Reduce Costs and Improve Customer Service by Automating Oracle EBS Tasks

When businesses try to find more efficient ways of doing business, they often ignore some of the easiest ways to save time and money. Automating repetitive tasks is one of those things that can fall through the cracks. Automating Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) tasks is a perfect example of something that is easy to do but saves a significant amount of time, and therefore money, as time goes on.

The Benefits of Automating Oracle EBS Tasks

Oracle EBS drives a number of complex applications such as ERP, CRM, and Supply Chain Management. Its complexity requires more management than many other types of installations. Because Oracle EBS is involved in so many mission-critical activities, ensuring that it runs optimally is critical.

Automating many of Oracle EBS’s repetitive tasks provides a range of benefits:

• Able to reassign DBAs to perform more valuable work once you relieve them of mundane, repetitive tasks.
• Manage today’s talent shortage by retaining talented DBAs when you provide them with more challenging work.
• Eliminate human error that is inevitable when employees complete boring, repetitive tasks.
• Receive automated alerts that let you address issues before they become problems.
• Avoid having your users notify you of system problems before you’re aware of them.
• Increase the level of service you provide to your users.

How can you automate Oracle EBS tasks? We have worked with many clients to help them write custom code to create software bots that complete repetitive or mundane tasks without human intervention.

The Top 7 Automation Opportunities in Oracle EBS

Luckily, there are many repetitive tasks that you can automate to make managing your Oracle EBS installation more efficient. Here are the top seven tasks that software bots can easily automate.

1. Clones and Refreshes

   You need to create clones and refresh them to create environments for a number of reasons, including development, training, and quality assurance. At Datavail, we have automated a clone that took 12 hours to complete. Now it takes three hours, and no intervention is needed. With that software bot in place, you can give your DBAs time to do more valuable tasks.

 

2. Daily Dashboard and Health Checks

   Your DBAs need to evaluate the health of your systems every day. The checklist of daily checks can be lengthy, especially if your DBAs are monitoring more than one environment. Software bots can turn a task that usually requires hours of logging in and out of systems to perform checks manually into an automated task that only takes a few minutes.

   Another excellent feature you get when you automate daily checks is that the reports are produced at different levels of detail to meet the needs of different audiences. Making these reports automatic, and eliminating human error, can often help identify problems before affecting users.

 

3. Concurrent Managers and Workflow Monitoring and Alerting

   Concurrent operations are at the heart of the Oracle EBS application. If the concurrent managers and workflow components aren’t operating at peak performance or running with their assigned processes, requests may not be processed optimally or at all. It doesn’t take long for users to identify that a problem exists.

   The beauty of automating these processes is that you will get alerts that help you identify a problem. No one needs to be assigned to do manual checks. You can frequently fix manager problems before they cause a significant problem.

 

4. Detecting Concurrent Requests: Pending, Long Running, and Errored

   Automating Oracle EBS tasks such as tracking pending, long running, and errored requests let you be proactive rather than reactive when problems occur. Whether your system has pending, long running, or errored requests, your Oracle EBS installation is about to affect important business operations.

   For example, many of your users won’t monitor their scheduled requests. If a request related to a mission-critical operation fails to run successfully, it will affect the outcome of those processes. That situation can have a substantial impact on your business operations.

 

5. Lingering Sessions

   Sessions can linger on Oracle EBS, which take up an amazing amount of system resources. Sessions can also create shadow sessions that tie up memory and processes as well as lock  other sessions from running.

 

6. Performance Tuning

   You can create automated reports to identify requirements for performance tuning. Rather than scrolling through hundreds of SQLs to find the ones that need to be tuned, you can let the software bot identify them for you.

 

7. Request Sets and Month-End Close Activities

   The month-end close process is often complicated and requires the involvement of employees in almost every department. Having a software bot to check the status of request sets can save untold time, frustration, and costs.

   There are other tasks that can be automated beyond these top seven. Consider the effect on your operations if you could automate configuring UNIX, migrating code, comparing code, or performing security audits and vulnerability patches.

Next Steps

If you have an Oracle EBS installation to manage, learn more about automating Oracle EBS tasks to make your life easier by contacting an Oracle EBS expert today!