Tuesday, March 22, 2011

GL: Statistical Journals -- not suppport by journal approval workflow

I saw this question on OAUGnet and thought I'd respond to it...

"Can anyone verify this: In R12 G/L, the seeded Journal Approval workflow (WF) will not route a statistical journal for approval regardless of the journal's source."

Here is what I found in My Oracle Support
MOS [ID 1076823.1]
"Currently Statistical journals do not require approval as per standard functionality.

The only limitation you can make is that you can use the profile option Journals: Mix Statistical and Monetary to prevent STAT and monetary lines on the same journal.
It is not possible to restrict entry of STAT lines by user."

Not really sure I understand how this profile option 'limitation' addresses the issue, but it is there nonetheless... Sometimes support analysts just hate saying "no Oracle doesn't provide that functionality"...

Regards,
Jeffrey T. Hare, CPA CISA CIA
ERP Risk Advisors
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreythare
send me a linked in request - jhare@erpra.net

Friday, March 18, 2011

Does your organization maintain proper workflow history?

Reviewing docs for a client today and ran across this comment in a document "I believe that there are audit reporting requirements to provide evidence of workflow approvals of changes to compensation or position-related edits"

Question: Does your company property maintain workflow history for approvals? Let me help with another question to ask your DBAs - how often are workflow history tables purged? Your homework for the day...

Based on my experience, many organizations do not have the evidence for such approvals if an auditor asks for this type of history.

I have enabled anonymous comments to protect the identity of those responding. Please respond anonymously with any comments.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Ad hoc SQL statements in Production environments by a developer

I had a client email me today the following:
"Is it normal to have IT dev/support group run SQL queries in production to fix errant/stuck data in an Oracle EBS shop? As an example have an data issue that is listing the load weight as 0LB and have IT fix that through an SQL query directly in production?"

Here was my response:
"No. This is not normal for two reasons:

1. Developers should not have access to run scripts in Prod. Any scripts should be developed by the developers, executed by the DBAs in a non-prod environment, tested by an end user then executed by the DBAs in Prod.

2. May or may not be an issue... SQL scripts can either be supported or not supported by Oracle depending on how they are written. If they call a public API, generally they are supported. If there is no public API, Oracle should be providing the data fix script. Otherwise, they'll not support it and the execution of it may void your support agreement."