Fixed Assets - Introduction

In simple terms, an asset is a resource having future economic benefit owned by an entity. Future benefit could mean in terms of contributing to the profit for profit oriented organizations and providing services for non-profit oriented organizations.

Assets are formally controlled and managed within larger organizations via the use of asset tracking tools. These monitor the purchasing, upgrading, servicing, licensing, disposal etc., of both physical and non-physical assets.

Assets may be classified in many ways.

1. Current assets (Current deposits, Inventory)
2. Long-term investments (Investments in securities)
3. Fixed assets (land,buildings, machinery, furniture, tools)
4. Intangible assets (patents, copyrights, franchises, goodwill, trademarks)

Fixed assets are those that are expected to keep on providing benefit for more than one year. Some common examples are: scientific equipment, office equipment, photo copiers, land and buildings, vehicles, Machinery, Property held for Investment purpose.

Understanding Discrete Manufacturing

In discrete manufacturing, the manufacturing floor works off orders to build something. Examples include toys, medical equipment, computers and cars. The resulting products are easily identifiable

Discrete manufacturing is often characterized by individual or separate unit production. Units can be produced in low volume with very high complexity or high volumes of low complexity. Low volume/high complexity production results in the need for an extremely flexible manufacturing system that can improve quality and time-to-market speed while cutting costs. High volume/low complexity production puts high premiums on inventory controls, lead times and materials costs.

Discrete Manufacturing includes makers of consumer electronics, computers and accessories, appliances, and other household items, as well as consumer and commercial goods like cars and airplanes. Discrete Manufacturing companies make physical products that go directly to businesses and consumers, and assemblies that are used by other manufacturers.

(With Thanks, Source: Wikipedia)

DESCRIPTIVE FLEXFIELDS (DFF)

DESCRIPTIVE FLEXFIELDS (DFF)

DFF provide customiszable expansion space to capture information which otherwise is not captured by the standard application. Gives you the flexibility to satify different group of users without having to reprogram the application.

DFF can be context sensitive where the information your application stores depends on other values your users enter in other parts of the form.

Each DFF has a name you assign. You can specify valid segment values or setup criteria to validate the entry of any value.

DFF is made up of subfields and appears in a pop-up window on the form. DFF are implemented as a set of database columns with one column for each segment. The brackets [ ] indicate the presence of a DFF. When the cursor reaches the brackets the DFF pops open. DFF can be enabled and disabled - hence it only pops open when it is in enabled mode.

Flexfields

As the name suggests, flexfield is a "flexible field". Flexfield is a field made up of multiple segments which are actually table columns. Each segment has a name that can be assigned and a set of valid values.

There are 2 types of flexfields in Oracle Applications namely "Key flexfield" (KFF) and descriptive flexfield (DFF)

Using KFF and DFF, Oracle gives enormous amount of flexibility to customers to customize (or rather I may call it configuring) to match the different business needs without the need for programming. Flexfields provide the flexibility to implement code structure and capture additional information.

KEY FLEXFIELDS (KFF)

KFF represents an 'intelligent key' that uniquely identifies an application entity. Each KFF segment has a name you assign and a set of valid values you can specify. Each value has a meaning which can be again specified. KFF provides with a flexible 'code' data structure that users can setup in whichever way they like to use the KFF segments. As mentioned, for each segment one can also define valid values for each segment as well as cross-validation rules to describe valid segment combinations.

Oracle General Ledger Accounting flexfield is an example of a KFF used to uniquely identify a General Ledger account. Another example of KFF would be Item flexfield in Oracle Inventory - its used to uniquely identify inventory items. It could contain segments such as product class, product code, size, color and packaging code. You could valid values for the color segment - for example a user can enter only from a range of "01" to "10" (where "01" meand red and "02" means blue and so on).

Cross validation rules can also be applied to validate combination of segment values entered by the user. For example, take an example of shirt - if a user select "01" in color code (which means red color), size can be only "40" and "42" and not "44". This is because business has red color shirts available in size "40" and "42" only.

Flexfield segments are usually validated against a set of valid values - called as value set. Oracle Applications provide a couple of seeded Key flexfields.

Watch out for the next post on Descriptive Flexfields (DFF). If you wish to receive an email whenever that is posted, drop a email on oracleondemand@gmail.com.

Oracle Projects - An Introduction

It has become vital for industries like project based manufacturing companies (like building products on order basis), construction, professional services, telecom, product development and as well as government agencies need to track costs and revenues of each project. The manner in which projects are planned, executed upon, and controlled can vary widely from organization to organization. Oracle Projects is comprehensive yet flexible to occupy these complex needs of different organizations.

Currently its called "Oracle Projects suite" which includes following modules:
1) Project Costing
2) Project Billing
3) Project Resource Management
4) Project Management
5) Project Contracts

However the most used among the above are Project Costing and Project Billing - which could be together called "Project Accounting" - it collects or calculates your project costs and revenues, translates them to your chart of accounts, and automatically posts journal entries to your General Ledger. Project Costing and Project Billing make up a true core of the suite.

Oracle Projects closely integrates with couple of modules such as General Ledger, Human Resources, Purchasing & Payables, Receivables, Inventory and Fixed Assets.