Oracle OpenWorld 2010 facilitated almost 50 sessions on a wide range of Siebel subjects. Also available were 14 demo’s, a CRM lounge, a CRM Experts forum and a CRM Social Reception. Nevertheless, news reporting on Siebel CRM was very limited and seemed to be overshadowed by the anouncement for Fusion Applications to become available Q1 2011. Below an overview of most important CRM related announcements, based on several news reporting agencies.

Fusion CRM

At a press session on Monday, Anthony Lye, Oracle senior vice president of CRM, defined Fusion as “the most modern set of applications on the planet”. The on-premise and on-demand applications are based on the same code base, enabling the ability to switch between both delivery models. “You can deploy it one way and six months later if you want to change, you can.” He added that firms can run their CRM system on one database and their financials on a separate machine, but they would still get a single view of customer data.

Last night Larry Ellison announced the general availability of Fusion Applications v1. In his key note at the start of Open World he told the audience  that it has been, and continues to be, an enormous engineering effort.

He also said laughing: “We’ve never done that before, and I hope we never do it again.”

Follow Open World news this week on BloggingAboutOracleApplications…

We just got used to PeopleTools 8.50 and now PeopleTools 8.51 can now downloaded from Oracle eDelivery.

Version 8.50 brought a lot of great enhancements to PeopleSoft and 8.51 will be only make the product better.

Read this post for the Release Value Proposition for PeopleTools 8.51 and this post for the Advisor Webcast to see what this new version will bring us.

PeopleBooks for PeopleTools 8.51 is also availible from the usual PeopleBooks link page.

Since receivables dunning letters have been obsoleted in R12, it’s hard to find useful information on the Oracle Support site about dunning letters in R12, especially about running dunning letters at delinquency level. In R12 now you will need to run Oracle Advanced Collections Dunning Plans instead.

A couple of months ago one of our customers asked me to find out if it’s possible to send dunning letters at delinquency level per customer/transaction type. They were using 4 transaction types and wanted also a different dunning letter template for each transaction type, so I was facing another challenge on that.

I knew before I started my research that dunning letters in R12 were based on transaction scoring. You have to define one or more score components, score-engines and dunning plans to get this all working. Oracle delivers seeded score components and score-engines, but all that seeded stuff wasn’t really helpful for me.

First thing I did was searching for more information on the Oracle Support site and reading the implementation guide to get an idea where to begin with the setup. As you can guess I could find hardly any information about dunning letters at delinquency level. All information I found was about dunning letters at customer level, because 95% of the Oracle eBS customers is using dunning letters at customer level.

With the attachment functions in PeopleSoft it is possible to load pay slips, annual statements or other documents into the database. It is a good idea to have the attachments into the database, because then you can handle the security with PeopleSoft (and with Oracle on the database level), instead of on the file system. In this case the attachments are in PDF format. Once the pay slips are uploaded into the database, it is possible to view them by clicking on a link in ESS (Employee Self Service). When you click on the link, acrobat reader will start and present the pay slip in a new window. The user can print the pay slip or annual statement from acrobat reader.

Example ESS page

When all pay slips and annual statements would be printed by everyone, surely there is no business case for saving paper. But nevertheless there is a business case for saving stamps. In practice not all of the pay slips will actually be printed, however.