Basic Cloud Deployment and Initial Setups

As part of standard subscription, Oracle provisions two environments :

• Production Environment
• Non-Production Environment(For testing purposes such as SIT/UAT/Development etc.)

If there is any additional non-production environment requirement, customer need to buy additional license for the same.

Initial Setups :

1. OIM Administrator

Once environments are allocated, client will receive an email with Oracle Identity Manager(OIM) administrator login credentials.OIM Admin has the capability to create certain superusers.

• Prepare the Oracle Fusion Applications Super User for user management and configuration
• Provision the IT Security Manager job role with user and role management entitlement

Oracle Cloud SCM Introduction

Happy New Year 2017 !!!

With the advent of Oracle SCM Cloud Release 11 in the market, Cloud ERP got the much needed momentum that was missing earlier. Let’s take this opportunity in 2017 to delve more into the key concepts that are available in Oracle Supply Chain Management.

Below are the important modules that are part of Cloud SCM.

Before we start our journey with Inventory Management setups, let’s see some of the common setups that a functional consultant should be aware of.

Below are the 3 key setup areas in Cloud Inventory Setup :

1. Common Applications Setup
2. Common SCM Setup
3. Inventory Setup
   

Kanban Pull Replenishment

Kanban in Japanese means “sign” or “signal”. This system is used in where the items have a relatively stable demand and medium to high production volume.

Kanban Cards are used in a Pull based System. A pull based system is one where inventory items for a particular part or assembly area are replenished as soon as they are needed. When the items are needed, Kanban cards in Oracle Inventory change their Supply Status to Empty, and Inventory generates the Kanban replenishment request.

Kanban represents replenishment signals that are usually manual & highly visible (e.g. Color Coded Card / Empty Bin etc)

Local Timezone Setting

Oracle EBS includes as standard a feature called User-Preferred Time Zone Support. In general, all users interact with the system in the “corporate time zone”, which will normally be the time zone of the headquarters of the client, and the time zone in which the database runs. The client may have their presence in other countries with different timezone such as India, England etc. whose timezone is different from corporate timezone.

Employing the user-preferred time zone feature enables users to specify their local time zone for both display and entry of date-with-time fields.

Key benefits :

• Users see date-with-time fields in their preferred (local) time zone, and can enter dates with time in this time zone
• Date fields without a time component are not affected by this feature
• The data in the database continues to be stored in the standard corporate time zone

Physical Inventory Guidelines

It's year end and holiday season. When it is time for everyone to relax, the warehouse team and finance team may have difficult time to get prepared for their Annual Physical Inventory and year end books closure. Oracle Physical Inventory is a very stable process if you follow certain guidelines. Today, I want to share with you few guidelines that will help you in doing the year end physical counting smoothly.

1. Important: It is recommended to clear the Pending Transactions and Transactions Open Interface, before taking a snapshot of inventory quantity. Please do inform us before taking a snapshot.

2. Enter the starting tag number. Tag numbers may be alphanumeric, but you can increment only the numeric portion.

Important: When entering a starting tag number, make sure that it contains the total number of possible digits that a tag can have. For example, if your tag numbers can have up to five digits and you want the starting number to be 1, you would enter 00001.

Oracle Social Network Cloud

Every day a lot of information flow across the network between you and your connections. It can be live conversations, online chats or file exchanges and reviews. Many of these exchanges are informal, and so, vulnerable to loss. Oracle Social Network connects applications, teams and customers in real-time, and preserves the information flowing between them. It enables people to have online conversations, share documents, start one-on-one chats for quick private exchanges, and build out rich user profiles to find the right people to connect with.

Oracle Social Network is not a separate standalone application that people have to learn in a vacuum. Majority of the employees are already proficient with platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and instant messaging, so it seems only logical to leverage these skills in the workplace.

Opportunistic Cycle Count

Today we discuss about a new advanced topic "Opportunistic cycle count" that is introduced in R12. This feature enables users to perform an unscheduled cycle count during picking operation if the picking item falls below a minimum quantity tolerance for the locator. If the resulting quantity is less than or equal to the specified quantity, then the system asks you whether or not you would like to perform a cycle count for this item at this locator.

For instance, if the Opportunistic Cycle Count Trigger Quantity is set to 3, then any time a pick from a locator leaves 3 or fewer pieces in the locator, the system prompts you to count the item. We will take Item as 'WM100', Sub-inventory as 'BULK' and Organization as 'W1' for our testing.

Onhand Status/LPN Status

Material status control is one of the beautiful concept in Oracle EBS which restricts the usage and movement of your on-hand quantity.

Navigate to Inventory(R) > Setup > Transactions > Material Status to see the existing statuses that are defined in the system or to create a new material status.

1. You can use material status controls to control any of the status controlled transactions such as move order transfer, sales order picking, shipping an internal order, or issue material for a work order. By default, all the transactions are shown under 'Allowed Transactions' as shown in the below screenshot. Based on your requirement, you can move some of those transactions to 'Disallowed Transactions' at the time of creation.

Locator Alias

Many a times, your temporary warehouse operators may not really complete the task physically but completes their corresponding task in RF Gun. Some smart workers go to the next extent of picking the required part from a nearby location rather than picking it from the original location suggested by the RF Device as the location that is suggested by the system seems to be difficult to reach(say upper rack, too far from user's current location etc.). This leads to a discrepancy between the physical onhand and the quantities in the system. The shipments/assembly manufacturing gets delayed as all the parts are not available on time. Locator aliases ensure the presence of a user at the physical location. You can use a barcode to represent the locator alias. This ensures that when the alias is scanned, a user must be present at the physical location. A locator alias is an alternative identifier that corresponds to a physical locator. It can be a check digit, a unique identifier, or a non-unique identifier. For example, you can use '13LA1.1.1' as the locator alias for the locator LA1.1.1. The system does not suggest a locator alias to you during a transaction, rather it suggests the actual locator.

Lot Translate

Lot translate enables you to either change the name of an existing lot or convert one product to another. This is one of the key requirements in life science industry where one product may get translated into another due to various chemical changes. You can change the lot name, item, revision, or sub-inventory of an existing lot and move it to another assembly. You cannot translate a lot, if reservations exist. 

This functionality can let you perform the following actions with lot translate :

•  Update the lot name to an existing lot name
•  Update the lot to a new lot
•  Update the item to a new item and a new lot
•  Update the item and lot to an existing item and lot

Rename Item (or) Update Item UOM

Renaming the item (or) part number is a very key requirement in any of the Oracle EBS Implementation.
Let's take an example of defining an item accidentally with a wrong Unit of Measure(UOM).
As per standard functionality, you cannot edit or update an Item's UOM once it is defined. Now let's taken a Part #  WM100 which is defined with wrong UOM. The workaround for this issue is renaming the existing item to some 'XXXWM100' and make it 'Inactive'. Now create a new item with correct UOM and retain the original part # i.e., WM100.

Now let's see how to achieve this with step-by-step explanation :

Oracle Min-Max Planning

Oracle Inventory lets you manage your inventory levels using any combination of min-max planning, reorder point planning, and a replenishment system for generating orders. Inventory planning involves answering two questions:

• When should you place a new order?
• How much should you order?

Using the Oracle Inventory application, you can set up the following types of inventory replenishment plans:

• Min-max planning
• Reorder-point planning
• Kanban replenishment planning
• Replenishment counting
  

Container Pack & Shipping in Inventory Org

License Plate Number

Introduction In Oracle Warehouse Management, a license plate number (LPN) is any object that holds items.  Although LPNs are associated with containers, they do not need to represent a physical entity,  such as a box. Thus, you can define an LPN as a collection of items. Oracle Warehouse  Management enables you to track, transact, and nest LPNs. Oracle WMS provides full  visibility to inventory items that are stored in license plate numbers (LPNs)

Back to Back Order

Back to Back Order Process is a common scenario for Wholesale Distributors who use Sell-Source-Ship business model.

1. Customer places the order with you
2. You place the order with supplier 
3. Supplier ships the product to you
4. You ship the product to customer

For eg. You order a Shoe Rack from Flipkart and Flipkart orders the same to the supplier. Once the goods are received by Flipkart they pack and ship the goods to customer.

Drop Shipment

Drop Shipment Business Process

Receiving orders for items that you do not stock, and have a supplier provide the items directly to your customer is called Drop Shipment. The following diagram illustrates the drop shipment process.

Imagine a scenario where you order a Dell Laptop from Flipkart/Amazon(Order Processing Company). Flipkart doesn’t manufacture the Dell Laptop rather they create an order with DELL to ship the product to customer directly. DELL ships you the laptop and you pay Flipkart on successful delivery. Flipkart pays DELL after successful receipt by the customer on his behalf.

Pull Replenishment

Today We discuss about one of the latest advanced feature introduced in Oracle R12 Warehouse Management System. 

Pull Replenishment: A replenishment suggestion is auto-created as soon as a shortfall is detected during the order release process. This type of replenishment is useful for items with high uniform demand in forward pick areas. Pull Replenishment improves productivity and reduce pick area stock outs. Automated replenishment of pick area happens based on order demand and min-max quantities.

• Initiated by the Pick Release process

• Pick release will spawn a new concurrent request named ‘Pull Replenishment’ (if replenishment is needed)

• A new concurrent program has been created for this functionality.

Move Order approval & Notification to Subinventory Planners

We will see How to setup Move Order Approval process in OracleApps and also we will explore a way to send a notification to a list of planners who are associated with a specific subinventory.

Define Item Planner in 'Planners' window. In this example, I am using J. Smith as Item Planner.

Oracle Bulk Picking Functionality

Bulk picking will reduce the number of times goods are processed and returned to a user. After pick release occurs for both outbound sales orders and internal orders, or for manufacturing component picks, Oracle Warehouse Management consolidates tasks of similar characteristics into a single bulk task. This process can be initiated either at the time of pick release, or through a concurrent program(“WMS Bulk Task Generation”) separate from the pick release process.

Bulk picking only works effectively if the same item is picked repeatedly from the forward pick location causing frequent replenishments.

GTIN - Global Trade Item Number

As businesses become interconnected using various technology options such as EDI and XML, there is a need for global product identification standards that are usable by all trading partners in the extended supply chain. A major goal of these standards is to guarantee unique and unambiguous identification of products and services across the supply chain.  A Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) is a unique number assigned to a product within the EAN/UCC framework for standard product identification.

The Oracle Warehouse Management and Inventory Mobile Supply Chain Applications are capable of resolving items defined in the system using GTIN. You can scan a GTIN barcode and the system will translate the scanned value to an internal item.

Catch Weight Functionality

Dual UOM or Catch Weight management is used primarily in the meat and metal Industries. In these industries due to variability of each piece logistic unit of measure will generally differ from the valuation unit of measure. Shipping and receiving generally happens in Each or Box but payment happens on the weight. The key requirement for this business process is to track the inventory in two different unrelated UOMs where the relationship between both the UOMs is not fixed.

Oracle Manifest Picking

Order Picking and Assembly

Once an order is received, the items on the order must be retrieved from the warehouse, assembled, and prepared for shipment. All these activities involve labor and the movement of goods. The work should be organized to provide the level of customer service required and at least cost.

There are several systems that can be used to organize the work, among which are the following:

Oracle Distributed WMS

Oracle now provides customers the flexibility to deploy Oracle Warehouse Management as a distributed solution. Customers can take advantage of the latest industry-leading warehouse management capabilities from Oracle without upgrading to the latest version of the Oracle E-Business Suite.

The high velocity demands of today's supply chain require solutions that are always-on and always connected, regardless of network model, ERP or application infrastructure.

WMS Deployment Flexibility

Until now Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Warehouse Management System (WMS) required the transaction source systems like Purchasing and Order Management and execution systems like WMS reside and operate within the same instance. With the release of Distributed WMS feature, Oracle WMS can be deployed on a separate physical instance that is distinct from E-Business Suite (EBS) instance. This feature gives powerful choices to customers to deploy WMS either as an "integrated" as a module within EBS or as a "distributed" and independent solution installed on a separate instance.

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Setup

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is an Extract, load and transform (ELT) tool that offers a GUI environment to build, manage and maintain data integration processes in business intelligence systems. Oracle Data Integrator is a comprehensive data integration platform that covers all data integration requirements: from high-volume, high-performance batch loads, to event-driven, trickle-feed integration processes, to SOA-enabled data services. Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) 12c, the latest version of Oracle’s strategic Data Integration offering, provides superior developer productivity and improved user experience with a redesigned flow-based declarative user interface and deeper integration with Oracle GoldenGate. ODI12c further builds on its flexible and high-performance architecture with comprehensive big data support and added parallelism when executing data integration processes. It includes interoperability with Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) for a quick and simple migration for OWB customers to ODI12c. Additionally, ODI can be monitored from a single solution along with other Oracle technologies and applications through the integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c.