R12 : Trading Community Architecture(TCA)

Trading Community Architecture (TCA) is a structure which was based out of R11 Customer Model designed to support complex trading relationships to cater additional need which further extended in R12 with Supplier and Bank. So, TCA is a data model that allows you to manage complex information about the parties, or customers or suppliers or bank who belong to your commercial community, including organizations, locations, and the network of hierarchical relationships among them.

What is Trading Community Architecture (TCA)?

What is TCA, the Trading Community Architecture? Is TCA an Oracle Applications module? Is it functionality within an Oracle module? These are few common question, and there are often many answers given.

The TCA is a data model that supports the entry and management of entities that you interact with. So lets revisit the concept.

Trading Community Architecture is a Very flexible, very robust model which defines the components involve in trading within in E-business Suite.

The implementation of technology and applications to allow users to create and maintain relationships among entities

The universal data schema for customers, prospects, suppliers, distributors, resellers, consortiums, bank across all Oracle EBS applications

TCA not only allows for the tracking of relationships between the implementing organization and its trading partners, but also tracks relationships between the trading partners themselves.

You should also note, TCA is neither an Oracle Applications module nor requires separate license.

If you see TCA guide, you can find these are the key features of TCA

• Provides a foundation for a single source for customer information.
• Ability to represent all business entities as a “Party” (organizations, people, groups, relationships) and to handle them the same way. This approach provides flexibility to accommodate all B2B, B2C and hybrid models in the same repository.
• Many-to-many relationships between Parties and Locations, that allows for less duplication and easier updating.
• Capability for advanced relationship modeling between entities within the trading community. Any party can figure in any number of Party Relationships even within matrix hierarchies (relationship networks).
• Ability to setup and maintain any number of party classifications which can be used for reporting and assignment purposes.
• Extensible data model to enable various business data requirements.
• In reality , three entities Drive in the TCA model , which are Party, Account, and Relationships.

 TCA Terminologies

• Party
  • The concept of ‘Party’ enables the Customer Model to treat all business entities equally, regardless of type. It easily handles B2B, B2C.
    Parties of type ‘Group’ allow for the grouping of any number of other parties into a single entity which enable modeling of households and buying consortiums.
  • Parties of type ‘Relationship’ allow for the relationship between two parties to be viewed as a party in its own right
  • Party - A Party is an entity that can enter into a business relationship and can be of four types.
    • Person - A unique individual (dead or alive) of interest to the owner of the software.
    • Organization - A legal entity recognized by some government authority.
    • Group - a combination of two or more people, organizations or groups of created for the use of the owner of the software.
    • Relationship - The association between an individual person and an organization. Usually a contact at an organization or group.

Fig 1: TCA Logical Diagram

• Account
  • Account - Is a financial roll-up point to track the monitory portion of a customer’s purchases and payments. Stores details about a customer relationship between a Party and your business.
    • This Represents selling-buying relationship such as billing and shipping events
    • Accounts required for a transaction
    • A account cannot exist without a party
  • A Party may have one or more Customer Accounts
    • Account Role - The relationship that a Party has in regard to controlling or using an account.
    • Customer Account Site is a Party Site that is used within the context of a Customer Account (e.g., for billing or shipping purposes).
    • A Customer Account Contact is a Party Contact that is used in the context of a Customer Account.
• Customer
  A customer account represents the business relationship that a party can enter in to with another party. The account has information about the terms and conditions of doing business with the party. For example, you could open a commercial account for purchases to be made by Vision Distribution for its internal use and a reseller account for purchases made by Vision Distribution for sales of your products to end-users .

You can also define contact people, bank accounts, payment methods, telephone numbers, and relationships for each customer account.

You can also maintain multiple customer accounts for a customer that transacts business with more than one line of business in your organization. You maintain separate customer profiles, addresses, and contacts for each customer account.

A party site is the location where a particular party is physically located. Every party has only one identifying address, but a party can have multiple party sites.

A customer address is a party site used in the context of a customer account for billing, shipping, or other purposes.

A contact communicates for or acts on behalf of a party or customer account. A contact can exist for a customer at the account or address level. A person usually acts as a contact for an organization, but can also be a contact for another person. For example, an administrative assistant could be the contact for an executive.

Old Model vs New Customer Model

Fig 2; Customer old model and TCA model

• Locations/site :A Location is a point in geographical space described by an address. A party site is a location.
• Party Relationship :Any relationship between two parties of the above type (person and organization) that needs to be stored as its. own record. Data that directly corresponds to this relationship (contact info etc.) is stored as well. Relationships are stored in the HZ_PARTY_RELATIONSHIPS table.

Factors which you can consider for TCA entities

• Business requirement including your reporting
• System/application requirement
• Country or Organization Legal Requirement
• Global Consideration
• Process standardization

TCA Setup Considerations

When you are doing TCA customer Modeling, keep these things in mind;

• Party be any real Person or Organization.
• Party sites are locations for Party or Organization.
• Relationships are generally used to construct hierarchical structure of Organizations.
• Party becomes a Customer/Account, once a selling relationship is established.
• An account should typically have at least one active ‘bill_to’ site. It helps for accounting and reporting purposes.
• When creating Parties, what all party sites can be or should be created as Parties.
• Generally, if you want to see activities for site level separately from your parent level party, you should create that Site as a separate Party/Entity.
• An account is a separate entity. Create account only where you have selling relationship i.e. only for customers. It identifies selling attributes e.g.payment terms, shipping and billing preferences etc. of the relationship.
• You can have multiple accounts, for each relationship between external party and your business entity. It enables you to have multiple
  sets of selling attributes e.g. payment terms etc.
• You can build relationship between accounts and have one account to pay for another.
• If transaction needs to be segregated within a party to perform granular analysis based on selling or business relation,separate accounts with a party should be created.

TCA Integration with Other Oracle Products

This is how TCA data is tighten with other Oracle products.

 TCA Technical Tables

• TCA - Customer : Here are Technical details for 11i/R12 customer in TCA. You can also refer old post for customer model.

• TCA - Suppliers

Here are Technical details for R12 Supplier in TCA. You can also refer old post for more details.

• TCA - Bank