Release 12 – Customer Acceptance

Customers in some industries and geographies often need to be able to defer invoicing and/or revenue recognition for shipped goods until the customer receives the shipment and formally accepts the material. Customer acceptance can be captured from customers, customer service representatives, or from an external system. Customers can log into the self-service Order Information portal, customer service representatives can call the Order Information portal from their sales order workbenches, or Order Import/Process Order API can import customer acceptance captured from an external system. Oracle Order Management supports only full acceptance or total rejection for each outbound order line. One can set the number of days for Implicit acceptance, after the product has been shipped.

The OM System Parameter to enable Customer Acceptance has been introduced to take care of this new feature. This is for performance reasons, as calling the AR API to invoke their rules engine on every order line is expected to be expensive. It is called Enable Fulfillment Acceptance and the values are Yes/No. The default is No. This new parameter is seeded in the Generic
Category of System Parameters. Once this parameter is enabled, the Accounts Receivables API is called to invoke the rules engine to validate customer acceptance on every order line.

The basic business need is to defer invoicing and/or revenue recognition for the shipped goods till the customer
receives the shipment and accepts the material. Consequently, COGS accounting is deferred till customer communicates acceptance. In pre-billing acceptance, the customer accepts the goods first and then invoicing takes place. For pre-billing and
post-billing acceptance, you can accept the goods explicitly or implicitly.

Customer Acceptance is set up in AR’s Revenue Management module. At order entry, Order Management defaults the customer acceptance deferral reason and its attributes from Receivables onto the sales order line.

Customer acceptance can be enabled at Operating Unit level through OM system parameter: Enable Fulfilment Acceptance – Y/N.

We need to enable function security for the given responsibility for the following two functions:

1. Sales Orders: Fulfillment Acceptance – This ensures that the action attribute Fulfilment Acceptance is available in the Actions LOV.
2. Sales Orders: Update Acceptance Attributes – This allows for updating the acceptance attributes of Acceptance Name and Acceptance Expire days. These are attached to the sales order menu – ONT_ Sales_Order.

We will also need to define a deferral Reason, as follows

• Navigation: Revenue Management Super User -> Contingency Search / Definition -> this launches an HTML page.
• Define assignment rules to assign the deferral reason to customer, site, item, etc.
• For defining a Pre-billing Acceptance, use the deferral reason removal event as Invoicing.
• For defining a Post-billing Acceptance, use the deferral reason removal event as Customer Acceptance.

The Invoice Interface Workflow subprocesses handles sending interface data to Oracle Receivables for invoice and credit memo creation. It is used to handle pre-billing customer acceptance. If an order line requires pre-billing Customer Acceptance, this sub-process will prevent the order line from being interfaced to Receivables.

The Invoice Interface module does the following:
• Checks if pre-billing Customer Acceptance is required on the order line.
• If required, it waits until customer acceptance is recorded.
• When customer acceptance has been recorded, it continues the invoice interface process.
• If pre-billing acceptance is not required, it continues the invoice interface process without waiting for customer acceptance.
• Interface acceptance information and the deferral reasons information to Receivables.
• OM will change Invoice Interface to not interface an RMA line to AR if it references pre-billing rejected quantity.