What is an ORACLE APPS?

Lets take an example.

                   Suppose you are running a small mobile shop named univercell mobile shop,
   so the typical operation as a shop owner will buy basically mobiles from some big seller
   and stock it in your shop. Now people come to your shop for day-to-day needs and buy mobiles
 from your shop at a slightly higher price than what you originally bought and stocked it in
 your shop.
probably you may not be carrying items or run out of stock that people ask for so you
make a note of it and promise the person to come back tomorrow and they will get their item.
 So far so good, now lets name some entities before we proceed and things get complicated.
 The big seller from whom you buy stock is called as Vendor, the people who come to your shop
 to buy things are known as customers, the stock in your shop is known as inventory.
 So far we have identified few entities that play an active role in your day-to-day operations.
 As time goes by, your business expands and now you take orders over the phone and provide service
 to deliver the items to your customers, so you hire people to help you out in maintaining the
 inventory, do the delivery part and all the necessary stuff to keep the business running smoothly.
 The people you hire are known as employees.
So in this small shop, you typically manage the bookkeeping activities by hand using a notepad
or something similar. Now imagine the same setup on a larger scale where you have more than
50,000 customers, have more than 5000 vendors, have more than 5000 employees and have a huge
 warehouse to maintain your inventory. Do you think you can manage all that information using
 pen and paper? Absolutely no way! Your business will come to an end

To facilitate big businesses, companies like Oracle Corporation have created huge software
known in the category of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) as Oracle Applications.
Now coming to think of it, Oracle Apps is not one huge software, instead it is a collection
of software known as modules that are integrated and interact (or talk)to each other.

Now what is meant by integrated? First let us identify the modules by entities.
 For e.g Purchasing and Account Payables deal with the vendors since you typically purchase
 from vendors and eventually have to pay the dues. Oracle Purchasing handles all the requisitions
 and purchase orders to the vendors whereas Oracle Accounts Payables handles all the payments to the vendors.

Similarly Oracle Inventory deals with the items you maintain in stock, warehouse etc.
 Dealing with customers is handled collectively with the help of Oracle Receivables and
 Oracle Order Management. Order Management helps you collect all the information that your
 customer is ordering over the phone or webstore etc whereas Receivables help you collect
 the money for the orders that are delivered to the customers.

Now who maintains the paychecks, benefits of the 5000 employees? right! it is managed by Oracle
Human Resources. So you get the idea by now that for each logical function there is a separate
 module that helps to execute and maintain that function.

So all the individual functions are being taken care but how do I know if I am making profit or loss?
 Thats where integration comes into play. There is another module known as Oracle General Ledger.
 This module receives information from all the different transaction modules and summarizes them
 in order to help you create profit and loss statements, reports for paying Taxes etc.

Just to simplify the explaination, when you pay your employees that payment is reported back
to General Ledgers as cost i.e money going out, when you purchase inventory items the information
 is transferred to GL as money going out, and so is the case when you pay your vendors. Similarly
 when you receive items in your inventory it is transferred to GL as money coming in, when your customer
 sends payment it is transfered to GL as money coming in. So all the different transaction modules report
 to GL (General Ledger) as either money going in? or money going out?, the net result will
 tell you if you are making a profit or loss.

All the equipment, shops, warehouses, computers can be termed as Assets and they are managed by
Oracle Fixed Assets. Initially Oracle Applications started as bunch of modules and as time passed
 by they added new modules for different and new functions growing out of the need for todays
 internet world.

So if you come across a module that you are trying to learn and work on, first try to understand
 what business need is it trying to fulfill and then try to understand what the immediate modules
 that it interacts with. For e.g lets say you come across Oracle Cost Management module, you will
 learn that it helps to maintain the costs of items in your inventory and the immediate modules
 that it interacts with are Oracle Inventory (ofcourse), Oracle Bills of Material, Order Management
 and so on..

 THIS IS SIMPLE STORY TO KNOW WHAT IS AN ORACLE APPS!