Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA) is a data model that allows you to manage complex information about the parties, or customers, who belong to your commercial community, including organizations, locations, and the network of hierarchical relationships among them.
This information is maintained in the TCA Registry, which is the single source of trading community information for Oracle E-Business Suite applications. These applications, as well as TCA itself, provide user interfaces, batch data entry functionality, and other features for you to view, create, and update Registry information. See: Using Oracle Trading Community Architecture.
The key entities in TCA include:
Parties: Entities of type Person or Organization that can enter into business relationships. Parties can also be of type Relationship. For example, Joe as himself is a party of type Person, but Joe as a contact for Vision Corporation is a party of type Relationship. Every party in the TCA Registry has a unique Registry ID.
TCA includes an extensive variety of information for parties, for example party name, addresses, contacts, and contact points. Joe as a person can have a personal phone number that differs from the phone number for the relationship of Joe as a contact.
Party sites: Addresses that parties use for specific purposes, or uses.
Customers: Parties with whom you have a selling relationship.
Customer accounts: The business relationships between you and your customers.
Customer account sites: Party sites used in the context of customer accounts for specific purposes, or uses, for example ship-to and bill-to account sites.
Locations: Geospatial points, usually defined by an address.
Contacts: People who have a contact or employment relationship with an organization or person.
Contact points: Means of contact, for example, phone and e-mail address.
TCA also includes conceptual functionality that helps you manage and understand your trading community. For example, you can use relationships to model the roles that parties play with respect to one another, and classifications to classify entities.
Entities in the TCA Registry consist of logical groups of descriptive, related attributes. For example, the Person Profile entity contains attributes, such as last name and date of birth, that describe parties of type Person. Likewise, the Organization Profile entity consists of attributes that describe parties of type Organization, the Address entity has address-related attributes, and so on.
An entity corresponds to one or more tables in TCA. For example, attribute values for a party record are stored in the HZ_PARTIES table.