Oracle EBS (E-Business Suite) is a comprehensive suite of integrated business applications that helps manage information about customers, products, catalog, discount policies, pricing, contracts, inventory, invoices, customer service, logistics, human capital, financial management etc. Oracle Commerce (ATG + Endeca) is an end-to-end eCommerce platform focused on providing personalized experience to shoppers and can be leveraged by both B2C and B2B businesses.
Companies using Oracle EBS and Oracle Commerce will invariably want to integrate these two systems to enable convergence of offline and online commerce, synchronize information to facilitate real time data updates and efficiently manage the buying and post buying processes.
In most cases Oracle EBS becomes the system which holds the master data related to customers (MDM) and products (PIM). Integration Repository from Oracle Commerce and Integrated SOA gateway from Oracle EBS is commonly used for data exchange between the two systems and here are some of the common data flows between the two.
- Product related changes gets updated in Oracle Commerce either in real-time or during periodic syncs.
- Volume based or differential pricing or complex product configuration based pricing gets updated from EBS to Oracle Commerce.
- Discount policy, Credit limits, Eligibility, Product Catalogs etc is governed by data pushed from EBS to Oracle Commerce.
- Quotation submitted in Oracle Commerce is pushed to EBS which is then assigned to appropriate Sales/Account manager for approval.
- Customer details and orders flow from Oracle Commerce to Accounts/TCA & OMS respectively in EBS in real-time.
- Data related to order status, fulfilment and shipping gets updated in real time from EBS to Oracle Commerce enabling the users to check status online.
- Certain events can happen in both the systems, example customers can cancel an order either online or through a customer support executive. This scenario will require a two-way synchronization.
- From an Omni-channel perspective, customers may place an order through offline mode (sales executive) but would like to check the order status online or vice-versa, in these cases, data will flow from either end.
- Typically, Accounts/Shopper Profile, Complex Pricing, Order Status, Product bundling details are updated in real time and Product/Catalog specification, Simple Pricing, Promotion details are updated on a periodic basis (usually once or twice a day).
Integrating Oracle Commerce and EBS helps leverage the benefits from the both the systems, enables Omni-channel, provide better customer experience, reduces sales cycle time, facilitates direct-to-consumer and governs online transactions by contracts and pricing policies.
