Chapter 1. Introduction to Oracle Applications E-Business Suite

Oracle E-Business Suite is an Enterprise Resource Planning, which is also abbreviated as ERP. What exactly do we mean by an ERP? The three words themselves describe the meaning of this. You have an Enterprise that is a company, an organization, or even a small start-up. You need manpower to run this enterprise. Hence the word resource. In order to function effectively and efficiently, you need to manage and plan these resources.

In short, you need to plan your resources in your enterprise to meet the objective of your enterprise. Hence, you need an ERP. There are numerous benefits of Oracle E-Business Suite in today's world. Each business today has various aspects, and managing those aspects is, in its own way, very challenging. Almost every enterprise today is dependent on software technology and applications to perform their day–to-day operations.

So in order to provide an integrated solution, Oracle has come up with a unified solution that helps in managing all facets of running a business on a single platform. Oracle E-Business Suite provides this capability. This helps businesses to make better decisions. In addition, it also reduces cost and in turn increases productivity and profits, which is the bottom line for all businesses.

Oracle E-Business Suite has a wide chain of applications as follows:

• Oracle Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Oracle Financials
• Oracle Human Resource Management System (HRMS)
• Oracle Logistics
• Oracle Supply Chain Applications
• Oracle Order Management
• Oracle Transportation Management
• Oracle Warehouse Management System

The following diagram is a pictorial representation of the Oracle EBS. In the following diagram, we have various applications across Oracle EBS such as CRM and Human Resource and modules such as self-service, which are used across all the applications of Oracle EBS.

Business Intelligence (BI) is the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes.

Local and vertical extensions are used in order to integrate, orchestrate, access, and analyze data and processes across applications. Local is within particular applications such as Human Resource, and vertical might be across other applications such as BPEL or other ERPs.

In addition to the preceding applications of E-Business Suites, there are a few other ERPs such as Oracle JD Edwards, Oracle People Soft, and so on, which are provided by Oracle. These also work on similar lines as E-Business Suite and each has their own architecture, as explained in later sections.