Overview
Oracle Purchasing is the application
for procurement professionals that streamlines purchase order processing while
strengthening policy compliance. It is a key component of Oracle Advanced
Procurement, the integrated suite that dramatically cuts supply management
costs.
Features
Professional Buyer’s Work Center
Oracle Purchasing Release 12.0
speeds up daily purchasing tasks with an enhanced Professional Buyer’s Work
Center. Based on the latest web-based user interface models, the Work Center is
a central ‘Launch Pad’ from which buyers can efficiently perform their daily
tasks:
- View and Act upon Requisition Demand
- Create and Manage Orders and Agreements
- Run Negotiation Events including Auctions and RFxs
(requires Oracle Sourcing)
- Manage Supplier Information
The Professional Buyer’s Work Center
leverages Multi-Org Access Control (MOAC) by allowing buyers to view and manage
documents across all of the operating units they service. For more details,
please reference the MOAC section of this document.
Professional
Buyer’s Work Center – Launch Pad to Perform Daily Tasks
Requisition Management
The Work Center offers a
streamlined, HTML user interface to look up and act upon requisitions. Buyers
can aggregate demand from different organizations and consolidate it in a
single document in an organization that they designate. The document could be a
solicitation (Auction/RFx) for bids (requires Oracle Sourcing) or a Standard
Purchase Order. Buyers can search for requisitions with several pre-configured
views and advanced search criteria. Default views include My Requisitions, My
Urgent Requisitions, My Requisitions requiring a RFQ, Requisitions with a
Suggested Supplier, Requisitions with a New Supplier, and Unassigned
Requisitions. In addition, buyers can save their own views, specifying custom
search criteria and display columns. Buyers can view details of the
requisitions by clicking the requisition links. In
addition, buyers can return
requisitions to requesters to solicit additional information, reassign
requisitions to other buyers, split requisition lines in order to source from multiple
suppliers and replace off-catalog requests with items available in the catalog.
Requisition
Demand - View All Requisitions Assigned to the Buyer Across Multiple Operating
Units Purchase
Order Creation and Maintenance
The Work Center user interface
optimizes the standard purchase order creation and management processes. The
new user interface allows buyers to edit and view delivery schedules and
account distributions across all order lines, thus eliminating the need to
drilldown on individual lines. For simple purchase orders that do not require
staged delivery schedules or multiple account distributions, buyers can quickly
enter all necessary information for the orders in the header and line sections,
without having to navigate to the schedules and distributions sections.
Orders – User Interface Tailored to PO Creation
Purchase
Order Lines – Enter Schedule and Delivery Information When Creating Lines
Purchase Agreement Creation and
Maintenance
The Professional Buyer’s Work Center
provides a dedicated user interface for creating and maintaining agreements,
targeting the strategic buyer responsible for agreement maintenance and
compliance.
Agreements
– User Interface Tailored to Creating Long-Term Agreements (Schedule and
Delivery Information Replaced by Agreement Controls)
In addition, user extensible
attributes can now be captured on the blanket agreement to further enrich the
description of the products and services listed in the document. Such attributes
could be generic to all items (Example: Manufacturer Number, Lead time) or
could be category specific (Example: Color, Size, etc.)
Negotiations in Oracle Sourcing
The Professional Buyer’s Work Center
increases the drill down capabilities between Oracle Purchasing and Oracle
Sourcing. Buyers can now easily navigate from purchasing to sourcing documents,
and vice-versa, using a single, friendly user interface
Enhanced Catalog Access
Release 12.0 of Oracle Purchasing
builds on the popularity of Oracle iProcurement’s search capabilities by
offering professional buyers a similar search interface to easily find the
items they need to procure. From the Demand Workbench, buyers can access the
catalog to find negotiated alternatives to non-catalog requests. While
authoring orders and agreements, buyers can use the catalog to quickly add
items, thereby accelerating the document creation process.
New Supplier Setup User Interface
Release 12.0 introduces a new HTML
UI for managing suppliers, which replaces the existing Suppliers Form.
Obsolete Suppliers Form
The new UI delivers an improved
layout for accessing all aspects of a supplier's setup, providing a clear
distinction between the supplier's company details and the terms & controls
that are used to manage the trading relationship. General and site level setup
parameters is now available on a single page and work has been done to rationalize
the organization of setup preferences across fewer sub-tabs to allow administrators
quicker access to information.
In addition, a new Quick Update page
gives each administrator access to an initial summary page that can be
personalized to suit the needs of their role.
New HTML Supplier Setup UI
For those companies that have
enabled supplier access to their profile information through the Portal, the
Supplier Profile Management tools have been integrated into the Setup UI pages,
affording administrators a single view of a supplier's setup and any pending
updates that have been provided by the supplier to the buying organization. The
new Supplier UI also includes a Survey section that provides administrators
with access to the results of questionnaires that were created using i Survey
and which the supplier had been asked to complete, either during
self-registration or as part of profile maintenance through the Portal. Security
controls are incorporated into the Setup UI so that companies can limit an administrator’s
access to specific tabs within the supplier setup. This feature is key for
assisting companies to comply with the separation of duties elements of the Sarbanes-Oxley
legislation.
Document Styles
Document styles allow buying
organizations to control the look and feel of the application to match the
needs of different purchasing documents. Through reusable document styles,
deploying organizations turn on or off various Oracle Purchasing features,
thereby simplifying the user interface. When a purchasing document is created
using a document style, disabled features are hidden to simplify the user
interface. For example, organizations can create a document style for a
specific commodity, such as temporary labor. This document style optimizes
field labels and presentment for that commodity, simplifying purchase order
entry by hiding regions/attributes that are only relevant for that commodity. In
addition, document styles provide the ability to appropriately name purchasing documents
to align more closely with the naming conventions of the deploying organization’s
business. In other words, the same purchasing document type (e.g. Standard
Purchase Order) can assume different names based on the style applied. The following
figure shows a style intended for authoring agreements and orders to acquire
facilities related services. The name assigned to Standard Purchase Orders using
this style is ‘Facilities Maintenance Order’. The name assigned to Blanket Purchase
Agreements using this style is ‘Facilities Maintenance Contract’. These names
are exposed throughout the Work Center and also to the supplier.
Document
Styles – Various Settings Allow Companies to Control Look and Feel of User
Interface
Note: The existing Oracle Purchasing
forms for managing requisition demand and purchasing documents, including
orders, agreements and releases, will still be available in Release 12.0. Also
note that creation of the following documents will only be supported in the
forms interface:
- Blanket Purchase Agreements and Releases (Work
Center will only support authoring of Global Blanket Purchase Agreements)
- Planned Purchase Orders and Scheduled Releases
Across Fortune 1000 companies,
services-related procurement accounts for about 54% of procured total
procurement spending. Outsourcing and globalization are the key drivers of this
trend. Due to the increasing share of budget allocated to services, procurement
organizations are increasingly being given responsibility to control services
spend. Much of services spending go to complex services, such as outsourced
high-value projects that require extensive collaboration between the buyer and
supplier organizations. These complex services include consulting, advertising,
construction, research and development, and professional services. These
services require complex negotiated contracts that often include complex
payment arrangements. These arrangements can include:
- Progress payments
- Advances and recoupment of advances
- Retainage and retainage release
Release 12.0 will support
acquisition of complex services by allowing buyers to author, negotiate, execute
and monitor complex contract payment arrangements like progress payments,
advances and retainage. Please see the Services Procurement part of this RCD
for more details.
Multi-Org Access Control (MOAC)
Multi-Org Access Control enables
companies that have implemented a Shared Services operating model to
efficiently process business transactions by allowing them to access, process,
and report on data for an unlimited number of operating units within a single applications
responsibility. This increases the productivity of Shared Service Centers for users
who no longer have to switch application responsibilities when processing transactions
for multiple operating units at a time. Data security is still maintained using
security profiles that are defined for a list of operating units and determine
the data access privileges for a user. In Release 12.0, Oracle Purchasing will
leverage the new Multi-Org Access Control capabilities to support more
streamlined operation of Shared Procurement Service Centers. Without changing
Responsibility, and without closing windows, buyers will now be able to view
consolidated requisition demand spanning multiple operating units. Using a
single Responsibility, they will be able to manage demand (i.e. requisitions), conduct
sourcing events, enter into agreements and issue purchase orders on behalf of
any of the operating units that they serve. The operating units that they can
transact on behalf of will be controlled by the security profile associated
with their responsibilities. Similarly, receiving clerks will now be able to
easily inquire about, plan for and receive expected shipments against purchase
orders or requisitions or RMAs originating in multiple operating units without
needing to close windows and change responsibilities.
E-Business Tax
Oracle E-Business Tax is a new
infrastructure for tax knowledge management and delivery, using a global system
architecture that is configurable and scalable for adding country specific tax
content. As the single point solution for managing transaction-based tax,
Oracle E-Business Tax will deliver tax services uniformly to Oracle E-Business
Suite business flows through one application interface. Oracle E-Business Tax
significantly enhances the current tax code/tax group based tax computation
capabilities within the Procure to Pay business flow.
For more information, please refer
to the Oracle E-Business Tax section within the Oracle Financials RCD.
Document
Publishing Enhancements
Release 12.0 further enhances the
11i10 feature, which introduced the ability to generate purchasing documents in
Adobe PDF format.
Support
for RTF and PDF layout templates
In Release 11i10, generation of
purchasing documents in Adobe PDF format required organizations to create
layout templates in the form of XSL-FO style sheets. With Release 12.0,
organizations can also use RTF or PDF layout templates which require little
training to configure and maintain.
Publish Contracts using user
specified layout
In order to comply with reporting
requirements of regulatory bodies, organizations, especially in the public
sector, need the ability to publish the contracts that they award in multiple
formats as prescribed by these bodies. In Release 11i.10, Oracle Purchasing
supported generating purchasing documents in Adobe PDF. Format for such
documents were limited to a single layout template as configured in the Document
Types Setup. Release12.0 enables buying organizations to easily publish
documents on demand using any predefined layout template. To generate a document
using a certain layout, organizations simply provide the layout name as a
runtime parameter while submitting the ‘PO Output for Communication’ concurrent
program.
Publish
Contract – Additional parameters introduced in the concurrent parameter allowing
selection of pre-defined Adobe PDF or RTF layout templates
One particular application of this
feature is for public sector organizations to generate government forms (such
as SF30, OF347 etc.).
Communicate Document Attachments
to Suppliers
Release 12.0 enables buyers to
communicate all necessary document attachments to suppliers. Oracle Purchasing
supports various types of file attachments (MS Word, Excel, PDF etc.) that can
be appended to purchasing documents in addition to long and short text attachments.
In previous releases, only text attachments were communicated to suppliers. With
Release 12.0, buyers can communicate all necessary attachments to suppliers, including
file attachments via email. When the system emails a purchase order to the supplier,
the corresponding file attachments appear in a zip file attached to the email. System
administrators can specify the maximum allowable size for this zip file to minimize
network traffic.
Oracle Supplier Network - Rapid
Supplier Enablement
Oracle Supplier Network lets Oracle
Purchasing customers leverage pre-defined connectivity to quickly enable
electronic messaging with suppliers. The Oracle Supplier Network (OSN) provides
a community of suppliers available for transaction integration, capable of sending
and receiving XML documents, such as Purchase Orders and Invoices. The hosted
network service eliminates the costly IT effort involved in building and
maintaining direct connections with specific suppliers since each trading party
only has to maintain a single connection with the OSN. This enables companies
to drive machine-to-machine messaging down to a larger base of their repetitive
suppliers with even less resources. Release 12.0 is certified with the OSN,
which ensures that all R12.0 Purchasing and Payables’ XML documents are fully
supported for end-to-end message routing and transformation over the OSN. A
quick start guide is provided to help buying organizations quickly connect
R12.0 to the OSN.
Maintain Sourcing Rules/ASLs for
Agreement Items
Release 12.0 streamlines enabling
blanket agreements for automatic document sourcing in specific inventory
organizations. Previous releases allowed buyers to instruct the system to
automatically create sourcing rules, sourcing rule assignments and approved supplier
list entries out of all blanket agreement lines during blanket agreement
approval submission. The system would then automatically source of requisition
demand for all inventory organizations within an operating unit Release 12.0
allows finer control of how blanket agreements are enabled for automatic document
sourcing. Buyers can now choose to enable them only in specific inventory organizations.
Thus, buyers can negotiate a blanket agreement to fulfill requisition demand
for a subset of inventory organizations and enable the agreement for auto
sourcing only in those inventory organizations. To use a blanket agreement for
autosourcing in a specific inventory org, the buyer simply submits a concurrent
program specifying the inventory organization and the blanket agreement number
as runtime parameters.
Support for Contractor Purchasing
Users
More and more companies are
outsourcing part or all of their procurement processes in an effort to reduce
costs and improve efficiencies. In keeping with this recent trend, Oracle
Purchasing Release 12.0 introduces support for contingent workers in the
procurement process. Authorized contingent Purchasing workers can raise
requisitions, conduct negotiations, and create and maintain purchase orders.
Compliance to Packaging
Constraints
Release 12.0 makes inventory
replenishment more efficient and less expensive by applying supplier-packaging
constraints to replenishment choices. Material replenishment recommendations
from Inventory Planning systems are typically designed to maintain inventory
levels to match predetermined policy guidelines. Such guidelines seldom take
into consideration packaging lot sizes or minimum order quantity requirements
of the supplier. Placing orders based on such requests without any review or adjustment
may force the supplier to over or under-ship the order, or even reject the order.
To reduce cost and time delays
associated with administering such orders, Oracle Purchasing can automatically
apply supplier-specific order modifiers, including fixed lot multiple and
minimum order quantities to replenishment requests that originate in Inventory
planning systems. These include Min-Max, Reorder Point and any requisitions
imported from legacy systems via the open interface. Automatic application of
such modifiers can be used both for requisitions sourced from external
suppliers as well as those sourced from internal warehouse locations within the
enterprise.
Auto-Approval Tolerance for
Change Orders
With Release 12.0, business users
can use a web-based interface to define tolerances for auto-approval of
document revisions.
eAM Support for Services
Procurement
Release 12.0 extends the support for
Enterprise Asset Manager (eAM) to include fixed price services line types. Now
requesters can associate maintenance Work Orders and Operation References for fixed
price services requisition lines. The existing eAM integration for goods and amount
based requisition lines is still supported.
Model Complex Pricing for Blanket
Line Items
With Release 12.0, Oracle Purchasing
extends the integration with Oracle Advanced Pricing to allow procurement
professionals to model complex pricing rules for items listed on Global Blanket
Agreements. Requisitions and orders sourced to these agreements can now
leverage dynamic pricing formulas and/or modifiers defined in Oracle Advanced
Pricing, in addition to the agreement line price and price breaks.
Advanced Approval Support for
Requisitions
Release 12.0 of Oracle Purchasing
further expands and enhances integration with the Oracle Approvals Management
product for approval routing of purchase requisitions. This integration gives
enterprises even more flexibility to configure their business approval
processes. Key enhancements include:
- Position Hierarchy based Approvals
Position
based hierarchies allow organizations the flexibility to create reporting structures
that remain stable regardless of personnel changes. Enterprises already using
position hierarchies via Oracle Approval Management can immediately leverage
those hierarchies for the requisition approvals process.
- Parallel Approvals
The
Parallel Approvals functionality gives enterprises the option to speed up the approvals
process by routing a requisition to multiple approvers simultaneously.
- Support for FYI Notifications
Certain
individuals or business roles need to be kept informed of purchases and decisions,
but do not necessarily need to take action against that notification. Release 12.0
provides new functionality to allow certain individuals or roles to review the purchases,
but do not require any response from the recipient.
Sub-ledger Accounting for
Budgetary Control Actions
In Release 12.0, Oracle Purchasing
utilizes the new Subledger Architecture (SLA) for encumbrance accounting
entries created for documents in Oracle Purchasing and Oracle iProcurement.
These entries will be available for analysis and reporting with other SLA reports.
Customers will also now be able to configure accounting annotations for their purchasing
encumbrance accounting entries. Please see Subledger Accounting section of the
Release 12.0 Oracle Financials RCD for more details.
New User Interface for Oracle
Purchasing Setups
With Release 12.0, more
user-friendly and intuitive web-based user interfaces will replace the
following existing Oracle Purchasing setup forms. • Define Buyers
- Define Approval Groups
- Assign Approval Groups
- Define Purchasing Options
- Define Receiving Options
- Define Line Types
- Define Document Types
- Control Purchasing Periods
- Setup Expense Account Rules
- Define Hazard Classes
- Define UN Numbers
- Define Quality Inspection Codes
- Define Job and Category Association
The new UIs will also leverage MOAC,
making it easier for system administrators to perform setups in multiple
operating units in the context of a single application responsibility.
Chargeable Subcontracting
The Japanese legal and business
practice of Chargeable Subcontracting is a method of subcontracting assemblies
from an OEM to one or more manufacturing partners. According to this method,
the OEM ships and makes a provisional sale of component materials used to build
the assembly at the manufacturing partner. When the assemblies are completed
and returned to the OEM, the manufacturing partner bills the OEM for the gross
price of the assembly. In order to provide support for the Chargeable Subcontracting
business practices, the Pay on Receipt Auto-invoice program has been enhanced
to create separate invoices for these items. For more information, please refer
to the Chargeable Subcontracting features within the Oracle Logistics RCD.
Support for Unified Process
Manufacturing/Discrete Inventory
Release 12.0 of Oracle E-Business
Suite merges the Oracle Process Inventory and Oracle Inventory applications
into a single version of Oracle Inventory that manages inventory across the
entire E-Business Suite. This single application supports Process characteristics
such as dual units of measure, grade, child lots as a subdivision of lot controlled
inventory, and the use of material status. This convergence removes the need
for integration between Oracle Process Inventory and Oracle Purchasing. The
process-enhanced Release 12.0 version of Oracle Inventory is the one source for
all material management information. Oracle Process Quality for receiving
inspection has been enhanced specifically to support Purchasing. Process users of
Oracle Inventory can leverage all of the related functionality in Oracle
Purchasing including:
- Consigned and Vendor Managed Inventory
- Cross Operating Unit Drop Shipments
- Center-Led Procurement Flows
- Warehouse Management System functions.
Dual Unit of Measure Control
In many industries, such as the
meat, poultry, metals or chemicals industries, ‘catch weight’ is a term used to
track inventory simultaneously in two different units of measure. To run their
businesses, these industries need to know the number of cases, bars or drums of
product stored, as well as the weight or potency of that product. Prices are
calculated based on the shipment weight of the product, not on the number of cases
or units shipped. 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. The
dual unit of measure support that had been available only for Oracle Process Manufacturing
enabled organizations is now available for all Inventory organizations. Thus,
if a user chooses to enable dual unit of measure control for a given inventory
item, Oracle Receiving will now require quantity entry in two units of measure
according to the defaulting rules set up at the item level.
Material Status Control
Quality Control and product
lifecycle issues may require that certain material, although stored in a ready
to use state in the warehouse or production facility, may not be usable for
certain applications. A lot that has not yet passed inspection should not be
shipped to a customer or consumed in production. A warehouse location that has
been discovered to have erroneous inventory balances should not be included in
available to promise calculations. With this release, if material status
control has been enabled for a given lot or serial controlled item, Oracle
Receiving will now require quantity entry of the status for each new lot or
serial received.
Sublot Control
Getting fast answers to questions
such as the following may determine whether your company will survive a crisis:
- Which lots were delivered to which customers?
- Which other lots were produced from that production
line during that shift?
- What was the quality of the components or
ingredients and which suppliers sent them?
To enable better visibility to a lot
and its genealogy and attributes, significant enhancements have been made to
the lot tracking capabilities within Oracle Inventory. 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
could 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.
With this release, if sublot control
has been enabled for a given item, Oracle Receiving will now require quantity
entry of the parent lot for each new lot received. For more information, please
refer to the OPM Convergence features within the Oracle Logistics RCD.
Depot Repair Enhancements
Many business processes require
receiving capabilities to complete a material movement flow. When receiving
material based on business processes initiated in other forms, minimizing
keystrokes is key to a great user experience. With this release, different applications,
such as Depot Repair can invoke the receiving forms with the requisite data; such
as requisition number and/or requisition line number and the system will
directly show the results of the search criteria by completely bypassing the
'find' screen. For more information, please refer to the Depot Repair RCD
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