Training Comes First: Managing Oracle Fusion's Monthly Change Cycle

Summary

Oracle Fusion Cloud now changes every month. Since June 2026, monthly maintenance has been mandatory on top of the quarterly updates. That turns four change events a year into twelve or more.

Most organizations already hold the two inputs a training plan needs. The help desk shows where people struggle today. Oracle's release documents show what is about to change. Put together, they say who needs to learn what, and when.

This paper sets out a training-first way to run the Fusion update cycle. Training is not an add-on at the end of an engagement. It is the deliverable, and the goal is a team that can manage its own environment.

How Oracle changes Fusion

Fusion changes on four tracks, and only one of them used to be on most calendars.

Track	How often	Can it be skipped?
Quarterly update	Four times a year, by cohort (A, B or C); test first, production about two weeks later	No
Monthly maintenance	Every month, mandatory since June 2026	No
Critical Security Patch Update	Monthly, newly added alongside the quarterly security patches	No
Exception maintenance	Off-cycle, when Oracle needs an urgent fix	No

Oracle states plainly that quarterly updates are mandatory and cannot be skipped. Oracle's own forum carries the notice "Mandatory Monthly Maintenance for All Fusion Applications Environments."

Exception releases can land with little notice. In July 2026 one customer reported a third straight month of exception maintenance, notified on July 8 for a July 14 deployment, in the middle of their quarterly regression testing.

No internal team can absorb that pace by reading release notes in its spare time.

What each update contains

Every quarterly update carries fixes and new features, and Oracle sorts the features by whether they reach users on their own. The feature summary in each What's New document uses these terms:

Oracle's term	What it means	What it calls for
Features delivered enabled, larger scale	Ready for use by end users; bigger UI or process changes	Test and train before the update reaches production
Features delivered enabled, small scale	Minor changes to fields, validations or programs	A short note to the affected roles
Features delivered enabled, report	New or changed Oracle-delivered reports	Tell the people who run reports
Features delivered disabled	Customer must take action: opt in, opt in plus setup, or setup only	A decision: adopt now, later or never

Opt-in features are enabled under Navigator > My Enterprise > New Features.

The surprise to avoid: opt-in expiration

A feature delivered disabled can be switched on automatically in a later update. Oracle calls this an opt-in expiration. It is announced in advance: Oracle gives at least two quarters of notice for changes that need setup or configuration, and publishes a consolidated list of expiration dates across Fusion.

The surprise does not come from Oracle. It comes from nobody reading the notice.

A feature that could have been adopted on the organization's own schedule arrives on Oracle's, and users meet it without warning.

Redwood: the largest opt-in expiration coming

Redwood is Oracle's new user experience, and it follows the same path as any opt-in feature: optional, then default, then deprecated, then removed. Classic pages work through menus and drop-down navigation. Redwood is built around search: users type what they want and results appear as they type. That search depends on Oracle Search profile options and scheduled processes being turned on.

In my experience the rollout has moved module by module:

HCM went first and is essentially done. Employee and manager self-service pages moved to Redwood by 25B, and the deadline was extended to 25C for the rest of HCM.
Procurement and supply chain are next. Classic Requisitions was retired from 25C, and customers are asking when Purchase Orders follows. Partners cite different SCM deadlines: 26D, 27A and 27B.
Financials is behind. General Ledger, Payables, Receivables and Projects have seen fewer Redwood changes so far, and customers are still asking how to enable the Redwood pages that exist.

CX shows where every module ends up

Sales and Service is the first area where Oracle has published every stage with dates. Classic Sales and Service enters deprecation in 26D and is removed in 27A. Four lessons carry over to every other module:

Screens are rebuilt, data is not lost. Layouts made in Application Composer must be recreated for Redwood in Visual Builder Studio; custom objects, fields and data carry over.
Small behavior changes create tickets. Field validations that fired when a user tabbed out of a field now fire on save. Nothing is broken, but users who are not told will report it.
Migration tools run once, so order matters. The Redwood Migration Accelerator is a one-time pass per object.
Search was quietly auto-enabled. Adaptive Search is now on by default for Accounts and Contacts; other objects must be turned on.

Financials customers have time that SCM and CX customers no longer have. The question is whether they use it.

The help desk as a training source

Every help desk ticket is a lesson the organization has not yet taught. The ticket says exactly where a person and the software failed to meet, and how often it happens.

Ticket	What it usually means	Training that answers it
Can't log in or can't see a page	Role or access gaps, or a task that moved	Role-based navigation guides; access request steps
Can't find the information I need	Search or reporting habits that do not match the system	Search and reporting how-tos
The form does not work as expected	A changed behavior, often from an update	A note on what changed and how to do it now
The process does not fit the software	A business process built for the old way of working	Process training, or a case for changing the process
Data looks wrong	Entry errors upstream or a misunderstood field	Data entry standards for the role that creates the data

A ticket closed without a lesson comes back from the next person. A ticket turned into training stops at the source.

The help desk also measures the result. When training lands, tickets on that topic fall. When they do not fall, the training missed or the problem is not a training problem.

The training-first model

The model runs the same loop every month: read what is coming, decide what matters, prepare, train, then listen to the help desk to see whether the training worked. What the help desk reports feeds the next month's plan.

The monthly training cycle.

The training deliverable

Every engagement ends in the same set of outputs, so the client knows what training means before work starts:

Materials: a how-to for each change that matters to a role, with navigation written as a breadcrumb path and screenshots only where something changes.
Videos: short and role-specific, made each cycle.
Live sessions: for the changes with the largest effect on users.
A monthly cycle review: matched to Oracle's monthly maintenance. What is working, what the help desk is saying, what is coming, and which training comes first.
A quarterly readiness briefing: the bigger look ahead. New features worth adopting, opt-in expirations on the calendar, and Redwood pages coming due.
An admin handover: when screens are rebuilt in Visual Builder Studio, the client's own team learns to maintain them.

Why this ends in independence

The aim is a team that manages its own environment. Self-sufficiency on what has already shipped does not end the need for help, because Oracle ships something new every month. The client owns yesterday's changes and has a partner for tomorrow's.

Oracle gives the same advice: establish a team chartered to lead change through each update, with executive sponsorship for feature adoption. Most organizations cannot staff that team on their own. This model fills that role until they can.

Tools behind the model

The training is only as good as the work it explains, and that work runs on a handful of Oracle tools. Each one is also something a client's own team will eventually need to learn.

Tool	What it does	Why it matters now
Visual Builder Studio	Tailors and extends Redwood pages. Express mode for simple changes; Advanced mode adds Git, branching and deployment pipelines	On Redwood, Page Composer no longer applies and VB Express is the supported path
Application Composer	Custom objects, fields and server-side logic	Back-end triggers stay here even on Redwood
Redwood Personalization Helper	Lists every classic page personalization and which ones convert; can migrate them into a VB Studio workspace	The inventory is the first step of any Redwood plan
Oracle Search and Adaptive Search	The search that Redwood pages depend on	Misconfigured search looks like a broken Redwood to users
AI Agent Studio	Builds and extends AI agents inside Fusion, at no additional cost	Oracle expanded it again in March 2026
Regression testing	A repeatable test pack run against each update	Oracle delivers the update but no test tool; monthly maintenance makes manual testing hard to sustain

Where to start

An organization can begin with five steps, none of which needs new software:

Know your cohort and calendar. Confirm which quarterly cohort the environments are in and when monthly maintenance lands, and put both on the same calendar as month-end close and payroll.
Pull the opt-in expiration list. Check every feature due to switch on in the next two quarters against how the business works today.
Run the Personalization Helper in Report Only mode. Where Oracle offers it (HCM and SCM today), it produces the inventory of classic customizations that Redwood will touch, without changing anything.
Sort the last 90 days of tickets. Group them by the ticket types above. The largest groups are the first training topics.
Hold the first monthly cycle review. One hour: what changed last month, what the tickets say, what is coming, and which training comes first.

After one cycle the organization has a calendar, a list of what is coming, an inventory of what Redwood will touch, and a ranked training plan.

About the author

John Rae is Principal of ERP Management Group. He has spent thirty years in ERP systems, the last three running Oracle Fusion Cloud day to day across Finance, Procurement, Supply Chain, HCM and Projects, through every quarterly update, opt-in decision and help desk ticket that followed.

Training Comes FirstManaging Oracle Fusion's Monthly Change Cycle