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Control Your Oracle E-Business Suite Applications
Looking for a way to maximize the quality of service delivered through Oracle
E-Business Suite? Oracle Applications Manager and Oracle Grid Control provide end-to-end control for your E-Business Suite systems. Oracle Applications Manager, built into Oracle E-Business Suite, optimizes the performance and availability of an Oracle E-Business Suite system, while Oracle Grid Control prioritizes, optimizes, and manages resources across multiple Oracle
E-Business Suite systems.
Oracle Applications Manager provides diagnostics and troubleshooting, configuration management, and other critical system management features within the Oracle E-Business Suite. It also allows you to map system components to your custom business flows and track the impact of the performance and availability of those components on your business. Similarly, system errors and other events are shown within the context of your business flows, allowing you to plan your response based on your business needs.
Oracle Applications Manager helps reduce total cost of ownership by minimizing system downtime and streamlining system maintenance and support. Proactive patch notifications and detailed patch impact analysis help you plan for maintenance activities. Diagnostic tools minimize unplanned outages by identifying potential problems, automating problem resolution, and facilitating communication with Oracle Support.
"Oracle E-Business Suite includes hundreds of modules and many complex business processes. The overall health of the system and the corresponding cost of managing it require management software that is integrated at the product code level," says Kurt Larsen, vice president in Oracle Support. "Oracle Applications Manager allows our customers to enjoy the highest quality of service while reducing the cost of managing the entire applications infrastructure." For more information, visit http://otn.oracle.com/managing.
Oracle Customer Data Hub Serves IHOP Franchisees
The Oracle Customer Data Hub, Oracle's integrated customer data management solution, is cooking up impressive opportunities for IHOP, a chain of 1,300 restaurants famous for their breakfasts.
IHOP uses the Oracle Customer Data Hub in two ways: first, to track the needs and performance of IHOP franchisees. Royalty payments, point-of-sale information, guest relations, and other metrics are all available. Using Oracle Sales Online, IHOP is also tracking new franchisees from prospect through successful operation.
Second, IHOP is learning about the experiences of individual IHOP guests. When diners call or e-mail with a comment or complaint, those messages are logged (via the Oracle Call Center application) and passed to the individual restaurant for action.
IHOP also incorporates information from several third-party, non-Oracle applications, including six different point-of-sale systems, a Lawson enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, an Informix data warehouse, and information from a mystery shopping service called Shop'n Chek.
That disparate data is consolidated, organized, and made available to IHOP franchisees, who can view customer praise and complaints, compare the size of customer checks, and track the effectiveness of IHOP promotions. Franchisees with multiple restaurants can compare metrics of different outlets. All data is available over the Web—great news, since many franchisees don't have extensive IT resources.
Free HR Advice for Small- to Medium-Size Businesses
While technology-enabled human resources (HR) processes have been at work for years in large enterprises, they're just getting a foothold in
small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs, with revenues of US$100 million to US$1 billion).
A META Group white paper, available from Oracle, explores this
landscape and provides practical advice.
META Group interviewed nearly 100 C-level executives in North American SMBs and found room for improvement in HR processes and effectiveness. The good news is that powerful, consolidated HR applications—and the business benefits they provide—are now available to SMBs. The white paper lays out specific steps in three areas where companies and their HR professionals can focus their efforts: individual competency, process knowledge, and HR technology.
To receive a free copy of "A View from the Top: The State of HR in Small and Medium Businesses," go to oracle.com/start.
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