Rookery Software: Configuration Management for Oracle E-Business Suite

Andy Harriss, Director
The age of globalization is transforming industries and forcing organizations to rethink the business models and corporate strategies that have helped them thrive for decades. Many choose to implement both ERP and cloud-based solutions from popular vendors to meet their needs rather than developing in-house solutions. One of the most widespread of these solutions is Oracle’s E-Business Suite. Effective configuration management within the Oracle E-Business Suite is an essential requirement for all organizations that use it, but is a huge task. The process is prone to human error and carries a significant overhead cost. “Our software acts as an enabler, helping organizations to implement, enhance upgrade and maintain their Oracle solutions by allowing them to apply simplified, standardized and automated processes. Organizations then have the scope to better focus their resources on activities that provide real benefit to the business,” says Andy Harriss, Director, Rookery Software.

The Wiltshire, UK based company has developed ConfigSnapshot, a flexible and comprehensive configuration management software product that is successfully helping hundreds of organizations worldwide manage their Oracle E-Business Suite systems—reducing risks, increasing control and providing governance and audit capabilities. The flexible platforms implifies processes across all stages of the application lifecycle reducing the effort and cost, increasing accuracy, allowing problems and issues to be solved more quickly, and enabling tasks to be easily repeated across multiple environments. Traditionally,organizations manually documented the setups of their E-Business Suite environments. “By using ConfigSnapshot they can automatically both document and analyze their setup in a wide variety of formats and can decide whether to review all setups or to target specific data using the extensive filtering capabilities of the product,” adds Andy.

ConfigSnapshot can quickly compare setups across multiple environments to help ensure that all changes are correctly deployed, from initial development right through to production use. For companies rolling out to multiple companies and countries it also enables direct comparison across entities such as operating unit or ledger to confirm setups reflect common business process as well as local or legislative needs.


Oracle E-Business Suite—enabling organizations to successfully execute risk, control and governance and configuration management


Change over time can also be managed; the product provides both point-to-point comparison via baselines and full audit track of all changes to high risk areas to provide traceability and help ensure only authorized changes have been made. All reporting is shown in easy-to-use formats that relate directly to the way the data is presented in the E-Business Suite itself.

Another major benefit of the software is its ability to allow setup data to be planned prior to deployment to the E-Business Suite environment and to automatically migrate this data rather than relying on manual re-keying, which is both time consuming and error prone. Moreover, validated setup can be migrated from one E-Busi¬ness Suite environment to another using ConfigSnapshot.

ConfigSnapshot’s customization impact analysis identifies where objects affected by major or minor upgrades have been referenced in custom code; including providing an annotated version of the code highlighting exactly where the objects have been used. Developers use this information to dramatically reduce the time to remediate their code. Patch reporting provides details of application components and setup data that have been affected, allowing teams to determine where to focus testing efforts rather that spending valuable time on areas unaffected by the change.

Currently, the firm aims to extend its offering across other applications in Oracle’s portfolio such as Fusion. “A number of our customers and partners are beginning to move, in part, towards Oracle’s Fusion or Cloud offerings, particularly as part of a co-existence strategy, and have expressed interest in us being able to help them both in their implementation and ongoing management of these systems,” concludes Harriss.

Company
Rookery Software

Headquarters
Wiltshire, UK

Management
Andy Harriss, Director

Description
Provides flexible and comprehensive management software called ConfigSnapshot for better managing Oracle E-Business Suite