Integration with Revenue Management in Oracle Fusion Applications

This article discusses the Inbound Revenue data Integration with Revenue Management in Oracle Fusion Applications. Below are the Objectives of this Article:

1. Understanding inbound integration options with Revenue Management
2. Understanding how Oracle E-Business Suite integrates with Revenue Management
3. Understanding how third party applications integrate with Revenue Management
4. Understanding Outbound integrations with Revenue Management

Before you can perform more work on these integrations, You need to have reference data in place such as enterprise structures, legal entities, ledgers, business units, Parties, Customers, customer accounts, customer account sites and inventory items in the Oracle Cloud. Also, you would need to create a source system and item relationship called Spoke System Relationship.

Defining a Source System

This is part of the prerequisites for integration. Go to the task "Manage trading community source system" and click on "Create" and click on the option "Enable for Items" and also "Enable for Trading Community Members" because we're going to be loading inventory item information as well as customer information into the cloud.

Defining a Spoke System Relationship

A spoke system relationship is a relationship between items and a source system. This is required when integrating with third-party applications. To define a spoke system relationship, you would need to first Define Master Data.

To find out more about Defining a Spoke System Relationship, check out a separate article on Creating Items and Their Spoke System Relationship in Oracle Fusion Applications.

Defining Master Data means that you need customer and inventory item data loaded into Oracle Fusion before you can do integrations. There are predefined templates to upload customer information and import or update inventory items. Once done, you would need to register the source of the integration, called a Source System.

Prior to Performing a third-party or spreadsheet integration, you must register the source system so that you can then bring data into the Oracle Cloud and over to the Revenue Management interface tables. The Steps to Registering a Source System are:

1. Create a source system within the Trading Community Model
2. Import a source system reference file from a Spreadsheet

Inbound Integration to Revenue Management Cloud

There are multiple ways to bring data into Oracle Revenue Management Cloud. As mentioned, it can be through an FBDI template, or the pre-defined integration with E-Business Suite, or a custom program. The entry point for all solutions would be the Universal Content Manager (UCM).

Integration with E-Business Suite

There is out-of-the-box integration with the below E-Business Suite modules

1. Order Management
2. Service Contracts
3. Receivables

These E-Business Suite modules have prebuilt integration because they contain information relevant to Revenue Management Cloud. Service Contracts would contain contract information, Sales orders in Order Management, and invoices and credit memos information in Receivables. 

There is a predefined program in E-Business Suite that extract data from EBS and brings it over to the Cloud via the Universal Content Manager. In turn, the UCM will populate the interface table and will create contracts in Revenue Management Cloud based on rules. Note that there are required steps to configure E-Business Suite integration with Revenue Management.

For more detailed information on Integrating E-Business Suite with Oracle Revenue Management Cloud, check out a separate article: Integrating E-Business Suite with Oracle Revenue Management Cloud

Integration with other Oracle Fusion Cloud Modules

Oracle Revenue Management also tightly integrates with other Oracle Cloud applications such as Fusion Receivables, Cloud Project Financial Management Contracts since both of these applications contain data that's going to be relevant to the new revenue recognition standard.

For Cloud Receivables, source documents such as invoices, credit memos will be relevant to Revenue Management, while for Project Financial Management, it would be documents like contracts, warranties, etc.

There is a pre-defined process called the Extract Revenue Basis Data from Oracle Fusion Applications that will extract data from the other modules and populate the interface tables. After the interface tables have been populated, a process called "Identify Customer Contracts" needs to be run to validate that data and identify customer contracts, the same process used for E-Business Suite.

Setups for Revenue Management Integration with Oracle Cloud applications

There are some required configuration in the page "Manage System Options for Revenue Management". You would need to configure Source Document Types for both Receivables and Project Financial Management. Source documents are documents such as warranty contracts, specific types of invoices, or credit memos, etc.

You would need to specify revenue clearing account for each Source Document Type to identify the default accounting combination. Also, we see extraction start date. This indicates that starting on this date, the data will to be extracted from the Fusion applications and into the interface tables to creating customer contracts.

Additionally for AR, you need to configure Oracle Fusion Receivables Transaction Sources because every single invoice, credit memo, debit memo that you create in Receivables is associated with a transaction source.

Processing Historical Data

It will be important to load historical revenue and billing data for iterative modeling and comparative analysis. In the Manage System Options page, you will need to provide the start date for that particular integration to indicate how far you are going to integrate that source data for modeling.

The revenue standard was effective January 1, 2018, but you might make a decision to go back two years, or three years for modeling and comparative analysis. You can bring that data on or after January 1, 2014 from the E-Business Suite ERP or Financials Cloud ERP. You can not really bring that data over prior to this date.

Spreadsheet Integration using File-Based Data Import

Oracle Fusion has a number of templates that can be used to bring data over into Revenue Management from third-party applications with the use of File-Based Data Import (FBDI) templates. They allow you to bring revenue basis and billing data into the Cloud and over to the Revenue Management interface tables.

If you decide to go with the FBDI template, there are separate FBDI templates you need to use for revenue data (Revenue Basis Data Import) and billing data (Billing Data Import). The template will contain source header data from the source document, sales order, the warranty contract, and sublines that impact satisfaction information. You can download the FBDI template from Oracle Documentation: File-Based Data Import for Financials.

The Revenue Basis Data Import template will have three tabs, each one for different types of data:

1. Header Data (VRM_SOURCE_DOCUMENTS)
2. Line Data (VRM_SOURCE_DOC_LINES)
3. Satisfaction event information (VRM_SOURCE_DOC_SUB_LINES)

While the Billing Data Import only has one tab (VRM_BILLING_LINE_DETAILS).

You need to run an import process to get that CSV data file into the Cloud, called "File Import and Export". After the import process takes the data into the UCM server, run the process "Load Interface File for Import" to populates the Revenue Management interface tables. 

This will trigger the process "Validate Customer Contract Source Data" that will validate the data in the inteface. Next, you would need to run "Identify Customer Contracts" to create customer contracts from the Revenue Management base tables.

Custom Program using a SOAP Web Service

If you decide to go with a custom program, you will need two APIs for this integration, the Revenue Basis Data Import API and the Billing Import API. 

You will have to utilize the Web Service API to place a file in the UCM server. After the file is in the UCM server, you run the same process to load the interface tables ("Load Interface File for Import") and proceed to run another process to automate the five steps to revenue recognition ("Identify Customer Contracts"). 

Error Correction for Integrations

There is a spreadsheet template that Oracle provide that allows you to not only correct import errors but check for errors. This function is called "Correct Contract Document Errors in Spreadsheet" and is found by navigating to the Revenue Management work area.

Outbound Integration

With the use of the subledger accounting engine, we are going to generate journals in Revenue Management. Those journals will end up either in a target General Ledger. If your target General Ledger is Fusion GL, We're not going to do any outbound transactions because the journals are going to stay within the cloud.

However, if you are using EBS, what will happen here is that you will run Create Accounting as you normally would do. A data file will be created and sent over to the Universal Content Manager, then you then run a process to import those journal entries from the cloud and into E-Business Suite. This data is going to go to the GL interface tables in EBS. You can then run an import process that takes the data to the EBS GL production tables. It creates the journals. After you create the journals, then you can post those journals in EBS GL.

There are certain setups you have to do in the cloud to allow for this outbound integration with EBS. And so here you see the name of the task, Manage Subledger Application. Pick the desired application ("Revenue Management") and choose the application you'll transfer the Ledgers to. There is an option to transfer to EBS. You have to go with this option here to transfer ledgers externally to EBS.

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