Applications Software Packages

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Applications Software PackagesApplications Software Packages

You are more likely to contact Application Software Packages than write software.

In this lecture we will be looking at the components, objectives of 2 major packages

• SAP (R/3)

• Oracle Financials



However, before we do that, you need to be aware of the rapid increase in the number, and use, of mobile devices

The integration or convergence of Internet technologies such as– Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)– Extensible Markup Language (XML)– Web application servers– Wireless Application protocol (WAP)

has made it practical to extend Enterprise Resource Planning information to mobile users with a wide range of physical platforms



This in turn has opened up the way for people to use advanced systems (such as SAP) - this ‘leverage’ increases the existing IT infrastructures and increases its value by allowing access to more timely information through ‘new’ e-business channels

An e-business channel is a path to an end user. The channels include WAP, B2B, Internet, Palm VIIs

This does raise a problem - how familiar are these ‘extended users’ of SAP software ?



There are 2 major forms for connectivity models• connected• intermittently connected

They are self defining.


SAP ?SAP ?

So what is SAP ?

Systems, Applications, Products

in Information Processing

SAP Attributes - Integration, (which means connection of modules)

- Flexibility

- Real time

- On line



SAP is one of the ‘re-engineering’ packages mentioned in a previous lecture

SAP had considerable success with their software

but

as many users and developers found, the increasing awareness and use of the Internet, e-commerce, B2B and other devices led SAP to re-engineer SAP

There was also a shift in emphasis - market share became more dominant than cost efficiency.



Front-office sales automation and Customer Relationship Management emerged - and very rapidly

SAP commenced restructuring - to serve specific industries with deeper domain expertise in sales, consulting services and product development

and to fully embrace or utilise the Internet

Why ? - because the market place had altered.



There is now an infrastructure system which can / will handle– the recording of transactions– extending this to the physical handling of goods– valuation of transactions– financial settlement among the Companies involved and

the customers– customer information



What ‘information’ is likely to be required ?– The last time customers attended a seminar or company

briefing– The complete record of each customers order history– Details of locations of each customers offices - where

they are, how many staff, goods handled, …– Organisation chart of each of the customers and their

satellite offices– Product information– Mission statement– Customer deductions, promotions, marketing programs

and of course keep this up to date



Remember that this is ‘Solution Software’

It is not a specific solution for each customer - it is the availability of software which each customer can interact with via a variety of Web interfaces and browsers



In the following overheads, there will be a brief outline of some of the features/uses of SAP and this will be introduced by a commercial approach to– ‘commodity production’ which means availability and low

costs, – and custom creation - (perfect fit and customer loyalty)

Many industries accept ‘custom orders’ only.



SAP R/3 has potential to design applications with– variable bills of materials (BOM)– flexible manufacturing processes

This permits the design of a variety of product offerings – Configure to order– Build to order– Engineer to order

order types.



A model contains 3 major elements– Classification– Bills of material– Rules

Classification is the most important underlying data structure

– all rules refer to classification data– efficient rule design and the ability to maintain rules

depends on good classification system design– changes to the classification system will have a

major effect on change management



Class typing : AN R/3 class type must be assigned to each class

Class Hierarchy : Many class are required to describe the range of materials or objects which are being modelled for a new Sales order Creation (SCE).

An example of this is a finished product such as a motor vehicle which requires many parts, products, materials to build a complete model which works for both sales and manufacturing (a ‘used-in’ ….). A product could be an electrical or electronic component such as the engine management system



Bills of Materials define the master data structure for the parts which manufacturing will use to build a product

Variant BOM structures will allow for a bill of material to be created for each customer-requested configuration (as in special features or accessories to a vehicle).


Applications Software Packages Applications Software Packages

Rule design

The foundation of Rules are the Bill of Material and Classification

Good design of BOMs and Classifications enable efficient rules

These assist in determining a correct BOM for the product

Constraints are declarative dependency rules



Configuration technology is used in computing, cat manufacturing, telecommunications as well as loans, medical equipment, engines, electronics

Personal finance, home improvement projects, company benefits packages are also the subject of applications

Reasons for implementing this technology ?

Increase in sales

Better assistance in product options

Increased customer satisfaction

Lower returns of ‘unacceptable’ products

Reduction in cost of sales



The previous overheads were based on the use of SAP as an example of what could be achieved in a dynamic assembly line

SAP was the product responsible for

all item, product and assembled details

calculations of time and costs

classification and modeling of the finished product

variable modelling

controls

a wide range of ‘personal’ aspects

maintaining the module data bases


Oracle FinancialsOracle Financials

• Now we are going to ‘pull apart’ the Application Package from Oracle.

• And see what its components are, and also• See how they communicate and• What they communicate about

• Another possible title is ‘The Anatomy of Oracle Financials’



The correct title for this package is ‘Oracle Financial Analyser 11i’

It is licensed and its licence fee is approximately $A2200 per named user

There is another package required - Express Server



The minimum Operating Systems on which this package will run are– Windows NT4.0 with service pack 3, 4 or 5– Solaris 2.6 or 2.7

Windows NT Server Hardware Configuration – Dual Processor Pentium Pro– 256Mb memory– 512 Mb paging file (2X physical memory)



Sun Solaris hardware:– Dual UltraSparc 200MHz– 1 Gb memory– 256 swap space

Windows Clients : Windows 95, 98, 2000 or NT4.0

Pentium 133

32Mb RAM



Web Products:

Web Browsers :- Netscape Communicator 4.61 and 4.7.x

Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 with JVM 5

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 with JVM 5

Web Servers :- Oracle Application Server 4.0.8.1, 4.0.8.2 for NT and Unix

Oracle WebDB 2.2

Apache 1.3.9

Netscape Enterprise Server 4.1

Microsoft IIS 3.0 and 4.0



There are 2 modules in the financials :

Oracle Financial Analyser (OFA)

Oracle Sales Analyser (OSA)

They are prebuilt business intelligence applications which use the Oracle Express Server as their multi-dimensional On Line Application Processor (OLAP).

The previous version of this software was 6.3, which was released in November, 1999



OLAP servers store data in multidimensional arrays (sometimes called cubes) and these arrays copy the baselines by which managers analyse data.

If we look at statistical measures, such as revenue, costs, and units sold, an OLAP multidimensional array will organise this data by business properties such as :– time period– product– customer– location



There is a new type of DBMS called a main memory database (MMDB).

This holds the entire database in the computer’s main memory - the advantage being exceptionally high query request response (there is one in Windows 2000 - (IMDB))

One of the requirements of Decision Support Systems is that of On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP)

Relational databases are used in many commercial environments



There is therefore a need to have the Relational Databases capable of holding large amounts of data.

This has a negative impact on processing time - and of course DSS applications required much data

The ‘solution’ is to have tools to import, integrate, and populate the data warehouse with operational data

Most of the relational data-loading tools perform load operations in batch mode - but this requires that the source and target database must be locked



A technique known ROLAP provides advanced decision support capabilities which are scalable to a complete enterprise - and is a logical choice for those companies which have RDBMS for their operational data.

This is where we see the ‘dimensions’ appear

Multidimensional online analytical processing (MOLAP) extends OLAP functionality to multidimensional database management systems (MDBMs) (more processes)



An MDBMS uses special techniques to store data in matrix form n-dimensional arrays.

Many of the techniques used are derived from engineering fields such as Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) and geographic information systems

MDBMS users ‘see’ data (or a better term is ‘visualise’) as a 3 dimensional cube - known as a data cube.

The location of each data value in the cube is a function of the x, y and z axes in a 3 dimensional space



It is possible to increase the number of dimensions and this is known as a hypercube.

The data cubes are created be extracting data from the operational databases -or from the data warehouse

They are static - they are not subject to change and must be created before they can be used

As an example a cube for sales could have (for instance)

product, locations and time dimensions - and only data associated with these dimensions can be queried



The data cube creations process is critical and requires in-depth, skilled frond end design work

Data cubes are generally held in memory - in a ‘cube cache’

This diagram is a 3-dimensional cube :

y

x

z



The use of recurring aggregations indicated that the data processing language needed to have s new operator (or command) which could carry out all of the possible aggregations in a table which had been extracted for analysis.

This table shows the rows relating to red Holdens or red Toyotas sold between 1998 and 2000

Make Year Colour Sales

Holden 1999 Red 5000


Toyota 1999 Red 8000



The table also contains many other rows relating to sales of other cars and other colours

This is a segment of SQL code (which you should be able to understand) and which includes the ‘with cube’ operator

select make, year, Colour, sum(sales)

from Sales

where (make = ‘Holden’ or make = ‘Toyota’)

and colour = ‘red’

and year between 1999 and 2000

group by Make, Year, Colour

with cube;



The 3 dimensions are Make, Year and Colour

The query extracts all the constructed aggregates, and the aggregation is represented by the value ‘ALL’ which is present in all the domains and corresponds to all the possible values present in the domain.



The data cube of the previous tale would look like this :

Make Year Colour sum(Sales)



Holden 1999 ALL 8000

Holden 2000 ALL 9000

Holden ALL Red 11000

Holden ALL ALL 17000

Toyota 1999 Red 8000

Toyota 1999 ALL 10000

Totota ALL Red 8000

Toyota ALL ALL 10000

ALL ALL ALL 27000



The spatial diagram would look like this :-

2000

1999

ALL Holden Toyota ALL ALL

Red



So now that you have some idea of the terms

– multidimensional– cube– aggregation– OLAP– ROLAP– Multidimensional DataBase Management System

we will now move on to the Oracle Financials



This diagram shows the Express Suite Product relationships

Client Web Excel Client Web Client Web Excel Tools(VB)

Financial Analyser Sales Analyser Custom Application

Client

Server

Financial Sales Custom

Analyser Analyser Application

Oracle Express Server

Oracle General RDBMS Legacy (Old)

Ledger Flat Files



The net results of all that is :

The Express Server develops and organises data relevant to the ‘cube’ - multidimensioning (time, value, product)

and the Oracle Financial applications are then utilised to further analyse the data collected by the Express Server

The Express Server can be thought of as the ‘database’ engine



• Let’s look at OFA - Oracle Financials Analyser

It is an application which is directed at – financial reporting– analysis– planning

It has been designed in a distributed architecture mode which permits users the autonomy to to create and manipulate their own scenarios of data - but not the ability to modify the base data



The Architecture

There are different workstation ‘types’ which allow for the tailoring of features and capabilities by individual users

These ‘types’ also manage the flow and control of structures and data in the application



There is ONE Super Administrator (software component) which has control of the application

Sub-Administrators can be created

These Administrators – create and distribute common structures (financial

account values for example)– load and calculate data– create users– control access



With each Administrator workstation there is a Shared Database and a Task Processor

The shared database is the central data repository



The Task Processor

This controls the processing, submission and distribution of data and structures in the system

The Task Processor can be run by its associated Administrator Workstations as a background task

or it can be run from a dedicated workstation



Express Server allows – single-write– multi-read access to an individual database

The Task Processor sequentially controls the submission and processing of information to the shared database



Each Administrator can have one or more subordinate workstations

– Budget - Users have full access to their own section of data and can work in connected or disconnected mode

– ‘What if’ analyses can be run on this section of data without affecting other users accessing the shared database

– Analyst - Users access the shared database and can create their own documents - reports, graphs (or charts) and worksheets and save these in their own personal database



– Analyst (cont’d)

Authorisation can be granted to make ad hoc changes to data in the shared database (do you think this is

• sound• secure• a good feature• dangerous

– Another feature is that the Analyst workstation can create and view personal documents from Windows or a Web client



External Web

Users can access the shared database directly but don’t have a personal database

They cannot create and save their own documents

Such as user is a ‘casual’ - probably only needing to view and manipulate existing documents or enter and calculate data



Excel

This is an add-in (remember Solver ?) which can be used to query and report directly against the shared database.

There is an Excel Data Collection toolkit which is useful for infrequent users. VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is included in this toolkit



Sub-Administrator

Users control a sub-set of the application.

Sub-Administrators can have a sub-ordinate Budget, Web, Excel, and Administrator workstations

That’s probably all very interesting but Oracle Financial Applications need to be built - much the same as you will, or have, ‘built’ the Excel assignment

The next few overheads look at ‘the building regulations’.



The developer must create and populate the various components

These components are– Express database objects such as

• dimensions• multidimensional arrays (aka Financial Data items)• hierarchies• models

Most of these can be built from a Windows client using menu options

There is some Express Stored procedure Language development



The main components of an OFA application are– Dimensions - which provide the index to the

multidimensional data

– Hierarchies - which allow aggregation of data to higher levels of summarisation - and also provide drill down capability

– Financial Data Items - these store the different scenarios such as Actual, Plan, Forecast (and versions of these such as Plan1,…



– Models - these are sets of equations which are used to perform interrelated calculations (which are normally between members of the Line Item dimension

[ Express stores the model logic separately from data. This allows the same model to be run against different Financial Data Items

or - different models to be run against the same data.

Pessimistic and Optimistic (worst and best case) models can be run for instance.

– Data Entry - Windows client, Web client, Excel all support data entry. Data can be entered into multiple FDIs



– Solves - are models, hierarchies which define how an FDI is to be calculated (as with your Excel assignment using the Solver Options and Constraints)

– Copy Data Profiles - allow copying of data from one FDI to another. This can be useful as an update technique -replacing ‘old’ data with ‘newer’ data for the next cycle

And finally, Oracle Financial Analyser is able to be integrated with the Oracle General Ledger

We don’t have time to go into this, but it is a reminder that the ‘new generation’ software is very extensive and can be integrated

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Applications Software Packages