By Ravi Shankar, PgMP, PMP, PMI-RMP and PMI-SP

Oracle Advanced Global Intercompany System (AGIS) is a powerful application designed to handle global corporations’ complex Intercompany accounting and processing requirements. It has been designed and built using the OA Framework that is easy to use yet very sophisticated and rich in feature sets. It leverages the core building blocks of R 12 architecture in the areas of Legal Entity, Trading Community Architecture, Sub Ledger Accounting for Transaction Account Definition, workflow integration for processing, and Approvals Management Application(AME) for transaction approval. The most significant benefit of the application is its ease of use for multiple companies belonging to different legal entities and Primary Ledger(s) across the globe that shares the same Oracle Application instance.

Once the Intercompany accounting and relationship are set up in the respective Primary Ledgers for the various transacting trading partners, the application elegantly processes the transactions and creates the accounting. Distribution account defaulting for the Initiator and Recipient can be automated through configurations in the Transaction Account Definition Window of sub-ledger accounting and assignment to the respective Primary Ledgers. Transactions can be entered online in the application or loaded using WebADI integrator.

Approval of the Intercompany transaction is key to further processing in the respective ledger(s). Depending on whether invoicing is required, the journal is sent to the respective General Ledger(s) or the Initiator’s and Recipient’s Receivables and Payables Module, respectively. Transaction access is secure using the Role Based Access Control model at the Organization level. The application provides for the effective reconciliation of transactions with drill-down features to identify the differences between the respective trading partners’ processed Receivable and Payable transactions.AGIS needs to be correctly configured to harness its rich features. Further, additional care needs to be exercised in certain setups to ensure that the application behaves as intended, as these are either not clearly documented or learned based on implementation experience.