revisit some of our most popular episodes with you. Over the next few weeks, you’ll be able to listen to six of our most popular episodes from this year.  Nikita: Right, this is the best of the best–according to you–our listeners.   01:20 Lois: Today’s episode is #1 of 6 and is a throwback to a discussion with our Principal OCI Instructor Sergio Castro on multi-cloud. Keep in mind that this chat took place before the release of Oracle University’s course and certification on multi-cloud. It’s available now on mylearn.oracle.com so if it interests you, you should go check it out. Nikita: We began by asking Sergio to help us with the basics and explain what multi-cloud is. So, let’s dive right in. Here we go! 01:51 Sergio: Good question. So multi-cloud is leveraging the best offering of two or more cloud service providers. This as a strategy for an IT solution. And Oracle embraces multi-cloud. This strategy was clearly communicated during Open World in Las Vegas last year. We even had demos where OCI presenters opened the cloud Graphic User Interface of other providers during our live sessions. So the concise answer to the question is multi-cloud is two or more cloud vendors providing a consolidated solution to a customer.  02:29 Nikita: So, would an example of this be when a customer uses OCI and Azure? Sergio: Absolutely. Yes, exactly. That's what it is. We can say that our official multi-cloud approach started with the interconnect agreement with Azure. But customers, they have already been leveraging our FastConnect partners for interconnecting with other cloud providers. The interconnect agreement with Azure just made it easier. Oracle tools such as Oracle Integration and Golden Gate have been multi-cloud ready even prior to our official announcement. And if you look at the Oracle's document... the documents from Oracle, you can find VPN access to other cloud providers, but we can talk about that shortly. 03:16 Nikita: OK. So, why would organizations use a multi-cloud strategy? What do they gain by doing that? Sergio: Oh, there are many reasons why organizations might want to use a multi-cloud strategy. For example, a customer might want to have vendor redundancy. Having the application running with one vendor and having the other vendor just stand by in case something goes wrong with that cloud provider. So it is best practices not to rely on just one cloud service provider. Another customer might want to have the application with one tier or the application tier with one cloud provider and their database tier with another cloud provider. 03:53 Sergio: So this is a solution leveraging the best to cloud providers. Another company or another reason might be a company acquired another one, you know purchasing a second company, and they have different cloud providers and they just want to integrate their cloud resources. So every single cloud provider offer unique solutions and customers want to leverage these strong points. For example, we all know that AWS was the first infrastructure access service provider, and the industry adopted them. Then other players came along like OCI and customers realized that there are better and less expensive options that now they can take advantage of. So cloud migration is another reason why multi-cloud interconnectivity is needed. 04:42 Lois: Wow! There really are a lot of different use cases for multi-cloud. Sergio: Yeah, absolutely. There is, Lois. So Golden Gate, for example, this is an Oracle product. Oracle Golden Gate allows replication from two different databases. So if a customer wants to replicate the Oracle Database in OCI, in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, to a SQL server in Azure, this is possible. And now there's an OCI to Azure interconnect (live) and it can facilitate this, this database replication. And if a start-up needs to communicate OCI to Google Cloud Platform, for example, but a digital circuit is not economically viable, then we have published step-by-step configuration instructions for site-to-site VPN, and this includes all the steps on the Google Cloud Platform as well. So these are some of the different use cases. 05:37 Lois: So, what should you keep in mind when you're designing a multi-cloud solution? Sergio: The first thing that comes to mind is business continuity. It is very important to have High Availability and Disaster Recovery strategies. This to keep the lights on and focus on the organization's current technology, the organization's current needs, the company's vision, and the offering from the cloud service providers out there. The current offerings that each cloud service provider brings to this company. For example, if an organization's on-premises, current deployment consists of Microsoft applications and Oracle Databases, and they want to use as much as they can of their current knowledge base that their staff has acquired through the years, it only makes sense to take the apps to Azure and the database to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and either leverage ODSA, Oracle Database Solution for Azure, or our OCI-Azure interconnect regions. We have 12 of those. 06:39 Sergio: So ODSA was designed with Azure cloud architects in mind. The Oracle Database solution for Azure. For each database provision using ODSA, the service delivers OCI database metrics, OCI events, and OCI logs to tools such as Azure Application Insights, Azure Event Grid, and Azure Log Analytics. But the concise key points to keep in mind are latency, security, data movement, orchestration, and operation management. 07:10 Nikita: So, latency... security... Can you tell us a little bit more about these? Sergio: Yes, latency is crucial. If an application needs, let's say X milliseconds, 3 milliseconds response time, the multi-cloud solution better meet these needs. We recently published a blog post where we released the millisecond response of our 12 interconnect sites to Azure and OCI. We have 12 interconnect sites of Azure regions to 12 regions from OCI. Now, regarding security, in Oracle, we pride ourselves for being a security company. Security is at our core of who we are and we have taken this approach to multi-cloud. This for encryption of data at rest, encryption of data in transit, masking the data in the database, security key management, patching service, Identity and Access Management, Web Application Firewall. All of these solutions from Oracle are very well suited for multi-cloud approach. 08:17 Lois: OK, what about data movement, orchestration and operation management? You mentioned those. Sergio: I mentioned Golden Gate earlier. So you can use this awesome tool for replication. You can also use this for migration. But data movement is much more than replication, like real live transactions taking place and backup strategies. We have options for all of this. Our object storage, our bulky regions backup strategies. Now for orchestration, the Oracle API Gateway avoids vendor lock-in and enables you to publish APIs with private endpoints that are accessible from within your network and which you can expose with a public IP address. This in case you want to accept traffic from the internet. 09:07 Nikita: Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining those, Sergio. Now, what multi-cloud services does OCI have? Sergio: So I already mentioned a few like ODSA, the Oracle Database Solution for Azure. So, this is where Azure customers can easily provision, access, and operate an Oracle Database enterprise-grade and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with a familiar Azure-like experience. ODSA was jointly announced back in July 2022 by our CTO Larry Ellison and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. He's the CEO. This was last year. And we also announced the MySQL Heatwave, which is available on AWS. This solution offers online transactional processing analytics, machine learning, and automation with a single, MySQL database. So OCI multi-cloud approach started when the OCI regions interconnected via FastConnect to Azure regions Express Route. This was back in June of 2019.  10:12 Sergio: Other products for multi-cloud include OCI integration services, OCI Golden Gate, the Oracle API Gateway, Observability and Management, and Oracle Data Sync to name a few. Nikita: So we've been working in multi-cloud services since 2019. Interesting.  Lois: It really is. Sergio, can you tell us a little bit about the type of organizations that can benefit from multi-cloud? 10:36 Sergio: Absolutely. My pleasure. So organizations of all sizes and of all industries can benefit from multi-cloud, from start-ups to companies in the top 100 of the Forbes list and from every corner of the world, you name it, every corner of the world. So it's available worldwide for customers, the Oracle customers. There are also customers, and we know this of other providers. So in terms of cloud, it's to the customers' benefit that cloud service providers have a multi-cloud strategy. In OCI , OCI has been a pioneer in multi-cloud. It was in 2019 when the FastConnect to Express Route partnership was announced. And Site-to-Site VPN is also available to all three of our major cloud competitors. So the beauty of the last word, cloud competitors, is that indeed they are our competitors and we try to win businesses away from them. 11:29 Sergio: But at the same time, our customers demand the ability for cloud providers to work with each other and our customers are right. And for this reason, we embrace multi-cloud. Recently, the federal government announced that they selected four cloud providers: OCI, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. And also, Uber announced a major deal with OCI and Google Cloud Platform. So these customers, they want us to work together. So multi-cloud is a way to go, strategy and we want to make our customers happy. So we will operate and work with these cloud providers, service providers. 12:09 Nikita: That's really great. So a customer can take advantage of the benefits of OCI, even if they have other services running on another cloud provider. Now if I wanted to become a multi-cloud developer or a cloud architect, how would I go about getting started? Is there a certification I can get? Sergio: Absolutely. Excellent question. I love this question. So this depends on where you are in your cloud journey. If you are already a cloud knowledgeable engineer with either AWS or Azure, you can start with our OCI for Azure Architect and OCI for AWS Architect. We have courses for both. And if you are just getting started with cloud and you want to learn OCI, you can start with our OCI Foundations as the path to OCI and as you progress along, we have OCI Architect Associate, we have OCI Architect Professional. So there's a clear path, but if you have a specialty like a developer's or operations or multi-cloud certification, so we have all of this for you. And regarding the OCI Architect Professional certification, it contains in the learning path a lesson and a demo on how to interconnect OCI and Azure from the ground up. 13:23 Lois: And all of this training is available for free on mylearn.oracle.com, right? Sergio: Yes, that is correct, Lois. Just visit the site, mylearn.oracle.com, and create an account. The site keeps track of your learning progress and you can always come back and continue from where you left off, at your own speed. 13:42 Lois: That's great. And what if I don't want to get certified right now? Sergio: Of course, you do not have to be pursuing a certification to gain access to the training in MyLearn. If you are only interested in the OCI to Azure interconnection lesson, for example, you can go right to that course in MyLearn, bypassing all the other material. Just watch that lesson. If you're interested, follow along with the demo on your own environments. 14:09 Nikita: So you can take as much or as little training as you want. That's wonderful. Sergio: Absolutely it is. And with regards to other OCI products that are great for multi-cloud, our API Gateway is greatly covered in our OCI Developer Professional certification. The awesome news that I'm bringing to you right now is that soon Oracle University will release a new OCI multi-cloud certification. This is going to be accompanied by with the learning path and the multi-cloud certification, this is what I'm currently at this moment working on. We are designing the material. We are having fun right now doing the labs, and shortly, we will write the test questions.  14:51 Lois: That's great news. You know I love to share a sneak peek at new training we're working on. Thank you so much, Sergio, for giving us your time today. This was really insightful. Sergio: On the contrary, thank you. And thanks to everyone who's listening. I encourage you to go ahead and link your multiple cloud accounts and if you have questions, feel free to reach out. You can find me in the Oracle University Learning Community. 15:15 Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. And like we were saying before, the multi-cloud course has been released and has quickly become one of our most sought-after certifications. So, if you want to access the multi-cloud course, visit mylearn.oracle.com. Lois: Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 15:39 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

21 Nov 202316min

In the final episode of this season, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Sr. Principal ERP Learning Strategist David Barnacle, dive into the Accounting Transformation process flow, which covers how financial transactions are converted into journal entries and how subledger journal entries are processed through subledger accounting.   They also explore the Budget to Report process flow, which focuses on planning, accounting for transactions, and reporting financial information to the appropriate stakeholder. Budget reporting goes a long way in helping businesses take corrective actions and improve their financial performance.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, Parvathy Narayan, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started. 00:26 Nikita: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! Last week, we had David “Barney” Barnacle, Sr. Principal ERP Learning Strategist, with us, who spoke about Procure to Pay and Asset Acquisition to Retirement, which are two major business processes within the Oracle Financials Business Process Model. Barney is here with us for one last time this season to take us through the last two business processes, Accounting Transformation and Budget to Report.  01:02 Nikita: Welcome back, Barney!  Barney: Hi Niki! Hi Lois! Nikita: So Barney, what can you tell us about Accounting Transformation? Barney: Accounting Transformation is one of the most important business processes in the Oracle Cloud Financials Business Process Model. All our enterprises are required to record their financial transactions, and the Oracle Fusion Cloud: ERP application supports businesses in recording these transactions with the help of best practice life cycles like Invoice to Cash, Procure to Pay, and Asset Acquisition to Retirement. 01:32 Nikita: Everything we’ve discussed in our previous episodes. Barney: Right. Now, Accounting Transformation refers to the process of converting business transactions from Oracle subledgers, or transactions from external source systems, into detailed, auditable journal entries.  Source systems are typically industry-specific applications that are either purchased from third parties or built internally within the customer organization. Examples of such systems include core banking applications, insurance policy administration applications, billing applications, and point of sales applications. And to do this transformation, we have a very powerful tool called the Accounting Engine. If the accounting engine is only used in Oracle Cloud Subledgers (for example, Assets, Payables, etc.), then this engine is referred to as the Subledger Accounting Engine. 02:24 Lois: And what does this Subledger Accounting Engine do? Barney: The Subledger Accounting Engine, also known as SLA, is loaded with predefined event models and accounting methods, i.e. the accounting rules. And within this engine, users can also create user-defined accounting methods, i.e. new rules, to achieve multiple financial reporting requirements. The accounting engine’s job is to convert business transactions into auditable and balanced accounting journal entries. 02:55 Lois: Is SLA a separate product? Barney: SLA is not a separate product itself but is Oracle’s common engine, which caters to the accounting needs of all the Oracle subledgers. Subledger Accounting is a rules-based accounting engine that is centralized for use by all the Oracle Cloud subledgers. 03:13 Nikita: So how does Subledger Accounting work? Barney: When using Oracle Cloud Financials, financial transactions such as invoices or payments are recorded in the Oracle Cloud subledger products, whereas transactions from legacy systems are recorded in Oracle Fusion Cloud Accounting Hub. Each financial transaction has some accounting event type associated with it. For example, creating a customer invoice, adjusting a payment, validating a supplier invoice, and so on. As I was saying earlier, Subledger Accounting has predefined accounting rule sets, also known as accounting methods. And these accounting methods follow industry practices (for example, Standard accruals). 03:53 Nikita: And how do accounting rules work? Barney: The accounting rules pick the accounting event type associated with the business transaction. It uses relevant transaction attributes like Amounts, Currencies, Dates, Customers, or Suppliers. Then, it converts the transactional attributes into balanced and auditable Subledger and ultimately General Ledger journal entries, which may also require the copying or complete creation of account code combinations. 04:19 Lois: Can all the accounting requirements of a business be met with the help of standard accounting methods? Barney: No, Lois. Sometimes, standard accrual accounting methods don’t meet all the accounting or business requirements. But then subledger accounting can support user-defined accounting methods to generate different accounting entries to support these different regulatory or business requirements. For example, by using a local GAAP. 04:44 Nikita: Barney, can you tell us in more detail the various steps involved in the accounting transformation process? Barney: So, the first step is to record business transactions using modern business life cycles. As the user processes these transactions, with such actions as create, validate, adjust, delete etc., these actions are recorded as event types. The accounting engine uses these types and the accounting method rules to create detailed subledger journals. It is the accounting rules that take the transaction source attributes, such as amount, date, customer supplier, etc., and converts them into a balanced detailed subledger journal that can be audited. If there are insufficient or incorrect account or no account values within the source transactions, then the account rules, mapping sets, and user-defined formula that can be configured to create the correct account combinations. 05:39 Barney: To create these journals, the create accounting process can be automated to run on a regular basis, typically at least once a day. The Create Accounting process first generates detailed subledger journals in draft or final mode within the SLA data repository. If these SLA journals are in final mode, then they can also be transferred to create summarized or detailed general ledger journals. Once posted, these GL journals update the account balances of all dimensions stored within the GL Essbase cubes. From these account balances, you can create flexible financial reports to meet the requirements of all stakeholders. And the best part is any role that’s assigned SLA privileges can carry out these tasks. 06:30 Have an idea for a new course or learning opportunity? We’d love to hear it! Visit the Oracle University Learning Community and share your thoughts with us. Your suggestion could find a place in future development projects. If you’re already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to join the community. You will need to log in first. If you’ve not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started.  06:59 Nikita: Welcome back. So, transactions are created, accounting is generated using the powerful SLA engine, and then when that’s done, organizations can publish their financial reports and submit them to government authorities and their stakeholders, right? So, how do they administer control over their financial planning and spending? And how do organizations create these different reports? 07:23 Barney: Financial reports/statements are key to assessing the financial efficiency and determining the key performance indicators of any organization or enterprise. In Oracle Fusion Cloud, we talk of producing reports across three key axes, the legal, the management, and the functional axis, to match the varying requirements of stakeholders. Some organizations, to drive good financial control, plan and generate budgets and/or forecasts. This is so that they can estimate their revenue and expenses for a specific future period. In fact, some enterprises go much further and use budgetary control and encumbrance accounting to ensure expenditure remains within budgeted control levels per period and they can block further expenditure on items that have spent over planned budgeted amounts. 08:15 Barney: Other enterprises may have a rolling 12-month budget that can be updated at the end of each financial period. Simple to complex budgets or forecasts can be loaded into the GL Essbase cubes and the planned budgeted account balances over a period can easily be compared with actual performance using a variety of financial reporting tools provided by Oracle Cloud. Any budget variance can be used to drive financial control and analysis, while contributing to effective, strategic decision-making. The Oracle Fusion Cloud Budget to Report process focuses on planning, accounting for transactions, and reporting financial information to the appropriate stakeholder. 08:59 Lois: Why is this process so important for organizations? What are the benefits of budget reporting? Barney: It is a great way to drive financial control by efficiently tracking the company's performance versus the budget or forecast plan. Budget reporting allows an organization to perform frequent comparisons of forecasted and actual results with the purpose of fixing the key deviations. It allows organizations to allocate cash to assets worth the investment, make acquisitions, or create disposals or disinvestment strategies.  09:32 Lois: Barney, what are the key processes within Budget to Report? Barney: Within the Budget to Report processes life cycle, there are three key subprocesses: managing budgets and forecasts, capturing transactions (i.e. account balances), and period close to financial reporting. Accountants will cycle through these three processes on a regular basis, which is typically monthly. Let’s start with the Manage Budgets and Forecasts process. This process refers to the entire cycle of events that start with planning and formulating and ultimately ends with creating budgets and forecasts in the application. Oracle General Ledger simplifies budget and forecast uploads into the system by the use of Excel spreadsheets. 10:15 Barney: Next is the Capture Transactions and Journal Entry process. Financial transactions captured in the subledgers are accounted for via the SLA accounting engine and are converted into detailed subledger and summarized general ledger journals (i.e. the accounting process we have just discussed under SLA). Manual journals can also be created with the use of the user interface or via spreadsheet uploads. The account combinations on these journal lines, once posted, that record the actual account balances, which detail organization revenue, expenditure, taxation, and so on over a period. 10:52 Barney: The Period Close to Financial Reporting process starts with the period closure for each subledger application, ensuring all financial transactions are captured and reported in the correct period. It includes the reconciliation of all key suspense accounts or key accounts (for example, cash balances, tax debtors, liabilities, etc.), special period-end processing, such as foreign currency requirements for revaluation and translations or allocation journals to spread the account distribution of central costs or revenue pools, and the use of consolidation ledgers, with requirements to move currency account balances between ledgers. Finally, from these consolidated, reconciled account balances, a variety of reporting tools can be used to generate the required financial reports/statements for both internal and external stakeholders.  11:42 Barney: Some of these reports will include the comparison of actual versus budgeted values, and any key variances will be used to revise or amend the budgets/forecast plans. We return to where we started with a review or modification of our strategic financial plans. 11:59 Nikita: Barney, what are the key job roles associated with the Budget to Report process? Barney: There are three job roles associated with this process that are predefined as standard by Oracle: General Accountant, Financial Analyst, and General Accounting Manager. The General Accountant manages all financial transactions and revenue, expenses, assets, liability, and equity accounts, and is responsible for recording accounting adjustments, such as accruals, allocations, currency revaluations, and translations. The Financial Analyst analyzes the financial performance of an enterprise or an organization. The General Accounting Manager manages the general accounting functions of an enterprise, including general ledger, subsidiary ledgers. They also manage period close activities. 12:49 Lois: Any final words, Barney, as we conclude this series on ERP Financials business processes?  Barney: So, in these last couple of episodes, we discussed the five financial business process life cycles. These processes are collectively known as Record to Report. The Record to Report process includes data extraction, collection, and processing to deliver accurate and timely financial information and enhance decision-making within the organization or enterprise. Using embedded analytics to drive an error-free financial close process, Oracle Fusion Cloud can not only automate and transform the R2R process, but also enable timely, real-time financial performance reporting. 13:37 Nikita: Thank you so much, Barney, for being our guide and taking us through the Oracle Financials Business Process Model.  Barney: Thank you. It’s been great being here with both of you. Lois: If you missed any of our earlier episodes with Barney, you should go back and check them out. And if you’re interested in learning more about Oracle’s business process training and getting certified, visit mylearn.oracle.com. Until next time, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 14:03 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click  Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

14 Nov 202314min

Time to unlock your finance team’s digital potential! Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Sr. Principal ERP Learning Strategist David Barnacle, as they discuss the Procure to Pay process flow, an integral financial process that integrates purchasing with accounts payable activities.   They also talk about the Asset Acquisition to Retirement process flow, which includes all the main activities that occur during the life of an asset, right from acquiring it all the way to disposing it at the end of its life.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, Parvathy Narayan, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started. 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi everyone. In our last episode, we looked at Invoice to Cash, which is the first business process within the Oracle Cloud Financials Business Process Model. Invoice to Cash refers to everything from the moment a receivable invoice is created until the customer's receipt is settled and reconciled with the bank statement. If you missed that episode, do go back and give it a listen. 01:01 Lois: Today,  David “Barney” Barnacle, our Sr. Principal ERP Learning Strategist is back on the podcast to tell us about the next two business processes, Procure to Pay and Asset Acquisition to Retirement. Nikita: Hi Barney! Thanks for being back with us. So, what is the Procure to Pay process? 01:20 Barney: Hi Niki. Hi Lois. Good to be here. Let’s focus on Procure to Pay or P2P for short, which is an integral financial process within any organization. It integrates purchasing with accounts payables activities and involves a series of tasks. These could include placing a purchase requisition or a purchase order, receiving and inspecting the delivered goods or services, capturing the supplier invoices, which is the company’s liability to the supplier, matching the unit quantity and price to the original PO, calculating the relevant taxes or withholding taxes, approving the charges for final payment by the company, and finally, recording the bank statement lines with all payments made to suppliers or employees. 02:04 Barney: Oracle Fusion Cloud: ERP's capacity to use cutting-edge technologies for effective operations is what distinguishes it from the competition. The true value is in the automation, which helps enterprises improve processes, increase efficiency, and get the latest insights and alerts.  Let me give you some examples within P2P. We have something called Intelligent Document Recognition or IDR for short, which is a fully integrated invoice recognition solution. As you know, many suppliers send payables invoices electronically via email. With Oracle’s cloud solution, IDR extracts invoice information from the emailed documents to create invoices and then imports them directly into Payables. Another interesting feature is the ability to calculate the trip distance in mileage expense entry by using the Oracle Maps Cloud service. For mileage expense types, on the Oracle Maps page, you can enter the start location, subsequent stops, and the end location. It’s that easy. 03:09 Lois: Oh wow, that’s pretty cool. I remember having to track my miles manually many years ago. What a nice feature. So, is creating an invoice the beginning of the P2P process?  Barney: No, Lois. Invoicing is not the beginning but just one part of the larger parent P2P process. The P2P process can be broken into three key phases. These phases are set in a repeating loop and fine-tuned and improved with every cycle. The three phases are the Purchasing process, the Receiving process, and finally, the Payment process. 03:46 Barney: During the Purchasing process, purchase requisitions for goods and services are created and approved. Suppliers are evaluated and selected. And then, purchase orders are issued for the required goods and/or services. Next is the Receiving process, where goods and services are received. Receiving documents are then reviewed and logged for the goods. In the final Payment process, which includes the Invoice, Payment, and Reconciliation sub-processes, invoices are received and invoice processing is completed, recording the supplier’s liability. Invoices are reconciled and cross-checked with the original purchase orders and goods receipts or receiving documents. This is called purchase order or receipt matching, and it ensures that the enterprises only pay for goods and services it has ordered and received. Errors are recorded and corrected, and approved invoices are paid, reducing the supplier’s liability. Payments are then reconciled with bank statement lines. 04:47 Nikita: OK. So, there are multiple activities, like purchasing, receiving, and invoicing, which are part of the P2P process. But how do these activities flow with regard to the Oracle Fusion Cloud: ERP application?  Barney: The Procure to Pay process spans multiple departments within an organization. And in the Oracle application, it covers different modules like purchasing, payables, cash management, and general ledger. Demand generation for goods or services can originate in the Manufacturing departments based on planned or actual orders, or by internal employee orders for goods or services that the business requires.  05:23 Barney: This demand gets converted into requisitions within the Purchasing department. Everything from the creation all the way to the authorization of these requisitions is performed within the Purchasing department. Once the requests have been authorized, the buyers or procurement agents consolidate the requests and convert them into a purchasing document, like a purchase order. Next, the process of receiving goods or services against the purchasing document is typically carried out by the employees requesting those goods or services or by the staff at the receiving location. 05:54 Nikita: And a receiving location could be a warehouse, for example, right? So there is a purchasing department processing purchased orders and another receiving department recording the receipt of goods. Barney: Exactly, Niki. And once the goods are received and recorded, the transaction flows into the Payables department within the finance business function. Supplier Invoice to Payment, which comes within the finance business function, touches internal as well as external parties involved with an organization.  06:23 Barney: For example, when talking about the process of expense reimbursement, employees are considered internal parties. In this process, employees record and submit expenses incurred on behalf of the organization and are reimbursed for the authorized items. For an external party, the process of recording invoices against goods or services used by the organization and the subsequent process of making payment to clear these invoices is also a key part of the Procure to Pay process.  For example, organizations purchase assets like printers or furniture, which are recorded as part of the purchasing process. Oracle Assets is a fully integrated solution to track internal products and assets at internal or external sites, while providing the ability to capture financial transactions with back-office automation. 07:10 Barney: And then there is the Treasury department that some companies may call the Cash department, which, at periodic intervals, receives bank statements and reconciles the statement lines with payments made to suppliers. The key focus of the Treasury department is to determine the cash position and to assist in managing the cash forecasting process. These are just some activities of the Procure to Pay process that touch multiple departments within the business. 07:35 Lois: You mentioned expense reimbursement and making payments to external suppliers for goods received. How does this fit into the Oracle Financials Business Process Model?  Barney: As we discussed, P2P involves multiple processes spanning procurement to cash, specifically payables invoice to cash. Let me list out the processes that are aligned with Oracle Financials business processes as part of the P2P process. First, we have the Expense Report to Reimbursement process that deals with getting business expenses reimbursed for employees and contract workers, also known as contingency workers. 08:13 Barney: The Supplier Invoice to Payment process deals with recording liability for purchases made by the organization directly from external parties and paying for those purchases. The Capture Tax process deals with applying transactional tax or withholding taxes based on the information entered in an invoice and invoice line level, and legislative requirements. The Bank Transaction to Cash Position process deals with matching bank statement lines to payments made to suppliers. Accountants working in the Treasury department can prepare the expected cash position based on the expected receipts and payments within that specific period.  08:51 Lois: Each of the Oracle business processes you mentioned seem to be aligned with the general flow of activities in a typical organization. What are the advantages of having such a streamlined P2P process? Barney: A streamlined and automated Procure to Pay process helps organizations remain compliant with supplier-related contractual terms and legislative tax requirements. It also helps them reduce the risk of fraud with risk migration controls in place and automation within the process.  09:18 Barney: It results in better supplier management in terms of sourcing and evaluating suppliers, and monitoring and controlling supplier invoice aging, resulting in timely payments being made to suppliers. The ability to capture supplier invoices from multiple channels, including scanning and online submission by suppliers to enable batch processing of payments, results in cost reduction for an organization and saves hours that would have been spent manually processing invoices and payments. Most importantly, a streamlined Procure to Pay process provides the ability to capture data at each stage, which helps with future decision-making. 09:56 Nikita: What are the job roles associated with the Procure to Pay business process? Barney: There are a few key job roles in the P2P business process. There’s the employee job role, which identifies the person as an employee who can create a requisition and an expense report. The Procurement Agent job role is responsible for transactional aspects of procurement processing. The Expense Audit job role reviews and audits expense reports daily to ensure compliance with the company's reimbursement policy. The Accounts Payable Specialist job role enters invoices, ensuring accuracy, uniqueness, and completeness, and matches invoices to the correct purchase orders or receipts, all while making sure that the invoices comply with company policy. The Accounts Payables Supervisor job role oversees the activities of Accounts Payable Specialists, initiates and manages payment runs, and resolves non-data entry holds. And finally, the Cash Manager job role protects and develops the company's liquid assets, maximizing their use and return to the organization. 10:58 Lois: For an organization to have an optimized Procure to Pay process, I’m sure they need to track certain key performance indicators, right?  Barney: Yes, and they do. Some of the KPIs that are tracked for the P2P process are Expenses vs. Budget, Invoice Payment Days, % Discount Taken, Time to Settlement, Time to Reconcile, and Payables Overdue Invoices. 11:20 Lois: Barney, earlier you spoke about how easy it is to raise expenses and use the Maps functionality. Are there other emerging technologies used by the ERP application in the Procure to Pay process? Barney: Yes Lois, Oracle Fusion Cloud: ERP uses the latest emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, digital assistants, and image scanning in different areas of the Procure to Pay process. Adaptive Intelligence models are used in the Payables module to calculate and recommend discounts for single payments. Intelligent Document Recognition is used to scan and automate the invoice creation process in Payables, incorporating the required reviews and approvals. Within the Expenses module, Digital Assistants are used to punch in expenses and submit them automatically. You can also click photos of receipts and process them to input the required expenses.  12:16 Working towards an Oracle Certification this year? Grab all the help you can get. Attend a cert prep live event in the Oracle University Learning Community. And once certified, don’t forget to join our exclusive forum for Oracle certified users.  If you’re already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to join the community. You will need to log in first. If you’ve not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started.  12:47 Nikita: Welcome back. Barney, you mentioned that Payables is one of the starting points to capture or track assets in the application. Can you help us understand how this is built in to Oracle Fusion Cloud? Barney: In the Oracle Financials Business Process Model, Asset Acquisition to Retirement is a key process that covers all the main activities that occur during the life of an asset, anything from acquiring it to disposing it at the end of its useful life. There are many things a business will need to do with assets. Capture asset acquisition, record financial transactions, track asset movement for reporting and regulatory purposes, and so on. We can manage these assets and simplify fixed asset accounting tasks with the help of Oracle Fusion Assets. It has the ability to record leased assets in line with the requirements of the two new accounting standards. 13:37 Barney: Oracle Assets integrates with other modules like Payables, Subledger Accounting, and Projects. You can add assets and cost adjustments directly into Assets from invoice information in Payables. The Create Mass Additions for Assets process sends valid invoice line distributions and associated discounts from Payables to the Mass Additions interface table in Assets. You can then review the mass addition lines in Assets and determine whether to create assets from them. 14:03 Nikita: So, what are the different stages in the Asset Acquisition to Retirement life cycle? I’m sure the first one has to be acquiring the asset. Barney: You’re absolutely right there, Niki. The Asset Acquisition to Retirement life cycle starts with the Asset Acquisition stage. A business can acquire an asset through the Procure to Pay life cycle and record the asset in the asset register. An asset can be acquired by purchasing it, leasing it, constructing/developing it (i.e. by the use of Oracle Fusion Projects), or by mergers or acquisitions. And by acquiring assets, we mean capturing and recording the purchase of assets from all business locations. 14:42 Barney: The next stage is Monitoring and Tracking. Once an asset has been created and added to the asset register, you can perform various activities during the asset’s life cycle. These activities could be changing its category or financial details, transferring assets, i.e. from locations, or running or changing depreciation. Any finally, we have Retirement. When you sell an asset, or an asset is lost, or the asset reaches the end of its useful life, you must remove it from the asset register. 15:14 Lois: And before we let you go for today, remind us – what job roles perform the functions related to this life cycle, Barney? Barney: There are two main job roles involved in this process. One is the Asset Accountant, the basic user who performs all functions in the asset management module. Then there’s also the Asset Accounting Manager who has much of the same access as the asset accountant, along with extra access in terms of reporting and running accounting processes. 15:40 Nikita: I think we’ve discussed these two important Oracle business processes quite thoroughly. Thank you so much, Barney, for taking us through them.  Barney: Thanks for having me! Lois: Yes, thanks, Barney. This is a great introduction. Next week will be our final episode on the Oracle Financials Business Process Model, where we’ll cover the Accounting Transformation and Budget to Report business processes. And don’t forget to head over to mylearn.oracle.com to learn more about these processes and get certified. Until next time, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 16:13 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click  Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

7 Nov 202316min

Want to know about the key financial business processes that make up Invoice to Cash? Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, as well as Sr. Principal ERP Learning Strategist David Barnacle, are here to simplify this critical process flow for you.   In this episode, they go over the entire Invoice to Cash process flow, which includes everything from the moment the invoice is created to the moment when the customer's debt (payment) is settled and reconciled with the bank statement.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, Parvathy Narayan, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started. 00:26 Nikita: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hello everyone! In our last episode, we spoke about Enterprise Resource Planning business processes, particularly those related to Oracle Fusion Cloud: Financials, with our Sr. Principal ERP Learning Strategist David “Barney” Barnacle. We discussed how there are five business processes within the Oracle Cloud Financials Business Process Model. Today, Barney joins us once again to take us through the first of those business processes, the Invoice to Cash process. Nikita: Welcome back, Barney! 1:08 Barney: Hi Niki. Hi Lois. Nikita: Barney, what does the Invoice to Cash business process cover? Barney: Invoice to Cash is a child process of a parent life cycle commonly known as Order to Cash. Order to Cash includes all the steps involved in fulfilling customer orders, from order entry to delivery to the final customer payment. 01:31 Barney: Order processing can take many forms depending on the industry, product, and customer. It can range from delivering standard items that are directly shipped from stock to complex items, configurations (or structures), which can be fulfilled from multiple sources i.e. make, buy, or transfer. It can include processes such as drop shipments and internal orders. Certain businesses may process orders based on subscriptions only, which may or may not include fulfilment of items. If you’re interested in learning more about these complex business subprocesses, I’d suggest visiting mylearn.oracle.com and looking for the business processes under Supply Chain Management (SCM), in particular Order Management Processing. 02:20 Barney: Here, in the business process for financials, we have simplified Order to Cash into two child subprocesses: Order to Shipment and Invoice to Cash. It is the second subprocess i.e. Invoice to Cash that uses financial products and covers customer billing (including the calculation of transaction tax), customer payments, also known as receipts, bank statements, reconciliation of receipts, and the ultimate creation of accounting entries for all transaction events in this billing process. 02:55 Lois: So, you’re saying Invoice to Cash is just one part of the Order to Cash process. Barney: That’s right, Lois. While the origin or source of a customer transaction can be multiple feeder systems (for example, Order Management, Projects, Subscription Management, and third-party or legacy billing systems), Invoice to Cash refers to an end-to-end process covering everything from the moment an invoice is created until the customer's debt is finally settled and reconciled with the bank statement. The real value for businesses lies in automating the process and getting insights and alerts from the Oracle Cloud applications to improve their overall profitability and cost savings. 03:38 Lois: Help me understand the flow of events, Barney. Because surely there are processes that occur before an invoice is raised, right? What are the processes covered in the larger Order to Cash cycle? Barney: You’re absolutely right, Lois. Let’s break it down further. Order to Cash is the parent business process. It starts in Order Management (with order capture and pricing) and ends in Cash Management (with the reconciliation of customer receipts). If we take a simple view of Order to Cash, we can use, as our example, ordering standard product items delivered directly to the customer from existing stock. We have two subprocesses here: Order to Shipment and Invoice to Cash. These processes use many different SaaS products. 04:25 Barney: The Order to Shipment subprocess starts with order capture by the order entry clerk, the salesperson, or directly input by the customer. The order captures essential attributes, such as items and quantities, required delivery dates, and financial contract terms, like payment terms, and so on. The pricing engine is called to create a sales price and then the global order promising check verifies supply of the items. Once the order is validated, submitted, and optionally approved, the order line passes on to order orchestration or fulfillment. 05:04 Barney: The order orchestration process drives scheduling and reservations. Then, within warehouses, the items are picked, packed, and shipped to the customer. Once the shipment is confirmed, the customer is invoiced based on contractual terms. Here, the second subprocess of Invoice to Cash takes over. The order orchestration process pushes the order attributes into the auto invoice interface tables. From there, the Billing Manager runs auto invoice to import customer invoices. This, in practice, will often be automated. The transactions will include the correct taxes as well as default accounts, and revenue will be recognized based on defined revenue recognition rules or events. 05:52 Nikita: Can I just interrupt, Barney? What do you mean by revenue recognition rules? Barney: Revenue recognition is an accounting principle that asserts that revenue must be recognized as it is earned. Let’s look at this simply. The revenue recognition principle is a key component of an accrual-basis accounting. This accounting method recognizes revenue once it is considered earned, unlike the alternative cash-basis accounting, which recognizes revenue at the time cash is received or anytime cash changes hands. In the case of cash-based accounting, the revenue recognition principle is not applicable. 06:34 Barney: Revenue is generally recognized after a critical event occurs, like the product being delivered to the customer. Revenue recognition standards can vary based on a company’s accounting method, geographical location, whether they are a public or private entity, and other factors. In essence, revenue recognition looks to answer when a business has earned its money. Typically, revenue is recognized after the performance obligations are considered fulfilled, and the currency amount is easily measurable to the company. A performance obligation is the promise to provide a distinct good or service to a customer. On the surface, it may seem simple, but a performance obligation being considered fulfilled can vary based on several factors. 07:19 Barney: Essentially, the revenue recognition principle means that companies’ revenues are recognized when the service or product is considered delivered to the customer — not when the cash is received. Determining what constitutes a transaction can require more time and analysis than one might expect. To accurately recognize revenue, companies must pay attention to the five steps outlined in the various accounting standards and ensure they are interpreting them correctly. 07:47 Barney: For revenue recognition within our simple process flow, we could use an account receivables invoice and accounting rule to defer revenue, or we could pass the information over to the Revenue Management product to follow the steps of the relevant accounting standards and only recognize earned revenue when a performance obligation has been satisfied. Nikita: OK, I get it now. Thanks for that, Barney. 08:10 Barney: Great. So, getting back to our financial process, the invoice or invoices are either printed or electronically sent to the customer. The payment terms attached to each transaction will determine when full payment is due and may include early settlement discounts. Monthly statements sent to the customers will highlight account balances and any late or overdue transactions. Customers will send their payments, manually or electronically, and the company may also create automatic receipts (commonly known as direct debits) to transfer funds from customer bank accounts to the company’s bank account on a regular monthly basis. 08:52 Barney: The receipt received will be applied to the open transactions (debit items such as invoices) and either clear or reduce the customer’s account balances. The cashier will then ensure these receipts have all been correctly accounted in the company’s bank account – a step called bank account reconciliation. The subledger accounting rules engine will ensure that at each transaction event (e.g., create invoices, adjust invoices, create receipts), the correct accounting is created and ultimately transferred to the general ledger as receivables journals. That means a full account record is created for each order line processed within the Order to Cash flow. 09:37 Barney: Finally, the Collections team monitors customer account balances on a regular basis and with various collection strategies and actions (such as sending dunning letters) aims to reduce Days Sales Outstanding and improve the company’s cash inflow. 09:53 Lois: Let me make sure I get this. We have the larger life cycle, the Order to Cash process, which connects the various pillars of Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP, like Financials and Procurement. And within them, there are modules like Order Management, Receivables, Collections, Cash Management, and General Ledger. Barney: Exactly, Lois. Nikita: So, since the focus of this series is on Oracle Financials, we’d like to learn more about the processes under it. 10:19 Barney: OK, Niki. Oracle Cloud provides capabilities to streamline the Invoice to Cash business process, and Oracle Receivables Cloud is the cornerstone of the Invoice to Cash solution. This application helps you improve cash flow, increase efficiencies, and optimize customer relationships. It has user-friendly interfaces that you can leverage to efficiently manage the process. And you can proactively manage the entire customer billing cycle and process customer receipts. 10:51 Nikita: From what I understand, the Accounts Receivable Specialist seems to be an important role in the Order to Cash process. So, how does the Oracle application help Receivables Specialists work more efficiently? 11:02 Barney: Oracle Receivables has embedded business intelligence that offers summarized dashboards within the work areas, giving you or giving the receivables specialist an intuitive, simple, and modern user experience. Infolets highlight, in real-time, issues with the key processing steps, such as auto invoicing, receipt processing, etc., allowing receivables specialists to take effective action. Some of these errors can also be downloaded into a spreadsheet for efficient bulk correction of data. 11:40 Barney: Another interesting feature is social enterprise network, which can highlight issues within the receivables and collections team, leading to quicker adjustments or corrections of the customer account balances or transactions. There’s also Oracle Bill Management, which provides a self-service approach to reduce customer inquiries. You can set up Bill Management to enable the customer to directly complete various receivables processes for themselves, such as reviewing outstanding transactions and credit memos, monitoring disputes, and more importantly, making online payments. 12:22 The Oracle University Learning Community is a great place for you to collaborate and learn with experts, peers, and practitioners. Grow your skills, inspire innovation, and celebrate your successes. The more you participate, the more recognition you can earn. All of your activities, from liking a post to answering questions and sharing with others, will help you earn badges and ranks, and be recognized within the community. If you’re already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to join the community. You’ll need to log in first. If you’ve not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started. 13:01 Nikita: Welcome back. So Barney, you spoke about how Invoice to Cash has several tasks within it, like invoicing customers, collecting payments, and so on. How does all of this come together in terms of the Oracle Cloud Financials Business Model? Barney: Invoice to Cash is an integral financial process within organizations and is broadly divided in our model into four subprocesses: Customer Invoice to Receipt, Capture Transactions, Customer Statement to Collection, and Bank Transaction to Position. Let’s have a look at each of these in turn. 13:36 Barney: The Customer Invoice to Receipt subprocess includes several tasks. Everything from recording the invoice to be sent to customers for goods sold or services provided and addressing billing-related issues, if there are any, to recording customer receipts, making adjustments to outstanding amounts, posting receivables activities so that the Receivables subledger can be seamlessly closed, and finally using analysis and reporting tools to get deeper insights and drive better decision-making. 14:04 Lois: That’s a lot of details that are being captured. Barney: Yes, Lois. Every minute detail that affects the financial status of an organization can be captured, like the Capture Taxes subprocess. This is the process of applying required taxes based on legislative requirements. It’s based on the information entered within the invoice and invoice line level. This could be regarding customer ship to, bill to, product and tax classification codes, and so on. The system automatically applies the attributes and calculates the correct taxes at the invoice line level and then calculates the total taxes applicable to the whole invoice. 14:43 Barney: Then we have the Customer Statement to Collections subprocess, which includes sending statements to customers at periodic intervals, flagging delinquents, creating and assigning collection-related tasks to collection agents, recording and resolving disputes raised by customers, recording payments, and tracking and measuring KPIs to review the collection team’s performance. And finally, the Bank Transaction to Cash Position subprocess deals with matching bank statement lines to payments received from customers. Accountants working in the Treasury Department can prepare the expected cash positions, based on the expected receipts and payments to be made within the specific time period. 15:26 Lois: OK, so we’ve established that the application captures a lot of details. But we also need to be able to extract this data to assess the financial health of the organization, right? So, when it comes to receivables activities, what are the key performance indicators for an organization? Barney: Yes, you’re right there, Lois. KPIs are required to closely monitor and measure the performance of an organization. And to really optimize the Invoice to Cash process, the Receivables department in any organization will have certain KPIs they need to track. 16:01 Barney: Some critical ones we’ve already mentioned are Days Sales Outstanding or DSO, which measures the average number of days that a company takes to collect revenue after a sale has been made, Time to Settle, Percentage of Current Receivables, Average Invoice Age, % Disputed Invoices, Operational Cost Per Collection, Number of Delinquent Accounts, and Time to Reconcile. These are all important KPIs. All these KPIs are easily available in the Oracle application in a visual representation, like a graph or percentage, and can be viewed by management simply in a single dashboard. They can also be displayed in a user-designed format for greater efficiency. 16:49 Nikita: Thank you so much, Barney, for coming back to talk to us about the Invoice to Cash business process. Barney: No worries. Happy to be here. 16:56 Lois: We’re really looking forward to having you back next week to tell us about the next two business processes, Procure to Pay and Asset Acquisition to Retirement. And if you want to learn more about these ERP business processes and get certified, visit mylearn.oracle.com. Until next time, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 17:18 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

31 Okt 202317min

Inside every successful corporation is a well-oiled financial team working to do what is in the best interest of the company. From the CFO to the finance intern, having a system of modern best practices and a comprehensive suite of financial solutions, properly utilized, is more important than ever before.   Join hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Sr. Principal ERP Learning Strategist David Barnacle, as they introduce you to the Oracle Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning suite and the key business processes within it.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, Parvathy Narayan, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ---------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started. 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi everyone! A few weeks ago, we concluded our spotlight on HCM business processes. And today, we’re going to move on to ERP business processes. ERP, as you may already know, is Enterprise Resource Planning. And to take us through this, we have David “Barney” Barnacle, our Sr. Principal ERP Learning Strategist. For over 20 years, Barney has successfully trained customers in the rapid configuration and effective use of Oracle Applications. Welcome Barney! We’re so glad to have you here today. 01:10 Barney: Thank you! Happy to be here. Lois: In previous episodes this season, we’ve spoken about the business process training that Oracle has. But from an ERP point of view, can you briefly tell us what it is and why we have it? Barney: Sure, Lois. Inside every successful corporation is a well-oiled financial team working to do what is in the best interest of the company. From the CFO to the financial trainee, everybody within an agile, innovative enterprise will be using modern best practice processes within a complete and fully integrated suite of SaaS applications. That’s why we have Oracle Business Process Training for Oracle Fusion Cloud: ERP. It’s a powerful training solution that gives users and companies a solid understanding of how Oracle ERP solutions work together to ensure effective and efficient transaction processing. 02:06 Nikita: Now that we know why we have this training, let’s get down to it. Barney, what is ERP? Barney: Enterprise Resource Planning or for short as it’s known, ERP, is a system or a collection of systems that companies use to manage day-to-day business activities efficiently. The ERP system brings together different dimensions of businesses from financials, procurement, risk and compliance, to enterprise performance management, and Oracle Fusion ERP analytics. ERP systems tie together several business processes and seamlessly allow data to flow between them. By collecting an organization’s shared transactional data from multiple sources, ERP systems eliminate data duplication and provide data integrity with a single source of truth. 03:00 Barney: Today, ERP systems are critical for managing thousands of businesses of all sizes and across all industries. For these companies, ERP is as indispensable as the electricity that keeps the lights on. Remember, simply, ERP is the vehicle for integrating people, processes, and technologies across a modern enterprise. 03:27 Lois: Barney, in the world of various ERP systems, how is the Oracle Cloud ERP application suite unique? And how is it structured? Barney: Thanks, Lois. Oracle Cloud ERP is a cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) application, or group of applications, that provides end-to-end business solutions. These solutions, in turn, enable businesses to significantly cut down costs, improve their process efficiencies, and enhance collaboration. Oracle Cloud ERP is classified into six different product families. We have Financial Management, Procurement, Project Management, Risk and Compliance, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and finally Enterprise Resource Planning Analytics. 04:14 Lois: So as I understand it, we have Oracle Cloud ERP, a modern cloud-based software application, and then have Oracle Financials, Procurement, EPM, and so on within the Oracle Cloud ERP suite, right? Barney: Correct. That’s right, Lois. Nikita: That’s quite an interesting mix of product families. Can you tell us about each of these products, Barney? 04:35 Barney: Sure can. Let’s start with Financials. Oracle Cloud Financials is a global financial platform that connects and automates your financial management processes, including payables, receivables, fixed assets, expenses, GL, and reporting, for a clear view into your total financial health. 04:56 Barney: Next is Oracle Cloud Procurement, an integrated source-to-settle suite that automates business processes, enables strategic sourcing, improves supplier relationship management, and simplifies buying. Then we have Project Management. Oracle Project Management helps you plan and track your projects, assign the right talent, balance capacity against demand, and scale resources up or down quickly as needs change. 05:27 Barney: Then there’s Risk and Compliance. Oracle Cloud Risk and Compliance Management is a security and audit solution. It controls user access to your Oracle Cloud ERP financial data, monitors users’ activity, and makes it easy to meet compliance regulations through automation. 05:45 Nikita: Interesting. And these pillars are connected to one another? Barney: Yes, Niki. One of the biggest advantages of choosing the Oracle Cloud ERP solution is its ability to integrate all the product offerings that come under it. Now, getting back to the product pillars in the ERP suite, we have Enterprise Performance Management. With this, you can model and plan across Finance, HR, Supply Chain, and Sales. You can streamline the financial close process and drive better decisions. 06:18 Barney: And closing out the list, we have ERP Analytics. Oracle Fusion ERP Analytics is a prebuilt cloud-native solution for Oracle Cloud ERP. It helps financial and procurement professionals uncover underlying drivers of profitability, improve the use of working capital, and control business expenditures. Oracle’s unique application capabilities enable organizations to unify financial analytics across different departments. So those are the six product families that make up the Oracle Cloud ERP. 06:56 Lois: I think that’s what all organizations want, right? A comprehensive solution to help them meet their business needs. But how do organizations that have legacy ERP systems and processes move to the Oracle Cloud ERP systems? Do they need to completely switch over? And what happens to the existing processes they’ve been following? Barney: Yes Lois, they can co-exist. But you can implement just one cloud product, such as expenses or revenue management, to enhance the existing or current business processes. You can then have several step-by-step projects to move different business processes to the cloud – until you are 100% cloud. 07:37 Nikita: So, within the ERP suite, we’d like to learn more about Oracle Cloud Financials. Can you tell us about the types of organizations that would benefit from using Oracle Cloud Financials? Barney: Sure, Niki. So like I was saying before, Oracle Cloud Financials gives you a complete view of the overall financial health of your organization by connecting data and process automation in payables, receivables, fixed assets, expenses, GL, and reporting. It also helps organizations respond quickly to an everchanging environment and deliver decisive insights as needed. It is a comprehensive global solution designed for organizations of every size and industry. 08:20 Lois: Barney, a typical organization will have various transactions and processes that have a direct impact on their financial balance, right? Everything from financial accounting, transaction processing, payment delivery, and cash reconciliation, to employee expense processing, and even asset management. How does Oracle Cloud Financials process all these activities or functions? 08:41 Barney: Good question, Lois. Oracle Cloud Financials has several modules to help businesses handle all the processes you’ve just mentioned. Let’s say procuring items, creating invoices, and making payments to suppliers are the typical day-to-day activities of a manufacturing organization. In Oracle Cloud Financials, the process of invoice to payment is handled by Oracle Payables and Payment tasks, which provide streamlined and user-friendly interfaces for Payables professionals to efficiently manage the Supplier Invoice to Payment process. 09:18 Barney: Let me give you another example. Every organization will have employees submitting their expenses for approval and payout. These expense-related activities are handled by Oracle Expenses. Oracle Expenses gives your organization the tools it needs to effectively manage the travel and expenses process. You can simply start the whole process by uploading a copy of your expense receipt using the expenses mobile app. 09:46 Lois: So, it looks like every financial end-to-end process in an organization is represented in Oracle Financials. Barney: Yes. Let’s take Oracle Receivables. It provides streamlined and user-friendly interfaces for Receivables professionals to efficiently manage the credit-to-cash process. You can use it to proactively manage the entire cycle of billing customers and processing customer payments.  10:11 Barney: When you deal with cash that needs to be received from customers in a very large organization, it’s important that you understand these customers well and build a good relationship with them. And to do this, many organizations hire specialists called collection agents. Oracle Advanced Collections is designed for these collection agents. For anyone who doesn’t know, collection agents are basically those responsible for working with late or nonpaying customers to resolve payment issues and remove non-payments. 10:43 Nikita: That can be quite problematic, right? I’m sure any delays in payment from customers would cause cash flow problems for a company. Barney: Exactly. And so Advanced Collections is the critical final step in the credit/billing-to-collections business process, where the aim is to reduce delinquent customers, encourage prompt customer payment, and minimize the company Days Sales Outstanding. For those who don’t know, Days Sales Outstanding is the average number of days it takes a company to receive payments for a sale. 11:19 Did you know that Oracle University offers free courses on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure? You’ll find training on everything from cloud computing, database, and security to artificial intelligence and machine learning, all of which is available free to subscribers. So, get going! Pick a course of your choice, get certified, join the Oracle University Learning Community, and network with your peers. If you’re already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to begin your journey. If you have not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started.  11:58 Nikita: Welcome back. We were just going through the various modules within Oracle Financials. So far, we’ve covered Payables and Payments, Expenses, Receivables, and Advanced Collections. What other modules are there, Barney? Barney: We have Oracle Assets, which is a complete asset management solution. Nikita: So assets like property… equipment… Barney: Exactly. Yes, and Oracle Assets helps you maintain your assets accurately. It supports the end-to-end asset life cycle from asset acquisition to retirement, i.e. from capture to retire. Also, if you do not directly acquire or buy the assets outright, we have a product called Lease Accounting, which covers all the accounting entries for leased assets. 12:45 Nikita: Ok. And what else? Barney: We also have Oracle Cash Management, tax engines, subledger accounting, intercompany engines, and general ledger. Nikita: Can you quickly run us through these modules? Barney: Sure. Oracle Cash Management is a comprehensive business solution that helps you optimize enterprise-wide liquidity and control cash. Tax engine is used to calculate transactional taxes based on business, products, places, and country rules. For example, when to use sales tax as opposed to when to use value added tax or VAT. 13:19 Barney: Oracle Subledger Accounting is a powerful, rules-based accounting solution that provides consistent accounting treatment for financial transactions created across Oracle Cloud applications. The intercompany engine is used to automatically balance journals that are between different organizations. For example, a central management fee charged annually between the organization’s headquarters and each of its subsidiaries. In the cloud, with intercompany, you can have up to three balancing segments. However, the primary balancing segment is still used to identify the company or fund holder. 13:59 Barney: Then we have Oracle General Ledger. Oracle General Ledger is the central repository of accounting information. It provides highly automated financial processing, effective management control, and real-time visibility into financial results. 14:16 Lois: Before you continue, Barney, can you tell us what a general ledger system does? How is it different from subledger accounting? Barney: Sure, Lois. The main purpose of a general ledger system is to record the financial activities of a whole company and produce financial and management reports to help people inside and outside the organization make decisions. 14:38 Barney: Subledger journals can provide the detail and a fully auditable path back to the source transaction that created the accounting entry. This single source of subledger accounting detailed data is often summarized into account balances when transferred across to general ledger. It is these summarized GL account balances that will drive real-time financial reporting using the various cloud reporting tools. 15:04 Lois: Ok. So, you’ve told us about the modules within the Oracle Cloud Financials suite that capture different types of transactions. For Oracle Fusion Cloud users, what’s the quickest way to uncover business insights and deliver financial improvements to their enterprise? Barney: To identify underlying drivers of profitability, improve the use of working capital, and control business expenditures, we have Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP Analytics. This is an analytics-based, state-of-the-art, technology-driven tool that provides you with the organization’s financial status at any given point. Financial Reporting and Analytics helps you speed up your decision-making process with graphical insights, configurable analytics dashboards, and event-based delivery of information so you can take targeted actions. 15:56 Lois: That’s interesting. Thanks for that, Barney. That was a lot for me to take in, but it’s very insightful. Nikita: Yes, it was. Getting back to some of the processes you mentioned, like the Expense Report process or the Supplier Invoice to Payment process, can you give us an overall picture of how these processes are fulfilled within the Oracle Cloud Financials function? 16:17 Barney: Absolutely. At Oracle, we can map these different processes to the Oracle Financials Business Process Model. This model refers to the end-to-end business processes enabled by Oracle applications to record financial data and derive reports for efficient and successful business performance. There are key business processes in this model. 16:42 Nikita: I know you’re going to be joining us in upcoming episodes to talk about each of these business processes, but can you briefly tell us about them? Barney: Sure, Niki. Let’s start with the process that records cash inflow into an enterprise. Invoice to Cash refers to the cycle of events captured in the system, starting with recording customer invoices for goods and services provided, processing customer receipts based on the terms of payment, and reconciling receipts with bank statements and customer account balances with the Account Receivables ledger balances. 17:15 Barney: Then, we have the major processes that cause an outflow of cash from the enterprise. Procure to Pay involves recording the journey of transactions, from requisitioning and procuring goods and services from the supplier to receiving them at their destination and the ultimate entering of supplier invoices and payments. Asset to Retirement empowers organizations to manage the entire financial cycle of assets, including acquisition, capitalization, depreciation, and the ultimate retirement. 17:46 Barney: Accounting Transformation is the process of converting transactions or activities from subledgers to journal entries to meet corporate needs and statutory or legal reporting. And finally, Budget to Report covers the entire process of creating budgets, capturing actuals, and conducting budget reporting and variance analysis. 18:08 Lois: Each of these business processes has users with various job roles working on the application, right? They’ll be taking action… providing input… So how does Oracle Cloud Financials define these job roles in the application? Barney: Well, in small or medium-sized companies, the financial functions may be the responsibility of a single accountant. But in large organizations, there is going to be a financial team, where the job roles are specialized, often focused on a particular business task or function. 18:43 Barney: The responsibility for these roles are often grouped into three main categories. We have the Specialist or Clerk, who is responsible for a specific group of tasks. For example, creating payments or reconciling bank statements. Then we have the Supervisor, who is responsible for managing the specialist executing the specific business tasks. And finally, we have the Managers or Manager, who is responsible for managing the team to meet company objectives. 19:15 Barney: When we’re talking about the business processes I mentioned earlier, each of them are performed by different job roles. For example, for the Invoice to Cash business process, we have the Billing Specialist and Billing Managers, Collection Agents, and Cash Manager. For Procure to Pay, we have the Accounts Payable Specialist and Supervisor. Asset to Retirement, there’s the Asset Accountant and Asset Accounting Manager. The Accounting Transformation business process is usually managed by any role assigned SLA privileges. And finally, for Budget to Reporting, we have the General Accountant and General Accounting Manager. 19:55 Nikita: Thank you so much, Barney, for giving us this thorough introduction to Oracle ERP, and particularly Oracle Financials Cloud. Barney: Thanks, Niki. It was a pleasure to be here. 20:05 Lois: We’re looking forward to having you back on the podcast next week to talk about the first of the five main Financials business processes, the Invoice to Cash process flow. And to learn more about these business processes and get certified, visit mylearn.oracle.com. Until next time, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 20:27 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. 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24 Okt 202320min