Ten Ways of Using iSetup to Streamline E-Business Suite Implementations

By Uma Prabhala on May 22, 2008

[Editor update: The iSetup Development team is eagerly monitoring the newly-created iSetup OTN Forum for your burning questions; direct email ID removed]

At the recent OAUG Collaborate conference at Denver, I had a session on "Setup Management for E-Business Suite using iSetup." This being the last session on the last day of the conference, I was really surprised to see more than 40 people attending the session, listening with rapt attention and asking a lot of questions! Interestingly enough, only a handful of the attendees were using iSetup in their EBS implementations, and a majority of the customers in the room were interested in knowing how and when to use iSetup. iSetup in a Nutshell The main focus of iSetup is to help migrate functional setups from one E-Business Suite instance to another. During migration, setups can be extracted selectively using filters on setup attributes. Extracted setup data can be optionally transformed before loading into target instance.

Another neat capability of iSetup is setup comparison, whereby a report can be generated on the

exact differences of setup information between two instances or from the same instance across different timelines.

Ten Typical Uses for iSetup 1. A first time EBS implementation involves a manual setup using either Business Accelerators or a manual entry. iSetup can help jump-start such implementation scenarios by loading a CRP instance from an industry best practice configuration. 2. iSetup provides an enterprise wide repository to store business specific configuration snapshots. These Gold copies can be used to configure a new instance, thus avoiding reconfigurations. 3. iSetup expedites implementations by providing out-of-the-box migration templates tailored to suit various implemenation phases. 4. iSetup can also help promote setups from CRP to multiple test, development and production environments. iSetup enforces business validations inherent in interfaces owned by Oracle product modules. iSetup abstracts the complex setup dependencies across functional modules by orchestrating the deployment of setups during migration. 5. iSetup can be used to copy all setups striped by an Operating Unit and move it to another EBS instance using Hierarchical selection set feature which cascades filter criteria to all

related setups in the selection set template. 6. In a roll-out scenario, iSetup can be used to replicate the setups tied to an existing Operating Unit to a new Operating Unit; similarly replicate Payroll Element setups tied to existing Business Group to new Business Group using Transformation feature which cascade the changes to all related setups in the selection set template. 7. iSetup can be used to migrate incremental setups selectively across instances using filters on setup attributes. 8. Instead of cloning the entire EBS instance, iSetup can be used to move required setup data from a production instance to a testing instance. New setups can be added to the test instance and those specific setups can be selectively migrated to production instance while the instance is up and running. This minimizes the need to redo setups, and execute expensive clone activities. 9. iSetup provides standard and comparison reporting features. Standard reports help in documenting the setups in regular PDF/RTF/Excel that serve as a standard reference for implementation teams. Release 12.1 also supports BR100 styled reports. iSetup also generates detailed deployment reports for post implementation audits and sign-offs (coming soon in 12.1). 10. iSetup comparison reports can help in troubleshooting functional setups by enabling users to compare setups across instances or timelines.