Oracle Fusion Install - On premise (Bare Metal, OVM) or Hosted

Whoever is implementing Oracle Fusion will definitely have to answer the following question; 

Do you need to have the Oracle Fusion environment hosted on your premises or do you want to host with a third party or host this in Oracle via the Saas or OnDemand model?

To add some more complexity, Oracle provides you with option either to install the application on 'bare metal' or leverage Oracle Virtual Machines (OVM) to host all components.

Our experience has been that the fastest and easiest way to get going is if you use hosting service of Oracle or some third-party. However, the flip side of using a hosted applications is that you will see an increase in the turnaround time if you are upgrading, applying patches or debugging, which will be quite high in the initial days and you should keep a buffer for all these exigencies in your project plan.

The next best alternative is to use an on-premise OVM install. You can be up and running in 3 days. Internally at Wipro we are able to set up an environment using OVM install in less than 3 days. The last route is to go for a bare-metal install. This is quite a challenge from DBA perspective and can take well over 2 weeks to set up the environment. Oracle ships both bare-metal as well as OVM versions of the releases, so customers can choose either of these.

Oracle Fusion Applications - Next generation in ERP

Oracle Fusion Apps is the next generation in ERP space. It's completely web-based and takes in the best in class of all products under the Oracle umbrella. Some truely world-class features include the following:

- co-exist with third party legacy applications, thereby giving huge business benefits where customers have already invested heavily in legacy applications and want to plug and play Fusion Apps with existing system.

- Best in class user roles and responsibility features. Truely amazing if we compare this with R11i and R12 stack of products.

- Complete web-based solution, so no hassles of installing client thin or thick. Only thing that you need to be up and running is a browser. Fusion works great on Google chrome, Mozilla along with IE.

- Oracle Fusion Applications feature embedded business intelligence. So, you have plenty of Dashboards, BI reports, smart reporting tools like Smartview (uses an excel add-in) and FR Studio (again uses the best from Hyperion reporting)

- complete SOA based architecture, makes processing and integration real cool.

Invoice Image Processing Architecture in Fusion Payables

Fusion Payables is tightly integrated with Oracle Document Capture (ODC), Oracle Imaging and Process Management (IPM), Oracle Content Management and Oracle BPEL process Manager to provide a seamlessly integrated solution supporting the entire payables cycle starting from scanning of physical invoices, invoice image recognizition using OCR to pre-populate invoice header, routing of the scanned invoices to AP entry specialists and subsequent approval and payment of invoices. Oracle is the only vendor in the market today offering a fully integrated solution without the use of third party bolt-on solutions.

Once the invoice arrives in a centralized mail room, the imaging specialist would sort and prepare the invoices based on parameters like invoice amount, due date, supplier, etc. and then scan these invoices using ODC. Next the images are automatically sent to Forms Recognition for intelligent recognition to extract key invoice header data like PO number, Supplier, Invoice Number, Invoice Amount and Invoice Date from scanned images using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities. Once the key header data recognition is completed, the invoice images are sent to Oracle Imaging and Process Management for storage and subsequent routing to accounts payable invoice entry specialists using Oracle BPEL Process Manager workflows. The BPEL process is generated whenever an invoice image is saved successfully in Imaging and Process Management, and this image is then routed to the AP invoice entry operator based on pre-configured rules like invoice amount, supplier, etc. The AP specialist views the scanned image and then fills up the remaining fields of the invoice to kick-off the subsequent process of invoice validation, approval, accounting and payment.