What is Oracle E-Business Suite?

Oracle E-Business Suite (i.e., Oracle Applications, Oracle Apps, Oracle Financials, Oracle Manufacturing, Oracle CRM) is the suite of products that used to be called Oracle Financials. Oracle Financials was first released in the late 1980s and has evolved into a full-fledged solution for enterprise processes for companies of nearly any size. The Oracle E-Business Suite contains over 55 integrated modules for financial management, supply chain management, manufacturing management, project management, human resources management, and sales force automation all pulled together to provide business automation. Oracle E-Business Suite combines ERP and CRM into one fully integrated package that can meet all of a company's needs. Oracle E-Business Suite can provide a company with business performance metrics, current financial ratios, profit and loss report summaries, and other information that can be tracked across departments, across product lines, even across geographies. It allows information to be shared across the enterprise. It further allows a company to centralize a single definition of what a customer is, what a supplier is, what an employee is, a business partner is, or product is, and maintaining this definition and its connected information across the enterprise. Oracle E-Business Suite allows upper management to access its business intelligence information and take immediate action when situations warrant it. The Customer Resource Management module allows a company to manage customer information, from leads to sales to revenue through multiple channels of input (e.g., Web, phone, mail order, or e-mail).

Oracle E-Business Suite also incorporates a powerful, flexible combination of state-of-the-art technology integrated to aid in rapid implementation. Various implementations in varying configurations can be found in shops with fewer than 200 employees to many of the Fortune 500 companies. Oracle Applications 11i also brings the evolution of the core technology, which saw its start with terminal emulation, to true Internet computing architecture. Where, in past releases, users needed some special piece of software installed on their workstations to run Financials (these could
have included a terminal emulation package or Forms and Reports executables or the like), now the only piece of software that is really necessary to use Apps 11i is a Java-compliant browser. The only Oracle E-Business Suite specific software today that ends up on the end user's computer is a Java applet (JInitiator™ client platform) that is downloaded and cached the first time the PC connects to applications. This new, evolved architecture has opened the door for new modules and new functionality.