Oracle Linux pre-install RPM for EBS

When deploying Oracle software on a Oracle Linux (or any other Linux distribution) you will have to set a number of pre-requisites. In some cases you need to set certain kernel parameters and ensure you have specific packages installed on your machine.

For the Oracle database there is already for a long time a way of doing this by installing a specific RPM. As this is providing a great way of preparing your environment for the software installation Oracle is also providing a similar mechanism for preparing your environment for the installation of Oracle e-Business suite.

You can install a pre-install RPM for Oracle e-Business Suite 12.1 and 12.2 which you can fetch from the addons channel at ULN. A best practice for creating a new Oracle Linux environment to run Oracle e-Business Suite is to do a minimal installation of Oracle Linux and install the pre-install RPM on top of this. Reason for this is that you will not have unneeded packages and functionality which might cause hindrance at a later stage.

• In essence the pre-install RPM will undertake the following tasks:
• Downloading and installing all software package versions and dependencies required for installing E-Business Suite R12 (12.1, 12.2)
• Creating the users oracle and applmgr for use as owners of the database and application tiers respectively, while setting hard and soft shell resource limits
• Updating kernel parameters in /etc/sysctl.conf to recommended values
• Sets DNS resolver parameters in /etc/resolv.conf to minimum recommended values
• Sets 'numa=off' in the kernel in the kernel commandline
• Disables 'Transparent Huge Pages (THP)' if enabled 

For more information on the pre-install RPM’s please refer to the following notes on My Oracle Support: 761566.1 & 1330701.1

Oracle Logistic chain

The overall logistic chain used within companies around the world is for 90% the same for all companies. Some specific customer variances are there and the way it is implemented might be different however overall all they all look quite the same. You purchase goods, you do something and you sell it to customers. Purchasing goods can be purchasing parts where you build your own product, purchasing goods to mine your final product or purchase, store and sell. All in all your company will buy things. Selling can be to external customers or external customers (cost centers) however somewhere your company will make profit (I hope).

Meaning all in all the model will look quite the same and you will see this model reflected in your ERP system. having Oracle eBS or SAP or another ERP system somehow it will be having a standard logistic chain in the system. For each ERP product will have some different naming for the modules. For Oracle Oracle eBS the logistics chain will look somewhat like the one below.

This model quickly shows a introduction on where to place the Oracle e-Business suite modules in the logistics chain. You can see for example Oracle AP, Oracle AR, inventory, General Ledger, etc etc etc

Oracle Fusion customization platform

Sara Woodhull and Gustavo Jimenez recently gave a talk on how to do changes to Oracle E-Business Suite in a correct way. The talk was part of the ATG Live Webcast series which shows you how to make changes to a GUI that makes sense without the need to do much coding. When coding is needed examples will be used in the form of forms personalization and OA Framework Personalization’s

This presentation is also a great way to have a look into how the technology components of Oracle Fusion are used in Oracle e-Business suite and how they can help you and how you can build upon them to create customizations and custom solutions for customers with Oracle e-Business suite.

You can review the webcast at the oracle website and you can see the slides used below.

Personalize, Customize, and Extend Oracle E-Business Suite User Interface

Oracle eBS internet Explorer certification Matrix.

Sometimes I just have my blog to write reminders for myself (and for others) so they can quickly find some information on a specific topic. This is one of those posts. I am currently requested to look into the certification of systems used at a customer. One of the questions is if it is certified to upgrade Internet Explorer to version 9 in combination with Oracle e-Business Suite.

If you talk about Oracle e-Business Suite and browsers and java versions you tend to end up always on the weblog of Steven Chan. Also on the certification of Internet Explorer 9 for Oracle e-Business Suite steven has written a blogpost on his corporate Oracle blog. The latest (at this moment) post on this subject dates from 7-OCT-2010 and it states:

"IE 9 is available via a public platform preview today. We've been working with the latest IE9 beta, but it but hasn't been certified with the E-Business Suite yet."

As this is already a somewhat older blogpost I did a quick check with the people from Oracle and was directed to two metaling notes which provide a certification matrix for Oracle e-Business Suite.

Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 11i (Metalink Note 285218.1)

Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 12 (MetaLink Note 389422.1)

From the document you can cleary see that Oracle has NOT certified IE 9 at this moment. In the future please do refer to one of those two documents as they will be updated when things change.

Solved: Logged in user does not have permission to access this page.

When you work with a new installation of the Oracle Install Base module you may encounter some issues when you try to enter a note. This is also encountered in some of the setup done for the vision installation of Oracle e-Business Suite Release 12. I encountered it during some tests of a R12 vision installation. The issue is that if you click "create" button in the notes page in Oracle Install Base you will get a error page stating "Logged in user does not have permission to access this page". No other explanation is given. Looking at metalink the following cause is given in note 455871.1 "The function JTF_CAL_FUNCTION_SECURITY is not added to Oracle Install Base Menu as a SubMenu.". This note is giving you a solution for release 11.5.10.2 and some hints for release 12.

As it turns out the note is not spot on for release 12. What you need to do to get it working for release 12 is the following:

Step 1:
- login to the system and select the system Administrator responsibility
- Go to "security" -> "responsibilities" -> "Define"
- query the Install Base responsibility which is giving you the issue
- copy the value of the "menu" field

Step 2:
- Within the system administrator responsibility go to "applications" and then "Menu".
- Query the correct menu by searching the "User Menu Name" which you retrieved from step1

Step 3:
Now you have to create a new submenu under the menu.
- Leave the "prompt" value blank
- Enter the value "JTF HTML Calendar-Tasks-Notes Function security menu" in the submenu field.
- Enter the value "JTF HTML Calendar Function Security" in the function field
- Save the new submenu

Step 4:
bounce the Apache server so the webserver cache is cleared.

Now you should be able to login to Oracle e-Business Suite and all should work. The change with the metalink note is the value that needs to be entered in the function field when creating a new submenu. The value stated in the metaling note will throw a error when done in a release 12 instance.

solved: there are no valid navigations for this responsibility

Recently I tried to setup some roles for Oracle e-Business Suite (11.5.10.2) by using Oracle User Management. To be able to do so I granted myself the User management responsibility. However, when entering the responsibility I encountered a error stating "there are no valid navigations for this responsibility" as shown in the screenshot below.

As it turns out you need to do some other things when you want to grant yourself this responsibility You have to grant yourself the rights via user management by using the sysadmin account. It looks like a catch 22 however this is in a normal situation something you only need to do when you setup your system the first time and would like to make use of Oracle User Management. In a normal situation (not a test instance) you would provide one user the rights to access this and have this user propagate the rights to other users from within his account.

Looking At Oracle metalink you have to undertake the below steps and indeed, this is the solution for this issue;

1. Log into the applications as SYSADMIN User.

2. Choose User Management responsibility.

3. Navigate to Users web page.

4. Search and find the user you want to inherit the Security Administrator and Customer Administrator Roles.

5. Click on Update Icon.

6. Click on Assign Roles button.

7. Find and choose 'Security Administrator' Role.

8. Apply.

9. Repeat the Steps (6-8) for 'Customer Administrator' Role.

10. Log as the user who was assigned User Management Responsibility and facing the issue.

11. Retest the issue.

12. Migrate the solution as appropriate to other environments.

Oracle Promotional goods

When you run your sales in Oracle E-Business suite you want from time to time run promotions. For example if you sell an item in Oracle Order Management you want to “give” the customer a second item for free, a promotional item.

This is common practice in a lot of businesses and especially in B2C businesses that you get a second item for free if you buy a special product. Oracle is providing you will all the options needed to arrange this inside Oracle e-Business Suite.

For example, if you sell a laptop you want to add an extra battery pack as a promotional item. You can arrange this by using Oracle Advanced Pricing and create a Modifier of the type “Promotion”. As can be seen below we create a modifier named JLO-01.

Inside the modifier we have created a line for item AS18947. This is a laptop and we want to give a promotion of a second item for every customer who buys this item. If you click the “Define Details” button you will be able to set the item that the customer will “get”. You have to make sure you define it as a “get”item.

You can see that we have stated here a get item for item CM11222 and we have stated the “Application Methode” is “New Price”. This will make sure that the price of the get item will be overwritten by the value defined in the “value” field which is in this case zero. Meaning this item will be for free if the customer buys your item AS18947.

If we now add the item to an order we will see something nice happening. We use Oracle Order Management to create a new order. If we add the line and we are done you will notice a message popping up stating that a second line is created.

You can see in the below example that indeed a new line has been added for item CM11222 for the quantity 1 and the price 0. This is what we intended when we created the modifier JLO-01. If you check via actions > “View Adjustments” you will also notice that a adjustment to the order is done by modifier JLO-01

Oracle forms not starting with JRE and IE8

Most likely a hot debated topic at the sites of many Oracle EBS customers is the question if they would like to stay on Oracle jInitiator or to make the switch to the JRE approach.

Oracle E-Business Suite makes use of Oracle forms which is a Java application for witch you have to load some .jar files onto your local browser who will take the client software role. Oracle always used jInitiator for this which used to do this task. Recently Oracle made a switch to a new approach and started to advocate the use of Sun Java Runtime Environment or JRE for short.

This also makes it possible to start your forms part of Oracle E-Business suite from Internet Explorer 8 for example and other browsers like FireFox. This was possible in the past however would take some hacking from the users who wanted this to happen. As most customers are upgrading their workstations and browsers to a newer versions it is feasible to go for the JRE option.

The following things need to happen:

(A) You have to apply patches on your server and make it ready for JRE.
In this case you should review metalink note 290807.1 which informs you about all the steps needed to take to make this happen on the server side.

(B) you have to make sure the correct version of JRE is installed on (or gets installed) on your clients.

Due to some bugs it is very important to look for which version is the best at the moment you start this project. My best advice would be to keep an eye on the weblog of Steven Chan for this subject and start a service request at metalink before you make a decision.

Even if you have taken all the steps to make sure all should work fine you can run into problems with some clients which for some reason will refuse to start a new forms session. I recently had this issue at a client and it later turned out to be a networking/firewall/proxy issue. The best way to start debugging in those cases is the logging in JRE which is not very known to many people.

Open the Java Control Panel and go to the advanced tab. Here can activate tracing and logging. When you have activated those try to start a forms session again and review the log and trace file.

The resulting files can be found at "\Sun\Java\Deployment\log" and do contain a lot of useful information for you debugging. I would like to advise to always do a trace/log first on the client in cases you have problems on a client starting the forms session with JRE instead of Oracle jInitiator.

Oracle flexfields as LOV

The issue with most systems where users have the option to enter data in a free form is that as soon as they enter the information you have the possibility that they make a typo. For a textfield like a description this is from a system point of view not a very big issue, however if you want to base logic on the information entered it can be a very big problem. To prevent this you should design applications and interfaces always in such a way that a user can make as little as possible mistakes. You can for example use dropdown menus where a user can select values instead of entering them by hand. This will reduce the number of possible mistakes.

In Oracle E-Business suite you have besides the standard fields where users can enter information also a option to add extra fields (on most of the screens, not all). Those fields are referred to as flexfields. You have the option to define a Oracle flexfield as a free text field however you can also make it a dropdown menu or LOV (List Of Values).

Most Oracle consultants are aware of how to create a free text field to be used as a flexfield. The option of creating a flexfield as a LOV is however somewhat less commonly know. Please find below an example of how to create a DFF (Dynamic FlexField) with a LOV (List Of Values). We used in this example a request to add a LOV as a Flexfield to a order line in order management.

Step 1:
Identify where you want to create a flexfield. In our case this is in Oracle Order Management at order line level. Just query any random order in the screen and get the record history information of the line via “Help” > “Record History”. You will get a screen like the one below:

Here you will see that the table name is OE_ORDER_LINES_V. This is however not correct, the _V is indicating that this is not a table, it is a view. And as flexfield information can only be stored in a table we have to find out which table is used. In 99 percent of the cases you can remove the _V and you have your table name or in some cases search for something else than the V In our example the table is OE_ORDER_LINES_ALL.

Step 2:
Select the responsibility “Application Developer” and navigate to “Flexfield” > “Descriptive” > “Register”. Here we will query the descriptive flexfield which is already defined for this table. We can do so by executing a query against the table name which we just learned is OE_ORDER_LINES_ALL.

From this screen you can see that the application is indeed “Order Management” and that the title is “Additional Line Attribute Information”. We note this down as we need it in a following step.

Step 3:
Select the responsibility “Application Developer” and navigate to “Flexfield” > “Descriptive” > “Segments”. Here you can query the needed segment (or create one). In our case we search for Application = “Order Management” and Title = “Additional Line Attribute Information”.

Select a Context Field Value you want your new flexfield to appear in (in our case we use Global Data Elemenst) and click the “Segments”button.

Step 4:
Here you can enter a new line (in our case line 90) with the information you need.

However, before you enter information in the “value set” field click on the “value Set” button. This will open a screen where you can enter the information about the value set that later will hold your preset data for your LOV which will appear in your flexfield.

It is smart to pick a name starting with XX_VS where XX stands for custom setup and the VS is representing that it is a value set. After you have set all the information you want you can save it and return to the previous screen where you can enter the new “value set name” into the “value set” field. Save you work and close the screen.

Step 5:
Select the responsibility “Application Developer” and navigate to “Flexfield” > “Descriptive” > “Values”. Query for your new Value Set.

Here you can enter the preset information as you whish. After you are done, save your work.

Step 6:
Go to the screen where you intended your flexfield to be a check it. If all is ok you should now have your flexfield as a List Of values in your screen.

Not a valid responsibility for the current user

Some behavior I noticed in Oracle EBS release 11 (11.5.10.2) turns out to be still in Oracle release 12. When you add yourself a responsibility which makes use of JSP pages it might happen that if you try to enter one of those screens you get a error message something like:

“iStore and Sales Management is not a valid responsibility for the current user. Please contact your System Administrator. “

Here can substitute “iStore and Sales Management” with whatever responsibility you have added and makes use of JSP pages. It also turns out that from the JSP page menu you are unable to see the newly added responsibility.

The issue is that the webserver cache is still thinking you do not have been granted this responsibility and because of this it is throwing you this error page. A solution is to flush the cache. You can flush the cache by (A)rebooting the apache webserver, (B)deleting the cache object by hand or (C) using the Oracle EBS Applications Administration pages.

The Applications Administration responsibility is providing you the option to flush the cache manually without having to reboot the apache webserver or diving into the cache objects. A downside of this is that those pages are also not form object but JSP pages so if you do not have this responsibility already you will not be able to use it.

Go to Application Administration and the “Core Services” tab, select the sub-tab “Caching Framework” and on this page select “Global Configuration”. On this page you will find a button “Clear All Cache” You will receive a warning like this:

“Clicking on 'Yes' will clear all the caches across all the mid-tiers. This will impact performance. Are you sure you want to proceed? “

This is not a false warning, as all java objects will have to be JIT compiled again and placed in the cache your applications will be slower until they are used at least once. So you might want to time the moment you do this. However, after clicking the button the cache will be flushed and you will have the ability to access the responsibility without any issue.

Address style Oracle

Oracle Applications let you enter customer, supplier, bank, check, and remit–to addresses in country–specific formats. For example, if you have customers in Germany, you can enter German addresses in the format recommended by the Bundespost, or you can enter addresses for customers in the United Kingdom in the format recommended by the Royal Mail.

This is done by using descriptive flexfields to enter and display address information in the appropriate formats. The flexfield window opens if the country you enter has a flexible address style assigned to it, which lets you enter an address in the layout associated with that country. If there is no address style associated with the country, Oracle Receivables uses the standard address format.

Oracle iStore for example also uses these formats to output the address for example in the checkout pages. An address style tells Oracle Applications how to format and arrange the address fields so that they best suit the address entry requirements of a particular country. Many countries can use the same address style, although a country can only use one address style at a time. You assign address styles to countries using the Countries and Territories window. You can assign one of the address styles provided or you can create your own.

You can create your own by using the using the “Application Developer” responsibilities and selecting the “Flexfield” > “Descriptive” > “Segments” menu. Here you can search for Application: Oracle Receivables & Title: Address, this will give you the Descriptive Flexfield Segments who are taking care of the address style in Oracle.

By using Segments you can add or remove valuesets to the address style. This will result in a new style for input and output of your addresses and will result for example in changes in the Oracle iStore checkout pages.

Oracle EBS R12 Error: Stale Data

When navigating within the HTML screens of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 you can come across the below error message about Stale Data. The message is really clear however I do get some questions about it every now and then. The problem is most likely that you have been using the back (or forward) button of your browser. The way the HTML code (Actually the JSP code) is setup is making it so that it can not handle this in some cases. You can try to get out of this by clicking more back and forward buttons however this will not make the page work as before. Best things to do is just close the page and return back to it from you forms session. If you are not coming from a forms sessions the best way is logout and login again to the system. This is until Oracle will solve this " Bug"


Error: Stale Data

The requested page contains stale data. This error could have been caused through the use of the browser's navigation buttons (the browser Back button, for example).

To proceed, please select the Close Window link at the top of the application page to return

Oracle R12, Min-max planning report

As discussed in the previous post I discussed a little the min max planning of a item per subinventory in Oracle e-Business suite Release 12. You can set for a item the minimum and maximum stock level. Fast running items will have a bigger stock in most cases than items that you sell every now and then. Setting the correct minimum and maximum stock levels for a item can be a very challenging task. For large organizations it can involve datamining and some higher math, however I will not go into this in this post.

To make use of the minimum and maximum stock level settings defined for a subinventory within Oracle Inventory you can make use of the Min-max planning report. To start this report, or schedule it you have to go to you concurrent requests screen and start a new single request. The name of the concurrent request is "Min-max planning report". There are numerous parameters which can be set for this concurrent request.

Planning Level:
planning level states if you want to run the report on organization level which will include all the subinventories of the organization or on a specific subinventory. If you pick the last you will have to define the subinventory.

Item selection:
Here you can state the selection of the items you want to include in the report. You can pick all the items that have a current stock level below the minimum stock level, include only the items which have currently more stock than the max stock level or include all items.

Category set:
You have to set a category set, by default it will be set for inventory item however a other item category for the items to be included on the min-max planning report can be chosen.

Item Category:
Item category families and categories can be set to even more finely grain the selection of items you can set to be included in the final report.

Items from (to):
A range of items can be set if you want a defined set of items. You can use this option to run the report only for a single item. In this case you define the same item number in the from and to field.

Planners:
The same as can be done for items in the item from and item to fields can be done for the planners. You can run the report for a specific planner of group of planners.

Buyers:
the same as can be done for items and planners can be done for buyers. You can run the report for a specific buyer or set of buyers. This can be very useful when you (as a buyer) want to run the report for the items you are responsible for.

Sort By:
Sort by will influence the order of the items on the report. It can be set to Item, Category, Buyer or Planner.

Demand cutoff date:
The report includes demand on or before this date. If you do not check Net Demand this calculation is for display purposes only. You can also set the offset for this date.

Supply cutoff date:
The calculation for the includes open supply orders on or before this date.

Restock:
Here you can state if you want to do a restock automatically based upon the outcome of the report. When you set it to yes the system will create requisitions. If you run the report on organization level it will also run make jobs for the items where you have stated it is a make item.

For Repetitive Items:
"If you are using the Organization Planning Level, choose one of the following For Repetitive Item options: Create Requisitions for items under minimum quantity, Create Discrete Jobs for items under minimum quantity or run the Report Only without creating jobs or requisitions"

Default Delivery To:
Default Delivery To enables you to set a default deliver to location. This is only used when you use the restock = yes option.

Net Unreserved Orders, Reserved Orders, WIP Demand:
If set to yes the reserved, unreserved orders and the WIP demand will be subtracted from the total available stock on the given date so you will get a good indication what the stock will be on this given date and what the demand for restock will be on this date.

Include PO Supply, Move Order Supply, WIP supply, Interface:
If set to yes the calculation will take in account the quantity which will be delivered for this date based upon purchase orders, move orders, WIP jobs and non-nettable subinventories.

Lot Control:
here you will be able to state if items which are under lot control should be included in the report.

Display Format:
Here you will be able to set the way the report is displayed and what it will contain.

Display Item Description:
Include the item description in the report or not.

Oracle EBS R12 sourcing rules

When you are deploying a Oracle E-Business Suite instance in a major enterprise, or a company with many different locations you most likely will have to spend some time on sourcing. In cases a company has only 1 or 2 warehouses you will have a simple task. items are purchased from a supplier and shipped to one of the warehouses. However in most cases life is not as simple as that, when you are dealing with a large enterprise which is running operations in several countries or when you for example are working deploying at a company with a lot of locations in a single country you will have to think about how goods are purchased and distributed inside the company.

For a test I was asked to look into the following scenario which I tested on Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 instance running the Vision demo environment. A company has multiple organizations defined in Oracle (for this example we use the Netherlands and Germany). In The Netherlands there are several regional warehouses defined in Oracle and in Germany (which is a separate organization in the instance) also a warehouse is defined. Only one warehouse is purchasing the item from a supplier.

Some warehouses are sourcing the goods from the warehouse which is sourcing from the supplier and others are sourcing again from them or from a sub-inventory in Germany. In this example we have only setup a single item to be handled like this. to setup the sourcing of a item per subinventory in Oracle E-Business suite your first query the item of the specified organization in the Item Master under the Oracle Inventory responsibility. When you have queried the item you go to "Tools" and "Item Subinventories".

In the above screenshot you can see that there are min-max quantities set, this however is not mandatory. For the purpose of the inventories always having enough stock available I set them so that min-max planning in Oracle e-Business suite will make sure that enough stock will be at every location.

However, the main interest of this test was setting the sourcing rules, as can seen in the below screenshot their is setup a way of distributing the item and making some subinventories source it from a other inventory or subinventory or a supplier site.

As can been seen subinventory "WH Amsterd" is sourcing from the supplier, this means that if the stock is dropping below the minimum min-max quantity it will purchase new goods from the supplier. Subinventories "WH Rotterd" and "WH Eindeho" will source it from the amsterdam warehouse. The warehouses "WH Meppel" and "WH Utrecht" will source from "WH Groning" which in his turn will get the goods from a different organization. As can seen the sourcing rules for "WH Groning" are set to source the goods from organization E1(which is Germany) and inventory (not subinventory) S1.

When you setup this in a correct way you can organize a entire sourcing model per item which can be very beneficial for your organization. However, if you want to do this correct and benefit from it you will have to plan it very carefully.

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.

Oracle R12 eBS Item Catalog Groups

When we are thinking about setting up a new Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 instance (or any other version) you will have to spend some time about thinking how you will arrange items. I have already pointed out some things in previous posts on why this can be very handy in a later stage when you are in production and people are using Oracle E-Business Suite in a day to day working situation.

A good starting point is when you start thinking about which items are alike, this comes in handy when you start thinking about Item Templates which can come in handy when you create new items. One other thing you can think about at that point is Item Catalog Groups. With Item Catalog Groups in Oracle you can catalog your items in groups and add extra information to your items based upon the category the items is related to.

Creating catalog groups and placing items in catalog groups will have several benefits. One of them obviously is that you will be able to group items and search within groups. Other benefits are that you will be able, for example, add more information which is relevant only for the items within this group and you will be able to automatically create aƒ item description based upon this. So this will also help you bring uniformity in the way you create your item descriptions.

To be able to do so you first will have to create a Catalog Item group within Oracle Inventory. To do so navigate to "Setup", "Items", "Catalog Groups". Here you will be able to view, edit and create new catalog groups.
As shown in the above screenshot I created a new Catalog Group in Oracle Inventory named "Gear Pumps" which will hold all the items which are gear pumps. Or in other words, in alter stage I will assign the Catalog Group "Gear Pumps" to all the existing items who are gear pumps. If you create a new group, save it and click on the Details button you will be able to set more options.
As you can see in the above screenshot I have set some details for this Item Catalog Group. I have been adding Descriptive Elements. Descriptive Elements are used per Item. In this case I have chosen 4 Descriptive Elements which can be set for all the items which will be placed this Item Catalog Group. The sequence is deliberately defined as 10, 20, 30, 40 because in this case I can easily add a record in the middle without having to change all the sequences of the existing records. This is in general a good idea to do. I also have set for all 4 of the Descriptive Elements that they are required so when a item is added to the group you have to set it. Only for 3 of the 4 I have set that it is a Description Default. When you set a Descriptive Element to Description Default it will be by default used to generate you description.

When you like to add a item to a Item Catalog group you go to the Item Master and query the item, then go to the Tools menu and select Catalog. you will be presented with a screen similar as in the screenshot below.
In this case I have selected the Item Catalog Group I created " gear Pumps" in the top "Catalog Group" field. When you select it you will be presented with a list of all the available and active Item Catalog Groups. After filling all the requierd fields for the Descriptive Elements, in this case all, you can use the Update Description button which will fill the item description with the generated "Item Catalog Description" based upon the catalog name and the descriptive elements in combination with their sequence. This is how you can generate standardized item descriptions. You do however have the possibility to change and edit the description so you will ne bound to the generated description. If you set this up smartly however it can be very beneficial.

Oracle R12 eBS Item Templates

When creating items in Oracle E-Business Suite R12 there are a lot of options you can set for a item. Numerous of attributes can be set for a item and also numerous of items can be set incorrect for a item which can result in problems later in the process.

because you are able to control so much attributes from a item Oracle has some controls in place, for example some attributes of a item can only be controlled at "Item Master" level and some can be controlled at organization level. This makes is so that some people, the people maintaing all the items, can control some parts of the item and some can be controlled by the organization who is using the item. When a item attribute is controlled on item master level the settings are applied for all organizations. When a attribute is controlled at organization level this attribute is only set for the current organization so you can have some localization on your item settings. This can come in handy when you for example would like to provide the option to change the way it is stocked or the min/max planning settings.

however, even do we have this security in place we still have a issue on the moment that a item is entered. As in many cases the initial creation of a item is still done by humans we do have a weak link. Humans are making mistakes and when setting up a item you can make lots and lots of mistakes. When you start thinking about your items you will be able to create a couple of standard groups in which most settings are the same, for example, purchase items, service items, digital items, internal items, etc etc etc. all having their own basic setup. Because of this Oracle created Item Templates. You can create Item templates and use them every time you create a new item to make the number of human error's decrease.

As shown above I am trying to create a new item in Oracle Inventory by using a item template. you can do this by simply start creating a new Item and before you do anything click "tools" from the menu bar and select "Copy From" from the dropdown menu. When you select this you will be able to pick the Item template you would like to use.

You can setup your item templates in Oracle Inventory and navigate to "Setup", "Items", "Templates". Here you will have the ability to search for existing templates or create a new template when needed.

When you start with the setup of your instance and blueprinting you will notice that creating the blueprint for your Item Templates will take some time. However, when it is in place you will know for sure that the people who have to create and maintain the items will be so happy with this option and it will save them so much time, effort and money that it will make up for the initial time you have to spend on it.

When you look at the screen where you can create a new Item Template you will notice that you can select the values of every tab which is shown in the Item screen so for the easy of setup this can really help you. You can also see that it states where a attribute is controlled, on master level or on organization level which we have been discussing a couple of posts ago. Also you can set it enabled or disabled and you can set the default value. When you set a default value a user can set a other value so it is only a guideline in the template and it is not fixed. However this guideline will improve the productivity of users because they do not have to set all the attributes for a item but they can simply apply a template to a new item.

Oracle R12 global instance with RAC

LG Electronics is currently working on building a large scale global Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 implementation wich should be ready in 2010. In combination with Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle WebLogic Portals the single instance will be capable of servicing complete LG Electronics. To make sure the systems will be up and running all the time LG is making use of a 4 node real application cluster which will be running the Oracle E-Business suite R12 instance. To be complete secure the entire storage, networking and all the servers are multiplexed to ensure the best uptime possible.

Even do the complete rollout is not yet completed large parts of LG Electronics are already making use of the R12 instance. Oracle has created a customer video which can be seen below. If you look into the customer successes PDF which is provided at the Oracle website you can see the massive amount of applications and options LG is using in their new R12 instance; Financials, Assets, Cash Management, Financial Analyzer, Supply Chain Management, Order Management, Purchasing, Advanced Pricing, Release Management, Manufacturing, Inventory Management, Human Resources, Payroll, Self-Service HR, Time & Labor, Learning Management, Real Application Clusters and SOA Suite.

Oracle R12 Item attribute controls

When you setup Oracle E-Business suite and when you are thinking about items and items setup you might want to consider item attribute controls. If you have a company with more than one location which are defined as organizations in your Oracle E-Business instance you might not want to give all organizations the power to control all the attributes which can be set for a item.

In general the way that Oracle is handling items is that the items are created in a item master organization and after they are created they are assigned to the organizations who will do transactions with those items. If you have for example a master organization and organizations per country It is a good idea to give the country organizations the option to change the description of the item because they most likely will like to have the description in their own language. On the other hand the physical attributes like weight and dimensions will stay the same. To ensure that those settings are not lost you would like to control that on organization level they can change some things and other can not be changed.

To ensure this you can setup Item attribute controls. In the below screenshot you can see the screen where this is done in Oracle e-Business Suite Release 12 (oracle ebs R12).

Here you can set per tab/field for every item where it is controlled, on master level or on organization level. This can be controlled via the Inventory responsibility, go to Setup – Items – Attribute Controls. Here you will be presented with a screen similar as the screen below. This will allow you to set every item attribute to be controlled on master level or on organization level. Specialy for large companies who have a item information department this can be very handy. Also complicacy rules can ask for such security to be in place.

Oracle EBS R12 Supply Chain

Oracle just released some new certifications for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12. For Oracle EBS R12 you now can start a certification for E-Business Suite R12 Supply Chain Certified Expert Consultant, Purchasing and for E-Business Suite R12 Supply Chain Certified Expert Consultant, Order Management.

The Oracle E-Business Suite Supply Chain Management family of applications integrates and automates all key supply chain activities, from design, planning and procurement to manufacturing and fulfillment. IT professionals need special skills to implement and manage critical supply chain related business processes. The Oracle r12 E-Business Suite Supply Chain Expert credential was created to help IT professionals gain recognition for skills obtained through training and experience. Those who become certified have a proven foundation necessary to help keep implementations on time and on budget.

Among topics that candidates must master are key components of Oracle Inventory Management including materials transfer, receipt to issue process, inventory organizations and inventory controls. Additionally candidates may specialize in either Oracle Order Management or Oracle Purchasing by choosing one of two required elective exams. Candidates who wish to pursue both paths may take both electives and upon successful completion will receive two separate credentials.

You will have to do certification exam (1Z0-225) or certification exam (1Z0-226). In all cases you also will have to pass Essentials exam (1Z0-204) which will be about Oracle E-Business Suite R12: E-Business Essentials . About this exame you can find the details at the Oracle website along with all the other information about the certification