My experience on working towards OCP in Oracle E-Business Suite 11i Supply Chain Management Consultant

[I had cleared the final paper of this exam in May 2007 with Procurement as the main path. Though I had an experience of almost 3 years working in Oracle Applications Manufacturing, it was not an easy exam for me to take. As most of you might know by now, the OCP exam for SCM Consultant has 3 papers. The details are given in the official site. The certification path also includes a mandatory classroom training apart from clearing 3 papers before finally getting there.]

Prep Time (Paper wise):
Paper I: 2 weeks (1 week rigorous). Familiarity level: 4 on a scale of 10
Paper II: 2-3 weeks. Familiarity level: 7 on a scale of 10
Paper III: 4-5 weeks. Familiarity level: 4 on a scale of 10
Overall: 8-10 weeks

What to refer: Oracle Inventory and Oracle Purchasing Student's Guides (11i), Oracle Inventory and Oracle Purchasing User's Guides (11i), Hands-on practise on Vision Demo Database 11i

When I decided to take this exam (March 2007), there was absolutely no information on the net available to work on with. Added to this was the $95 (Paper I), $195 (Paper II) and $195 (Paper III) fees which made things worse. I could not afford to flunk any of the papers. Otherwise, I'd end up paying twice for a re-take. Despite this, there was a strong reason for my decision to take the cert. exam so early (just as it went into production). At that point I had some free time on my hands and I wanted to make the best possible use of it before I got busy again.

The first and foremost hurdle I faced was the EBS 11i essentials (1Z0-200: 11i E-Business Suite Essentials for Implementers). Though I had worked on reports and forms in my own small way when I was a developer, I was not familiar with the Sys Admin, DBA and workflow concepts. The best material for this was the sys admin student's guide which I was able to borrow from one of my friends who let's say, had access to it.

The student's guide really proved to be of great help. A rigorous one-week two hour per day study schedule after office hours worked wonders. I am sure if I had not done this, there was every chance I'd have flunked. So the best place to start for this exam is the Student's Guide if available. The workflow and sys admin questions were essentially lifted straight out of this book. One sad thing about this though is that I'm where I was before after the exam with regard to the fundamentals. I would not be able to practically apply the stuff I learnt from the Student's Guide. My prep was purely from exam point of view.

One down, two to go.

The 2nd paper (1Z0-221: Oracle Inventory Management 11i Fundamentals) was more in my league as I had been working in the functional side. Here though the thought was that you can pass this exam directly using the official Student's Guide, I felt otherwise. One has to have a good knowledge about the basics of Oracle Inventory which includes hands on practice. This is what I realized while I was taking this exam. Mind you, I did not have the Student's Guide for Inventory which I got access to much after. My advice in this regard is, use the User's Guide as the starting point:

* Check the fundamentals of Inventory in the User's Guide (Chapter 2 - Setting up)
* Concept of Subinventories
* Concept of Locators* Concept of Lots and Serials (especially from point of view of Inv Transactions)
* Concept of Item Key Flexfield
* Organizations (Master and Child) and Org Parameters* Planning - Min-max - Reorder Point Planningand the rest of the stuff..

Also, if you have the student's guide, do use it but don't completely depend on it. It is a good indicator of the syllabus and what to cover, but not comprehensive.

The questions mostly are like mini case studies which make you think and sometimes you will need to use the sheet to jot down the problem summary. And yes, there can be more than one correct answer. Once you put it on paper, its really easy to visualize where the question is getting to.

For instance, a sample question would go like this:
A company XYZ wants to set up Oracle Inventory with the following requirements. The item part number should contain the information such as item type, item number, and item serial information. How would you help the company design the item key flexfield?

Also there are trick questions (that's what I like to call them) where a lot of unnecessary information is given when the first sentence in the question will be enough to select the right choice.

And of course, there are questions which you can answer based on elimination of wrong answers.

The best ways to prepare for this is work on an Oracle Applications Vision Demo Database and try different test cases, For example:

Create several items which are having different combinations of lot control, serial control and locator control. Do Inventory transactions on these items. The main transactions I would recommend are inter-org transfer and subinventory transfers.

The most difficult part was Inventory Planning. Apart from the Min-max, I had not worked on other planning methods which involved MRP. Some of these methodologies are direct formulas which you might have to memorize.

I allocated my time like this:
* one-week for familiarizing with the concepts mentioned earlier.
* 5 days for working on a Vision instance for doing different transactions. Out of this, I dedicated one-full day (3 hours) checking out the different flags in the Items form and creating several items with different inventory controls. The 2nd day for transactions and transaction managers (plus profile options), and Inventory controls, the third for Inventory integration with other modules, esp., WIP, Order Entry and Purchasing, and the fourth for reports and different Inventory forms. The fifth day I just went through the entire stuff which I had covered in the previous 4 days.

Also while doing this, I made sure that I referred the window help for each form which contained some good and useful information.

I skipped some of the Inventory Planning chapters as I had not worked on planning and kanban (it was purely a no-brainer that I skipped these topics because I knew I would not be able to cram this relatively new stuff in such a short time).

I expected that the 2nd exam would be similar to 1st one in terms of the type of questions that would come. What I mean to say is, I was expecting that the questions would be directly lifted of the Student's Guide. And this worried me; as I didn't get access to the Student's Guide, though I tried hard.

When I took the exam, it was an eye-opener and then some. I could see that whatever I had studied would not be directly useful but had to be applied. I had to work on each question as a case study and apply the concepts from what I had learnt. I was glad when it was over and was glad that I had practised the stuff on the Demo database. But it gave me a good idea as to what to expect for the 3rd test, provided the 3rd one would be based on similar lines.

Other colleagues of mine who had written Paper II mentioned that they got questions from Warehouse Management System also. I am not sure about this because I did not get any questions on WMS.

Two down, one to go.

The IIIrd paper (1Z0-222: Oracle Purchasing 11i Fundamentals) was again no cakewalk. I was only familiar with creation of a PO and receiving against a PO in an existing setup with a basic information of the PO workflow. I took 4 weeks preparing for this paper. At one point, in desperation I even searched in google for any OCP site. The only site I came up with was the OAUG blog which didn't contain much info on the Purchasing paper (this will be the first site you hit when you search for OCP in Google).

I started with the User's guide again. I tried to correlate the syllabus from the OCP site with the User's Guide. Once done, I tried to get info from my friends familiar with Purchasing. I got different approaches but I got back to the one that was the hardest and the most painful: Working on the demo Vision database. And again referring to the Window Help. I felt that this worked best for me.

Purchasing fundamentals mainly consists of Purchasing, Requisitioning and Receiving. There are other sub-modules iProcurement, iSupplier and Sourcing. Its a good idea to have an overview of these topics before starting. Again a good starting point is the User's Guide.

The first week I got to familiarize myself with the Purchasing fundamentals. The next was the setups, esp., the documents and approval hierarchy setups.

Questions on document types and approval hierarchy are one of the most straightforward ones you get in the paper.

The other part which was a bit new to me was the Purchasing interfacing with other modules which mainly consisted of Payables.

After completion of these, I went for the Approved Supplier Lists (ASL). The sourcing part of the Purchasing was really confusing. In this regard, one profile option that's important is the PO: Automatic Document sourcing.

The exam also contained questions on iProc and Oracle Sourcing which are a part of the Procurement suite of products in Oracle Applications.

And then, it was all grind and no play. Work on the Vision demo database. Create POs, BPAs, requisitions, releases and other documents.

On the day of the exam, I was glad that the questions set in the 3rd exam were similar to the way they were set in 2nd. Based on the concepts, I was able to get some sense out of questions. One thing worth mentioning (again) is, when I was reading the questions, I simultaneously jotted down the problem points and the steps on a piece of paper to analyze the questions. It made things easier and saved me time. For the questions for which I was not sure of the answers, I revisited them after I had answered the questions I knew. For all the papers, I was left with about a little more than 1o mins for revision.

The exercise paid off and I got certified with a decent score (I had never aimed for 100%).
Three down!!
Whew!!
Here, I should really appreciate the folks at Oracle. They had aimed to test the candidate's knowledge of fundamentals and they did succeed to a great extent.