Oracle eAMs Best Friend-Automated Work Order & Attachment Printing

An Exploration of Work Order and Attachment Print Functionality in Oracle eAM 11i & R12

This paper is intended to educate users, developers, managers, and executives of companies using Oracle
Enterprise Asset Management (eAM) to successfully automate the printing of Oracle eAM documents such as work
orders and accompanying attachments into their business processes.

A company is only as good as its infrastructure. Regardless of size or purpose, business processes and services
within a company rely heavily upon the dependability of assets from high-tech manufacturing equipment to the
phone on someones desk all are vital for successful day-to-day operations within any company. An increasing
number of companies realize the impact these assets have on their everyday business processes, and have
implemented asset management software, such as the Oracle E-Business Suite module Enterprise Asset
Management (eAM), to monitor their assets.

eAM creates an efficient way for companies to manage, track and schedule maintenance of their assets.
Maintenance staffs use Oracle eAM to create work orders as a way to report problems with assets or to assign
routine maintenance on them.
Figure 1: Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Work Order Definition

As an added feature, Oracle eAM provides users the option to attach one or more documents to a work order. This
ensures that detailed information relating to a specific work order request is available for reference. For example,
a work order for routine maintenance of a vehicle may have instructions on how to balance the tires (as a Microsoft
Word document), a part diagram (as a gif image), and a picture of the actual equipment itself (as a jpeg image).

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Methods for Creating Work Orders

Oracle eAM provides two user interface methods to create work orders and view attachments: Oracle Forms and
Self Service/Web/Oracle Application Framework. Both of these methods provide access to work orders, however,
neither interface method fully addresses the need for printing of the work order and its accompanying
attachment(s), thus increasing the amount of time and resources in order to fully process each work order.
Oracle Forms

While the forms based method allows you to print a work order report in 11i and R12 it lacks the capability to
print associated attachments with work order print requests. Instead, the file attachments are merely
referenced in the work order report that is run as a concurrent request.
Figure 2: Oracle Forms - Work Order Document Attachments

Figure 3: Oracle Forms Work Order Detail Report

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 Oracle Application Framework
With the launch of R12, Oracle added the ability to print work order reports within the Self Service/Web/
OAF method (hereafter referred to as Self Service). Previous eAM versions (11i) required users to exit Self
Service and enter Oracle Forms in order to print a work order. This created inefficiencies for eAM users and
limited companies in their ability to manage user responsibilities within Oracle Forms.
Figure 4: 11i Oracle Applications Framework No Print Work Order Option

No Print Option

In R12 Self Service a new option to Print Work Order is available on the Work Order Search Screen.
Figure 5: R12 Oracle Application Framework - Print Work Order option

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 This new functionality allows a user to view the work order(s) in PDF format within Self Service. From this
point a user can use Adobe Acrobat to print the work order(s). However, like the forms-based method, the
PDF document only references work order attachments it does not actually include each attachment as
part of the PDF document.

Figure 6: R12 Oracle Applications Framework Printing Work Order Document

Figure 7: Oracle Applications Framework Work Order Detail Report

Summary of Standard eAM Print Functionality in 11i and R12

For both the Oracle Forms and Self Service methods in Oracle EBS - eAM 11i and R12 the work order is printed and
the maintenance staff is required to go back into Oracle EBS, pull up the work order, open each individual
attachment using the proper source application on their desktop to view and print the attachment document. Once
printed, the output is gathered, matched to an appropriate work order and finally manually collated into the actual
end product, a work order packet.

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In an environment where a high volume of work orders are generated daily or weekly, this seemingly minor print
work order, print attachments, gather documents and manually collate inconvenience can cause a major
disruption in business processes as it quickly erodes time and resources and lends itself to costly mistakes that
ultimately result in higher operating costs.

Automating Work Order Printing with Accompanying Attachments

To remedy these common printing challenges, a software solution is needed in order to print and collate work
orders and any accompanying attachments with one request from within either Oracle Forms or the Self Service
interface. Ideally this would be accomplished by submitting a standard print request to the Concurrent Manager,
Oracles report generator module.

Figure 8: Work Order and Attachment Printing Diagram

Using this proposed solution, a single or batch of work orders are submitted as a concurrent print request where a
third-party application, such as AventX Attachment Printer, processes each work order with its associated
attachments and directs the complete package to the designated printer. Attachments reside in virtually any
format, so it is important that any third party application be capable of converting the attachments from their
native format to a printable format. For example, AventX supports the following native formats for
attachments:
Microsoft Word Lotus FreeLance
Microsoft Excel Corel WordPerfect
Microsoft PowerPoint Visio
HTML TIFF
PDF RTF
Lotus 123 JPEG, GIF, PNG
Lotus WordPro

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The following examples use AventX Attachment Printer (hereafter referred to as AventX) as the third party
software solution for the printing of work orders and attachments in an Oracle EBS R12 environment. It is
important to note that this functionality is available in other Oracle EBS versions (e.g., 11i10, etc.) as well.
AventX in Oracle Forms
Using AventX with the forms-based method, printing work orders and accompanying attachments is
accomplished by simply submitting a request to run the work order report as the user normally would. The
user need only select a style on the Upon Completion form that is associated with AventX, then select a
printer and submit the request. When the request is submitted, AventX automatically pulls the attachments
associated with the work order, converts them to a printable format, and forwards the work order and its
attachments to the designated printer.

Figure 9: Printing Work Orders from Forms Style Selection

AventX in Self Service

Using AventX with the Self Service method, printing work orders and accompanying attachments is
accomplished by taking advantage of forms personalization to add a Print Work Order and Attachment(s)
button that, when clicked, will allow the user to submit the work order to AventX using a concurrent request.
For 11i users the addition of a print work order button adds incremental benefit above and
beyond printing attachments in that they can now print work orders directly from Self Service.
Once the Print Work Order and Attachment(s) button has been added, the user clicks the Print Work Order
and Attachment(s) button, specifies the name of the concurrent report to be generated, selects the
appropriate AventX style and printer, and submits the request. When the request is submitted, AventX
automatically pulls the attachments associated with the work order, translates them to a printable format,
and forwards the actual work order and all of the attachments to the designated printer.

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 Figure 10 Step 1: Printing Work Orders and Attachments from Self Service

Figure 11: Step 2 Work Order Printing Program Name

Figure 12: Step 3 Work Order Batch Printing Parameters

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 Figure 13: Step 4 Work Order Batch Print Style and Printer

After generating a concurrent request, the user may then check the status of the printed documents by
searching for the request ID using the AventX Delivery Status form. The status of each work order document
and its accompanying attachments are displayed here.

Figure 14: Work Order Package Print Status

Value of Printing Work Orders with Attachments

The inability to automatically print work orders and accompanying attachments from eAM is a significant pain for
users. Companies waste thousands of personnel hours annually by printing work orders and then manually
locating, printing and collating attachments with work orders. Not only is this multi-step process inefficient, but
also increases the chances for users to make costly printing and collating mistakes. Imagine the costs your
company would incur by sending a maintenance worker to the field with a work order requesting the repair of an
air-conditioning unit, yet the work order attachments detail the replacement of a tractor tire.

By combining Oracles eAM asset management tools with STR Softwares AventX Attachment Printer, you can
eliminate a very manual and mistake prone process and enable your maintenance staff to spend more time on
productive exercises and less time on clerical work.

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What to look for in a Vendor

When considering a document printing solution, try to obtain the following information from each vendor as it
pertains to their automated document delivery system:

Live demonstration of the vendors product operating within Oracle EBS eAM (11i or R12) rather than a
slide presentation
Installed customer references
Annual support agreement what is included
Source of Support is it provided by the vendor or an outsourced company
Customizations does the vendor document product customizations and support them
Implementation ask for a detailed outline and list of tasks and ask if you can do it yourself
ROI can the solution create an ROI in less than a year

Summary

As evidenced, Oracle eAM does a good job of allowing you to attach documents to a work order, yet they do not
provide the necessary technology that allows you to print a work order and accompanying attachments in the same
print request. A third-party solution like STR Softwares AventX Attachment Printer must be present in order to
print a work order with related attachments.

To learn more about how STR Software can help save your company time and money, please visit us online at
www.strsoftware.com or call us at 804-897-1600 x.2 (toll free 800-897-7097).

STR Software Product Demonstrations

Experience STR Softwares AventX product live within an Oracle EBS - eAM production environment. Visit
http://www.strsoftware.com/webcast.htm and sign up for our next live product demonstration.

Cannot wait for the next live product demonstration? Take a look at our pre-recorded seven minute product
demonstration. Choose the environment most relevant to you; 11i or R12.

About STR Software

Founded in 1986, STR Software, an enterprise software company, is headquartered in Richmond, Virginia.
Providing a single point of contact for its AventX Product Suite, the company develops, markets, and supports
automated document delivery solutions for email, fax, internet fax and print for host ERP applications such as
Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and SAP in Unix, Linux, MPE, and Windows environments. STR Software, an
Oracle PartnerNetwork Certified Partner, has been recognized for engineering reliable Solutions That Run.

AventX is a registered trademark and the property of STR Software. All products and companies herein may be
registered or unregistered trademarks of their respective owners and are hereby acknowledged.