Oracle Applications Release 12 - Inventory - What's new?

Oracle Inventory - Discrete & Process Manufacturing environments meet !

1. Improved Genealogy !
This genealogy links the final assembly to the various Lot and/or serialized components manufactured or procured from suppliers, so that rejects/product defects can be traced back to the root cause.

Increased product composition visibility, the lot and serial genealogy inquiries have been consolidated. Users now have a combined view of lot and serial genealogy in one inquiry.

In addition, for Oracle Discrete manufacturing users, operators performing the WIP issue transactions can tie their component lot and/ or serial numbers with a parent assembly. User can see the direct genealogy construct between the parent assembly lot and child component lots rather than using the WIP job as the connection between the products.

To ensure the integrity of the genealogy, only the lots that were issued to the work order can be returned from the work order into inventory when performing a component return for a lot controlled item.

2. Oracle Inventory's Dual Unit of Measure Control enables users to transact inventory in two unrelated units of measure where the conversion between the measures vary from lot to lot or from one transaction to the next.

If an item is dual unit of measure control enabled,during transactions, users will be prompted to enter the transaction quantity in both units and will be able to query on-hand balances, availability and reservations in both units for full supply chain visibility to all required handling units of measure.

Dual unit of measure control is available in Oracle Inventory, Purchasing & Receiving and Order Management and Shipping.

3. Tracking Assets
Users can now mandate entry of the location field while defining transaction types in Oracle Inventory. When users perform miscellaneous transactions for these transaction types, they are required to specify a field location from/to where the asset is being received or deployed.

4. For customers using Oracle's Configure to Order functionality on internal orders, intercompany invoicing can now determine the invoice price for an internal order based on the model and the options chosen. This eliminates the need to pre-define the configuration on a price list

5. In the Organization Parameters form, users can only select those accounts those are associated with the legal entity to which the inventory organization is assigned.

6. Material Workbench now lets a user see material across organizations categorized into three "buckets" -

• Inbound Intransit
• Receiving
• On-hand

User can drill down into each of the individual "buckets".

Availability information is calculated according to the material location of the relevant material for Inbound Intransit, Receiving, and Onhand material.

Users can save their queries and allow others to reuse common inquiries.

In a single form, users can view Purchase Orders, Advanced Shipment Notices and Internal Orders

7. Users can perform project issue and receipt transactions for any project defined in the set of operating units to which the user has access.


8. Functionality previously only available to Oracle Warehouse Management users that enable users to assign a material status to the material in an inventory lot, serial, subinventory or locator and to use that status to restrict transactions is now available to all Oracle Inventory users. Those material statuses will dictate which transactions can be performed on the lot, the serial or the material that is stored in the subinventory or locator. In addition, Oracle's planning applications and Inventory's availability calculations can now take the material status into consideration when determining availability. Users can determine whether or not product of a particular status can be reservable, included in ATP calculations or netted in production planning.

9.Sublot control allows users to track the parent lot from which multiple lots were created. The parent lot may refer to the production batch that spawned the lot but, if the output of that batch varied in term of grade or other QC attributes, multiple sublots might be received into inventory. Users can query lots in by their parent lot and view the parent lot in the lot genealogy form. Users can also now grade control their lot controlled items. The product can be queried by grade and the grade can be changed as required. Users can also track retest dates, expiration and retest actions among other lot attributes. In addition, a new concurrent request in Oracle Inventory can initiate a workflow if a lot or serial approaches any key milestone dates such as expiration, retest or best-by date.

10.Oracle Inventory picking rules engine has been enhanced to incorporate certain restrictions on allocation logic in addition to the sort criteria for acceptable material. These restrictions are available for both sales order and work order allocation processes.

For example, a customer may require premium grade material while another, more price sensitive client, may have no such restrictions. Some customers may mandate a certain number of usable days left on product that is to be shipped to them.

11.In order to better facilitate manual allocation processes, the transact move order form can now present all allocation options to a user and allows the user to choose the allocations that he or she wishes to commit. This ensures that the allocations honor the customer restrictions but still allows the warehouse operator the flexibility to choose the material that is most accessible for picking.

12.New material aging workflow. This workflow can be leveraged to create work orders, send notifications to planners, update material status or request a movement of expired product to a quarantine or inspection area. This functionality is offered in a new concurrent request in Oracle Inventory which can search for any date attribute of a lot or serial (including flexfields) and will initiate the workflow for the lot or serial if the date attribute is within a user specified range around the current date. For example, the request could initiate the workflow for all lots that will expire in the next 5 days.

13.Oracle Inventory has introduced the concept of lot indivisibility. This item attribute will indicate to the system that, during reservations and allocation, the system must allocate the entire lot quantity in a given location or none at all. In order to meet this requirement, over and under allocation, within tolerances, will be supported automatically at pick release for indivisible lots. Users may still choose to transact part of a lot quantity during user initiated transactions but Oracle Inventory will not suggest these splits during allocation and any reservation created will have to specify the lot to be reserved and will have to reserve the full lot
quantity.

14. Oracle Inventory's lot split, merge and translate transactions can now be performed on items that are both lot and serial controlled.

15. Inventory Organization parameters form has been added with attributes such as include labor reporting, locator aliasing, EPC compliance support for RFID tagging, chargeable subcontracting and best fit quantity allocation.

16.Oracle Inventory now supports reservations to expected supplies such as purchase orders, internal requisitions, advanced shipment notices, manufacturing jobs, and process manufacturing's batches. Users can create these reservations through Inventory forms and public APIs.

Users can now reserve a specific serial number and Oracle Inventory will ensure that the reserved serial is allocated at pick release.

17.Users can set a value for the Order Management system parameter “UOM Class for Charge Periodicity” to identify the available unit of measures to represent periodicity.

In order to enable Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) in service industries (Telco, Utilities etc) to better identify and group various charges (recurring, one-time, usage based) on customer orders/quotes, users can now identity the nature of each charge item (recurring vs. non-recurring) and the periodicity (weekly, monthly, quarterly etc) while setting them up in the Item Master.

19. Navigation
Different applications can invoke "transact move order" screen by passing the Inventory organization and Sales order information,and the system will directly show the results of the search criteria by completely bypassing the 'find' screen and taking the user to the 'detail' screen.

19. Not sure if this is already a feature in 11i or comes with Release 12, can someone help me finding out more on this ---> If such serialized equipment is shipped to a customer on a sales order, Oracle Inventory will ensure that serials shipped to a customer can only be returned into Inventory via an RMA receipt.