WP_Query Object( [query] => Array ( [post_type] => blog [posts_per_page] => -1 [orderby] => post_date [order] => DESC [ignore_sticky_posts] => 1 ) [query_vars] => Array ( [post_type] => blog [posts_per_page] => -1 [orderby] => post_date [order] => DESC [ignore_sticky_posts] => 1 [error] => [m] => [p] => 0 [post_parent] => [subpost] => [subpost_id] => [attachment] => [attachment_id] => 0 [name] => [pagename] => [page_id] => 0 [second] => [minute] => [hour] => [day] => 0 [monthnum] => 0 [year] => 0 [w] => 0 [category_name] => [tag] => [cat] => [tag_id] => [author] => [author_name] => [feed] => [tb] => [paged] => 0 [meta_key] => [meta_value] => [preview] => [s] => [sentence] => [title] => [fields] => [menu_order] => [embed] => [category__in] => Array ( ) [category__not_in] => Array ( ) [category__and] => Array ( ) [post__in] => Array ( ) [post__not_in] => Array ( ) [post_name__in] => Array ( ) [tag__in] => Array ( ) [tag__not_in] => Array ( ) [tag__and] => Array ( ) [tag_slug__in] => Array ( ) [tag_slug__and] => Array ( ) [post_parent__in] => Array ( ) [post_parent__not_in] => Array ( ) [author__in] => Array ( ) [author__not_in] => Array ( ) [suppress_filters] => [cache_results] => 1 [update_post_term_cache] => 1 [lazy_load_term_meta] => 1 [update_post_meta_cache] => 1 [nopaging] => 1 [comments_per_page] => 50 [no_found_rows] => ) [tax_query] => WP_Tax_Query Object ( [queries] => Array ( ) [relation] => AND [table_aliases:protected] => Array ( ) [queried_terms] => Array ( ) [primary_table] => tet_posts [primary_id_column] => ID ) [meta_query] => WP_Meta_Query Object ( [queries] => Array ( ) [relation] => [meta_table] => [meta_id_column] => [primary_table] => [primary_id_column] => [table_aliases:protected] => Array ( ) [clauses:protected] => Array ( ) [has_or_relation:protected] => ) [date_query] => [request] => SELECT tet_posts.* FROM tet_posts WHERE 1=1 AND tet_posts.post_type = 'blog' AND (tet_posts.post_status = 'publish' OR tet_posts.post_status = 'acf-disabled') ORDER BY tet_posts.menu_order, tet_posts.post_date DESC [posts] => Array ( [0] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5275 [post_author] => 6 [post_date] => 2021-06-09 20:49:46 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-06-09 16:49:46 [post_content] =>

How to setup Document of Record (DOR) for Salary Certificates

The following case shows how to use the Document of Record (DOR) functionality on Oracle ERP Cloud by implementing the salary certificate request which is usually requested manually from the HR department. Applying the standard Document of Record functionally will reduce the manual work and expedite the process.

The following information represents the HR requirements to issue a salary certificate:

 To implement the above requirement, we need to follow the following: 

1.      Create Document Category

Setup Information

• Document categories (for example, absence) provide a way to group these documents into meaningful categories at a higher level. Document subcategories (for example, general or medical) provide further grouping of documents. Use the DOCUMENT_CATEGORY lookup type to define new document categories and subcategories. Define document categories as values for the DOCUMENT_CATEGORY lookup type and document subcategories as extended lookup values for the selected category.

 

• To create a category search for the task, Manage Common Lookups and then search for the lookup type DOCUMENT_CATEGORY. Under section DOCUMENT_CATEGORY: Lookup Codes you will see several categories delivered by oracle. You can make use of them or create your own category. For our business requirement, we will create a new category called Reimbursement. For the same click on the + (new) icon and enter details as follows.

 Lookup Code: CERTIFICATEEnabled: YesMeaning: CertificatesDescription: Certificates 

•  Once you entered all these details, click the Save and Close button.

 

2.      Create Document Subcategories

Setup Information

• Now as per the requirements, we will create two subcategories. To create subcategories, search for the task Manage Extended Lookup Codes. You will be on the Extended Lookup Codes On this screen search for entry Document Category under section Lookup Types. Now scroll below and under the section Document Category: Manage Extended Lookup Codes click on + Add icon, to create subcategories.

 

• Now add all your subcategories one by one and click on save.

  

• Once you enter all these details, click Save.

   

3.      Create Document Types

                       Setup Information

• To create Document Types, search for the task Document Types. In the Search Results section, click on the + Create button and enter the details for each section as given below.

 Document Type Information

• Name: Salary Certificate
• Country: United Arab Emirates
• Category: Certificate
• Subcategory: Salary Certificate
• Status: Active
• Minimum Attachments: 1 employee has to attach at least one document, but we will keep it 0 no documents required
• Approval Required: Yes
• Allow Multiple Occurrences: Yes. This allows the employee to submit multiple requests.
• Publish Required: No. If you require any document to be available only between selected time, choose Yes. But since we want workers to submit reimburse anytime it is set to No.
• Enable Document Delivery Preference: No

 Document Record Preferences

• Restrict Create: No
• Restrict Update: Yes, we do need the employee to update the approved request so select Yes.
• Restrict Delete: Yes, we do need the employee to update the approved request so select Yes.

 Attributes 

Name	Relevant	Required
Document Name	Yes	Yes
Document Number	No	No
From Date	No	No
To Date	No	No
Issuing Country	No	No
Issuing Location	No	No
Issuing Authority	No	No
Issued On	No	No
Issuing Comments	No	No

 

• Now add all your subcategories one by one (Salary Certificate) and click on save.

  

• After you enter all the details, click on the Submit You will receive a confirmation message. Click on the OK button and you will be taken back to the Documents Type page. Once you save the record, you will not be able to change the attributes highlighted in red.

 

• You can create another document. You do not need to enter all the details from scratch. You have the option to copy/duplicate existing documents. Let’s see how it works.

 

• When you are on the Documents Type page, search for the document we just created -Salary Certificate Letter.

 

• You will see the document in the search result section. While that document name is selected, click on the Duplicate button. This will take you to Create Document Type page. On this screen, you can update/change the details as per the requirement.

 

• For another certificate, if required etc. salary transfer certificate, every detail would be the same expecting the following attributes, so change these values and save the record.

 

• Type: Certificate

 

• Subcategory: Create a new one called (Salary Transfer Certificate)

   

4.      Create Contexts Sensitive Segments

General Information

As per the requirement, we also need to create the following context-sensitive fields for the Salary Certificate letter request.

 To get it done, search for the task Document Records Descriptive Flexfields and open it.  You will be on Document Records Descriptive Flexfields page. On this screen, click on the Edit button.   

On this screen, click the Manage Contexts button which takes you to the Manage Contexts page. On this screen click on the + Create button under the Search Results section, this will take you to Create Context. Your screen will look like this.

  

How to get the context code for Document of Record?

Now to have our segments populated based on the document type we select; we need to know the Context  Code of our document type. There are two ways to get the Context Code.

 

Get context code from the back end

The context code of a document type is stored in the table HR_DOCUMENT_TYPES_B So you can run the query below to get the context code of any document type.

select system_document_type,

document_type_id,

category_code,

sub_category_code,

legislation_code,

creation_date

from hr_document_types_b

 order by creation_date  desc Context codes are in uppercase and prefixed with the country code. If you see the extract above, our context codes for, (Salary certificate) are listed below.How these codes are generated is explained in the second method.

• GLB_SAAED_SALARY_CERTIFICATE

 

Now we have got the context code, let’s enter the details as follows:

• Display Name: GLB_SALARY_CERTIFICATE
• Context Code: GLB_SALARY_CERTIFICATE
• API Name: Accept Default
• Enabled: Yes

 Once you click on the Save button, menus under the section Context-Sensitive Segments will become active. Now click on the + Create button under the Context Sensitive Segments section. One by one, enter all your segments here. Once done, click on the Save and Close button. You will be taken back to the Manage Contexts page. Just follow the steps above to create segments for the Transfer letter.  Click on Save and Close again and you will be on Document Records Descriptive Flexfields page. Click on the Save and Close button and again, and you will be on the screen below.  Click on the  Deploy Flexfield button and let the process complete. 

5.      How employees can use Document of Record

To check the DOR that we created,

• Navigate to Me » Personal Information » Document Record

 

• You will be taken to the Document Records page. Click on the + Add button to add a document.

 

• Then search for the document name (Salary Certificate)

  

• After you select the Salary Certificate request, the document will open like the below screen and will automatically select the Context Value that we have created and you will see the segment.

  

• Based on the input, it will go for approval, if you keep the DOR without approval it will reflect on the employee DOR profile directly.

  Author: Ahmed Mosad, Senior Oracle HCM Consultant [post_title] => Document of Record (DOR) in Oracle ERP Cloud [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => document-of-record-dor-in-oracle-erp-cloud [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-06-09 20:49:46 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-06-09 16:49:46 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.tahaluf.ae/?post_type=blog&p=5275 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => blog [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5259 [post_author] => 6 [post_date] => 2021-06-09 20:34:49 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-06-09 16:34:49 [post_content] =>

Is it the end of CNNs? What is Multi-Layer Perceptron?

For many years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been the cornerstone of any computer vision architecture. Image Analysis requires feature extraction and the key component that is responsible for that task is CNN. For example, given an image, the convolution layer detects features such as two eyes, long ears, four legs, a short tail, and so on. The CNN is responsible for numerous applications in computer vision such as Face Recognition - knowing the identity of the person in the image, Object Detection - determining the location of an object, and Video Analysis- classifying the behavior of an individual.

Despite the importance of CNN and its applications, the rise of Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP-Mixer) has opened the door to new architectures that show competitive performance without the need for CNN layers which makes us wonder about the future of CNNs in deep learning and computer vision applications.

In this article, we will give a quick brief about the newly released MLP-mix architecture and try to figure out if it threatens the position of CNNs in the field of computer vision. Especially when we know that the new proposed “MLP-Mixer” achieves very close results to the SOTA models trained on tons of data with almost 3x the speed without using any convolutions or any self-attention layers.

 

MLP for Computer Vision Applications

Last month, the Google AI team published a paper entitled "MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision" (code is available on GitHub) where they proposed a new computer vision architecture that depends only on multi-layer perceptrons. According to the team, "In this paper, we show that while convolutions and attention are both sufficient for good performance, neither of them are necessary. We present MLP-Mixer, an architecture based exclusively on multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs)" 

Moreover, and interestingly, the new model achieves similar results compared to the state-of-the-art models trained on large datasets with almost 3x speed. “When trained on large datasets, MLP-Mixer attains competitive scores on image classification benchmarks, with pre-training and inference cost comparable to state-of-the-art models,” claimed Google AI.

The following table shows the inference throughput of the MLP-mixer compared to SOTA models. The MLP-mixer clearly outperformed many models achieving 105 images/sec/core, while a model such as vision transformer is at 32 images/sec/core only.

  The interesting thing is that MLP is the basic unit of deep neural network which makes the architecture of the MLP-mixer model really simple.   

How does MLP-mixer work?

While in CNNs, the image is passed to the network and the processing is performed on the pixels of the images, the MLP-mixer follows the patches approach. The image is divided into patches and then passed as an input to the network. The mixer of the model contains two types of layers. The first one mixes the channels of the image, while the other one performs a mix between patches to ensure communication between spatial features of the image.

 

Figure 1- Source: MLP-Mixer on arxiv

  

What makes MLP-mixer attract the attention

The previous image illustrates the architecture of the mixer layers. It contains two fully connected layers, GELU nonlinearity, skip-connections, layer norm, and linear classifier. That shows the simplicity of the model which depends essentially on matrix multiplication, while Convolution is more complex than the plain matrix multiplication in MLPs as it requires an additional cost reduction to matrix multiplication or specialized implementation. Furthermore, the MLP-mixer takes the same size of the input at each layer which eliminates the need of scaling down the image such as in CNN.

Conclusion

It is just the beginning and as the Google AI team says, "…we hope that our results spark further research, beyond the realms of established models based on convolutions and self-attention". So, we expect to see more research focused on this point resulting in more improved and advanced architectures to solve computer vision problems such as image classification and object detection which may create a new stream that pulls the trigger on CNNs.

  Author: Moaaz Abdelrahman ElMarakby, Computer Vision Engineer [post_title] => Multi-layer perceptron is all you need … Is it the end of CNNs? [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => multi-layer-perceptron-is-all-you-need-is-it-the-end-of-cnns [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-06-09 20:48:18 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-06-09 16:48:18 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.tahaluf.ae/?post_type=blog&p=5259 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => blog [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5093 [post_author] => 6 [post_date] => 2021-05-06 15:11:28 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-05-06 11:11:28 [post_content] =>

Waterfall + Agile: Waterfallgile

 Have you heard about this management approach? Have you ever considered this approach to run and manage your daily work? There is no such thing as "The Best" or the "Most Comprehensive" approach to follow, but all project management approaches are fine to implement as long as it serves the project desires and success.Dealing with day-to-day activities as a business analyst or project manager needs a well-designed project management approach. And as we know, most methods that are used nowadays and have the appropriate maturity is the Waterfall management approach or the Agile method. 

Waterfall VS Agile

It's all about how to manage the client's expectations and how to achieve the project's desires, so in any project, the success points or milestones need to be identified from the very beginning.The Agile approach is adopted to identify the project milestones, implemented through something called sprint planning. This way, it will give the client and the project controller the ability to predict. So maybe at this point, we could use a "milestone" word to refer to sprint, but in most cases, the sprint plan won't be able to achieve something tangible, or in another term, something the client sees.

"The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them — preferably in unexpected and helpful ways"

So again, it's all about client expectations and how to achieve the set milestones.The Waterfall management approach also cares about the client's expectations and could be more useful to fulfill the project's desires, and also could be a good approach to enhance the project's profitability by identifying full package milestones including specific deliverables on a specific date. In this case, both parties won't need to revisit the plan and keep going forward to finish the full project release.Maybe implementing the Waterfall method will give the stakeholders what they need from the beginning (project kick-off), to achieve the full delivery with full covered desires, so in this case, the project plan will be built on predefined milestones along with a specific full delivery date. But there are a lot of assumptions that need to be considered if we're willing to follow this approach, such as the full requirements of a predefined project which would impact the cost if major changes happened during the development. And the most important thing is how to achieve full delivery without client involvement, and also how to run the project with full requirements from the beginning?The Waterfall approach is like a domino effect.  It needs one event to knock on, affecting the whole project, but it needs more if obstacles start appearing. Agile is a process by which a team can manage a project by breaking it up into several stages and involving constant collaboration with stakeholders and continuous improvement and iteration at every stage.The methodology begins with clients describing how the end product will be used and what problem it will solve. The client in this approach needs to be well-educated and know about the most efficient way to get the final results.Eventually, as I said earlier, it's all about the client's expectation and the project profitability that allows us to decide which approach will get the most benefit.There are a lot of aspects that need to be considered to know which approach to follow as shown in the table below:Considering all the mentioned aspects, it still depends on what I need to accomplish and what the client needs to see. Say I have a demanding client that needs to be highly engaged, it's better to implement the Agile method. But what if the client demands exceed my expectations? Do I need to implement a requirement document and get it signed-off to minimize the changes requests? Or maybe implement a high-level project charter?Now, is there a way that you can use these two development methodologies to work on a single project? Is there anything called Waterfallgile? Do we use it unawarely? Could it be considered as a hyper management approach? Waterfallgile is an approach that could be the best of both methods. The reason the two methodologies can work harmoniously is that Agile is more of a mindset and approach than a methodology, so it’s possible to use the Agile philosophy with the more rigid Waterfall methodology.   Author: Saif Al Najjar, Business Analyst Team Lead [post_title] => Waterfallgile [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => waterfallgile [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-05-19 11:10:44 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-05-19 07:10:44 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.tahaluf.ae/?post_type=blog&p=5093 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => blog [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [3] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5085 [post_author] => 6 [post_date] => 2021-04-22 11:02:40 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-04-22 07:02:40 [post_content] => Lies spread faster than truth, fake news and misleading headlines can fool millions of watchers and readers, and the ability to alter reality has taken a leap forward with the prevalence of “deepfake” technology.Deepfake technology doesn’t only have the ability to produce fake news but it is also used in financial fraud, hoaxes, and pornography. 

What is a Deepfake?

The term Deepfake melds two words: deep and fake. It combines the concept of deep learning which is a subfield of artificial intelligence with creating content that isn’t real.Deepfakes are generated images, videos, and sounds created by Deep learning algorithms for real people doing things they never did or said and it’s hard to detect by the average user.It gained more attention after a lot of users used it for making pornography for celebrities and fake videos for politicians saying and doing things they never did or said which is a real threat.Below is a deepfake image of Jim Carrey instead of Jack Nicholson in the movie ‘The Shining’.  

How does Deep Fake work?

The technique first extracts information about the anonymous subject’s facial expressions by finding the positions of their eyes, ears, shoulders and nose.It then uses deep learning methods – the most powerful of which is GANs (Generative Adversarial neural networks).GANs are relatively recent concepts in AI which aim to synthesize artificial images that are indistinguishable from authentic ones.GANs consist of two separate artificial neural networks contesting with each other in a game, one of the networks working as a generator and the other one as a discriminator.

• The Generator is like a money forger that wants to fool the police detective to successfully use his forged money.
• Simultaneously, the Discriminator is the police detective who wants to detect the forged money and allow people with real money to safely spend it without punishment.
• With time, both players get better and better in doing their job until the generator becomes smart enough to fool the discriminator in 50% of the cases which is the goal of GANs to establish equilibrium between the errors of the two networks so that the generator is capable of creating very realistic fake images.

The whole system will be trained on millions of face images to create an entirely new face with the same expression. Then the new face is blended into the original photo, retaining the same background.  

How to detect the deep fakes?

Poorly made deepfake videos and images may be easy to identify, but higher-quality deepfakes can be tough and difficult to detect.Below are some characteristics we can use to detect deepfakes:

• Unnatural body shape, hair, or skin color.
• A lack of blinking.
• Unnatural eye movement.
• Bad lip-syncing.
• A mismatch between the size of eyes and ears.
• Unnatural positioning between the head and body during the video.

 Even with these characteristics, the continuous advances in technology created more trained and advanced deepfakes that are very hard to detect and that’s why a lot of researches and initiatives have been made to use AI algorithms to detect and attack the deepfakes which are also generated by AI.Hence, It’s like using AI against AI.One of these initiatives have been done to detect the deepfakes like DFDC (Deepfake Detection challenge) that was kicked off by major companies like Facebook to help innovation in deepfake detection technologies and to achieve faster solutions by sharing work and motivating the researchers to create creative solutions, the highest average precision achieved in this competition was 82.56% on a public dataset shared with 124k videos. The whole challenge also featured 8 different algorithms to detect facial modifications.Also, one of the most recent and interesting researches has been made by scientists from the University at Buffalo to detect deepfakes by detecting the reflection of light in the eyes.The concept is that, if you captured a photo for a real face with a source of light, the reflection on both eyeballs will be similar because they are seeing the same thing in the scene, which successfully attacks GANs. In this case, while generating these deepfakes, it failed to imitate this reflection behavior on both eyeballs, and by analyzing the corneas, a score generated for each eyeball which used as a similarity metric that indicates the deepfakes with the smaller scores 

Images of real human eyes 

Images of Fake synthesized human eyes 

 The system is effective with 94% accuracy in deepfakes detection. Despite that, it has some limitations regarding the ] need for a light reflection source for both eyeballs and it’s proven effective only in portrait images.Overall, the researchers plan to investigate these issues to improve the effectiveness of their method.Read more about the research here.

Some precautions you can take against a Deepfake

One of the precautions you can take is to limit your public presence on social media and apply more privacy restrictions to prevent scammers from stealing your images and voice.Applying more powerful verification procedures in your work and validating well the people you are talking to through digital communications.Don’t believe anything you see or hear for the first time on social media or even the news, always validate first.In the end, more education and awareness of the technology to the average users will help society more than anything else to face these new challenges – as detectors get better and smarter, so will the deepfake technology. Author:  Mina Tharwat, Computer Vision Engineer [post_title] => AI: Detectors and Precautions against Deepfakes Attacks [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => ai-detectors-and-precautions-against-deepfakes-attacks [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-05-06 15:17:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-05-06 11:17:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.tahaluf.ae/?post_type=blog&p=5085 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => blog [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [4] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5084 [post_author] => 6 [post_date] => 2021-04-22 11:00:48 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-04-22 07:00:48 [post_content] => Companies usually log expenses that need to be recognized on different periods, say for example an insurance policy that spans for a whole year.According to accounting principles, “Expense to be recognized as and when services are rendered”, which implies the following in our insurance example:

1. The expense of insurance should not be recognized as a whole for the period the invoice is recorded.
2. Insurance service is going to be recognized for the coming year.

The Multiperiod accounting feature in Oracle Payables Cloud was developed to serve this purpose, it enables the users to record payables invoice that generates monthly entries to recognize the expenses over the specified term.Below is the information required to record the multiperiod accounting:

1. Expense recognition start date
2. Expense recognition end date
3. Accrual account (pre-paid expense account)

Assuming that a user recorded a multiperiod accounting invoice of 120,000 AED for the employees’ health insurance, and the start date for the insurance policy 1/2/2021 while the end date is 31/1/2022, after posting the invoice the following entry will be recorded:Dr. Insurance Deferred Expenses 120,000 AEDCr. Liability 120,000 AEDAs part of the month closing procedures, the user will run the “create multiperiod accounting” process to generate the recognized expense entry for the current month, the entry will look like the following:Dr. Insurance Expenses 10,000 AEDCr. Insurance Deferred Expenses 10,000 AEDThe user should the process mentioned as part of the month closing procedures until the expense is fully recognized and the expense recognition end date is reached.Below is a full walkthrough of how to log the multiperiod accounting invoices on the Oracle payables cloud. 1.Record the invoice and fill in the start date, end date, and accrual account. 2. Post the invoice and notice that the invoice entry is posted to the deferred expense account. 3. Run the “multiperiod accounting” process.  4. Check the entry generated after the process has been completed. Author: Mohammad Abdulfattah Hussein, Oracle Finance Consultant [post_title] => Oracle Cloud Application: How to amortize deferred expenses using Multi Period Accounting [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => oracle-cloud-application-how-to-amortize-deferred-expenses-using-multi-period-accounting [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-04-22 11:00:48 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-04-22 07:00:48 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.tahaluf.ae/?post_type=blog&p=5084 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => blog [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [5] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5080 [post_author] => 6 [post_date] => 2021-04-22 10:58:42 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-04-22 06:58:42 [post_content] =>

Introduction

 

The supply chain is a global network used to deliver products and services from raw materials to end customers through an engineered flow of information, physical distribution, and cash “as per APICS/ASCM definition".

 

The Basic Supply chain has a minimum of three entities producer/service provider, supplier, and customer. Information between these three entities flows in both directions upstream and downstream. Most of the organizations that deal with suppliers that provide services use the concept of service procurement or complex purchase order to manage milestones, work confirmation, payment plan, recoupment, and retentions. 

 

Retainage is a practice of withholding funds from payment until the contractor completes an agreed-upon portion of the work or fulfills contractual obligations. The practice of retentions has its origins in the British Railway Mania of the 1840s, Retentions are widely used in the British construction industry; featuring in the majority of all contracts awarded. It is a sum of money that is withheld as security against poor quality products (defects) or works left incomplete.

 

Most ERP consultants, Implementors, Presales and Sales who interacted with Oracle E-Business suite ERP then shifted to Oracle Cloud ERP noticed that there is no complex purchase order feature exist till update 20D, we also noticed that most of our customers who migrated or are planning to migrate from on-premise to oracle cloud ERP found this point an obstacle. 

 

Therefore, some customers, especially those who use service procurement as a core in their business decided not to shift to Oracle Cloud until this feature existed or they decided to develop a full custom solution on PaaS to cover this part. Recently, Oracle released a new update 21A which has one of the complex work procurement features namely, the “Retainage”. 

 

In the 21A update, the Complex Work Procurement solution is comprised of 3 features as below: 

 

• Create Purchase Orders with Retainage Terms (Oracle Procurement Cloud)
• Negotiate Retainage for Services (Oracle Procurement Cloud)
• Creation and Management of Supplier Invoices with Retainage (Oracle Financials Cloud)

 

Value Proposition

From a business point of view, the use of retentions is intended to encourage efficiency and productivity. The contractor has a financial incentive to achieve completion as early as possible (to release the first moiety payment) and to minimize defects in the works (to achieve the second payment).

 

From a system point of view, Complex Work Procurement is an end-to-end integrated solution across Oracle Procurement Cloud, Oracle Financials Cloud, and Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud applications. This solution is designed to model the procurement of complex contracts in industries such as construction, consulting, and professional services. Complex work contracts tend to have high dollar values and long lead times and are governed by complex payment terms.

 

You can use Complex Work Procurement to manage various aspects of the acquisition processes involved in procuring complex work.

 

How to Enable the Retainage

1. Login to Oracle Cloud instance which has the update 21A.

    

2. You need to have a role that contains the “Manage Purchasing Document Style “privilege such as the Procurement Application Administrator Role.

  

3. From the Navigator choose “Setup and Maintenance”.

   

4. Search for the “Manage Document Styles “task.

  

5. Create a new document style or update an existing user-defined document style then save and close.

Note you can’t update seeded document styles: Standard style, Consignment style, Configure-to-Order style, and Outside Processing style.   

6. Now you can navigate to the home page → Procurement → Purchase Orders → Tasks → Create Order.

  

7. Choose the new purchase order style which has the retainage option enable and press create.

   

8. Fill the purchase order header details then navigate to the line level and add new line → Fill Line details → then you have to show the retainage columns from the view section as below:

  

9. Navigate to the right side till you find the Retainage Rate (%) and Maximum Retainage Amount, Fill in the required percentage and maximum amount.

Note: You can change the Retainage Rate on the schedule level.  

10. Submit the purchase order for approval, then after approval search for the purchase order and open the view lifecycle option as below:

 

11. Now you can see the total retainage amount and the total retainage release on that purchase order.

 

12. You can do the same but search by schedule level so you can see the retainage and retainage release per schedule as below:

  To Be Continued …. Demonstrating the sourcing and invoice retainage features 

Notes:

• You can Enter the Maximum Retainage Amount and Retainage Rate on FBDI Purchase Order Import Template.
•  You can Analyze retainage-enabled purchase orders using the OTBI Purchasing Real-time subject area.

 

References:

• https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/r13/wn/proc/releases/21A/21A-procurement-wn.htm#F15900
• https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/procurement/21a/oapro/purchasing-configuration.html#OAPRO4334991
•  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retainage#History_and_purpose
• https://www.ascm.org/

  Author: Ahmed Eldemerdash, Oracle Supply Chain Consultant [post_title] => Oracle: Complex Work Procurement now on cloud Application 21A (11.13.21.01.0) [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => oracle-complex-work-procurement-now-on-cloud-application-21a-11-13-21-01-0 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-04-22 12:53:30 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-04-22 08:53:30 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.tahaluf.ae/?post_type=blog&p=5080 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => blog [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) ) [post_count] => 6 [current_post] => -1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5275 [post_author] => 6 [post_date] => 2021-06-09 20:49:46 [post_date_gmt] => 2021-06-09 16:49:46 [post_content] =>

How to setup Document of Record (DOR) for Salary Certificates

The following case shows how to use the Document of Record (DOR) functionality on Oracle ERP Cloud by implementing the salary certificate request which is usually requested manually from the HR department. Applying the standard Document of Record functionally will reduce the manual work and expedite the process.

The following information represents the HR requirements to issue a salary certificate:

 To implement the above requirement, we need to follow the following: 

1.      Create Document Category

Setup Information

• Document categories (for example, absence) provide a way to group these documents into meaningful categories at a higher level. Document subcategories (for example, general or medical) provide further grouping of documents. Use the DOCUMENT_CATEGORY lookup type to define new document categories and subcategories. Define document categories as values for the DOCUMENT_CATEGORY lookup type and document subcategories as extended lookup values for the selected category.

 

• To create a category search for the task, Manage Common Lookups and then search for the lookup type DOCUMENT_CATEGORY. Under section DOCUMENT_CATEGORY: Lookup Codes you will see several categories delivered by oracle. You can make use of them or create your own category. For our business requirement, we will create a new category called Reimbursement. For the same click on the + (new) icon and enter details as follows.

 Lookup Code: CERTIFICATEEnabled: YesMeaning: CertificatesDescription: Certificates 

•  Once you entered all these details, click the Save and Close button.

 

2.      Create Document Subcategories

Setup Information

• Now as per the requirements, we will create two subcategories. To create subcategories, search for the task Manage Extended Lookup Codes. You will be on the Extended Lookup Codes On this screen search for entry Document Category under section Lookup Types. Now scroll below and under the section Document Category: Manage Extended Lookup Codes click on + Add icon, to create subcategories.

 

• Now add all your subcategories one by one and click on save.

  

• Once you enter all these details, click Save.

   

3.      Create Document Types

                       Setup Information

• To create Document Types, search for the task Document Types. In the Search Results section, click on the + Create button and enter the details for each section as given below.

 Document Type Information

• Name: Salary Certificate
• Country: United Arab Emirates
• Category: Certificate
• Subcategory: Salary Certificate
• Status: Active
• Minimum Attachments: 1 employee has to attach at least one document, but we will keep it 0 no documents required
• Approval Required: Yes
• Allow Multiple Occurrences: Yes. This allows the employee to submit multiple requests.
• Publish Required: No. If you require any document to be available only between selected time, choose Yes. But since we want workers to submit reimburse anytime it is set to No.
• Enable Document Delivery Preference: No

 Document Record Preferences

• Restrict Create: No
• Restrict Update: Yes, we do need the employee to update the approved request so select Yes.
• Restrict Delete: Yes, we do need the employee to update the approved request so select Yes.

 Attributes 

Name	Relevant	Required
Document Name	Yes	Yes
Document Number	No	No
From Date	No	No
To Date	No	No
Issuing Country	No	No
Issuing Location	No	No
Issuing Authority	No	No
Issued On	No	No
Issuing Comments	No	No

 

• Now add all your subcategories one by one (Salary Certificate) and click on save.

  

• After you enter all the details, click on the Submit You will receive a confirmation message. Click on the OK button and you will be taken back to the Documents Type page. Once you save the record, you will not be able to change the attributes highlighted in red.

 

• You can create another document. You do not need to enter all the details from scratch. You have the option to copy/duplicate existing documents. Let’s see how it works.

 

• When you are on the Documents Type page, search for the document we just created -Salary Certificate Letter.

 

• You will see the document in the search result section. While that document name is selected, click on the Duplicate button. This will take you to Create Document Type page. On this screen, you can update/change the details as per the requirement.

 

• For another certificate, if required etc. salary transfer certificate, every detail would be the same expecting the following attributes, so change these values and save the record.

 

• Type: Certificate

 

• Subcategory: Create a new one called (Salary Transfer Certificate)

   

4.      Create Contexts Sensitive Segments

General Information

As per the requirement, we also need to create the following context-sensitive fields for the Salary Certificate letter request.

 To get it done, search for the task Document Records Descriptive Flexfields and open it.  You will be on Document Records Descriptive Flexfields page. On this screen, click on the Edit button.   

On this screen, click the Manage Contexts button which takes you to the Manage Contexts page. On this screen click on the + Create button under the Search Results section, this will take you to Create Context. Your screen will look like this.

  

How to get the context code for Document of Record?

Now to have our segments populated based on the document type we select; we need to know the Context  Code of our document type. There are two ways to get the Context Code.

 

Get context code from the back end

The context code of a document type is stored in the table HR_DOCUMENT_TYPES_B So you can run the query below to get the context code of any document type.

select system_document_type,

document_type_id,

category_code,

sub_category_code,

legislation_code,

creation_date

from hr_document_types_b

 order by creation_date  desc Context codes are in uppercase and prefixed with the country code. If you see the extract above, our context codes for, (Salary certificate) are listed below.How these codes are generated is explained in the second method.

• GLB_SAAED_SALARY_CERTIFICATE

 

Now we have got the context code, let’s enter the details as follows:

• Display Name: GLB_SALARY_CERTIFICATE
• Context Code: GLB_SALARY_CERTIFICATE
• API Name: Accept Default
• Enabled: Yes

 Once you click on the Save button, menus under the section Context-Sensitive Segments will become active. Now click on the + Create button under the Context Sensitive Segments section. One by one, enter all your segments here. Once done, click on the Save and Close button. You will be taken back to the Manage Contexts page. Just follow the steps above to create segments for the Transfer letter.  Click on Save and Close again and you will be on Document Records Descriptive Flexfields page. Click on the Save and Close button and again, and you will be on the screen below.  Click on the  Deploy Flexfield button and let the process complete. 

5.      How employees can use Document of Record

To check the DOR that we created,

• Navigate to Me » Personal Information » Document Record

 

• You will be taken to the Document Records page. Click on the + Add button to add a document.

 

• Then search for the document name (Salary Certificate)

  

• After you select the Salary Certificate request, the document will open like the below screen and will automatically select the Context Value that we have created and you will see the segment.

  

• Based on the input, it will go for approval, if you keep the DOR without approval it will reflect on the employee DOR profile directly.

  Author: Ahmed Mosad, Senior Oracle HCM Consultant [post_title] => Document of Record (DOR) in Oracle ERP Cloud [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => document-of-record-dor-in-oracle-erp-cloud [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2021-06-09 20:49:46 [post_modified_gmt] => 2021-06-09 16:49:46 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.tahaluf.ae/?post_type=blog&p=5275 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => blog [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [comment_count] => 0 [current_comment] => -1 [found_posts] => 6 [max_num_pages] => 0 [max_num_comment_pages] => 0 [is_single] => [is_preview] => [is_page] => [is_archive] => [is_date] => [is_year] => [is_month] => [is_day] => [is_time] => [is_author] => [is_category] => [is_tag] => [is_tax] => [is_search] => [is_feed] => [is_comment_feed] => [is_trackback] => [is_home] => 1 [is_privacy_policy] => [is_404] => [is_embed] => [is_paged] => [is_admin] => [is_attachment] => [is_singular] => [is_robots] => [is_favicon] => [is_posts_page] => [is_post_type_archive] => [query_vars_hash:WP_Query:private] => 025e5e23109a4624207f6d94c5b5fb75 [query_vars_changed:WP_Query:private] => [thumbnails_cached] => [stopwords:WP_Query:private] => [compat_fields:WP_Query:private] => Array ( [0] => query_vars_hash [1] => query_vars_changed ) [compat_methods:WP_Query:private] => Array ( [0] => init_query_flags [1] => parse_tax_query ))Document of Record (DOR) in Oracle ERP Cloud - 2021-06-09 20:49:46 - publish

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