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There has been a lot of buzz about whether Oracle is delaying or cancelling its upcoming 22A quarterly update. With so many Oracle customers perplexed as to whether the 22A will be rolled out as scheduled or not, we decided to write this blog to help clear the air.
First of all, we want to clarify that Oracle is not cancelling its 22A update. A detailed notification from Oracle has already been sent about the Oracle 22A update delay to all service administrators and contact owners. However, there is a catch.
Some customers will get Oracle’s 22A update as per the pre-defined schedule, while other customers who are using Fusion Middleware 12C will receive the 22A update along with the 22B patch update. This means that for them, a major Oracle update that includes both 22A and 22B will be rolled out at the same time at a later date.
Oracle Cloud Quarterly Updates are important for your enterprise as they:
- Contain security updates that protect your financial data.
- Introduce new features, some of which could be major improvements for your financial processes.
- Are often required to remain in compliance with legal entities.
- Deliver bug fixes that will make your software operate more smoothly.
What is expected in Oracle 22A update?
To fully understand what changes are coming with the Oracle 22A update, you should review the entire Oracle Cloud Readiness update documentation. For your convenience, we’re providing a short summary of this documentation below.
Oracle Financials
Payables
- Using standard XML by sending back electronic responses to inform the suppliers about rejecting electronic invoices.
- Users can now drill down from in-app notifications and email notifications for these workflows and view invoices if they have the "View Payables Invoice” privilege.
- Recognize and extract the invoice requester from the Invoice Document. This eliminates the need to manually enter the requester details.
Receivables
- Improve the application of unidentified receipts to transactions on the Edit Receipt page. By default, when a receipt does not contain customer information, the “Add Open Receivables” button is enabled and the “Add Application” button is not enabled.
Expenses
- Send expense digest notifications to delegates to allow them to fix expense items that require expense owner attention.
- The field behaviour in the Expenses mobile application now matches the Expenses web application. This helps reduce delays in expense report submissions due to inconsistent behaviour between the two applications.
- Now, employees to attach receipts and supporting documents to an approved expense report, even after expenses are paid.
General Ledger
- Create an updated chart of accounts mapping segment rules using a file-based data import template.
- FBDI is the best way to create CRV Rules from external sources. You can download the template from either the File-Based Data Import (FBDI) for Financials guide or the application.
- Now we can create, update, or delete historical rates for multiple ledgers at once using a standard file-based data import template. This method is particularly useful for entering or updating large volumes of historical rates.
Reviewing the entire Oracle Cloud Readiness update is a daunting task. However, a thorough understanding of new features, functionalities and bug fixes is critical to keep business continuity intact. Enterprises should always review this documentation, with a special attention to security roles. You must ensure that new features are applied correctly to each of the specific roles you’ve identified.
Although Oracle does its own testing before releasing a patch, their testing doesn’t run against your specific environment and customizations. So enterprises must perform regression testing to ensure that no aspect of their system, data, workflows, or reports will be adversely affected by the update. If you’re struggling to keep pace with Oracle Cloud’s quarterly updates, Opkey can help.
Test Guidance from Opkey
Opkey specializes in helping organizations manage upgrades like 22A seamlessly, can even help you with the intricacy of the Oracle 22A update delay without hiccup.
Before each Update applied to customer environments, Opkey runs a comprehensive series of automated tests to validate the features being released against various levels of the customer’s environment. These tests validate:
- The health of the build in a simulated existing customer environment
- Successful execution of tests in a simulated new customer environment
- End-to-end business process flows
- Primary use case scenarios
- Alternate use case scenarios
- Additional scenarios derived from design specifications
- Oracle Cloud’s Security tests
- Reports and Integration tests
We will come up with more details about the Oracle 22A update delay in our next blog, till then stay tuned.
