In the current IT landscape, there is a huge spike in companies adopting software-as-a-solution (SaaS) cloud applications to realize benefits like business agility, quick time to market, and cost optimization. One of the fundamental challenges that organizations face in adopting SaaS applications is exact fitment to their business needs. In most scenarios, organizations need to customize or extend the SaaS applications to meet their specific requirements. So, how do these customizations differ from the traditional on-premises application customization?
During on-premises Oracle applications implementation, these customizations are done through additional configurations and custom extensions built on top of the core functionality. RICEFW (Reports, Interfaces, Conversions, Enhancements, Forms and Workflows) objects represent requirements that are not currently supported within the core functionality of an Oracle Application module, and thus require additional technical development to satisfy the functional requirement of an organization. While this was achieved in on-premises world using Oracle developer tools like reports, procedural language / structured query language (PL/SQL), forms, Oracle Application Framework (OAF), and workflows, the same tool sets are not applicable for building RICEFW for Oracle SaaS applications like CX (Customer Experience) , Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), and Human Capital Management (HCM) on cloud. There is neither direct access to database schema nor option to alter the schema in Oracle SaaS.
Technologies used to build RICEFW on Oracle cloud
Reports
Following are the tools used to create analytical and transactional reports that are not available as standard reports in Oracle SaaS:
Available within Oracle SaaS
Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI): The tool is built on the power of Oracle's industry-leading business intelligence tool - Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE). This allows users to build powerful data visualization with real-time data that highlights data patterns and encourages data exploration instead of delivering static flat reports.
Smart view: With the smart view desktop tool, users can create or run OTBI analyses within MS Excel, Word, or PowerPoint and save them back into the OTBI catalog in real time.
BI publisher: It is a reporting solution to author, manage, and deliver all your reports and documents easier and faster than traditional reporting tools. It is pre-integrated with Oracle and works seamlessly with OBIEE, e-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards Enterprise One, Oracle Hyperion Planning, and Oracle Application Express (APEX).
Available with Oracle PaaS
Business intelligence cloud service (BICS): BICS can combine data from diverse sources and quickly create rich, interactive, analytic applications and reports. Data is stored in the Oracle Database Cloud Service, which is hosted on Oracle Public Cloud.
Interfaces
Following are the tools to build interfaces for external systems in online and batch mode: