White Paper Available - Managing Change in an Oracle EBS Environment

Excerpt from the paper:

Introduction – The purpose of this paper is to give organizations ideas and options on how to manage changes in their Oracle E-business Suite (EBS) environment. The paper is not specific to any version or release of software nor is it applicable only to EBS environments. The principles and ideas herein can be used for from a simple to complex system to manage, document, track and audit changes in an environment. The change management system that you put in place for your organization will depend on any number of outside or inside agencies or requirements. This paper will touch on topics that should satisfy the majority of those requirements such as internal auditors, Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC or HIPPAA. This paper can be used as a guide and you should consult with your audit and risk management teams on how and what you need to track in your organization.

What is a Change? – In setting up a change control system in your organization, you must first define the types of changes and which ones and how you would like to manage them. In an EBS environment, there are several types of changes to be managed, and each may have a different workflow for migration into production. The first is what I call master data. This would be objects like users, employees, customers, vendors, flexfield values and items. Secondly, are setup changes. This would be things like profile values and setup screen changes. The third type of change would be data fixes. This may be a fix from Oracle, or a fix developed by your own staff to fix a transactional issue. The final type of change is a very broad category defined as code changes. This can range from form personalization, custom reporting and descriptive flexfields to custom interfaces, workflows, database triggers and any other customizations you may have. This would also include Oracle provided patches and code changes. There may be changes that do not fit into any of these categories, and you should have a process for those as well.

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