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 :