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eBusiness Suite (EBS) PAG Mid-year Status Report

By Archive User posted 09-17-2012 04:01 AM

  

The first half of the year has seen the EBS PAG continue its work to increase its profile in the HEUG by actively participating on the HEUG board, Product Council calls and volunteering for working groups.

One of our key goals was to increase the numbers of interactions on the EBS list-serve, particularly with non-North American institutions. To meet this goal we have advocated the HEUG and the listserve widely when interacting within our communities and when engaging with schools who are currently not HEUG members. PAG members have been ensuring there are frequent postings on the listserve and have also ensured that postings get good quality responses so that members can see the benefits of these interactions.

The EBS PAG believes knowledge sharing and increased product awareness are key benefits for our members. So we have arranged a number of webinars with Oracle and held quarterly R12 Upgrade experience sharing calls. The R12 upgrade has been a very important topic for EBS users during the last two years and these calls always result in a very high level of participation.

The EBS PAG would like to increase its engagement with Oracle to ensure Higher Education and, in particular, EBS input into Fusion. PAG member institutions have joined several working groups to give their input into how taxation and encumbrances should need to work to meet the HE sectors needs. At the summit we met with the key developer for Fusion Grants and are in the process of engaging with him again to offer out input into product development.

The PAG has been working for several years to get Higher Education specific enhancement requests developed by Oracle. During Alliance we got agreement from Cliff Godwin to engage with Oracle strategist to start exploring these enhancements. A PAG working group collaborated closely with Oracle to explore enhancements for the Grants Accounting module. This was a very successful collaboration and has resulted in Oracle development working on several enhancements requests to be delivered as part of the Release 12 product line.

Several institutions have raised concerns about Oracle support levels and their responsiveness to support requests. The Procure to Pay modules and it’s interaction with Grants Accounting were highlighted as an area of particular concern. The PAG’s Oracle liaison arranged for the PAG to discuss these concerns with the Senior Director of Financials Applications Support. They listened to the feedback from the PAG, discussed changes being implemented at Oracle to help improve the support service and agreed to have to follow up calls to discuss progress.

The EBS PAG sees each year’s Alliance conference as an important time to increase the size of our growing community. We work hard to get a good breadth of topics covered at Alliance to ensure that the delegates feel it is a good value for money. To make sure we are delivering sessions that our delegates will find valuable we have sent out a survey via listserve to ask our members what they want to see covered. We’ll use these results to suggest themes to those thinking about presenting, help us select the sessions for Alliance 2013 and make it the best conference yet for EBS. Indy here we come!

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