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CRM For beginners

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a process or methodology used to learn more about customers’ needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. CRM helps businesses gain insight into the behavior of customers. This in turn can help businesses to Provide better customer service, Increase customer revenues, Discover new customers,
Cross sell/Up Sell products more effectively, Help sales staff close deals faster,Make call centers more efficient and Simplify marketing and sales processes. CRM is more than just technology, its a strategy. It is about the interactions of the entire business with your customers.

Typically a CRM solution would cover broad areas of Marketing, Sales and Service.

Things are looking bright for CRM professionals over the next year, according to a number of recent reports, job boards and industry developments. Year 2007 has seen couple of postponement of CRM projects just for the simple reason of unavailability of skilled consultants. That shortage of skills seems to be translating into increased pay for those that have them. Last year, the financial services industry had the most demand for CRM jobs, followed by manufacturing and healthcare & then services.

Major players in the CRM domain are SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. With Siebel, Oracle CRM and Peoplesoft CRM customers to serve, it seems that Oracle would be busy in serving the huge client base as well as getting them togther.

Oracle’s acquisition of Siebel will hit SAP hard and make it more difficult for Microsoft to make inroads into the enterprise market. So its all going to be interesting !

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Oracle Cost Management – Standard costing

Standard costing is used by Customers who employ predetermined costs for valuing inventory and for charging material, resource, overhead, period close, and job close and schedule complete transactions. Differences between standard costs and actual costs are recorded as variances.

Manufacturing industries typically use standard costing. Costs of items can be shared across organizations using standard costing.

The unit cost of any item is the sum of the costs of all the cost elements.
There are 5 cost elements, which are defined as follows:

1. Material — The raw material/component cost at the lowest level of the bill of
material determined from the unit cost of the component item.

2. Material Overhead — The overhead cost of material, which can be used for any costs attributed to direct material costs.

3. Resource — Direct costs, such as people (labor), machines, space, or miscellaneous charges, required to manufacture products.

4. Overhead — The overhead cost of resource and outside processing, which is
used as a means to allocate department costs or activities.

5. Outside Processing — This is the cost of outside processing purchased from a supplier.

Sub-elements can be used as smaller classifications of the cost elements. Each cost element must be associated with one or more sub-elements. An amount or rate is attached to each sub element.

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Sys Administrator Setup Tasks


After you log on to Oracle System Administrator, complete the following steps to set up your Oracle Applications:

Create Accounts for Implementors to Complete Setting Up
Create individual Oracle Applications accounts for users who will be completing the implementation of your Oracle Applications. Assign these users the full access responsibilities for the products they will be implementing.
Create New Responsibilities (Optional)
A responsibility in Oracle Applications is a level of authority that determines how much of an application’s functionality a user can use, what requests and concurrent programs the user can run, and which applications’ data those requests and concurrent programs can access. Oracle Applications provides a set of predefined responsibilities that you can use. You can also define your own responsibilities if the ones provided do not meet your needs.
Set Up Oracle Applications Manager
Oracle Applications Manager (OAM) allows you to configure and maintain many components of the Oracle Applications system.
Define Your Concurrent Managers (Optional)
Concurrent Processing is a feature of Oracle Applications that lets you perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Oracle Applications Concurrent Processing lets you run long, data-dependent functions at the same time as your users perform online operations. Concurrent managers are components of concurrent processing that monitor and run your time-consuming tasks without tying up your computers.
Oracle Applications automatically installs one standard concurrent manager that can run every request. You may want to take advantage of the flexibility of concurrent managers to control throughput on your system.
You can define as many concurrent managers as you need. Keep in mind, however, that each concurrent manager consumes additional memory.
You can specialize each of your concurrent managers so that they run all requests, requests submitted by a particular user, requests submitted by a particular application, or other constraints, or any combination of these constraints.
If you are using Parallel Concurrent Processing in a cluster, massively parallel, or homogeneous networked environment, you should register your Nodes and then assign your concurrent managers to primary and secondary nodes. You can spread your concurrent managers, and therefore your concurrent processing, across all
available nodes to fully utilize hardware resources.
Use the Define Concurrent Manager form to define new concurrent managers
Define Request Sets (Optional)
A request set is a group of reports or programs which you submit with one request. To define and maintain request sets, use the Request Sets form.
Specify Preferences for Oracle Workflow Notifications (Required)
The SYSADMIN user is the default recipient for some types of notifications in Oracle Applications, such as error notifications. You need to specify how you want to receive these notifications by defining the notification preference and e-mail address for the SYSADMIN user.
By default, the SYSADMIN user has a notification preference to receive e-mail notifications. To enable Oracle Workflow to send e-mail to this user, navigate to the Users window and assign SYSADMIN an e-mail address that is fully qualified with a valid domain. However, if you want to access notifications only through the Oracle
Workflow Worklist Web page, then you should change the notification preference for SYSADMIN to “Do not send me mail” in the Preferences page. In this case you do not need to define an e-mail address.
Set Up AuditTrail (Optional)
If you want to keep track of the changes made to your data by application users, you should set up AuditTrail for the relevant tables.
Defining AuditTrail for your site involves defining Audit Groups, which are groups of tables and columns for which you intend to track changes. You then define Audit Installations to instruct AuditTrail which ORACLE IDs you want to audit. Finally, you run the Audit Trail Update Tables Report, which allows your AuditTrail definitions to take effect.
Set Up Your Printers
You must define any printer types used at your site that are not shipped with Oracle Applications, then register each printer with its name as determined by your operating system.
For every custom printer type or specialized print style you define, use the Printer Drivers form to assign a printer driver to use with each print style used by a printer type Specify Your Site-level and Application-level Profile Options
Use the System Profile Values form (Profile > System) to set site-level and other profile optons..
Optionally set your Site Name profile option to your site name. Many profile options are set by AutoConfig and their values can be reviewed in Oracle Applications Manager.
Define Internationalization Options (Optional)
Optionally define settings for internationalization features.
Modify Language Prompts (Optional) : If you want to modify the field name displayed in the Translations window, you should change the Description value for the language you want to modify in the Languages window.
Modify Territory LOV Values (Optional) : If you want to modify the territory value displayed in LOVs, you should change the Description value for the territory you want to modify in the Territories window.

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Oracle Applications Manager


Oracle Applications Manager (OAM) allows administrators to manage Oracle E-Business Suite systems from an HTML console. Utilities available from OAM include Oracle Workflow Manager, Patch Wizard, and Concurrent Processing monitoring tools.
With Oracle Applications Manager, system administrators can view information on general system activity including the statuses of the database, concurrent managers and other services, concurrent requests, and Oracle Workflow processes. OAM provides a summary of configuration changes, infrastructure usage, performance, required
maintenance activities, potential security issues, status of business flows, and diagnostic test results. In addition, they can manage downtime and patching. System administrators can also start or stop services, and submit concurrent requests.
Using Oracle Workflow Manager, administrators can control Workflow system services, such background engines, the Notification Mailer, agent listeners, queue propagation, and purging obsolete Workflow data. OAM utilities are generally available from two main screens: the Applications Dashboard and Site Map
Oracle Applications Manager uses with Oracle Application Object Library’s function security model. You can create custom responsibilities and menus to control access to specific OAM features. These features can thus be directly available from the E-Business Suite Home Page.
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Restricting Access to Responsibilities Based on User’s Web Server

Oracle Applications has the capability to restrict access to a responsibility based upon the Web server from which the user logs in. This capability is provided by tagging Web servers with a “server trust level.”
The server trust level indicates the level of trust associated with the Web server.
Currently, three trust levels are supported: 1) administrative, 2) normal, and 3) external.
Web servers marked as “administrative” are typically those used exclusively by system administrators. These servers are considered secure and may contain highly sensitive  information. Servers marked as “normal” are those used by employees within a company’s firewall. Users logging in from normal servers have access to only a limited
set of responsibilities. Lastly, servers marked as “external” are those used by customers or employees outside of a company’s firewall. These servers have access to an even smaller set of responsibilities.
Setting the Server Trust Level for a Server
To assign a trust level to a Web server, set the Node Trust Level profile option. The Node Trust Level profile option uses the Server profile hierarchy type, meaning that the value of the profile depends on the particular middle-tier server accessing the profile.
This profile option can be set to either 1, 2, or 3, with the following meanings.
• 1 – Administrative
• 2 – Normal
• 3 – External
To avoid having to set the Node Trust Level profile option for every Web server, you may wish to set it to a default level of trust at the site level, such as level 1. If no value is set for the Node Trust Level profile option for a Web server, the Web server is assumed to have a trust level of 1 (Administrative).
Restricting Access to a Responsibility
To restrict access to a responsibility, set the security-based Responsibility Trust Level (internal name APPL_SERVER_TRUST_LEVEL) profile option value for that responsibility to be the number 1, 2, or 3. Setting this profile value ensures that only Web servers with the same or greater privileged trust level may access that responsibility.
Like the Node Trust Level profile option, the default value for the Responsibility Trust Level is 1.
When fetching the list of valid responsibilities for a user, Oracle Applications checks to find only responsibilities with a Responsibility Trust Level value greater than or equal to the Web server’s Node Trust Level. In this way, a responsibility with Responsibility Trust Level set to 1 would only be available if the Web server has the Node Trust Level set to 1 as well. A responsibility with Responsibility Trust Level set to 2 would only be available if the Web server has Node Trust Level set to either 1 or 2.
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