Business Challenges

Large Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) customers typically have multi-geography footprints with multiple Ledgers and necessitating an efficient period close process and successfully closure of GL ledgers periods. However, often this process becomes complex and challenging to manage, and therefore proper understanding and streamlining of this process is essential to have an effective period close. Ensuring that all journals are posted on time and adhering to General Ledger period close calendar is critical. Achieving this requires both system optimization and efficient resource management.

Following an upgrade from 11i to R12, some customers experience a significant and intermittent performance degradation of ‘Posting Single Ledger program’. This issue can cause considerable delay in closing GL Ledgers, leading to disruption in financial operations and loss of operational efficiency.

In certain cases, posting even a simple journal entry with only few lines takes anywhere from a few seconds to over 20 minutes. Notably, this issue exists even in ‘thin’ ledgers which have no associated subledgers.

This document serves as a reference for improving GL Journals posting performance for real-world Oracle EBS implementations. The performance metrics provided are based on successful application of best practices and optimization strategies for a leading Lifesciences client.

Figure 1 showing posting metrics before optimization of posting programs.

In most EBS Environments, Automatic posting Concurrent Program schedules are configured with varying execution frequencies such as every hour or every half an hour depending on the completion of the previous run. These schedules run under different responsibilities for multiple ledgers, each with distinct AutoPost criteria.

While the posting programs execute as per their scheduled intervals, they often experience extended run times, causing subsequent scheduled posting programs to remain in wait state and sometimes over an hour. Although Oracle provides multiple recommendations to address journal posting delay, not all of them effectively enhance posting performance.

Few best practices implemented to improve the performance of Posting programs in R12.2

1.Refine Subledger Accounting Processing

• Execute create accounting in Final Mode but set Post in GL to No
• Gather all unposted journals from Sub-Ledgers into GL and then post them exclusively through GL Responsibility only.

2.Explicitly control Submit Accounting program parameters

• Within Ledger Setup – Subledger Accounting option, configure the following options.
  • Posting in GL Set to No to prevent automatic posting from subledgers.
  • Allow Post Override Set to No to enforce posting control at the GL Level

3.Optimize Ledger Set Configuration

• Create a Ledger Set having same Chart of Accounts (COA) ID & add it to AutoPost criteria.
• Avoid including ALL ledgers in AutoPost Criteria as this can dramatically degrade the   posting performance.
• The Automatic posting program run is system-driven process that automatically posts journal entries from a pre-defined set of ledgers (identified by specific COA IDs), directly to a designated ledger with immediate posting enabled.

4.Enable parallel processing for posting programs

• Remove Incompatibility constraints on posting programs to allow parallel journal posting Apply Patch 18014340 which includes a script to force an update of General Ledger incompatibility between Posting and Open Period Program. A ‘Posting’ program that manage posting to multiple ledgers simultaneously is typically referred to as a ‘Parallel Posting’ program; this functionality allows a single transaction to be recorded in different ledgers at the same time.

5.Optimize AutoPost Criteria for Journal Sources

• Adjust the Priority sequence of Journal source in GL_AUTO_POST criteria set – based on  Journal volumes per source which in turn increases the posting performance of Ledger Set Journal Batches that are available for posting.

6.Improve performance with a custom Index.

• Create a custom Index on GL_JE_BATCHES Table to improve performance of Posting Single Ledger program.

By implementing these best practices, the posting run time and wait time will be significantly reduced to few seconds, leading to substantial improvement in GL Posting performance.

Figure 2 showing posting metrics after optimization of posting programs