This tutorial deals with Oracle Fusion Financials, and how it functions. In this tutorial,we look at an overview of Fusion applications and some commonly used Fusion terminologies.

Overview of Fusion Applications

The Fusion application, since its launch in October 2011, has been divided into seven pillars- Financials, Human Capital Management, Procurement, Projects, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, and Governance Risk and Compliance.

Each of these pillars have several of their own modules, which are used to perform functions relevant to them. The following diagram depicts the seven pillars of Fusion, along with the modules they contain.

Fig. 1 - The Seven Pillars of Fusion

When we look at the Financials pillar in particular, it has got a number of modules associated with it, for performing all the respective functions related to financials. The following diagram depicts the modules contained in Oracle Fusion Financials.

Fig. 2 - Oracle Fusion Financials Offerings

As can be seen from the illustration above, Oracle Fusion Financials consists of the following modules:

• General Ledger

• Accounts Payable

• Fixed Assets

• Accounts Receivable

• Revenue Management

• Advanced Collection

• Cash Management

• Financial Reporting

• Expense Management

• Fusion Tax, and

• Sub-ledger Accounting

The Revenue Management module, in particular, is not usually made available by Oracle to all of its customers. This is because it is an up-and-coming department, especially in the United States, where the government has issued regulations to be followed by companies. They have to implement revenue management policies and put them into effect by the start of 2018. Oracle has been working on this and will be implementing these features in the future.

Key Features of Oracle Fusion Financials

The key features offered by Oracle Fusion Financials are:

• Innovative embedded multi-dimensional reporting platform

• Role-based dashboards that push issues and work to users

• Embedded transactional intelligence that guides users’ decisions

• Imaging integration for supplier invoices

• Extensive spreadsheet integration across finance functions

• Simultaneous accounting of multiple reporting requirements

• Self Service Reporting

Benefits of Oracle Fusion Financials

Oracle Fusion Financials provides a number of benefits to its users. With the help of Oracle Fusion Financials, the user would be able to:

• Gain real-time access to live financial data

• Comply with global accounting standards and multiple legislative, industry, or geographic requirements

• Proactively resolve issues to expedite automated processing

• Improve decision making and increase accuracy during transaction entry

• Reduce transaction processing costs and data entry errors

• Utilise a cooperative system to work on, since the hardware, software, and processes are engineered to work together efficiently.

Fusion Terminologies

Some of the common terminologies used when talking about Oracle Fusion have been explained below:

• Functional Setup Manager (FSM)
  It is a tool used to configure applications across a project in Fusion.

• Oracle Identity Manager (OIM)
  The OIM is a tool used for user authentication, which includes validating user credentials, creating new users, managing users, deleting users, etc.

• Authorization Policy Manager (APM)
  The APM is another user-related tool used for user authorization, which deals with granting users access to particular areas.

• Weblogic Server
  The weblogic server is the server on which the business logic, pages, and codes are hosted.

• Business Unit
  A business unit is an entity that performs relevant business functions.

• Business Functions
  They are business-related functions that include payables invoicing, payment, requisitioning, customer payment processing, billing, etc. They are enabled through business units.

• Reference Set
  A reference set consists of a set of configuration settings that can be used across business units, like payment terms, payment type, etc.

• Date Effective Hierarchies
  This is a feature of Oracle Fusion, where hierarchies can be given an ‘End Date,’ after which a new version of the hierarchy will be used. Reports can also be generated from earlier versions of the hierarchies.

• COA Structure and Instances
  Chart of Accounts (COA) are divided into two levels: structures and instances.
  The COA structure describes the number of segments, sequence of the segments, segment labels, etc., along with a default value set for each of those segments.
  COA instances use the COA structures to define the required segments, which can have modified value sets according to the instance.

• Role Based Access Control (RBAC)
  This is a feature of Oracle Fusion, which means that the access of users to certain pages and functions is dependent on the role(s) associated with the particular user that have been defined in the OIM or APM.

• Essbase Cube
  It is a multidimensional database that stores data in a pre-aggregate format. This allows the data to be used in reports instantaneously, instead of waiting for a batch process to be submitted and run.

Krishnaa Lakshmanan

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