I have some basic questions about TCA tables which make me confusion at all time.

Lets take a case and try to answer your questions. Diamond Electronics is a company which sells electronic items. They sell those electronics wholesale and retail. Anybody can buy them online or at their stores. They sell wholesale to other companies like WINTER HOTELS. They sell retail to direct persons like you i.e. SRI KRISHNA. OK. Now, they are implementing Oracle Applications as their ERP system. What could be difference between customer and party? Give some examples. You go to Diamond Electronics shop and ask for some information about an electronic item. You are interested to buy, but first you want to get information and decide later. They will show you the item and explain the details and after that they take your personal details, so that they contact you later or it would be easy when you buy later. Thats part of Customer Relationship Management. When they enter in Oracle ERP, You become a party in TCA, not customer because you have not yet decided to purchase. The same case happens, if somebody from WINTER HOTELS goes to them and tells them that, he is representing WINTER HOTELS and they are planning to buy lot of electronic items to their new hotel. Here, 3 things are entered in Oracle TCA. WINTER HOTELS information, the person (ex: JOHN) who is representative of WINTER HOTELS, and the relationship between that person and the WINTER HOTELS. Here WINTER HOTELS is a party, JOHN is party contact and the relationship is AGENT. After sometime, you or WINTER HOTELS decided to buy electronics and you go again and make a purchase. That time, you become customer.

What could be difference between customer, customer accounts and customer account sites? Customer is already explained above. You are buying 2 items, but you want them to go to different places and billing address is also different. This way, it is easier for your financial consolidation. So, you give them different credit cards and different shipping and billing addresses. That time, they would create 2 customer accounts for you. The same case may happen to WINTER HOTELS, they may have Corporate Hotel Address, but they want to these expenses to be calculated at their new hotel. So they create a new account based on this new hotel address. Generally, site is logical representation of the location. Their new hotel physical address is location and it can be represented as site. Now, depending on the use it can be BILL-TO or SHIP-TO. The site use determines where the items to be shipped physically and where the invoice should go. What could be difference between site and location? Location is the physical address which needs to be created first. Then attach account site to the address based on the usage. Usage is at the site level and not at the location level. One physical address can be site for COMMUINCATION, CORPORATE, BILL-TO , SHIP-TO etc. I would say, site determines the purpose of the physical location. What could be difference between contacts and contact points? In the above case, JOHN is the Contact of WINTER HOTELS. Contact Points are ways to reach that person. Like his phone numbers, email address etc. They also take phone numbers of WINTER HOTELS. These contact points applicable to you also. When you give them

your phone numbers while buying the item, they are attached to your party record as contact points. What could be difference between addresses and address uses? Not clear. Address is the physical address of the party. I never heard the term address use. In TCA, we have party site use and account site use. They determine the usage of the address determining at what stage you are, either at party level or customer level. What could be difference between contacts and contact roles? In the above case, JOHN is the Contact of WINTER HOTELS. Contact Role is, what is the role of JOHN in the WINTER HOTELS? He is employee of WINTER HOTELS, but it is not mandatory that he is authorized to purchase items. Contact Role determines what is the role of JOHN as employee of WINTER HOTELS, so that when DIAMOND Electronics sell items, they check whether he is the correct person or not. Which information store in table hz_relationships? HZ_RELATIONSHIPS store the relationship between the parties. They may take information about WINTER HOTELS Corporate and WINTER HOTELS new hotel. Here new hotel is child of Corporate. They create a relationship between them as parent-child. This table stores that information. In your case, they make ask your family details. If you give your spouse details, they create her as new party and create a relationship between you as HUSBAND-WIFE. The hz_relationships table stores this relationship details. How TCA help client and programmer explain with one example? It is proven, flexible customer model. It is very flexible that it can be implemented with most types of the businesses. For programmer, it is complex and challenging. Anyhow, for a

programmer, things should be challenging. How the party information store in different levels or tables (like party >> party site>> contacts ...) and also give brief information about each tables. This answer is huge and he best answer TCA Admin Guide. Please check Oracle Documentation. Hope I was able to give you some idea. Regars, Ramakrishna