Written by Helene Abrams Sunday, April 20 2008
Release 12 is in your future whether you are drawn by the new functionality or pushed by the coming “retirement” of release 11. To make that move, there are two ways of proceeding – the Oracle provided upgrade or a reimplementation. Regardless of your reason or the method you plan to use, your results will be better and the process will go more smoothly if you change your chart of accounts to be exactly what you want beforehand.
The CHANGE – TEST – UPGRADE advantage begins by getting the results you want in Release 11.
The ideal way to obtain the chart of accounts that best fits your business is to be able to see exactly what your business looks like using the new chart of accounts. A properly ranged chart of accounts reduces the number of cross validation and new sub-ledger rules that your staff needs to write. A changed chart of accounts can save resources by eliminating unused segments or code combinations.
The available software for changing charts of accounts begins by operating in a test environment where you can go from mappings to a fully testable result in hours. Besides ensuring that there are no errors, testing permits you to see the results and change the mappings if the result was not as desired. It is a modeling process that allows you to see “what if” these segments were mapped together, or what if I added another segment to track a new area of the company. The upgrade then becomes as straightforward as possible – no changes to the accounting structure are being made as part of the upgrade.
If you have decided to reimplement, you have probably made the decision to bring over only a small amount of history into Release 12. You’ve made the decision to reimplement because you want to take advantage of the features of 12, and also because your e-Business Suite has not changed to meet your current business. The typical way to load the history into a new implementation is to load the transactions using a loading tool. However, if you are loading from one chart of accounts to another, that load script needs to include the conversion of the first chart of accounts to the second. If you are changing charts of accounts, you are creating a very complex scenario for your developers. They will have to map and translate the accounting for every transaction to the new chart. The testing becomes even more difficult because you must test to see that the data loaded correctly, you must reconcile your new chart of accounts with the old one, and you must test the new chart of accounts in every module. By changing the chart of accounts first, the load becomes a “clean load” with no mapping and translation effort for the migration.
The CHANGE – TEST – UPGRADE method creates a clean audit trail and creates the SOX compliant reports that show the history of the changes for every transaction. You have a baseline of reports that you generate before changing the chart of accounts, you have a listing of everything that has been changed, and you have the same reports that are generated after the chart of accounts change. If the change is done as part of the load process, you lose the audit trail. The changes are effected in Release 11, which is what your staff has worked with before, and allows them to test and reconcile the data to provide a baseline for comparison before the move to Release 12. The upgrade that is required is as “vanilla” as possible – apart from moving the data from 11 to 12, no other changes are being made. The more complicated upgrade functionality that permits changes at the sub-ledger level is not employed, nor will that part of the Release 12 functionality be needed. The complexity of Release 12 makes staying as close to its mainstream as possible a prudent strategy.
The benefits of the CHANGE – TEST – UPGRADE method are many, varied, and substantial. Those benefits can only be obtained by changing your chart of accounts in Release 11, before the upgrade to Release 12.
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January Puzzle
A traveler gets lost on a deserted island and finds himself surrounded by a group of n cannibals.
Each cannibal wants to eat the traveler but, as each knows, there is a risk. A cannibal that attacks and eats the traveler would become tired and defenseless. After he eats, he would become an easy target for another cannibal (who would also become tired and defenseless after eating).
The cannibals are all hungry, but they cannot trust each other to cooperate. The cannibals happen to be well versed in game theory, so they will think before making a move.
Does the nearest cannibal, or any cannibal in the group, devour the lost traveler?
Solution
The short answer is the traveler’s fate depends on the parity of the group. If there is an odd number of canibals, the traveler will be eaten, but if there is an even number, the traveler will survive.
To prove this, we will consider small groups and use mathematical induction to explain the solution for larger groups.
Case n = 1: this is an obvious case. If there is one cannibal, the traveler will be eaten. It doesn’t matter that the cannibal will get tired because there are no other cannibals around as a threat.
Case n = 2: this is a more interesting case. Each cannibal wishes to each the traveler, but each knows he cannot. If either cannibal eats the traveler, then he will become defenseless and the other one will eat him. So each cannibal uses backwards induction to realize that the only strategy is to not eat the traveler. The hapless traveler finds a bit of luck, therefore, and actually survives.
Case n = 3: this is where the problem gets interesting. The best strategy is for the closest cannibal to make a move and eat the traveler. The cannibal will be defenseless after eating, but ultimately he will be safe. Why is that? The reasoning is due to induction: once the cannibal eats the traveler, the resulting situation has 2 unfed cannibals and the 1 defenseless cannibal. But as we just showed above, when there are 2 unfed cannibals, neither will make a move for fear of being eaten by the other! Thus the first cannibal to make a move will be safe as the remaining 2 cannibals block each other.
We can prove the higher cases using mathematical induction. If the number n is odd, then the closest cannibal can safely eat the traveler because the remaining number of unfed cannibals is even (and by induction, with an even number of unfed cannibals no one makes a move). If the number n is even, then no cannibal will eat the traveler, for if he did, the remaining number of cannibals would be odd, meaning he will get eaten by the induction hypothesis.
Success Tips for Oracle Project Management
- Create a standard for documentation at the beginning of your project, and hold team members accountable for completing documentation requirements as well as keeping them at and above the standards required.
- Before promulgating user documentation or training, it’s also a good idea to choose a representative from the among the business users base to review materials first.
- If you are not sure about the resources and budget required, obtain several estimates from people that have experience with the same size and scope of your project.
- Be explicit, before beginning the project, what internal resources are required for execution. This includes people, infrastructure, hardware, and software.
- Help the project champion understand the impact your project will have on the organization and how its successful completion will make him or her an internal hero or heroine for supporting it.
- Break up your project into smaller projects (try for projects that can be completed in 4-6 months, especially early on) to get success and demonstrate momentum.
- Make sure that your testing includes reports, upstream and downstream interfaces, customizations, enhancements, and workflows.
- Ensure that comprehensive transition reports and meetings between departing and incoming personnel are completed.
- Instead of spending time and resources implementing third-party reporting, consider consolidating multiple instances, moving to a global chart of accounts (CoA), and/or standardizing on a consistent calendar.
- Include governance, risk, and compliance management as part of the project plan.
- Finally, celebrate the successes. Too many projects focus on defects, failures, or small cost over-runs without looking at the big picture and what was accomplished.
The Analyst Corner
John Van Decker, Research VP of Gartner, states:
"A single chart of accounts allows consistency in financial reporting across the enterprise by standardizing on common metrics and reporting structures, reduces dependencies on a separate financial consolidation system, and significantly reduces the costs incurred with ongoing, complex conversions and translations."
