Oracle R12 eBS Item Types setup

When defining items in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (R12) and working on the setup of Oracle Inventory one of the things that you will have to look into is the Item Types. A item always needs to have a item type to identify what kind of item it is. By default Oracle will provide you a list of preset items which are already defined and which are used throughout the system. In basic the item types which are default in Oracle are usable and well thought about. The predefined Item Types are: ATO model, Finished good, Freight, Inventory Type, Kit, Model, Option Class, Outside processing item, PTO model, Phantom item,Planning, Product Family, Purchased item, Reference item, Subassembly and Supply item.

Even do those Item Types will cover for most of the items used in a general company it can be beneficial to setup your own Item Types. For example you might already have types defined for items which are commonly used in the company and the legacy systems of the company. For the adoption of a new system it can be good not to change this into new types or you might even have some dependencies on the Item Types towards other systems which makes that you have to define your own Item Types.

A Item Type for a Item is set when setting up the item in the Item Master, creating your own Item Types is done under a oracle Inventory responsibility where you are able to do setup. To create a new Item Type navigate to "Setup", "Items" and select "Item Types". Here you will be presented with a screen as shown below.

In the screenshot above you can see the definition of the Item Type Lookups. You can see that the lookups are defined for the application "Inventory" with the description "Item Types". Also you can see that by default the Item Types access level is set to User which indicates that users can add and change the lookups. That is, if they have access to the functionality via their responsibility.

What can and needs to be defined when creating a new Item Type;

Code: This is the unique identifier of the Item Type.

Meaning: A free text field used to define the meaning of the Item Type.

Description: A free text field used for providing a "human" description/identifier.

Tag: tags can be used for the ease of maintenance, you can use it to group Item Types so you easily query and lookup groups of Item Types.

Effective Dates: the from and to effective dates are used to define a time range when a Item Type becomes available for use and possible a date after which it no longer can be used. However it it not necessary to define this. If you do not provide a start date the Item Type will become affective immediately.

Enabled: A checkbox where you can quickly activate or deactivate a Item Type when needed without making use of the effective dates.