Oracle B2B - Part1

 

Oracle B2B

Part1

In this post, I want to share knowledge required for Oracle B2B learners. I will try to make it as simple as possible with very neutral terminology.

The B2B system helps an Organization who wants to conduct e-business with other organizations like their suppliers and customers. In other words, I can say B2B helps an organization to process O2C and P2P transactions in a standard way. B2B system will use B2B standard documents for inbound or outbound transactions. Here few example B2B documents are EDI X12, EDIFACT, RosettaNet etc.

I will use below scenario to make you understand B2B.

"Dell Inc" is an organization wants to conduct e-business with "Intel Corporation" and "Oracle Corporation".

In Dell point of view, Intel Corporation is a supplier and Oracle Corporation is a customer. So we should have P2P flow between Dell and Intel Corporation and O2C flow between Dell and Oracle Corporation. 

Example: Oracle will send a purchase order to Dell Inc to buy 1000 laptops(This is a sale order for Dell). To assemble 1000 laptops, Dell needs 1000 processors. Assume, In Dell warehouse only 500 processors are available. Now Dell will send a PO to Intel for 500 I7-Processors.

Here I want to list few basic keywords which we use regularly in Oracle B2B.

1. Host Partner
2. Trading Partner
3. Trading Partner Agreement
4. B2B Standards / B2B Document
5. Listening Channel

Host Partner:

Organization who is conducting e-business is called as Host Partner. In our scenario, Dell Inc will be treated as Host Partner because Dell Inc wants to conduct e-Business with Intel and Oracle.

Trading Partner:

A trading partner is an organization that conducts e-business with other organizations. Intel and Oracle are the Trading Partners in our scenario.

Trading Partner Agreement:

A Trading Partner Agreement (TPA) is defined as a definitive and binding agreement between Host Partner and trading partners and vice-versa. In other words, we can consider TPA is a contract between two business profiles to use a specific message encoding protocol or a specific transport protocol while exchanging B2B message with each other. In  agreement, we have to configure the direction of transaction and trading partner identifiers. Without configuring agreements, we can't do any inbound or outbound transaction through B2B system.

As per our scenario, I need to configure two agreements. One with Oracle and other with Intel. Agreement with Oracle which allows Dell to accepts PO's will be treated as INBOUND agreement and  agreement with Intel  which allows Dell to sends PO's will be treated as OUTBOUND agreement. As per agreement configuration in our B2B, it never sends PO's to Oracle and it never accepts PO's from Intel. So as per agreement configuration transactions will be decided.

B2B Standards / B2B Document:

In e-Business, organizations have to interchange different transactions(purchase order request, purchase order change request, shipment notification, invoice etc). So the data and data format in a transaction should be understandable for both the organizations.  ISO, UN/CEFACT, OASIS, OAGi are the recognized standard bodies to write and approve B2B Standards like EDI X12, EDIFACT, RosettaNet etc. Some standards like EDI X12 and EDIFACT are NonXml standards and RosettaNet is an XML standard. Of course, we can define our own standards as per our organization and partners  business requirement. There are multiple consortiums formed to make customized B2B standards. RosettaNet is the one example, written by one consortium.

Listening Channel:

Channel is the way to communicate with B2B system. Here we have two types of channels. 

• External channel : A channel which helps to communicate between trading partner and B2B system.
• Internal Channel : A channel which communicates between B2B System and backend systems like any integration systems or ERP systems. 

We use channels for inbound and outbound communications.
Channel Ex : File Channel, FTP Channel, JMS, EMail, AQ etc