Seeded XML Publisher Templates for Financial Reports in Oracle e-Business Suite version 11.5.10.2 and Release 12

According to Oracle Release 12 offers flexible, XML-based solutions for 70% of all reports in the Financial modules. Who cares, when it’s the alltime hottest sunday afternoon in the Netherlands (29 degrees in April) ? I admit.I "care" … , but only after enjoying the beautiful weather first.

Does Oracle really deliver a flexible, out-of-the-box solution for 70% of the standard Financial reports ? Let’s investigate by counting seeded XML Publisher templates in Oracle e-Business Suite 11.5.10.2 and Release 12 (Vision demo environment). I will focus on the reports in the following modules: General Ledger, Receivables, Payables, Cash Management and Assets.

Oracle e-Business Suite and XML Publisher functionality

Let me first give you a introduction of using XML Publisher functionallity within Oracle e-Business Suite. XML Publisher is introduced in the later 11i versions of Oracle e-Business Suite (EBS). XML Publisher makes it possible to merge XML-output (generated by using Oracle Report or FSG report) with pre-defined report templates (layout).

Pre defined reporting templates can be found (and maintained) in the responsibility "XML Publisher Administrator". Templates are categorized by application name (f.e. Receivables, General Ledger). Within the "XML Publisher Administrator" responsibility you can also register your own company specific layouts. You can make a quick start by customizing (company specific layout changes) a copy of a seeded template. In the example below we will generate a company specific layout for a FSG report based upon this approach.

So, before we ran the report we customized a company specific reporting template starting from an existing reporting template.

1. In "XML Publisher Administrator" I selected a template already available (in the Vision demo environment). I opened the template to check the layout.

2. I made a copy of this FSG Balance Sheet template and I renamed this "AMIS-template" (Vision demo environment).

3. I opened the copy of the template and added our AMIS-logo in the header of the reporting template.

4. Now I was ready to run the FSG-report using the AMIS-balance-template. I submitted the FSG-balance sheet-report request as General Ledger Superuser. I selected XML as desired output.

5. After the request completed I opened the generated XML-file from the request screen.This wasn’ t the report layout I had in mind. It’s "only" the XML-file containing the data to publish/report. I still had to run the request that merges this data with the reporting template.

6. I started the XML Publisher-request and generated my AMIS-Balance sheet.I passed the XML-output, generated just before, as one of the input parameters. When this request was finished I opened the output of this request….and indeed, the AMIS-Balance Sheet appeared.

So far, so good. Most important: I did have a "seeded" template which gave me a quick start in defining my company specific template.

Seeded Reporting Templates in Release 12

Back to the main question of this article: does Release 12 offer the promissed number of reporting templates ? Does Release 12 really offer reporting templates for nearly 70% of the Financial reports ? Let’s investigate the numbers of seeded templates in the Financial modules (as mentioned before) of EBS version 11.5.10.2 and Release 12. Attention: this investigation is based upon the data in two fresh installs of the Vision demo environments.

The XML Publisher reporting templates found in 11.5.10.2 are listed below (only four):

Version 11.5.10.2 contains no reporting templates for the other Financial modules in my scope (Receivables, Payables, Cash Management and Assets).

The XML Publisher reporting templates found in Release 12 are listed below:

General Ledger:

Receivables:

Payables:

Fixed Assets:

Cash Management:

Version 11.5.10.2 doesn’t contain a lot of seeded Financial reporting templates (only four in General Ledger).Release 12 really offers more seeded templates for Financial reports. Fixed Assets exceeds the other Finance modules.Templates of some important external reports are still missing ! Where are the Customer Invoice and Dunning Letter reporting templates?

Does Release 12 deliver out-of-the-box reporting templates for nearly 70% of all Financial reports? No, I don’t think so. Of course, some templates do cover more than one report but 70% …. ? Based on the Financial-scope and the criteria (number of seeded templates) we stay far below this 70% ….

Did I misinterpret the partner release 12 news of Oracle in The Netherlands on 23 Feb 2007 or is my research/conclusion wrong ?

Hope to hear from anyone who knows more …