The mission of the EBS PAG is as follows: The E-Business Suite Product Advisory Group (EBS PAG) will be the link between the higher education institution users of the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Corporation for application enhancements, extensions and problem resolution. The EBS PAG will work to define the needs of member institutions for improvements in the Release 12 and Fusion applications to sustain quality business functionality. The PAG will also encourage and generate dialog among higher education institutions relative to lessons learned, technical help, application extensions, etc. The EBS PAG members will strive for consensus value for all user members. We will retain open communications among institutions of higher education to solicit input to issues of application usage. We will represent the entire EBS user base, not just specific institutions.
The Oracle EBS PAG has worked hard over the last year to achieve our 2009/2010 goals. We added Joe Addeo, a new Oracle strategist to our group last year, a move that has enabled us to have greater visibility into Oracle and expand our training opportunities for our members. Details on our activities over the year and progress towards our goals are included below.
Goal 1: Increase membership in the HEUG
- Initiative: Offer topics of interest to other EBS schools and invite them to participate in discussions. We engaged in an initiative to contact EBS institutions who are not active members of the HEUG to encourage membership and engagement in the HEUG, with limited success. We have had more success in engaging current HEUG institutions in attending webinars that we have begun sponsoring with Oracle on topics such as Subledger Accounting (SLA) in Oracle EBS Release 12, EBS Integration with PeopleSoft Service Pack 2, and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). We have posted these webinars to the HEUG site in an attempt to engage those members who were not able to participate in the webinars.
- Initiative: Attend local OAUG events; spread awareness with other EBS schools. Our members have attended OAUG events and spread the word about HEUG and the EBS PAG, but it has been difficult to track concrete results. We have also held discussions with the Public Sector user group about potential collaboration opportunities, but have found that most members are using PeopleSoft rather than EBS
Goal 2: Increase EBS visibility with Oracle through the HEUG.
- Initiative: Lobby the HEUG Board to champion EBS enhancements to Oracle. We collected from our members a list of enhancement requests and voted on the prioritization of the list. We then provided the list to Cliff Godwin; our EBS PAG liaisons to the Board held a discussion with Cliff on the enhancements. We are awaiting further developments.
- Initiative: Lobby the HEUG Board to champion Oracle to move out the desupport date from November 2010 to November 2011. Update: SUCCESS!!! The PAG and members of the HEUG Board championed the moving out of this date; due to their efforts and a general rallying cry from other EBS institutions, Oracle has moved this date out by one year.
- Initiative: Get EBS member schools to vote on a topic for a white paper and volunteer to participate. Rather than writing a white paper, two of our PAG members will be presenting on the topic “key personnel mass update capability” at Alliance 2010.
- Initiative: Invite another PAG expert who has been successful at lobbying Oracle to advise us on best practices. We have had conversations with the OAUG Federal SIG about lobbying Oracle for enhancement requests, since they have been so successful in this endeavor and received agreement to add our enhancements to their requested enhancement list and add our “vote” to enhancement requests that were common among both groups.
Goal 3: Establish communication channels among the EBS institutions
- Initiative: Use the HEUG site for information sharing to other EBS institutions. We posted the Oracle webinars we have co-sponsored to the site and have begun posting blogs on topics such as the delayed desupport charges for EBS R12.