Approach used for Data Conversion

1. Conversion Data Mapping ( map to specify the data of legacy system –> data of oracle ERP system )
2. Download Programs ( programs to extract data from database and insert into the Flat file )
3. ASCII Flat File (Flat file / Text file)
4. Upload Program
5.Interface Tables

. Description of Interface Table

. Creation of Interface Table
6. Translation Programs

7. Interface Programs

8. Application Production Table

9. Testing
10. Write and Perform Conversion Execution Plan

READ MORE DETAILS
http://www.infopurple.com/data-conversion-for-oracle-applications

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A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.

He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.

He is not an interruption in our work – he is the purpose of it.

We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to serve him.
– Mahatma Gandhi

I stumbled across the above quotation on a company website named ZOHO. I was not aware of this Indian based company until I read this article on how Zoho could challenge both Microsoft and Google

I was surprised at the breadth of product offerings Zoho has and more impressed by its attitude. A company’s attitude is judged by how it treats its customer and if they are truly following what they preach then I salute them.

Mahatma Gandhi’s quote is very relevant in today’s web world.

Let me take the liberty to make slight adjustments and apply it towards my websites.

“You are the most important visitor on my website. You are the reason for the existence of this websites (appsbi.com and infocaptor.com). You are always welcome to comment, email, ping or call me. Your feedback, love and loyalty is the greatest favor you will do on me”

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Posted on June 27th, 2008 by admin

I am proud of our GREAT INDIANS…I received this collection from forwarded emails.This is my way of forwarding to the world about our great great Indians.

ARYABHATT
(476 CE) MASTER ASTRONOMER AND MATHEMATICIAN

Born in 476 CE in Kusumpur (Bihar), Aryabhatt’s intellectual brilliance remapped the boundaries of mathematics and astronomy. In 499 CE, at the age of 23, […]

http://www.infopurple.com/great-indians

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Let us break this into simple terms.

Dashboards, in the most simplest terms is a collection of different reports, all in one page or view. Now let us tune this statement. These reports in the dashboard contain high level summary information rather than detail transactions. For e.g in traditional reports, you see a detail listing of orders or invoices with neat formatting, totals and sub-totals whereas the reports in dashboard mostly contain aggregate information such as total orders for current month, total invoices for current month, profit for this month, total cost for this month. If you notice, the common term here is total (sum, aggregate, or high level) view. Now you may show these numbers as they are or canvas them in beautiful charts.

Once you have your base information that you want your users to see, you display them in an appropriate format on the dashboard. Some information is better suited to be in tabular and some can only make sense in a Line chart or Stacked bar chart.

“If you ain’t got no goals, you ain’t got nothin”

Now smart companies want to grow their business and one thing they often ask is How did we do and How can we improve? So they try to attach goals to these numbers.
For e.g If last year in July, if the total Orders were 10,000 and if they have been growing at 30% rate historically then they would like to see a 30% jump in the Total Orders for July of this year. This is known as “key performance” monitoring. They would like to visually see if total orders reached the goal or not. One way to visually see this is through a Gauge where the indicator can clearly indicate if it met the goal or not. If the indicator is in Green then it met and if it is in Red or yellow then there are some issues that needs to be investigated.

So when something is not right, users would like to know more about the details. This act of finding more details is known as “DRILLING”. In the Drills users would like to see a detailed listing of all the orders or some other information so they can investigate.

In a nutshell, your dashboard becomes your first interface to the information in your system and hence it is very productive to the end users for their analysis.

Here are few types of dashboards their purpose and benefits

Benefits of Finance Dashboard: Monitor Revenue, Profit, Loss and Expenses

Benefits of HR Dashboard: Monitor Employee activity, Headcount growth, Expenses etc

Benefits of IT dashboard : Monitor system activity, this may include database monitoring, server monitoring, memory metrics etc

Benefits of Inventory Dashboard : Monitor Inventory levels, warehouse and item information, orders etc

To get a feel of dashboards, try this Dashboard Designer, you download it and it will launch a pre-defined dashboard based on sample Excel data.
You feel right at home with once you see the dashboard in action.

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“The idea that dashboards are the endgame for BI is frankly terrifying. Have you see the typical dashboard? To misquote Shakespeare, “Much color and expense, signifying nothing”. Seriously, dashboards may be a step up from greenbar reports but the endgame? I don’t think so.”

In my opinion, Dashboards are certainly not the end game. Just a window to your Business information. I think dashboards for Business are important the same way they are for Cars. In Cars, you don’t even get excited with all the meters and dials anymore, you just assume them to be there. Once dashboards for Business becomes ubiquous, people would get less excited about the fancy charts and graphs.

This kind of ubiquity certainly cannot be achieved by pricey and complex software. Dashboards are a step above traditional reporting because Dashboards are one of the most simple UI and users immediately “GET” them. They immediately know the parameters, drills and export options.

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After installing the trial version of the product and reviewing some of its capabilities, I instantly knew my corporation couldn’t do without this tool. Dealing with RudraSoft LLC in answering technical questions or providing extra information vital to my analysis has been very refreshing. It’s very rare in today’s technology market you receive true professional service. If you are in need of a tool that with delivering fast metadata on the Discoverer reports in your environment while saving countless person hours, InfoCaptor is definitely the product of choice”

That’s all for this year, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

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In order to prototype dashboards, you need some sample data and the dashboard tool available that you can report against.

Now where do you get the sample data from? Remember, you just need to create a prototype so you can instantly (within couple of hours) go back to the user and show the dashboard output.

Usually, users can provide the sample or Mock-up data in a flat file or Excel format. Excel is convenient in lot of mock-up activity for following reasons

• If your data is in a different system which is currently not integrated with your dashboard environment, you can simply get an export of data from that system in Excel
• If the data is not yet available in any of your applications, users can create some dummy data in Excel
• It is easier to create and change data scenarios within Excel pretty quickly.

Now once you have your data in Excel, you can connect your dashboard tool to this file and query individual worksheets

For e.g. let us assume that your current project is to monitor the financial health of your exisiting customers. You are a very large corporation and have lot of customers who are big in size (it is always good to have fat customers ). So how do you get their financial health information? Do you call them and say ” Hi, How are you doing this quarter?” or do you call their insurance company and the check the health records (is this legal?)
Most of the fat customers are usually publicly traded companies so it is possible to get their financial information (legal too) from some financial services websites like Yahoo Finance. Let say you get a flat file containing the company name, stock ticker, current stock price, market cap, and other company information. Now see, this is a fresh requirement which your CFO just made up in his mind and decided to toss it out to his sub-ordinates and find out the feasibility or what it would take to make it to the finals.
Now as a smart consultant, you figure out the high level details and some of them would be as below

• Need to get the daily, weekly or monthly feeds from the Yahoo finance in flat file or XML
• Create an interface to get this data into your data-warehouse
• The customer name from the external feed may not match the way you store the customer name in your ERP and hence in your datawarehouse.
• So you need some kind of logic to map the external customer to the customer name in your system
• You could use DUNS number to do the matching (external feed needs to include DUNS for this matching)
• And then somehow get this information on the dashboard as a Drill through or as a seperate portlet (Top 10 worst performers? Top 10 best performers?)

So as you figure out the details, you realize there are some black boxes (unknowns or open issues) and some white boxes and the project is several man months to the quarter finals.

Before committing any time and dollars, one of the sane thing to do would be to create a quick prototype and simulate the dashboard. You could present this dashboard to the CFO within couple of days and let him decide to give a green or red flag.

For the prototype effort, you can extract customer information from your data-warehouse or ERP system in an Excel file. Lets call this excel file as “customer.xls”.

You can create a mockup data sample for your customer’s financial health records or just go to these finance websites and get an extract. Lets call this file as “customer_finance_health.xls”

Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to build dashboard using Excel Data

Using InfoCaptor, you can now connect to both the excel files as if you are connecting two SQL databases. You can then issue SQL commands like “select * from excel file” and create a tabular portlet or a chart (bar, pie, line etc). You can drill from one excel file to another excel file.
So within few hours you can create a working prototype and present it to your users for immediate feedback.

Now some sneaky marketing – My company’s product “InfoCaptor” is an excellent Rapid Dashboard development tool and you can easily create dashboards using any data-source including Excel.

It is also possible to mix data sources for e.g You can have a dashboard that has one data window sourced from a Access database, second window from an ERP system (based on Oracle, SQL Server or DB2) and the third set of window pointing to Excel file (ofcourse for prototyping)

NOTE: Whenever possible, use proper database for reporting. Use Excel only for presentation or prototyping purpose.

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——-

It isn’t often you find a product that has the two cardinal virtues:  a price that’s an order-of-magnitude below the big players in the field, and a development team that really listens and responds to customer feedback and requests.  InfoCaptor is such a product.

Dashboard design and use has swept through the Fortune 500 companies, but until recently it was too expensive and required too much technical knowledge for mid-size companies to embrace.  InfoCaptor has brought the benefits of dashboards to any organization with as few as one trained IT person on staff.

The real strength of InfoCaptor, however, is the dedication of the development team.  InfoCaptor staff worked to try and create additions to the current product in order to fit our specific needs.  There was no reluctance to help, none of the normal “We’re very busy right now� excuses; instead there were dozens of emails, remote assistance, and new beta components on virtually a daily basis.

I am a big fan, and look to InfoCaptor with eager anticipation of what features will be added next. The current product does what products costing 10 times as much do.  I can’t wait to see what this kind of drive, energy, and obvious love of the project on the part of those developing it, will bring to the table next.

Elliot Apter

CIO, Atpac Logistics

——-

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• First download InfoCaptor Dashboard Designer on your PC or laptop
• Create your Dashboard and for example, let us name the dashboard file as “my_dashboard.icvâ€? (all InfoCaptor dashboard files have .icv extension)
• Since we are going to place the dashboard files on the server, it is recommended that all the names are lowercase and there are no blanks in the name (replace blanks with underscore ‘_’)
• Let us assume the following

• Your domain is http://www.yourdomain.com
• You will place all the dashboard files in the directory “/dashboardsâ€?
• Your dashboard file is “my_dashboard.icvâ€?
• Your database host is located at “mycompany.server.comâ€? ( This maps to the yellow highlight in the connection window).If the database is on your own PC or machine then you may use “localhostâ€? as shown below
• Your database port is “3306â€? (green highlight)
• Your database name is “testâ€? (blue highlight)
• Your database user name is “some_userâ€?
• Your database password is “some_passwordâ€?

• All dashboards are accessed through a configuration file that will reside on the web-server. This file has a .PHP extension so your web-server should be able to launch PHP files.

• So your final launch URL will be

• http://www.yourdomain.com/dashboards/mysql_dashboard.php

Here are the preparation steps to get the above URL working.

• Get the latest infocaptor_mysql_webstart.jar file (http://www.infocaptor.com/files/infocaptor_mysql_webstart.jar)
• This jar file is different for each database as this jar file is packaged with the appropriate database drivers. If you need to connect multiple databases using the same jar file then a common fat jar file can be created. Please contact us at (contact@infocaptor.com or infocaptor@gmail.com) to get the appropriate jar files.

• copy the file to the http://www.yourdomain.com/dashboards directory
• copy your dashboard definition file “my_dashboard.icvâ€? to the same /dashboards directory
• Now create a new PHP file in any text editor and call the file “mysql_dashboard.phpâ€? or anything that you want.

• Enter the following information in the “mysql_dashboard.phpâ€? as shown in this PDF

• Now save your “mysql_dashboard.phpâ€? and ftp it to your webserver in the /dashboards directory

• Verify that the following files are in the http://www.yourdomain.com/dashboards/ directory

• mysql_dashboard.php
• my_dashboard.icv
• infocaptor_mysql_webstart.jar

Now you can launch your dashboard by typing the following in the browser URL http://www.yourdomain.com/dashboards/mysql_dashboard.php

Please email us if you need assistance in setting up for other databases like Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MS Access, Sybase, PostgreSQL etc

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So, using the above table, it is possible to get all children for any given node. (This is possible from the FND tables in Oracle apps too)

Here is the query

SELECT child_value
FROM
(
SELECT LEVEL,
parent_cc_id,
child_cc_id,
child_value,
lpad(' ',    3 *(LEVEL -1)) || child_desc cc_hrchy,
next_level_is_leaf_flag
FROM
(
select
h.parent_cc_id
,h.child_cc_id
,node_child.flex_value child_value
,node_child.description child_desc
,h.is_leaf_flag
,h.next_level_is_leaf_flag
from fii_cost_ctr_hierarchies h
, fnd_flex_values_vl node_child
where  h.child_cc_id = node_child.flex_value_id
and  node_child.flex_value_set_id = h.child_flex_value_set_id
and parent_level = child_level -1
)
START WITH parent_cc_id in ( select flex_value_id from fnd_flex_values_vl
where flex_value='
'
and flex_value_set_id = 1005351 )
CONNECT BY PRIOR child_cc_id = parent_cc_id
)
where  next_level_is_leaf_flag='Y'

If you need to see only sub-parent nodes then replace the last line in the query to next_level_is_leaf_flag=’N’

This query can be used in other reporting requirements such as using in any Discoverer reports.

For e.g. In your GL chart of accounts, lets say your Cost Center is segment2 and there is a need to find total balance for some particular Cost Center node “XYZ” then you could write a query similar to

select sum(balance column)

from gl_balances gb, gl_code_combinations gcc

where gcc.code_combination_id= gb.code_combination_id

and ...

and ...

and gcc.segment2 in ( result set from the above query...)

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Meter Chart

Thermometer

Dial demo

All of the above chart are driven on a single value. So if you need to display any single metric in any of the above, just enter the appropriate query for e.g. “select number_of_users from system_session_table”

and then pick the right chart type from the drop down.

With the Beanshell scripting, you can get beautiful dials as shown above.

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