The Business Value of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 for Midsize BusinessesAn Oracle White PaperApril 2008

The Business Value of Oracle E-Business Suite Release12 for Midsize Businesses

EXECUTIVE OVERVIEWThere’s no reason why midsize businesses or government entities shouldn’t have the same capabilities as larger enterprises. After witnessing their large enterprise competitors successfully utilize modern business applications to reduce costs, increase flexibility and responsiveness, Midsize Businesses are themselves looking to adopt similar technologies to achieve similar results. Consequently, this is driving increased demand for the products and services of enterprise technology vendors for the midsize business market.

This white paper describes how small and medium size businesses and government entities will be able to take advantage of the enhanced features and capabilities within the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (EBS R12) in meeting their business requirements, lowering their total cost of ownership of their enterprise application investment, and improving their overall competitive advantage.

KEY CHALLENGES FOR MIDSIZE BUSINESSESMidsize Businesses are extremely diverse, encompassing organizations in all private and public sector industries. And, Midsize Businesses have the same competitive and customer management issues as larger businesses:

How do I remain competitive in an increasingly crowded global market?

How can I meet the increase service expectations of my customers and partners while still controlling costs?

How can I continue to expand my business without creating fragmented business systems that limit my access to key information?

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“In our opinion, Oracle’s EBS R12 is a significant step forward in the integrated

suite approach to enterprise applications. The Suite is functionality rich and serves

the global enterprise well. As a tightly integrated suite of products, businesses

will realize significant gains from the interoperability of the suite environment.”

IDC White Paper sponsored by Oracle Corporation, "Oracle E-Business Suite 12,"

Doc # 204133, December 2006

Given limited budgets and limited resources, how can I improve the efficiencies of my operations?

Smaller businesses must innovate quickly in the face of global competition, financial pressures, and increasingly complex regulation. As a result, smaller businesses seek solutions of similar sophistication as their larger business counterparts but applicable to a smaller scale; be it in end-user counts, transaction volume, and/or IT management capacity. Today, smaller businesses typically seek more razor focused and pragmatic implementations with predictable value rather than long enterprise-wide suite implementations. Ultimately, Midsize Businesses want to be more connected, responsive, and adaptable. Oracle E-Business Suite is designed to meet and take on those challenges for Midsize Businesses.

DELIVERING VALUE TO MIDSIZE BUSINESSESOracle E-Business Suite provides Midsize Businesses the functional best practices and industry-specific capabilities they need to adapt to change and compete more effectively.

More specifically, Oracle E-Business Suite helps smaller businesses:

Protect their existing investment with applications that are easy to own

Extend the value of their applications with industry focused functionality

Evolve to the next generation of business applications with comprehensive and open solutions

Oracle E-Business Suite is a comprehensive, industry-focused suite of business applications that is easy to buy, implement and own. With a new user experience and hundreds of cross-industry capabilities spanning enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply chain management, EBS R12 helps Midsize Businesses manage the complexities of their business environment. At the same time, EBS R12 provides a platform that not only supports and protects investments in enterprise software but also continues to extend the solutions with additional features and capabilities allowing Midsize Businesses to take advantage of strategic opportunities when they make solid business sense.

Comprehensive To Meet Your Needs Today and Tomorrow – Good business solutions should be good at

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“By implementing Oracle E-Business Suite applications, we were able to support

recent business growth and are on track to realize a positive return on investment in

less than one year.”

-– Paul Wagner, Chief Information Officer, Bare Escentuals, Inc.

the fundamentals. And EBS R12 offers the right applications for all midsize business areas of concern, including business analytics, financials, procurement, project management, human resources, manufacturing and supply chain management, and customer relationship management (CRM).

Even better, as your company grows, EBS R12 grows right along with you, so you avoid the expensive rip-and-replace costs of other inflexible, non-scalable solutions.

Industry Focused For Your Unique Requirements - Often, smaller businesses are faced with a difficult choice: a “lite” version of an enterprise application that isn’t flexible enough to support future business growth or an application package designed only for smaller businesses. Neither provides the flexibility Midsize Businesses need or the ability to scale as business grows.

Oracle offers a third choice: customer-proven industry-focused applications that meet midsize business needs, both now and in the future, and are available for a wide range of industries, including: aerospace and defense, automotive, chemicals, consumer products, education, engineering and construction, financial services, healthcare, high technology, industrial manufacturing, life sciences, media and entertainment, natural resources, oil and gas, professional services, public sector, retail, telecom, travel and transportation, and utilities. With thousands of midsize business customers and years of experience, Oracle understands the key drivers and business-process flows of these industries.

By taking advantage of industry best practices Oracle has developed Business Accelerators that enable rapid implementation for EBS R12 applications.

With Oracle Business Accelerators, Midsize Businesses can minimize risk by eliminating the expense of customization and complex systems integration costs and get up and running quickly.

Easy to Own Solutions with Predictable Value – Installing and maintaining software can be difficult, especially with limited budgets and IT staff. The EBS R12 advantage is not only about having the most complete business software; it is also about having applications that

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work well together and are easy and cost-effective to buy, implement, use, maintain and own.

By focusing on user-friendly interfaces, automated setup and maintenance utilities, and single-architecture solutions, EBS R12 seeks to offer solutions that will allow organizations to operate at a lower cost. Built upon a flexible architecture, EBS R12 delivers an improved ownership experience through scalable solutions that easily integrate with existing applications and hardware investments facilitating customers’ evolution to the next generation of Oracle applications. With EBS R12, Midsize Businesses can take full advantage of this experience, freeing them to focus on running their business—instead of on how to make information systems work together.

EBS provides a platform that allows Midsize Businesses to scale as they grow in size and in complexity. EBS R12 is modular allowing Midsize Businesses to purchase and implement only those applications that make the most sense for their business today:

For the IT team, install and maintain only those applications that are used;

For Employees, focus on learning those applications that are actually used;

For Bottom line results, only purchase what you need, when you need it.

EBS R12 empowers SMB with more choices in their enterprise application investment. As needs change, Midsize Businesses can implement new applications.

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COMPREHENSIVE TO MEET YOUR NEEDS TODAY AND TOMORROWOracle E-Business Suite (EBS) is a fully integrated, comprehensive suite of enterprise business applications. The applications in EBS are built on a unified information architecture that consolidates data from Oracle and non-Oracle applications allowing for consistent definition of customers, suppliers, partners, employees, and order, shipment, inventory, and asset lifecycles across the entire enterprise. EBS provides end-to-end efficiencies across financial management, customer relationship management, procurement, supply chain management, project management, human capital management, and business intelligence processes.

Financial ManagementCompanies are always looking to improve the efficiency in completing common financial and asset management tasks. With this in mind, EBS R12 provides:

Greater flexibility and usability in implementation

Increased usability in the daily and period use of setup and operational programs

Enhanced ability to handle complex accounting and regulatory requirements often required in multi-company and multi-country deployments

Midsize Businesses will directly benefit from new financial management features and capabilities in EBS R12, which are designed to expedite regional and group control, lower finance expenses, and speed decision making by centralizing the processing of dispersed data. The global financial management capabilities in EBS R12 tremendously increase processing and reporting efficiency across operating units through the centralization of key business functions within a single database.

Centralized and Standardized Finance Functions

EBS R12 centralizes accounting, tax, payment, and banking functions to provide greater efficiency and control with unparalleled flexibility. EBS R12 gives customers the chance to standardize business processes across disparate business units and achieve real-time insight into their business.

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Centralized Subledger Accounting - Oracle Subledger Accounting allows users to comply with corporate, local and managerial accounting and audit requirements by providing them with the ability to create subledger journal entries tailored to their financial reporting and analytical needs.

Process Payments and Collections with a Single Payment Engine – EBS R12 allows users to process payments and collections faster with a single payment engine that manages disbursements and receipts, using Oracle Payments.

General Ledger

Oracle General Ledger enables companies to perform simultaneous accounting for multiple reporting requirements and allow super users to access and process data for multiple ledgers and legal entities at the same time.

Please refer to The Business Value of Upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite Financials Release 12 whitepaper for more detailed information about Financial Management capabilities in EBS R12.

ProcurementMidsize Businesses, whether in manufacturing, government, or asset-intensive industries, are continually pushed to drive cost down. In order to reduce costs today, companies must optimize their relationship with their suppliers while ensuring they receive the best quality and price for their goods and services.

Oracle Advanced Procurement is an integrated suite of software designed to manage all procurement processes from the request for proposal through supplier selection and award. Oracle Advanced Procurement provides complete procure-to-pay automation ridding organizations of traditional purchasing processes that are often inefficient and manual. Additionally, support of configurable sourcing rules allows the system to automatically process and validate incoming demand, determine allocation, and create and route POs. Midsize Businesses can leverage these capabilities to standardize and streamline procurement processes reducing maintenance, repair, and operating spend.

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For Midsize Businesses with limited procurement resources, EBS R12 enables improved command and control for all procurement responsibilities by providing a unified Professional Buyer’s Work Center. The Work Center allows buyers to efficiently perform their daily tasks: view and act upon requisition demand; create and manage orders and agreements; manage supplier information; and monitor procurement activity.

Customer Relationship ManagementOracle's integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution is a set of applications that provide information-driven sales, service, and marketing. Oracle CRM is built on an open, standards-based architecture that streamlines business processes, improves data quality, and allows all your key divisions to draw from the same source of data.

Service Request in EBS R12 enables Midsize Businesses involved in Service and Spare Parts Management operations to lower service costs by supporting a wide variety of service operations for complex and diverse work processes. Oracle TeleService Service Request provides a fully featured customer service platform for agent-assisted service across the enterprise. It enables service operations to effectively manage and automate the service process from initial request to issue resolution. Agents can use Oracle Service Request to provide resolution to customer issues using Oracle Knowledge Management, maintain product ownership, update customer contact information, and schedule service delivery according to service entitlement. The capabilities within Service Request enable organizations to drive service revenue by improving the management and coordination of service request lifecycles, maximizing the number of service visits for each service representative and driving cost reduction by reducing mileage, travel time, and cost

Supply Chain ManagementIn order to satisfy the increasing dynamics of the demand-driven marketplace, today’s supply chain management solution must be flexible and adapt not only to changing supply and demand pictures but also to innovative manufacturing paradigms like assemble-to-order, mass customization, and so forth. EBS R12 offers Supply Chain Management that provides a rich set of tools for that allow companies to manage global

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risk more effectively by anticipating supply and demand fluctuations and making more effective decisions. Supply Chain Management provides solutions that address requirements across procurement, order management, manufacturing, product lifecycle management, maintenance, logistics, and supply chain planning and execution.

Manufacturing and Manufacturing Execution – EBS R12 delivers a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) for both discrete and process manufacturers. R12 MES workstations offer features such as configurable dispatch, list-driven execution, configurable work content and sequential display of work instructions, clock in/out for actual time capture, enhanced shop floor transaction reporting, as well as streamlined lot and serial data collection. MES Workstation also provides a Supervisors Workbench with dashboards for a summarized view of exceptions.

Supply Chain Management - Supply Chain Management offers an integrated logistics solution that shepherds products and shipments from the upstream source to the downstream destination. Supply Chain Management provides pre-built integrations for Order Management, Manufacturing, and Warehouse Management systems, cross-functional business flows, and facilities for collaboration with carriers and customers for effective planning and proactive management of problems. This allows for more efficient “pull” and make-to-order methods for Midsize Businesses in Manufacturing and Distribution streamlining their time-to-market, minimizing inventory levels, and improving communications and shared processes throughout their supply chain.

Demand Management - Oracle Demantra Demand Management enables real time demand sensing and collaborative consensus forecasting. It enables users to sense demand real time by capturing demand more frequently, closer to the point of consumption, and at a much more granular level. Demand Management also provides increased precision on forecasts by combining quantitative and qualitative information, including advanced statistics. Demand Management enables Midsize Businesses to actively shape demand for profitability by managing the timing of production

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introductions as well as incorporating sales incentives and promotions. And finally, Demand Management provides a path to evolve to a real time sales and operations planning process.

Transportation Planning and Optimization - Process industry companies seeking to avoid an increase in logistic costs will be able to leverage Transportation Planning and Optimization features to consolidate loads and combine shipments providing additional opportunities to minimize transportation costs and maximize fulfillment services.

Transportation & Logistics - Integrated with R12, Oracle's G-Log is the market-leading transportation management solution with a proven ability to support multi-modal, domestic and global transportation operations for manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and logistics service providers. G-Log’s capabilities are fully integrated into R12's order management, purchasing, shipping and warehouse management functions.

Human Capital ManagementJust as in other areas of its business, Midsize Businesses are also seeking opportunities to optimize the usage of human assets within their business and the processes associated with their management (including recruitment, appraisal, compensation, and benefits managements). With self-service, workflow, mass update, and policy automation, Oracle Human Resources (HR) provides advanced capabilities to minimize the overhead required to attract, retain, develop, and manage all employees within a single system while adhering to local, in-country regulations. Oracle HR also includes local extensions for more than 30 countries containing regulatory and cultural functionality for each country.

With increasing demands to optimize the use of a limited workforce in a dynamic global business environment, Midsize Businesses are rapidly adopting new e-business practices to succeed in an increasingly competitive environment. Oracle Talent Management provides employers with improved performance management of workforce objectives and the appraisal process. These capabilities provide companies with a complete framework for developing skills and knowledge of their workforce and a systematic method for aligning and assessing their use in meeting business objectives.

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Project Management Today’s global marketplace has increased the complexity of project management with the inclusion of disparate project teams in multiple time zones and in culturally diverse environments, and with dynamically changing priorities and objectives. With their increasing role in the global marketplace, for Midsize Businesses this is no exception. Oracle EBS R12 addresses the complexity involved in managing global project portfolios across the global enterprise with key enhancements within the Project Portfolio Manager. Project Portfolio Management allows Project-Oriented Midsize Businesses (e.g. Construction, Real Estate, Engineering and Design, Field Services, and Homebuilder) to manage time, talent, and expertise to keep projects in scope, on time, and on budget.

In EBS R12, Project Portfolio Manager provides enhanced tools to balance and align global projects with organizational objectives and strategy. Additionally, EBS R12 also provides Earned Value Management (EVM) functionality, which provides an objective measurement of how much work has been accomplished on a project. The inclusion of EVM will provide extreme benefit to Midsize Businesses that are government contractors, who are now required to setup an EVM solution or strategy to comply with recent changes in US Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR).

With the features and capabilities within EBS R12’s Project Portfolio Manager, Project-Oriented Midsize Businesses can improve project management proficiency, increase project profitability and boost resource productivity, while reducing their exposure with clients and subcontractors.

Business IntelligenceAs more companies become driven by metrics, intelligent display of these measures together with the ability to quickly drill into the root of a problem provides a focus for managers, enabling quick decision-making, prioritization, and rapid response.

In EBS R12, Oracle equips Midsize Businesses with Real-time Operational Reporting, which provide an integrated view of complex business data in a seamless Executive Dashboard interface, combining measures and metrics across different business models. Out-of-the-box, EBS R12 provides 6 dashboards, 49 key performance indicators (KPIs), and 90 new

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reports, with more to come, allowing Midsize Businesses to quickly take advantage of the operation reporting capabilities in evaluating operational performance. With Oracle’s XML Publisher, EBS R12 enables business users to format reports, drill down into reports, sort and filter information, annotate reports with comments, and utilize familiar desktop tools such as Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word, to create and maintain report formats based on development delivered XML data extracts.

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INDUSTRY FOCUSED

Every industry has unique processes and its own take on best practices. Companies in these industries want functionality tailored to the nuances of the way they do business. To meet these challenges, Oracle E-Business Suite provides industry-specific content and vertical solutions uniquely suited to the rigorous requirements of the following industries and their associated industry segments:

Aerospace & Defense Industrial Manufacturing

Automotive Life Sciences Business Services Logistics Service

Providers Chemicals Natural Resources Communications Oil & Gas Consumer Products Professional Services Education & Research Public Sector Engineering &

Construction Retail

Financial Services Travel & Transportation Healthcare Utilities High Technology Wholesale/Distribution

EBS R12 provides industry-focused solutions that automate core business processes by incorporating predefined adaptive vertical workflows. By providing tailored and industry–specific capabilities and adaptive workflows, EBS R12 allow Midsize Businesses to take advantage utilizing tailored solutions with industry best practices that allow them to be competitive in today’s market. Examples of vertical industry solutions provided by EBS R12 are:

Aerospace & Defense (A&D) - Oracle® Complex Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (CMRO) provides key functional and usability requirements to increase Maintenance Planning and Execution efficiency.

Reliability Based Rotable Parts Planning - allows Midsize Businesses in A&D to accurately plan for rotable parts and determine the location where and when the part is needed. This functionality helps customer achieve optimal inventory levels for these, often extremely expensive, rotable parts at every maintenance location.

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Role-Based Maintenance Technician User Interfaces - CMRO provides role-based maintenance user interfaces and application flows to accommodate the different roles (i.e. Line- and Transit, Heavy and Engine-Shop) and information needs required for maintenance.

Life Sciences – For the Life Sciences Industry, EBS R12 adds a Clinical trial management solution that has two key components:

Life Sciences Data Hub –designed to facilitate data integration, analysis and reporting for regulatory submissions;

Adverse Event Reporting System – provides enhanced support for product compliance and adds features for the Japanese market.

Retail – EBS R12 closes the loop in providing a complete merchandising and store management solution, by providing integration between EBS Financials and the Oracle Retail solution, supporting direct merchandise invoice matching to payments, and stock ledger and point-of-sale transactions to the General Ledger. Additionally, EBS R12 provides Oracle Workforce Scheduling (OWS), which offers companies a comprehensive solution to forecasting the demand for labor and scheduling the right people to the right activities at the right time to meet customer service and cost objectives.

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EASY TO OWN – LOWER TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIPOracle is committed to offering the best total ownership experience in the enterprise software industry by providing tools that reduce the total cost of ownership, reduce the risk in managing IT operations, and increase IT’s agility to respond to dynamic business needs.

Easy to UseEBS R12 provides an improved user ownership experience by providing a set of rich features to enhance the user experience and improve personalization.

Increase User Productivity with Intuitive User Interface - EBS R12 provides a user-friendly and intuitive interface that allows users to easily access information and drive decision-making. Additionally, EBS R12 allows Midsize Businesses to incorporate business processes for common workflows, eliminating manual steps, and improving productivity. Providing an intuitive user interface lowers costs required to train and acclimate new users, leading to a much more productive user community.

Personalize EBS to Meet Your Needs - Today, with the increasing complexity of their business and industry, Midsize Businesses desire a greater need to personalize their solutions, but lack the resources to afford individually tailored solutions the precisely meet their needs. EBS R12 provides additional enhancements and features that facilitate the system administrator’s ability to tailor the EBS solution to accommodate the needs of end users, without programming. Advanced personalization features and capabilities accelerate systems setup and deployment and eliminate the need for costly customizations

EBS R12 also provides users with the ability to create new looks and feels to match web standards and further enable users to customize screens to match the “look-and-feel” of existing business applications.

Lastly, EBS R12 provides multi-currency and multi-language capabilities that allow Midsize Businesses to do business where their customers do business, further allowing Midsize Businesses to set their sights on new markets throughout the world.

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Providing enhanced personalization and configuration utilities, reduces the cost and effort required to migrate changes across environments, and streamlines the process for setup and configuration.

Easy to MaintainSince many of today’s implementations consist of many components and event channels distributed across environments, as the number of data source and environments grow, management and deployment of multiple instances of an ERP solution becomes extremely cumbersome and difficult to maintain. Given the limited IT constraints of many SMB organizations, EBS R12 assists Midsize Businesses by providing enhanced utilities to facilitate Oracle Applications system maintenance from installing and upgrading Oracle Applications systems, to updating configuration parameters, to maintaining and applying patches, to producing system reports, simplifying maintenance and minimizing system downtime.

Easy to Setup

Oracle knows that continually upgrading and maintaining your current enterprise application investment can be challenging and costly. In addition to hundreds of cross-industry capabilities to help you manage the complexities of global business environments, Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 was designed to make the upgrade process easier. EBS R12 provides advanced installation utilities and a user-friendly wizard interface to simplify and streamline installation, thereby allowing for faster implementation of Oracle E-Business Suite.

Simplified Patch Application

Over the course of the Oracle Applications lifecycle, patches are applied for upgrading the Oracle E-Business Suite to a higher maintenance level, applying the latest product enhancement, adding a new feature or functionality, or fixing issues. The advanced patch application utilities in EBS 12 benefit system administrators by reducing the risk associated with patch application through improved prerequisite checking and patch compatibility enforcement, decreases the chances of missed manual steps during patch application, identifies patch impact on customizations, and enables updates to be deployed more quickly.

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Improved Performance and Security Monitoring

Oracle Applications Manager Dashboard has been enhanced to improve the monitoring of the E-Business Suite in the areas of Performance and Security. The following features have been incorporated in this release:

Performance - The enhanced Performance dashboard provides administrators with key performance metrics related to online, batch, and workflow activity.

Security - An updated suite of diagnostic reports is now available within the Security dashboard. These reports check the Oracle E-Business Suite system configuration against Oracle’s best practices and detect possible security violations.

Web Analytics Intelligence - Oracle Web Analytics provides additional role-based dashboards, KPIs, and reports to help managers deliver superior internet campaigns and drive profitable customer interactions by enabling them to measure and understand online visitor interactions and customer purchasing behavior patterns.

Easy to IntegrateMidsize Businesses hoping to stay competitive with rising customer standards, whether B2B or B2C, will have to transition away from traditional linear applications toward collaborative e-business models that take into account the need for "right time" access to information and the ability to dynamically address business change "on the fly" across their supply and value chains.

EBS R12 meets these objectives by improving ease of integration for Midsize Businesses in the context of their ability to support adaptive processes that change rapidly, as well as supporting the need for closer collaboration and coordination with customers and vendors. EBS 12 offers a range of modular, pre-integrated applications that reduced implementation costs and ongoing maintenance burden. With an updated web services repository and process management tool, Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 enables lower cost integrations with third party applications and adaptable business processes. By simplifying business operations so that systems share information and all departments work from the same set of underlying data, Midsize Businesses are able to increase efficiencies and productivity; provide better service,

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and make smarter decisions based on accurate up-to-date information.

Comprehensive Web Services Integration Repository

To facilitate the management of web services, EBS R12 provides the Integration Repository, which is a comprehensive online directory of Web services, interfaces, and integration points that acts as the service broker for Oracle E-Business Suite.

Simplified Integration

Oracle Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) Process Manager offers organizations the ability to manage processes spanning heterogeneous applications. Oracle, 3rd party, and legacy applications can be integrated to extend process automation. Prepackaged, standard interfaces for applications and legacy systems are used to connect systems, reducing the integration effort and shortening time to value.

Pre-built Siebel CRM Integration

EBS R12 provides pre-built Siebel CRM integrations, pre-built bridges that seamlessly link Siebel CRM to Oracle Applications for end-to-end industry processes. By providing Siebel CRM Integration, EBS R12 provides a single vendor solution that allows you to manage the interaction with your customers, from inbound phone call to customer management. Built on open standards, the Siebel Integration pre-built bridges assist Midsize Businesses by reducing implementation costs and accelerating the deployment time for front to back office integration with minimal disruption to existing business operations.

Desktop Integration

EBS R12 allows users to integrate with desktop applications through its XML Publisher and Web ADI functions. Using this XML capability, users can perform additional reporting and output in Microsoft Word, Excel and Adobe PDF.

Continuity of the Fusion Strategy

Oracle’s Fusion strategy simply put is to protect customer’s current investments, extend value to existing environments, and ensure that customers can evolve to the next generation of software when and as it makes sense for their business.

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The new E-Business Suite Release 12 is the architectural basis for Fusion and is

the first release on Fusion Middleware utilizing BPEL, and while Release 12 is not

the last stop for Oracle before Fusion, it certainly is the next step toward Fusion.

Brian A. Mitchell

IBM Global Business Services Worldwide and Americas Oracle Practice Lead

Executive

EBS R12 is certified on Oracle Fusion Middleware. Oracle Fusion Middleware provides EBS customers with market-leading, solutions to extend processes, secure information, and enhance decision-making capabilities using E-Business Suite and other enterprise data. Solutions include round-trip process optimization, business intelligence; Web 2.0 enriched user experience, and identity management for security and compliance

Additionally, EBS R12 allows customers to take advantage of the latest Oracle technologies for improved system maintenance and performance: Oracle supports the latest database version, Oracle 10g; on the middle tier, EBS R12 uses Oracle Application Server 10g; and for Web-based Framework applications, EBS R12 uses Oracle JDeveloper 10.1.3. In doing so, EBS R12 keeps Midsize Businesses open to emerging and established technology standards, so Midsize Businesses can be open to new opportunities.

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KEY ENABLERS TO INCREASE THE BUSINESS VALUE WITH ORACLE E-BUSINESS SUITE RELEASE 12

Buying the right software to solve your business problems is the first critical step. Then you need to implement, use, and manage it efficiently, so you can achieve measurable results. Oracle provides a comprehensive set of offerings to help you optimize your Oracle investment.

Oracle’s Partner SolutionsOracle’s extensive network of partners supports the needs of Midsize Businesses. With local market knowledge and industry expertise, our partners understand the unique challenges you face and can tailor solutions for your specific requirements. Oracle partners have also been specially trained to provide the highest quality of implementation and support, so you can achieve fast return on investment. Oracle partners can provide customized solutions that deliver value to your business from day 1, as well as integration and migration services that allow you to grow your business.

Oracle Business AcceleratorsOracle and its partners recognize that Midsize Businesses demand comprehensive business solutions that are low-cost, low-risk, and provide industry-specific functionality and faster time-to-value. Oracle Business Accelerators for E-Business Suite provide a rapid implementation solution for new installs via a powerful and easy to use click and answer user interface that maintains 100% of the E-Business Suite for supportability and expandability. Targeted at small and medium business customers, Oracle Business Accelerators provide leading practice end-to-end business processes and pre-defined templates designed for customers requiring industry specific functionality across individual modules of the Oracle E-Business Suite.

Oracle On DemandIn business, the challenge from an IT perspective is to align investments with the organization’s key business drives, in order to demonstrate tangible business returns and deliver strategic value. Oracle On Demand provides a portfolio of industry-leading applications – available on a subscription or managed basis.

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“We looked at the other big names, but ultimately Oracle and Baytree offered a

more flexible solution that is easier to implement, easier to use, and easier to

maintain.”

− Mark Slaven, Chief Financial Officer, Cross Match Technologies, Inc.

“By using all the tools that Oracle Business Accelerators provide us, we can

get to Conference Room Pilot 1 in a day. Our approach is to use fixed pricing, and

maintain the scope.”

− Walt Zipperman, DAZ Systems Inc., Certified Oracle Partner.

“Implementing Oracle E-Business Suite On Demand allowed us to improve

customer service, enhance our operational efficiency, and minimize our IT

maintenance costs.”

--Wade Lewis, Chief Information Officer, Central Plastics

Oracle On Demand Subscription Applications - provide Midsize Businesses with a quick start with no up-front cost and without extensive IT department help. The application user interface allows business users to configure their software themselves and provides highly comprehensive solutions to meet varying business needs.

Oracle On Demand Management Applications - provide deep industry and sector specialization and are run on dedicated infrastructure. Customers own the Oracle software and rely on Oracle to manage software, technology, and infrastructure on their behalf.

By transitioning from internal operation and maintenance to SaaS delivery, Oracle On Demand customers eliminate not only the capital costs of server hardware, but also the endless and unpredictable management costs of deploying, testing, troubleshooting, upgrading, securing, patching and re-patching software systems. When SMB solutions are more available, secure and up to date, SMB personnel become more productive. By leveraging their own and Oracle's competencies, Midsize Businesses can lower TCO and turn their attention to new capabilities and more strategic projects.

By letting Oracle experts manage Oracle software, customers leverage Oracle expertise and investment in management tools, processes, infrastructure, and best practices. Specific benefits include:

IT cost reductions of up to 50 percent.

24x7x365 monitoring to ensure optimum system availability and fast problem resolution.

Improved problem management. Customers file 50 percent fewer support requests, and their problems are resolved 50 percent faster.

Enhanced performance. Customers report transaction processing time reductions of up to 40 percent.

Tighter security. Oracle regularly tests and applies patches for all Oracle On Demand customer applications.

Smoother change management. Oracle provides point release updates to reduce complexity and ensure that customers always have access to the latest releases and most complete feature sets.

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Better IT alignment with business strategy. Oracle On Demand services can be swiftly scaled, changed or reconfigured as necessary to support mergers, expansions, reorganizations and new business initiatives.

Applications UnlimitedApplications Unlimited is Oracle’s plan to continue providing ongoing enhancements to current Oracle Applications beyond the delivery of Oracle Fusion Applications. Applications Unlimited will provide customers with more visibility into our existing product roadmaps and help them derive continual success with their current applications by delivering dedicated, world-class development and support for years to come.

Applications Unlimited is beneficial to customers because Oracle is giving customers the option to choose what is best for their business. Customers can continue to derive value from their existing applications, which we plan to continuously update or they can upgrade free of charge to future technologies if there is a business case to do so. It is entirely the customer’s choice. There will be no forced migrations.

Oracle ConsultingOracle Consulting (OC) has developed an implementation program for Midsize Businesses that is designed to minimize complexity and, instead, focus on key business flows and the integrated Internet applications, which support them. Leveraging Internet business practices inherent in Oracle's integrated E-Business Suite, the implementation program delivers portions of the Suite that can be implemented with a fixed scope in a rapid time frame.

Pre-built solutions enable companies to implement Oracle Applications very quickly, with reduced risk, lower costs and greater simplicity than traditional implementation methods. This approach tightly controls the scope of the implementation by using selected implementation templates in Oracle’s proven AIM for Business Flows Methodology.

CONCLUSIONAfter witnessing how their larger competitors have utilized modern business applications to reduce costs, increase flexibility and responsiveness, Midsize Businesses want the same. They are looking to adopt similar technologies to

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Why Do Midsize Companies Choose Oracle?

Simplicity – A single integrated

software suite unifies systems,

streamlines processes, and drives

better business performance.

Scalability – A uniform business

platform gives customers the

freedom to grow as needed,

without expensive

reimplementation

Affordability - A low-cost

computing platform and rapid

implementation reduce cost from

day one.

Credibility – Tens of thousands of

SMB customers make Oracle a

market leader.

achieve similar results and achieve competitive advantage and ultimately, continued profitable growth. However, given the limitation of their resources and the nature of today’s global environment, Midsize Businesses seek preconfigured software that’s easy to install and at a low-cost and at an industry –level.

Oracle E-Business Release 12 provides Midsize Businesses with the tools they need to manage their business, reduce costs, and increase profitability and competitive advantage. With EBS R12, Oracle delivers on its value proposition for Midsize Businesses in providing solutions that are: Comprehensive, Industry Focused, and Easy to Own.

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The Business Value of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 for Midsize BusinessesApril 2008Author: Ronald BerryContributing Authors: Annette Melatti, Ramchand Raman

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