Business Relationship Management in Oracle Fusion Cloud
The Customer/Prospect/Supplier/Partner hierarchy will contain the Organization/Business records’ hierarchical relationship.
A hierarchy is often a tree-like structure with branches and nodes organized based on the requirements. In a tree-like structure, each kid node or branch will have exactly one parent. The Root Node has no parent and will be the highest node in the hierarchy. A parent node will contain other nodes. A Leaf Node is the lowest node in the tree and it does not have any offspring. For any particular node in a hierarchy, the nodes above it may be referred to as Ancestor nodes, while those below it may be known as Descendant nodes.
In Oracle Fusion Applications, the Hierarchy Tree is a separate object, not a recursive join between nodes as in some other programs. This architecture allows numerous unique hierarchies to exist at the same time, and a single node can participate in multiple hierarchical structures if necessary.
Oracle Fusion Common Hierarchy
Oracle Fusion has a number of common hierarchy types designed to meet the unique hierarchical requirements of various sorts of entities, such as customers, prospects (accounts), suppliers, and partners.
Customer Hierarchy
- Tree structure used to manage a hierarchy among a sales prospect, sales account, legal entity and customer.
Party Hierarchy
- Tree structure for a party hierarchy.
Partner Hierarchy
- Manage a hierarchy among a partner and inactive partner.
Debby and Dennis Corporation Hierarchy
- Predefined tree structure for maintaining the D&D corporate hierarchy.
Common Functional Use Case for Hierarchies
While there are other potential use cases and business requirements for leveraging hierarchy and relationships to assist with company planning and operations, the primary use cases are listed below.
Customer Hierarchies
A customer hierarchy represents a customer’s hierarchical relationships with other customers and is made up of hierarchy members. A customer hierarchy allows you to collect payments from one client and apply them to another in the same hierarchy. It can also be used to generate a revenue roll-up report, which aggregates revenue figures from opportunities for all customers in a hierarchy.
Oracle Engagement Cloud allows the business to manage their clients (accounts) hierarchically. In a parent/child relationship group, each customer (account) can be linked to only one parent customer/prospect (account). The business can have any number of levels in their customer/prospect (account) hierarchy. Typically, customer hierarchy is used differently depending on the business needs. Users can specify any number of levels in the hierarchy.
The figure below depicts the relationship definition of our corporate structure for Debby and Dennis Software Group LLC accounts, which can be created as needed to define this specific hierarchy in the Oracle Engagement Cloud.
Party Hierarchies
Party Hierarchies allow you to keep multiple relationships between parties in a hierarchical representation.
Debby and Dennis Software Group’s Sales and Service teams have various needs for defining the Party Hierarchy. As a result, it is necessary to maintain two distinct hierarchies. This can be accomplished by defining two distinct hierarchy instances (Debby_and_Dennis_Software_Group_Sales, Debby_and_Dennis_Software_Group_Service) with the hierarchical relationship required by the company. The key advantage of this Party Hierarchy model is that the same customer/prospect (account) can be included in several hierarchies at different levels depending on your business needs. Although these hierarchies can coexist, they are designed and managed by Oracle Fusion Cloud.
The figure below depicts both hierarchies for downstream and other business operations which are determined by the business requirements. These hierarchies can be exported and transferred to other applications as needed.
Partner Hierarchy
Partner entries will be identical to those found in the Customer hierarchy, which contains customers and prospects. In many circumstances, a Partner can also be a Customer/Prospect, or both.
For example, if a Partner record is to be created for one of the entities of Debby and Dennis Corporation but it already exists as a Customer record, the potential duplicates screen will appear, allowing you to choose between selecting the current record and creating a new Partner record. When an existing (Customer) record is selected, it is also made available for Partner Management.
The table below demonstrates Debby and Dennis Corporation serving as both a customer and a partner. A Partner hierarchy can be constructed, with Debby and Dennis Corporation listed as a member.
Summary
Before coming up hierarchies and deciding who is doing what, it is critical to have an organizational structure which is consistent with the company’s aims and objectives. Depending on the company’s organizational structure, which serves as a framework for properly delegating roles, responsibilities, job functions, accountability, and decision-making authority, the organizational structure frequently depicts the “chain of command” and how information flows within the company.
Based on the use cases and examples above as an overview, it provides:
Party hierarchy capabilities to support managing Organization / Business / Customer / Supplier / Partner hierarchies.
Account hierarchy capabilities in Financial cloud application to manage financial account hierarchies.
Oracle Fusion Cloud offers a suite of integrated cloud-based business applications and services. It encompasses a wide range of enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), customer experience (CX), and supply chain management (SCM) applications, among others. The goal of Oracle Fusion Cloud is to provide a comprehensive and modern platform which enables organizations to streamline their business processes, enhance collaboration, and make data-driven decisions.
On the other hand, if you need to create and manage enterprise data with comprehensive hierarchy capabilities, manage your financial accounts, Chart of Accounts, General Ledgers, Cost Centers, reference data hierarchy data centrally with governance, and publish/share enterprise data across applications, Oracle Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Cloud is the right fit for you. Additional comprehensive hierarchy capability provided by Oracle EDM is the ability to handle alternative perspectives for any of the Party Hierarchies managed in Oracle Fusion, as well as the ability to manage cross-functional views such as Sales Territory Management, Supplier Profitability Management, and Customer Profitability.
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