Enhanced Change Management Functionality to the IR/ISO Process

In 12.1 and 12.1.2, Oracle has introduced long awaited improvements to the Internal Requisition/Internal Order (IR/ISO) process…

Continue Reading Add comment May 29th, 2010

Does Oracle provide approval capabilities?

Well, it depends. Generally speaking, Oracle provides capabilities to integrate approvals within your business process. However, depending on the module and transaction these capabilities can vary. As an Order to Cash expert, I want to bring some clarity to what the out-of-the-box approval capabilities are within the Quoting and Order Management modules, then go into some of the enhancements I’ve implemented in the past to improve the functionality in some of these areas.

Continue Reading 3 comments February 19th, 2009

Pricing Qualifiers – How They Work and Creating Your Own Part II

In my last Qualifier article, I delved into the inner workings of Qualifiers in Advanced Pricing by walking through a quick demo of how to setup a Qualifier to reference Descriptive Flexfield data on a sales order transaction. In this article, I’d like to touch on how some Qualifiers require more advanced PL/SQL techniques to retrieve transactional data. For example, the “Customer Party ID” is tied to QP_SOURCING_API_PUB.GET_PARTY_ID function call because the Party ID isn’t stored directly in the G_HDR record structure. With that said, lets walk-thru the creation of a Qualifier that requires us to create our own PL/SQL function reference…

Continue Reading 3 comments September 12th, 2008

R12 Order Management – What’s changed?

Good question. I’m in the process of figuring this out myself. However, here are a few things I do know based on my research and my recent R12 engagement…

Continue Reading 9 comments September 11th, 2008

Pricing Qualifiers – How They Work and Creating Your Own

Oracle Advanced Pricing allows you to create discounts, surcharges, and other promotions (called Modifiers) that can be applied against sales orders both manually and automatically. Often there are requirements for Modifiers to only apply in certain situations. For example, promotions on specific products or product lines, discounts on customer types, additional charges on international shipments, etc. So in addition to creating Modifiers, Qualifiers can be used to reference specific attributes of a sales order, product, customer, etc. to determine if the Modifier qualifies for the sales transaction.

Oracle provides a wide array of Qualifiers to evaluate a sales transaction, but situations often arise where Qualifiers are needed for attributes that aren’t available out of the box. However, with a few configurations and little bit of PL/SQL knowledge, you can create your own Qualifier attributes.

Continue Reading 2 comments July 21st, 2008

Implementing Export Compliance in Oracle

In the United States there are numerous international embargo laws in place that restrict U.S. based corporations from selling to countries that are deemed a threat by the government. Cuba, Iran, and North Korea are all examples of countries which no one in the U.S. can conduct business with. These laws can change often depending on the political atmosphere or whoever happens to be in office, making it difficult for organizations who sell or distribute products globally to not only adhere to the laws, but to also adapt their audit procedures when a change to policy occurs.

Continue Reading 4 comments May 30th, 2008

Tax on Freight & Special Charges in Order Management

One of the fundamental flaws in Oracle Order Management (OM) is the inability to include tax on freight and special charge modifiers that are setup in Advanced Pricing (QP). There’s just no way to do it out of the box. Even if you use the Oracle suggested work around, which is to add freight as a line item to a sales order, it’s still a manual process and defeats the purpose of being able to include and calculate freight automatically the way you can through a charge modifier.

Continue Reading 21 comments February 29th, 2008

Interfacing Oracle to Your Legacy WMS – A Good Idea?

Over the years I’ve been involved with several Oracle implementations where the decision was made to retain the existing warehouse and inventory management systems in place of Oracle WMS. Perhaps your organization had made a similar decision knowing that the existing warehouse solution was best suited for your operations. Not to say that Oracle WMS is the best warehouse management solution out there – because it may very well not be. In fact, it may be true that your Legacy inventory system is the best fit for your business. Not only may it be the best fit, but keeping the existing system in place also eliminates any risk involved in changing the systems of what can be a fragile inventory and shipping operation. In other words, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – right?

Continue Reading 1 comment January 10th, 2008

Finally! An OE_Order_PUB.Process_Order Script That Works!

Recently I was looking for any working example of the OE_Order_PUB.Process_Order API to use for a volume test I wanted to setup. The idea would be to identify a base script that with minimal changes could be used to create and book a mass amount of sales orders. I scoured Metalink and Google, and for the longest time I could not identify a single working example. Many authors claimed to have posted an OE_Order_PUB.Process_Order script that, with slight modifications, are working examples, but this never was the case. There was always syntax or incorrect API parameter issues with each script I encountered…

Continue Reading 24 comments December 6th, 2007

Collecting Credit Card Information in OM Without iPayment

Up to 11.5.9, it was impossible to utilize the credit card functionality and secure fields unless you also implemented iPayment. Oracle iPayment is the module which screens and processes credit card transactions through Order Management (OM). While this is a nice package for clients who process high volumes of credit card payments, it’s not cost effective for the rest who may process credit cards on occasion and prefer to use an offline processor. So at the time you had two options; either fork up the money to buy the iPayment module, or process and store the transactional information offline and enter the prepayment manually in the system.

However, as of recently, Oracle has offered a patch (5192725) which allows for the use of the credit card fields in OM without the need to install iPayment. The application of this patch alone is not enough, as there are other tweaks that need to take place to make it all work. At any rate, I take this as a great act of generosity on Oracle’s part – it’s not often they provide us the choice to implement a module!…

Continue Reading 6 comments August 24th, 2007

Shipping without Transacting Inventory in Oracle

From an Oracle prospective, when I say “Shipping without Transacting Inventory”, I mean just that – being able to add a line item to the sales order in Order Management, following through with the pick release and shipment confirmation like a normal inventory item, but avoiding the inventory transactions that result from the shipment…

Continue Reading 13 comments August 1st, 2007

“Form Personalizations” Is Your Friend – Part II

In a previous article, I discussed some of the advantages to using Personalizations within Oracle forms by demonstrating how to validate field data in the Sales Order form within Order Management. I’d like to further demonstrate some of the advanced features of Forms Personalizations by solving a problem that is frequently encountered within the Oracle development community – how to prompt and force the selection of inventory organization when entering a form…

Continue Reading 3 comments July 13th, 2007

An Easy Way to Mass Progress Workflow Activities

Being that Oracle Order Management is a workflow driven module, there is a tendency for the transactions to get “hung” up on errored or deferred workflow activities that requires the workflow to be retried or progressed…

Continue Reading 1 comment July 7th, 2007

The Infamous “Order is not eligible for booking. Check workflow status.”

If you’re reading this article you probably did a Google search for this error message in hopes of finding a solution. Well, you may have come to the right place…

Continue Reading 5 comments July 5th, 2007

Telesales Quoting to Order Management – Extension to Convert Attachments from Quote to Order

While both applications have evolved to become very powerful tools, I’ve always been amazed about how drastically different the Telesales and Order Management applications have become. You would think that the Telesales quotation screens and the OM order entry screens would have some similarities – maybe even the same application interfaces since the data is so similar. But the reality is that like most Oracle modules, Telesales and Order Management were each independently developed by separate teams several years apart from each other. This leads to the obvious inconsistencies in how each module behaves from a user prospective and discrepancies in how Telesales interfaces to OM in the quotation to order process…

Continue Reading 6 comments December 15th, 2006

Providing View-Only to Order Management with Hold Capabilities

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…

Continue Reading 3 comments December 2nd, 2006

Complex Shipment of Manufactured Goods

There’s nothing that Oracle Shipping Execution can’t handle. Well, almost nothing…

Continue Reading 16 comments August 17th, 2006

An Analysis of Oracle Order to Cash Implementations

The Diebold and Stryker projects are both representative of the large-scale, global Oracle implementations for Deloitte Consulting. As leading manufacturers within their respective industries, unique requirements would need to be met that would test the limitations of the Order to Cash (OTC) process from a functional, technical, and performance prospective. The Order Management module, a major hub to the OTC process in Oracle, was one of the more challenging modules to implement for both projects…

Continue Reading 5 comments July 20th, 2006

Oracle Order to Cash Basics

If you want a high-level overview of Oracle Order to Cash, check out this deck.

7 comments July 20th, 2006