Multi Org Structure in R12: An Overview

What is a Multi Org Structure?

If an enterprise or a business wants to implement multiple organizations such as multiple Ledgers (Sets of Books), or Legal Entities, or Business Groups within a single installation of Oracle Applications, then we can summarize that the enterprise is planning to implement a multi org setup.

In 11i:

In 11i, a user working with a specific responsibility, under a given operating unit, would need to switch responsibilities, if she were to access a sales order that was created from a different operating unit. For this to happen, the user had to be assigned a second responsibility that was linked to the second operating unit.Responsibilities were tied to operating units through the profile option MO: Operating Unit.

In R12:

With Release 12, Oracle Applications had to ensure that certain aspects of the applications were redesigned to meet the inevitable advance of Globalization.

Organizational changes in R12

The Set of Books evolved into Ledgers and Ledger Sets. The philosophy of Multiple Organization Access Control (MOAC) introduced in R12, ensured that the same user could perform multiple tasks across operating units without changing responsibilities. The use of Security Profiles was extended beyond HR to make MOAC possible.

Organization Access Control in R12

In a multi org environment, securing the data in each organization becomes a key task and concern for management and the implementation team. By creating custom responsibilities, management ensures that employees are given access to only those menus and functions that they need to perform their routine activities. However, an addition layer of security needs to be designed to ensure that using those menus and forms given to them, employees cannot trespass into an organization that they should not have access to.

As mentioned above, in 11i access to organizations was compartmentalized based on operating units. This ensured data security, but at the expense of making it a little cumbersome for the user to switch between organizations that belong to different operating units.
The Multi Org Access Control (MOAC) feature in R12 retains the data security aspect between organizations and users. However, it also brings with it a certain degree of user friendliness in navigating between different operating units.

Host Concurrent Programs

One of the things to remember while registering a host concurrent program is that the first five parameters are reserved by Oracle E-Business Suite for its own use. The sixth parameter onwards is used for user-defined concurrent program parameters.

The first five parameters refer to the following:

$0: The shell script to be executed
$1: Oracle user/password
$2: Applications user_id
$3: Application user_name
$4: Concurrent program request_id

In addition to these, the environment variable FCP_LOGIN is also used to store the Oracle user/password. 

Tables and Naming Convention

If you are new to erp and need guidance on how to become an ERP consultant then yes you will
find lot of helpful information both functional as well as in-depth technical details.

Tables/Views ending with _ALL, _TL, _VL, _V,_F,_VL,_A,_AVN:

Very common thing, people get confuse why such type of naming convention oracle have used. Here is note for some of them:

_ALL : Table holds all the information about different operating units. Multi-Org environment. You can also set the client_info to specific operating unit to see the data specific to that operating unit only.

_TL are tables corresponding to another table with the same name minus the _TL. These tables provide multiple language support. For each item in the table without _TL there can be many rows in the _TL table, but all with different values in the LANGUAGE column.

_B these are the BASE tables.They are very important and the data is stored in the table with all validations.It is supposed that these table will always contain the perfect format data.If anything happens to the BASE table data, then it is a data corruption issue.

_F these are date tracked tables, which occur in HR and Payroll. For these there are two date columns EFFECTIVE_START_DATE and EFFECTIVE_END_DATE which together with the PK identifies a row uniquely. The date intervals cannot overlap. Many think they are Secured data. Guess someone from Oracle confirms.

_V tables are the views created on base tables

_VL are views for multi language tables which combines the row of the base table with the corresponding row of the _TL table where the LANGUAGE = USERENV('LANG').

_S are sequences, used for finding new values for the primary key of a table.

_A are Audit Shadow Tables

_AVN and _ACN are Audit Shadow Views (when data was changed, and with what values