Providing View-Only to Order Management with Hold Capabilities

December 2nd, 2006 |   Send this article to a friend!

One of things that have burned so many consultants (including myself) is being able to provide view-only access to the Order Organizer with abilities to apply and release holds.  It simply can’t be done out of the box.  This has been expressed in several bugs and forums on Metalink and Oracle has acknowledged that this is a known issue.  However, it has been labeled as a “future enhancement” and has been put off for the next release. 

This doesn’t help those who are in need of a solution now.

In every Order Management implementation I’ve been involved with the requirement to be able to provide view-only access to sales orders with the functionality to release holds has always appeared.  It’s not common to have holds applied during order entry that requires other departments in the organization to release upon reviewing information in the sales order. 

Oracle does provide the “Order Organizer: View” menu function (which is simply Order Organizer with the parameter QUERY_ONLY=”Yes”), however, there is an inability to use function security with the QUERY_ONLY parameter enabled.  Therefore, even if you add the release and apply hold sub-functions to the user’s menu, the form still doesn’t recognize them and enabled these items in the Actions button.  As a work-around, Oracle has suggested providing full-access to Order Organizer, however, providing these departments with full-access to sales orders is in blatant violation of Sarbanes-Oxley.  This usually doesn’t sit well with the client.

However, there just so happens to be a better solution which involves using Processing Constraints.  To start, create a new menu which provides access to standard Order Organizer.  Add to this menu the “Sales Orders: Apply Holds” and “Sales Orders: Release Holds”, which grant access to apply and release holds.

After you’ve created, saved, and compiled this menu, you’ll want to assign this to all your read-only responsibilities.

Next, within your Order Management super user responsibility, we’re going to create four constraints which will prevent update and creation of sales orders.  Navigate to Setup > Rules and open the Processing Constraints form.

Once you’re in the Processing Constraints form, query for application “Order Management” and entity “Order Header”.  Next, click into the Constraints block and create a new record with an operation of “Create” and user action “Not Allowed”.  We’re going to leave the Conditions criteria blank, because we don’t want any record creation of any kind to occur.

You may be wondering why we’re doing this since this would prevent any sales order header record from being created.  But by navigating to the Applicable To tab and selecting the “Constrained responsibilities” radio option, we now have the ability to pick and choose which responsibilities to apply this constraint.  Be sure to add all responsibilities which you had previously assigned the read-only responsibility menu to.

After you’ve completed this, create a new constraint for operation “Update” and user action “Not Allowed” and also assign to this the constrained responsibilities.  You’ll want to insert “Create” and “Update” constraints for application “Order Management” and entity “Order Lines” so that sales order lines are under the same restrictions.

Once you’re finished, you now have a responsibility which has pseudo read-only access to the Order Organizer with abilities to apply and release holds.  Any user under this responsibility who attempts to create or update sales order header or lines will receive messages similar to the following:

While this solution prevents any direct updates to sales orders, it still leaves it open for the user to perform scheduling actions or update document attachments.  Regardless, this is probably the best alternative until Oracle releases a fix in their next release.

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Mr. Thompson is a Senior Oracle Applications Consultant with Lexerd Group Consulting. Visit www.LexerdGroup.com to find out more about our firm.

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Entry Filed under: Order Management