Arena PLM – Oracle ERP Integration
Full transcript below:
Heatherly Bucher:
Good morning. For all of you who have joined this morning, we are going to spend the next 30 minutes providing you an overview of the Arena – Oracle EBS [E-Business Suite] integration from our partner Triniti.
I’m Heatherly Bucher, a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Arena and I’d like to introduce you to our presenters today. We have Niranjan, the Director of Solution Enablement at Triniti, joined by Vamsi, who is the Director of Integrations and Solutions at Triniti.
Before I turn it over to them, I have a few housekeeping items for the webinar, as well as a quick introduction into how we see systems integrations at Arena. First, on housekeeping, this webinar is being recorded. You will receive an email after the webinar with a recording link for later viewing. We will also have this webinar recording available on our website in the future for reference.
Second, at the end of the session, we will have a brief Q&A. If you have a question, please use your Webex platform options to send us the question anytime during the session. If we don’t have time to answer all the questions, we will get back to you individually after the webinar. All of you, our attendees, are on mute through the Webex platform. Therefore, you do not need to worry about muting your individual connection.
Finally, for our time today, we have a short agenda that you should see on the screen, including these introductions, a discussion of the business value of integrating key enterprise systems, such as PLM [product lifecycle management] and ERP [enterprise resource planning], an overview of the features and benefits of the Arena – Oracle EBS integration, and then a demonstration of the integration.
Before I turn the rest of the session over to Niranjan and Vamsi, I’d like to provide a little context around where PLM and ERP fit in the business. PLM, as you know, helps bring new products to market by automating the product development processes—it helps manage all your product data from mechanical to electrical, software, documentation, specs, and drawings. And it enables effective collaborations with your internal stakeholders and external supply chain partners throughout the whole product lifecycle.
ERP, such as Oracle EBS, on the other hand, picks up where PLM leaves off. ERP helps product companies deliver products to meet customer demand. ERP systems cover everything from point of order through planning, procurement, inventory management, production, and, ultimately, shipping. And, of course, it helps manage receivables, payables, assets, general accounting, and global financials.
Both ERP and PLM are required to accelerate new product introduction and get quality products to market on time and on budget, which is your goal.
Today, I’m going to turn over to our speakers from our partner Triniti. Triniti is the provider of the integration between Arena and Oracle EBS, and Arena and any other Oracle products as well. So now I’m going to be turning it over and they are going to share with you about the integration.
Niranjan:
Thank you, Heatherly. Hello everyone and thank you for joining us today. I am Niranjan Mamillapalli, Director of Solution Enablement at Triniti. I am responsible for sales and client engagement. We appreciate you taking your valuable time to learn about Triniti’s Arena integration adapter. The Arena integration adapter facilitates out-of-the-box, configurable, and real-time integration between Arena PLM and Oracle Business Suite. It enables automated flow or synchronization of data from Arena to Oracle, hence avoiding manual entry errors and ensuring that Oracle ERP is up to date with any change to product data. Triniti will take you through a short presentation and a live demo—with that, over to you, Vamsi.
Vamsi:
Thank you, Niranjan. Thank you, Heatherly. Hello everybody, welcome to the webinar. My name is Vamsi Vella, I am Director for Integrations and Solutions at Triniti corporation. I will be walking you through the rest of the presentation and I’ll demonstrate the integration from Arena into Oracle EBS.
Let’s first start with the benefits of maintaining good product data and using a tight integration solution. You will eliminate data entry errors, essentially needed for uninterrupted operation and more accurate planning. Use of a flexible and robust integration solution gives us an overall cost reduction for your custom integration. By properly managing your product data, you are reducing your noncompliance, credit risk, and inventory costs. Moreover, you are improving your product cycles. Also, by ensuring that complete and correct data is available across teams, you are increasing visibility and their capacity. With all the information available, using more automation and streamlined processes, your team can now focus on their core operations.
Listed here are the key features of our integration. There is no intervention in the integration, which means it allows automatic transfer of release data, eliminating delays and errors in data synchronization from Arena into Oracle EBS. We have included configurable business rules to identify and apply Oracle-specific details, such as organizations, item templates for the parts that are released.
Configuration is deployable in your existing ERP infrastructure, which reduces your overall cost of ownership. Transfer of data from Arena into Oracle is supported via Oracle’s SOA Suite [service-oriented architecture suite] or Informatica and also Triniti’s native integration software. Complete visibility for all data transferred via the integration is provided in our data management screens. Also, we provide custom hooks to support unique and very specific integration needs you may have. You could use these to default data, derive non-generic information, or validations to support your business needs.
Before we go further into additional information, let us start the live demo of the integration. As part of today’s presentation, we will release a predefined complete BOM structure in Arena. After the integration runs, we will view the item and BOM information in Oracle EBS. We will also see the complete BOM structure created in Oracle using our product view application. And we will also look at staging reports, and at the end of the demonstration we will take up any questions you may have on the presentation.
So, let me switch over to the application. For today’s demonstration, we have prepared a complete supply chain structure, right from your top sellable item builds subassemblies and also the purchase parts that are required to build the subassemblies.
So if you look at the sector, this is pretty comprehensive. It has around 60-plus components, including substitutes and preferred parts. It’s a GPS unit and all the components that go into building that GPS unit. You’ll also notice it is in unreleased state in Arena which means it does not exist in Oracle at this point. And, likewise, most of the components are not in Oracle also.
So as part of this demo, we will release this whole supply chain structure into Oracle EBS and see how it reflects in EBS. Without going into too many details of how Arena ECOs and releases happen, I will go and release this to the design state. I provide the revision. And also, for components, I will add all the components to the change, and I will select the default revisions that Arena suggests for these components.
Once I confirm the components, your complete BOM structure is released into Oracle, we have integrated. So the design, Beta, is the next lifecycle phase of the part. So this part will now be integrated into Oracle EBS using our integration which is running in the background.
Okay, while the integration processes all this information, let us go back to the presentation and then look at some of the additional information on the product integrator.
Our goal is to provide an integration that is flexible enough to work with different product data setups. We do this by providing simple UIs for configurations—these are easy to be trained and there is no need for any programming. Using these UIs, we are able to support various organization assignments, single or multiple template assignments for the items. And also predefine default values, translation values between the two systems, and necessary parameters for your integration. For example, one of the parameters we used to define item cost is the cost type to which the cost will be assigned. For this integration, we have used Oracle’s spending cost type. Likewise, we have parameters to define your sourcing assignments and so on. Modifications to the configurations as your business evolves or changes are easy. You can easily enable any new organizations or fields, et cetera, that are related.
Vamsi:
What do we support as part of this integration? As part of this integration, we support transfer of item, BOM, the supplier and manufacturer details. As you might be aware, Arena does not have any item or BOM associated with the organizations, but in Oracle EBS items have to be assigned to at least the master log by default.
Using this integration, you can assign items to different organizations, not just the master log. And each of these organizations, you are able to assign one or many templates in a sequential order. So your item definition is as close to complete as possible using this integration.
We also integrate item cost information where it is available. Also, we support item categories using custom hooks. Coming to BOM data, we are able to support creation of both primary and alternate BOMs. In Oracle to pre-configure items, we assign substitutes to components and also default values for components, like supply type, sub-inventory locator, et cetera. The supplier and manufacturer information associated with items is propagated from approved supplier lists, manufacturers, part numbers, sourcing rules, and sourcing assignments.
Let me walk you through the architecture of the integration and how it works. Product information released from Arena, like you have seen in the release that I did in Arena, is picked up by Arena’s ERP Exchange utility which generates an XML document that is used as an input for the integration. The integration processes these XML documents and does the data translation where it’s necessary. It applies default values or other dependent values. It also uses preconfigured business rules to support various functions like template applications.
Once the data is prepared and validated, the integration processes this information using appropriate Oracle APIs, which finally creates various objects in Oracle EBS which will be your items, BOMs, your ASLs, et cetera.
Let’s go back to the integration and see how the data is progressing in Oracle. So, this is the item that we have released into Oracle. So very quickly, again, the bill of material for this … and for some of the parts which are purchased, we have provided sourcing information, which we will look in Oracle, and also we have provided some cost details.
Let’s look at the progress of the supply chain into Oracle EBS. We provide a dashboard to look at all the data that is progressing through the integration. You can see live progress and also you can look at all the previously integrated data into Oracle EBS using this dashboard.
The dashboard provides a 360-degree view of your data that has been released from Arena into Oracle EBS. You can view the details of your staged data, and you can also view the details of the data that has been successfully processed into Oracle EBS.
Let’s start with some of the items that have already progressed in the integration. So, if you see our release that we have just created, some of the parts have already been integrated into Oracle. You can see the factors showing success for items, BOMs, and also sourcing information where they have sourcing details.
So let’s start with the item and BOM information. Go ahead and query item in the Master Items screen, where they look at the item information and its related attributes.
So this is the item that has come into the Oracle EBS just now as part of the integration. They provide visibility to the division that has been released from Arena, and also we drag the request or your ECO number from Arena, as description.
As part of the integration, we have assigned this item to the master part, and also we have defined business rules, which can be used to assign your item also. In this integration, we have assigned the items based on assigned rules to the M1 and M2 organizations.
And in each of these organizations, you can see the item and its attributes. Their attributes can vary from your master log, and that is facilitated through the application of various templates, which can also be configured.
Let’s go look at the BOM information for this particular item. I created the BOM in Oracle EBS. So, all these components associated with the self assembly in Arena can be built here in Oracle also.
So, the 2015 part has these components in Arena and we have a few items which have substitutes also. So, the item in Oracle, it looks like this with components that’s available in Arena. Let’s look at the substitute information also that is brought in as part of the integration.
Also, we provide ways to default some of the component-specific information, like here, in this case, we have defined rules to assign the suppliers of inventory for certain components based on certain attributes. So, if you see for certain components, you have assembly pull versus push for other components.
Let’s go back to the same reports again and look at the progress of other components. We will show you all these different tabs in a minute and explain what each of the tabs do and how you can use this to review all the information in one single screen. But each of these items, all BOMs, all suppliers’ information, where available, you can look at the details that are coming in from Arena into Oracle EBS.
So, all of this information is part of your Arena’s release—where you have BOMs, you can look at the component information for that specific item. For parts which have sourcing information, you can look at the sourcing details that are sent from Arena. Stage item details, they’ll give you a snapshot of all the organizations where the item will be assigned, along with the status showing which has been successfully processed into this orgs or which had problems. For records which have been successfully processing into EBS, you can look at EBS details here and also you can look at the EBS sourcing information.
We also provide indented BOM structure that we have released in Arena, so you can use this indented BOM also to look at the entire supply chain that was released as part of this particular change number.
So, let’s go into Oracle and look at the sourcing information and ASL information for the parts. So this particular part, I have sourcing information, so I’ll use this to query the sourcing information. We also provide parameters as part of the integration to define what is your sourcing assignment set that has to be used as part of this integration. For this presentation, we have Arena demo assignment set that we have used. So all your items that are procured, which needs sourcing assignments will come into this particular assignment set.
So if you see, we have sourcing assignments done for M1 and M2 organizations. And if I look at the sourcing rule details, it is exactly saying like what we had in Arena, where this particular item is procured from two different suppliers in 40/60 allocation.
Let’s go and check the ASL information for this particular part. So if you see, we had indirect process information in Arena, where we have both the actual supplier and the manufacturer information. And when it’s integrated it into Oracle, you have the supplier and manufacturer integration, both [parts] this part.
So, you have two different manufacturers providing parts to two different suppliers for this particular company, that we purchased. So this is your ASL information. Going back to the presentation. So that was our live demonstration of the integration, where we list a complete structure from Arena, we integrated it into Oracle and we have looked at all the details in Oracle EBS. Now, let us finally show you the complete supply chain structure that has been integrated into Oracle using our product views structure.
I will query the item definition from M1 organization. This particular component is part of the package solution that we provide with the integration. So with this viewer, you can view your entire supply chain structure that is defined in Oracle real time. So if you see, right from the top item, you have all these other assemblies, including the procure parts, going into the sub assemblies.
On the right-hand side, you will get the complete picture of all the item attributes, BOM component information, your item costs, item revisions, categories, and all the different information that is required or associated with your product structure. Then you navigate across different items. Your item information is reflected here, so you can quickly check, analyze, and see anything that is missing or not complete.
Finally, before we go into the Q&A, we would like to present the takeaway resource, the Triniti MDM Business Case ROI Calculator. This calculator is useful to build a business case and to justify the investment in an MDM solution and integration. It is available on our website and you can use this to look at it and analyze and present the case by providing parameters that are applicable. Thank you all. I send it over to you.
Heatherly Bucher:
Thank you, Vamsi, for sharing the details of the integration with us. As a reminder, if you have any questions for our presenters today, you can type them into the Webex platform and we will see them. We do have a few questions that have popped up and time to answer them. If we don’t get to everyone’s questions today, we’ll contact you after the webinar with an answer. So our first question, Vamsi and Niranjan, is we are looking to implement Oracle EBS in the next few months, should we bring the integration between our Arena workspace and Oracle EBS online at the same time or after?
Vamsi:
Okay. So, if you are implementing Oracle EBS and you have Arena, your total cost of integration will be the lowest when you have both Arena and EBS mature and stable. But, really, to get to that state, you may incur other costs and overheads.
So if the objective is to reduce the overall cost, then start the integration also in parallel, while you’re implementing Oracle EBS. The only word of caution in that case would be the overall implementation timeline may be a little longer and we have to work through that when we engage with you.
Heatherly Bucher:
Okay, great. So, it sounds like often people pursue the integration at the same time as implementing Oracle EBS by case-by-case trade-offs, with regards to the timeline of implementing, correct?
Vamsi:
Yes, Heatherly.
Heatherly Bucher:
Okay. We have a second question: Does the integration provide any audit trail?
Vamsi:
Yes, we do provide audit trail—all the data that processes through the integration is available in the staging tables. And you can use this staging report, which is the 360-degree view of your entire information from Arena into the staging, into Oracle EBS. But, also because the information is available to you, you can use it as appropriate and generate reports as well.
Heatherly Bucher:
Wonderful. And then our third question is: Does the integration support updates to items not just creating new items, but when items are modified in Arena through the change process, does the integration support updates?
Vamsi:
Yes, we support both new item creation and updates to the items that are released from Arena as part of the integration.
Heatherly Bucher:
Okay, great. Looks like we are almost at 09:30, our 30-minute allotted time. I want to thank all of our participants for joining us today. If you’re interested in the Arena – Oracle EBS integration, you can contact Triniti directly, you can visit their website for the ROI calculator, which you should see the URL on your screen. And on Arena’s website as well, we have information including a product data sheet on the integration and a short Triniti video that you can watch regarding the integration. So I want to thank everyone for joining today and hope you have a good day.