Oracle and LODESTAR

On April 24, 2007, Oracle announced our agreement to acquire LODESTAR Corporation ("LODESTAR"), a leading provider of meter data management and competitive energy operation solutions. We expect the transaction to close in May 2007, subject to certain closing conditions. Until such time, each company will continue to operate independently.

LODESTAR delivers best-in-class meter data management, commercial and industrial (C&I) billing, load research, load forecasting and pricing, load profiling, and settlement and transaction management solutions to the utilities industry. The strengths of LODESTAR's solutions for utilities are planned to be combined with Oracle's industry leading database, middleware, and enterprise applications, including Oracle Utilities applications acquired through SPLWorldGroup. Combined, we plan to deliver the most comprehensive suite of mission critical operational systems for all segments of the utilities industry, combining meter data management, load profiling, pricing, marketing, sales, customer care, billing, analytics and management of the networks, work force, assets, and business to business transactions. We are also committed to supporting our respective customers, which include over 2,500 utilities worldwide, and 10 of the top 10 Global electric and gas companies.

On 6/1/2007, Oracle completed the acquisition of LODESTAR Corporation.

LODESTAR Corporation encompasses over 25 years of industry experience, spanning a customer base that includes the largest electricity and gas companies around the world. Our partnerships with these companies have allowed LODESTAR to stay in the forefront of the industry with leading energy software solutions.

Recognized globally for our suite of applications, LODESTAR Customer Choice Suite (CCS) is the cornerstone of many energy companies' mission critical applications. The CCS advantage lies in the ability to provide scalability and flexibility. Most solutions to date cannot handle the complexity involved in handling energy data. Thus, resources are consumed where they could be better utilized elsewhere. Because LODESTAR has applications that require configuration only around customer specific requirements, a business reduces expenditure as well as install time.

LODESTAR understands a business' need to forge ahead competitively. This is why we are dedicated to offering the industry software solutions that easily integrate into the entire enterprise. Our applications work easily with other third party packages and can easily be changed by your internal staff or with the help of a LODESTAR implementation specialist.

Chris Hamilos, Chairman and CEO had the vision to create a component-based suite of products to address the demands imposed by the ever-changing and dynamic energy markets worldwide. The first product to manage load research was introduced by LODESTAR Corporation (as part of TASC) in 1978. Since that time we have evolved our offerings into more than 10 different products that include portfolio management, financial management, pricing, billing, contract management, transaction management and more.
We lead with boldness, passion, speed and innovation. Our focus is to continuously provide the technology that makes a difference. We offer flexibility, efficiency, knowledge and over 70 years combined experience in our management team.

Source: www.oracle.com & www.lodestarcorp.com

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Multinational Corporation ERP Implementation – Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains

If you look back to the history, you will see that ERP for large publicly traded company had to be built upon very reliable hardware (more likely non-Intel hardware: mainframe, Sun sparc, etc.), powerful database platform: Oracle, DB2, Ingress, Sybase and reliable OS: UNIX. 10 years ago Microsoft had Windows NT first tries, plus Windows 95 was kind of revolution, but not the one to stake on for corporate users. Nowadays hardware (from Intel side), Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition, WindowsXP Pro, and Microsoft SQL Server could be considered reasonably reliable plus it is certainly easier to support these products, because of the large pool of Microsoft-oriented IT professionals available Worldwide. Microsoft Business Solutions offers several lines of ERP systems: Microsoft Great Plains, Microsoft Navision, Solomon, Axapta. We don’t want to state here that in the future Microsoft will be only ERP systems provider, but it certainly is and will be one of the major players on the ERP/MRP market. In this small article we’ll consider the ways to implement large corporation required features in Microsoft Great Plains.

• GL Consolidation. If you do business exclusively in the USA – you probably do not need this, however if you have to operate in the multicurrency and under multiple countries regulations – you need this feature. European ERPs of late 1990th had this GL consolidation as separate module. Microsoft Great Plains doesn’t have this feature out of the box, and you have to implement it via MS SQL Server Data Transformation package, Stored Procedure or Great Plains Dexterity customization. The alternative approach is to use Enterprise Reporting or FRx with multicurrency to provide consolidated reporting

• Internal Audit reports. Internal Auditor should be provided with reliable random selection of documents to review. Great Plains is MS SQL Server based application and if you base your Crystal Report on the stored procedure in SQL Server – you can easily get random selection
• Intercompanies Transactions. This is probably complicated with multicurrency – but Great Plains has the module to address this issue

• Customer/Vendor Consolidation. You might deal through agents on your local or regional markets and based on the results you pay the agent or subtract from it. This feature is covered in Customer/Vendor Consolidation module

• Multiple languages support. Great Plains had support to all the major languages in version 6.0. When Microsoft acquired Navision Software – it staked on Navision in continental Europe and all the emerging markets (Russia, East Europe, Brazil, China). The way you implement local language or Unicode characters support – you translate several screens for GP local users and extend Dexterity with Unicode enabling software utility.

Do your homework with regards to implementation, customization, integration and if you have issues or concerns – we are here to help! If you want us to do the job - give us a call +420 724 160 427 or ask for info@espaceconsulting.eu

Author: Andrew Karasev

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Oracle HTML DB

HTML DB uniquely converts an Oracle database into an online development service, which enables anyone with a Web browser to create reporting and data-entry applications quickly without the need for professional programming skills.

What Is Oracle HTML DB?

· It’s Browser driven.
· Provides rapid application development.
· It’s Wizard driven.
· You can quickly build web applications on the Oracle database for:
o Reporting
o Data entry
· Supported by Oracle 9.0.2.3 or later.
· Only needs Oracle HTTP Server.

Browser HTTP Server Oracle DB & HTML DB

HTML DB allows

You can create forms for:

· adding a record
· adding multiple records at a time
· updating a record
· deleting a record(s)
· viewing a record as read only

It allows you to setup triggers that execute when a particular action is committed by the user. For example, if a user clicks the delete button, some code will execute that will remove a product from the Oracle database, or write that record to another table, so that you have an audit trail.

Data is stored centrally and can be accessed by users from various locations. Users can be given privileges, where they can access only their own data. As an example following is a business scenario.

Business Scenario

Effective project management is the key to completing any project on time and within budget. Within every project there are always multiple issues that need to be tracked, prioritized, and dealt with.
For example there may be several projects that must be completed on time for Company A to be profitable. Missing deadlines for any of the projects will cause Company A to lose money. The project leads are tracking issues in several different ways. Some individuals are manually tracking issues in notebooks, others are tracking issues in text documents, and other managers are using spreadsheets.

By creating a hosted application in Oracle HTML DB, each project lead can easily record and track issues in one central location. Not only will everyone have access to just the data they need, but having the data stored in one location, will make it easier for management to determine if any critical issues are not being addressed.

Reports

Reports can be produced that allow users to filter report output. This allows the end user to set values that will be queried against to produce a report. These reports can be sorted by any heading on that report and can also be filtered down again. To produce these reports a developer needs to set the reports up and add the SQL queries or PL/SQL code to HTML DB.

Data can be imported from a spreadsheet into HTML DB and put into an Oracle database. All that is required is the database tables need to be setup first.

Reports can also be produced as pie charts, line charts, date reports (a calendar with text on specific dates where for example a support issue arose), bar charts and text output.

Author: Dal Hayer

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