As part of the April 2022 update, Oracle announced important updates to the Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Enterprise Command Centers.
Before moving forward to a summary of the main updates and innovations applied to Oracle EBS Enterprise Command Centers, or ECCs for short, let’s quickly review what they actually are. Enterprise Command Centers are tightly integrated, information-rich dashboards that help Oracle EBS 12.2 users identify and act on priority transactions without custom operational reporting.
A key portion of that definition is that ECCs are only available for Oracle EBS users on Release 12.2 or higher, meaning that any Oracle EBS client in versions below like 12.1 or 11i do not benefit from this meaningful Oracle EBS improvement.
Cliff Goodwin, Senior Vice President, Applications Development of Oracle EBS delivered the update on Enterprise Command Centers in April 2022, and we’ll give you a rundown of what he conveyed.
This latest update, the eight so far since Enterprise Command Centers were introduced in October 2018, delivers one new command center, 13 new dashboards, and several new visualization options. The April 2022 update brings Enterprise Command Centers to a total of 33 with more than 130 role-based dashboards in Oracle EBS 12.2 instances. It’s worth mentioning that Oracle EBS is currently on release 12.2.11 as of November 2021.
The ongoing pattern of new ECC release is in line with Oracle’s Continuous Innovation model for Oracle EBS 12.2 which pledges the ongoing delivery of new updates, fixes, and security patches, as well as Oracle Premier Support for Oracle EBS R12.2 versions through at least 2033.
Enterprise Command Centers 2022 Updates
As mentioned, there’s now a total of 33 ECCs, including:
- Financial Management: Receivables, iReceivables, Payables, Assets, Lease Contracts (Financials), Lease and Finance Management.
- Order Management and Logistics: Order Management, Inventory Management, Advanced Pricing, iStore, Landed Cost Management, Channel Revenue Management, Incentive Compensation.
- Asset Lifecycle and Service: Enterprise Asset Management, Asset Tracking, Service Contracts, Service (TeleService), Field Service, Depot Repair.
- Procurement and Projects: iProcurement, Procurement, Projects, Project Procurement, Contract Lifecycle Management for Public Sector.
- Manufacturing: Bills of Material, Discrete Manufacturing, Process Manufacturing, Outsourced Manufacturing, Project Manufacturing, Cost Management, Quality.
- Human Capital Management: Human Resources, Payroll.
When introduced, Enterprise Command Centers marked an entirely new chapter in the Oracle EBS storyline, helping deliver and drive a new modern user experience thanks to the intuitive, business-intelligence style dashboards.
In its announcement, Cliff Goodwin mentioned that “the April 2022 Enterprise Command Center Update delivers many new UI and functional capabilities that Oracle E-Business Suite customers can use to enhance and extend current business processes.” Additionally, he mentioned that the announcement continued their “ pattern of providing ongoing suite-wide and family-level updates, demonstrating Oracle’s commitment to continuous innovation for Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.”
The ECCs highlights of the April 2022 update include:
- Cost Management Command Center. Designed to help professionals in the cost management department manage timely period close, analysis and optimization of product margins thanks to the Margin Analysis dashboard, and cost of goods sold.
- Projects Command Center. New Investment Turn dashboard for project-centric cash flow acceleration. This dashboard makes it easier to identify billing and invoicing bottlenecks, find opportunities to invoice customers, and solve issues that can delay cash collection.
- Lease and Finance Management Command Center. New Lease Cash Flow dashboard so users can improve cash flow by accelerating cash to lease invoices. There’s also a new network visualization that helps cash app admins manually apply cash to invoice lines if there are no cash receipts automatically matched to full invoice amounts.
- Order Management Command Center. New Returns dashboard to help research sales order returns trends and root causes.
- Inventory management command center. The new Track & Trace dashboard helps discover the root cause of problems in material handling and storage.
- Service Command Center. The new Service History Diagram helps users efficiently solve new service requests based on past requests for similar issues.
- Bills of Materials Command Center. The Bills of Materials network diagram helps users visualize current and future product configurations before approving and implementing manufacturing changes.
- Process Manufacturing Command Center. The new Genealogy & Trace dashboard lets users trade product genealogy for root cause and impact analysis.
- Project Manufacturing Command Center. The new Genealogy & Trace dashboard enables users to discover and address project supply chain issues with traceability analysis.
- Outsourced Manufacturing Command Center. The Track & Trace dashboard helps users analyze and address outsourced manufacturing supply chain issues.
- Quality Command Center. The new Track & Trace dashboard helps analyze the root causes of defects.
Organizations can easily add Enterprise Command Centers to Oracle EBS R12.2 with minimal effort or setup configurations. Thanks to an all-in-one installer, enterprises can quickly deploy ECCs for seamless, out-of-the-box integration with Oracle EBS applications.
Organizations looking to benefit from ECCs and other innovations in Oracle EBS are recommended to upgrade to Release 12.2 of the software to ensure it receives the ongoing delivery of new updates, fixes, and security patches, as well as fall under the umbrella of Premier Support again, which is Oracle’s most comprehensive form of support.