Release 12 - Price Book

With R12, Oracle Advanced Pricing provides a robust self-service capability for users to generate and publish lists of products they sell with their related prices. The user has the ability to generate a Price Book showing list and net prices for a specific customer.

The Price Book can cross multiple price lists to derive the net price for a customer. Multi-currency price lists as well as formula pricing are included. Current, past or future effective pricing dates are supported. Input criteria can optionally include specific items, item category, pricing attributes, qualifiers and price lists.

The final price will be the list price with the adjustments and Freight and special Charges (This is different from the Sales Orders window where you can see the list price and adjustments). You can add textual information, images, and other data to
use as a catalog with specified effective dates.

The Price Book uses the customer item cross reference number (when available) rather than the internal item number, making it easy for the customer to identify their items. A Price Book can be generated for a customer or a Delta Price Book showing only items with changed prices can be created.

The publication options for the Price Book include printed report, online views, XML messages and email. Additionally, a Price Book API is provided for other applications to generate a price book and then use the information as required.

The feature is available in Basic and Advanced Pricing. Basic Pricing users have a subset of the full price book functionality.

Using the Pricing User responsibility, navigate to the Reports tab in the Advanced Pricing HTML Page. You can create a new Price Book or search for an existing one.

Click the Price Book Name in the search results table to view the Price Book details. You can print the Price Book from the window shown below:

The Price Book lines are categorized according to categories.

Release 12 - Inventory Convergence

With this release, customers of Oracle’s Process Manufacturing applications can now use Oracle Inventory and Oracle Warehouse Management. The use of a single inventory application provides the Oracle Process Manufacturing user seamless integration with the rest of the e-Business Suite. This feature opens up additional functionality that was previously only available to Discrete Oracle Inventory users, such as vendor-managed and consigned inventory, reservations, move order requisitions, kanban, min-max replenishment and robust physical inventory and cycle counting functionality. The ability to implement Oracle Warehouse Management allows users to leverage sophisticated picking rules, license plates (LPN’S), putaway rules and task management.

Oracle Inventory, is the one source of all material management information. Key areas that have been enhanced for Oracle Order Management include improved allocation (picking) rules and added features to Move Orders. Additionally, the ability to price by a secondary quantity is available to all users who track their inventory in two quantities. Process users can leverage all of the functionality in Oracle Order Management, such as enhanced scheduling and reservations, and international drop shipments, as well as Oracle Warehouse Management functionality.

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 are prompted to enter the transaction quantity in both units and are able to query on hand balances, availability and reservations in both units for full supply chain visibility to all required handling units of measure.

This particular feature has an impact on the following functionalities

Product Development Workbench
Formula Management
Routings
Operations
Recipe Management
Simulator
Formula Analysis, Formula Inquiry,Indented BOM
Mass Search and Replace
Product Development Workflow and ERES

Release 12 - Web Analytics Support

Web Analytics is a new product that provides a complete web tracking solution – reporting on the entire online customer flow from clicks to lead generation to orders.

It is a tracking tool and reporting solution for Oracle iStore sites, providing seamless integration with the Oracle iStore site management infrastructure. It also tracks Oracle Partner Management and Oracle iSupport set up using the Oracle iStore site infrastructure. All of the reports provided by Oracle Web Analytics work out-of-the-box with these Oracle E-Business Suite sites. Oracle Web Analytics tracks Customer Application pages with no customization required, and then reports on these interactions.

Oracle iStore logs contexts to help Web Analytics track the user browsing pattern in Oracle iStore sites. Some of these contexts and events include:

• Product and Section ID contexts
• Login and logout events
• Cart creation events
• Order placement events

In Release 12 iStore provides the necessary framework support to Web Analytics product for the following features:

• Tracking visits
• Tracking registrations
• Tracking products and sections in the iStore catalog
• Tracking iStore shopping carts
• Tracking iStore order, payment and invoice inquiries
• Instrumentation and categorization of seeded iStore templates to allow the tracking
• Online privacy management for registered and anonymous visitors

Oracle Web Analytics, in combination with Oracle iStore, answers such questions as:

• Which sources bring the most customers, orders and revenue?
• Who are my most profitable online campaign partners?
• What is my conversion funnel?
• Which navigational paths lead to the most conversions?
• Is my online channel profitable?
• Does my online channel have usability issues slowing down the adoption?
• How are my summary traffic statistics (visitors, pages, visits, etc.) changing over time?
• How can I leverage my customer analytics from the web in my multi channel process?

Release 12 - Order Management System Parameters Setup

Parameters set up is one of the significant steps in Order Management Set up. These Parameters define basic steps or action to be taken as required. For example, when to start an audit trail or what to do when there is no response from the approver etc. The Parameters can be grouped into specific categories when creating them.


The values of these parameters can be set-up using tables or constant values. To navigation to the parameter definitions and values set up is as follows,

Order Management -> Setup-> System Parameters

The ‘define’ form gives a provision to create a new parameter. The interface is very straight forward. It asks to define the parameter code, name, description, category, value set, and open orders check. Value set allows us to select the type of value the parameter can take. It can take values from a table or the values can be entered as characters or numbers depending on the selection that is made. The category is taken from the lookup type ‘OM_PARAMETER_CATEGORY’.

Once the parameters are defined it has to be given a value when it is used in the order management set up for an organization. The ‘Values’ form can be selected by navigating as described above. The form has a field that displays the selected organization. The category can be selected to display the parameters only for the required category. The ‘Show all’ option will display all parameters from all categories. If ‘Show all’ option is selected the category field will be disabled. The required changes can be made to the parameter values and then it can be saved.

Using TCA APIs to Create Customer Information

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Oracle has provided TCA APIs, written in PL/SQL Procedures/Packages, that can be put to very good use for any Application that interfaces with Oracle Ebusiness Suite. We just need to be careful in the order in which these APIs need to be called, and the parameters that need to be passed for successful creation of customer related data.

Briefly, here is how we can call the APIs

– First, Creation the Location Record

p_location_rec.country := p_country;
p_location_rec.address1 := p_addr1;
p_location_rec.address2 := p_addr2;
p_location_rec.city := p_city;
p_location_rec.county := v_county;
p_location_rec.postal_code := p_zip;
p_location_rec.state := p_state;
p_location_rec.created_by_module := ‘ISTORE’;

hz_location_v2pub.create_location(
‘T’,
p_location_rec,
x_location_id,
x_return_status,
x_msg_count,
x_msg_data);

– If the location record has been successfully created, Create the Party Site

p_party_site_rec.party_id := x_party_id; –<
p_party_site_rec.location_id := x_location_id; –<
p_party_site_rec.identifying_address_flag := ‘Y’;
p_party_site_rec.created_by_module := ‘ISTORE’;

hz_party_site_v2pub.create_party_site(
‘T’,
p_party_site_rec,
x_party_site_id,
x_party_site_number,
x_return_status,
x_msg_count,
x_msg_data);

– If the Party Site record has been successfully created, Create the Acct Site

p_cust_acct_site_rec.cust_account_id := p_ship_to_cust_acct_id; –<
p_cust_acct_site_rec.party_site_id := x_party_site_id; –<
p_cust_acct_site_rec.language := ‘US’;
p_cust_acct_site_rec.created_by_module := ‘ISTORE’;

hz_cust_account_site_v2pub.create_cust_acct_site(
‘T’,
p_cust_acct_site_rec,
x_cust_acct_site_id,
x_return_status,
x_msg_count,
x_msg_data);

– If the Party Site record has been successfully created, Ship To info

p_cust_site_use_rec.cust_acct_site_id := x_cust_acct_site_id; –<
p_cust_site_use_rec.site_use_code := ‘SHIP_TO’;
p_cust_site_use_rec.created_by_module := ‘ISTORE’;
p_cust_site_use_rec.primary_flag := p_primary_flag;

hz_cust_account_site_v2pub.create_cust_site_use(
‘T’,
p_cust_site_use_rec,
p_customer_profile_rec,
”,
”,
x_site_use_id,
x_return_status,
x_msg_count,
x_msg_data);

Additionally, for the same address one can create the Bill To Address, by passing ‘BILL_TO’ as the site_use_code to the above API.

Request for support by sending an email to support@ibizsoftinc.com

Oracle ERP Solutions on the iPhone

Oracle ERP Solutions for ERP implementors enables sales, operational, service executives to query on the Order Status, Item Status and other such information within the Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle ERP Solutions for iPhone features a highly intuitive user interface for ‘mobile’ executives allowing to browse, search and provide the right status information of an Order, Item and other such information.

The Oracle ERP Solutions application requires only the username, password, hostname and port number of the server hosting the Oracle E-Business Suite to login. The screenshot below illustrates this screen:

If the credentials entered by the user shown in the screenshot above are accurate, then the user can query the Order Status or the Item Status using this application.A screenshot that shows the Order Status screen is shown below:

On entering a valid Order Number and the Order Date, the ERP Solutions application will whether the Order is ‘In Process’ or if it has been ‘Closed’. Similarly Item Status allows us to query the status of an Item from the Inventory. The screenshot pertaining to this functionality is shown below:

The ERP Solutions application on the iPhone will allow executives to check Order Status and/or Item Status on-the-fly using their mobile phones and will avoid the need to log on their laptop/desktop computers and run programs/queries in order to get the latest status on an Order or an Item.

Oracle R12.1.1 installation

Installation of Oracle Applications – R12.1.1 for Windows

Step – 1 PrerequisiteOperating System

• Windows 2003 Server

Software

• Oracle Apps R12.1.1 installation CD or files downloaded from Oracle edelivery
• Cygwin
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
• stopapps.bat and stopdb.bat files