Release 12 – Inventory Organization Setup

Every sales department requires a clear picture on every aspect of the product they sell. The product could be in any of their warehouses (if their organization has multiple warehouses) and each warehouse may have its own operating method. The product may have to be assembled from parts taken from various warehouses. This means the sales department will need an idea of the items required for the product, the count of the items, the location of the warehouse holding the item and Bill of Materials required for the product. All this comes as a part of the inventory and warehousing process within the organization.

This is a step that we find in the Oracle Order Management set up. One of the setup steps in Order Management is to define inventory organizations, also referred to as warehouses. For each warehouse we have to specify details on shipping, item, BOM etc. Further we have to define sub-inventories and picking rules within the warehouses. All these steps are related to inventory, so a source of reference for this set up process is the Oracle Inventory User’s Guide.

As seen above, the first step of this procedure is to define warehouses or organizations. This procedure is made easy by allowing us to copy the structure of an already existing warehouse or organization. The new organization can import the same structure and entities like BOM, Routing, Items, Categories, Sub inventories, Shipping Networks, Inventory Parameters, WIP Parameters, and BOM Parameters from a previously existing organization. This copying is done in 2 steps. Step one is to provide information about the entity we want to create. This data is made into an XML document which is stored in an interface table. In the forms window this can be done by navigating to the Maintain Interface form in the Order Management set up Navigator.

Navigation is as follows

Inventory –> Setup –> Organization –> Organization Copy –> Maintain Interface.

On opening the Maintain Interface form we see two forms 1) Copy Organization Interface 2) Find Interface Records. As we would like to create a new interface click the ‘new’ button on the Find Interface Records form. This opens up a new form called New Interface Record. In this form we type in the Group Code, Organization Name, Organization Code and Location name (the Location name can be filled form a list of values) for the entity we wish to create. On clicking the Populate Interface Table the XML text gets created and stored in the copy organization interface table.

Now if you open the Maintain interface form and do a find for the Group code that you created, you see the result populated in the Copy Organization Interface form. You can create any number of groups with the same Group Code. All these will get populated in the table. In the Copy Organization Interface form there is a text area with some XML code in it. I think the code can be modified as needed. Will look into that further and explain more.

Step two is to run the program to export or import the setup data.

Navigation is as follows

Inventory –> Setup –> Organization –> Organization Copy –> Launch Organization Copy.

On opening this form we get 2 forms again 1. Organization Copy and 2. Parameters.

In the Parameters form we select

1. the Organization structure that we would like our warehouse to look like.

2. And the Group that was created in the previous step.

Then we are given options to select if the information regarding the shipping network, sub inventories, items, categories, BOM, Routings and Purge has to be copied directly from the model organization. Once these are selected, click the ok button and these values get populated in the Parameters field of the Organization Copy form. Click the submit button in the Organization Copy form and the request is submitted.

The organization copy form has other fields like Run the Job and Completion Notification which can be selected as needed. I’ll explain on that in my later blogs.