What is TCA

Oracle's Customer Relationship management categorizes its products Sales, Marketing, Service, Interaction Center and eCommerce.The Service component supports activities related to customer management and support, field sales, spare parts management, and depot repair functions
The Oracle E Business Suite is designed and built as an integrated suite of applications that share Foundation components.One of the most important components of the Oracle Foundation is the customer data model known as the Trading Community Architecture (TCA).The Trading Community Architecture (TCA) is a customer model designed to support complex trading communities.
The main entities of TCA are the Party, Account ,Locations and party sites.The ‘party’ entity refers to any person, establishment or a relation between persons and/or establishments; that the implementing organization has business interests in.Locations are essentially the physical address.The connection between a location and a party that indicates that a particular location is valid for that party.The party site entity is basically to solve the Many-Many Relationship.Whenever there is a financial transaction with the customer, we crate a account .Please note that an account cannot exist without a prty but the viceversa is possible, that is a party can exist without accounts.

To explain the concepts clearly consider the following example.
You have taken a landline,mobile and a Broad Band Connection in Airtel.In ORACLE apps,you will be created as a Party(say Party 1) and three customer accounts will be created for landline,mobile and broadband connections(say A1,A2 amd A3).suppose say for the landline and Mobile accounts(A1 and A2) your bill-to address is your residential address and for the broad band(A3) its your official address.Then in this case there will be two addresses created for Party 1 in hz_locations table.Accounts A1 and A2 will be mapped to the residential address via the party site.

The main tables involved here are
HZ_PARTIES
HZ_LOCATIONS
HZ_PARTY_SITES
HZ_PARTY_SITE_USES
HZ_CUST_ACCOUNTS
HZ_CUST_ACCT_SITES
HZ_CUST_SITE_USES
HZ_RELATIONSHIPS
HZ_CONTACT_POINTS

TCA Modelling - Some Examples
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1. How do you view your customer who has operations in ‘n’ different regions/offices around the world? Do you consider it as one customer or ‘n’ customers?
The implications are straightforward; either there would be one party with multiple locations or many parties each with a location. This can still be crystallized to one requirement by the next question.

2. Assume that your customer has 2 offices; one in London and another in Tokyo. If your sales rep in Tokyo discovers that there could be a potential opportunity for a product for the London office; do you wish to have this sales rep assist his peer at London on the opportunity?
If the answer is ‘Yes’, well, it is one customer with multiple locations.