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.

HOWTO Oracle descriptive flexfields

According to the Oracle manuals a descriptive flexfield is the following; "A flexfield is a placeholder set of fields that can be configured by customers for use by their organizations. Once configured, the customer-defined fields (label/widget pairs) may appear in either form or tabular layouts. There are two main types of flexfields: Descriptive flexfields, which are configured as a set of fields that are indistinguishable from core (default) application fields, and key flexfields, which consist of multiple segments for entry of codes, such as a product serial numbers or bank account numbers.".

In short, a descriptive flexfield gives you in Oracle E-business suite the possibility to extend the information which you by default can enter. For example when you enter information about a product in de item master you can provide a number of default values. In some cases you would like to give the users the possibility to enter more information which is not by default setup by Oracle because they are very specific for your business. In this example we will add a couple of descriptive flexfields to the Item table in Oracle E-Business suite.

First of all we identify the screen where we want the flexfields to be shown, in this case this is the Master Item screen under the Inventory responsibility. Remember, if we create a flexfield for this screen it will show up under every responsibility so it will also be shown when you request this screen via, for example, the Order Management Super User responsibility.

Now we know the screen and we switch responsibilities to the Application Developer responsibility. Here we select the following from the menu: Flexfield - Descriptive - Segments. This will open the screen as shown below, we have to find the correct flexfield segment, in this case this is Application : Inventory and Title : Items.


Now we have find the correct descriptive flexfield segments we can select segments, we can for example add the flexfield test by simply adding a record. By setting the value set you can define to which conditions the field is bound. For example only numbers, only characters, only 5 numbers, only 5 characters... etc etc. There are a couple of pre-defined values however you can also create your own if needed.


You can also open the record and set some extra things, like is the field required, set a default value for the flexfield, set a range, etc etc.

When you are done you can save your work and close the flexfield screens. What you have to remember is that you have to run a concurrent program to compile the new flexfields. You can run the concurrent request "Compile Descriptive Flexfields", here you can specify which flexfield you want to compile. If you have some more time you can also re-compile all descriptive flexfields by running the concurrent request "Compile All Flexfields", no parameters needed. After one of those 2 is completed successfully the flexfields are available for use. Remember, you can only create as many flexfields per database table as defined, a good indicator is looking in the table and look how many ATTRIBUTE(x) columns are defined.

Oracle EBS cross references

When running a Oracle E-Business suite for a company who is handling goods you can come into a position that one product can have more than one item code. In a ideal world you would always have a one to one coupling between a 'tangible' and a item number. In some cases, think about for example a transition phase between a old system and a new system, you might need to have a many to one situation.

In this example we will discussing about migrating from SAP to oracle E-Business suite. In the scoping sessions the customer pointed out that he also want to give all his products new item numbers. The problem is that the people who work at the order entry department are so used to the old numbers that they would like to keep the old numbers in the system for the period of a year and the Product Data Management department stated they do not want to maintain every item twice. In this situation your best option is to make a list containing all the cross references of the old item numbers and link them to the new item numbers. You can even set a end date for the list that it will become unavailable after a year.

By using cross references you the Product Data Management department will not have to maintain old and new items in the system and the Order Entry department will be able to use the old items numbers for a period of time. You can find the cross references list under the Order Management Super User responsibility, go to Items -> Cross References.

Here you can set a Type, a description and a end date. The type is a free field where you can give the cross reference a meaningful short name like in this example 'OLD_ITEMNUMBER'. The description can be something like 'The old item number of the old SAP system'. At the end date field you can set the end date on which the cross reference will become unavailable to users. If at some point after this end date is reached there is still a need to use it again you can remove the end date again and the functionality will become available again. When you have set this information you can click on the Assign button and a new screen will open where you can assign inventory items to the list and provide the old item number for cross referencing.


Now when someone uses a old SAP number in Oracle it will be linked to the Oracle Item number. When a SAP number is the same as a real Oracle item number the user will be presented with a choice where he can see what the product is with the real number and the product linked to the old SAP number.

Cross references can be found in the database in the table mtl_cross_references.

Oracle and Drop Shipment

Drop Shipment is the process where you ask your supplier to ship the goods to your end customer instead of shipping the goods from your own warehouse. Drop Shipment can be the standard way your company is operating because you do not a own warehouse, also it can be done in cases that you do not have a requested item on stock or the item cannot be housed in your own warehouse.

For example you might be doing business in appendage for offshore oil-drilling, most of the requested item on a order from a drilling platform can be sourced from your local warehouse, however, the drilling pipes are longer than your average shelve so the decision is made that drilling pipes will be sourced from the supplier/factory directly. In those cases you can use a Drop Shipment method. In the figure below we can see the order, goods and invoice flow for the ordering of those drilling pipes order with a Drop Shipment.

• 1 The customer places a purchase order for x drilling pipes.
• A The order desk receives the order and creates an drop shipment order, the requisition import is done and from the requisition a purchase order is created.
• 2 After approving the purchase order is send to the supplier via mail, e-mail, fax or EDI
• B The supplier receives the purchase order and handles this at their order desk as a normal order
• 3 The supplier ships the goods to your end customer
• 4 The supplier sends an invoice for the goods to you.
• 5 An invoice is send from you to the end customer

By these steps the complete flow is done, your customer has received the goods directly and received a invoice from the goods from you. You have received an invoice from the supplier and by this the goods flow and the financial flow are completed.

To automate this process you have to make use of “Requisition Import” And “Autocreate PO”. By making sure your processes are aligned properly and all data that is required is in the Oracle E-Business suite master you can have completed the process of creating an order until sending a Purchase Order to your supplier in a matter of minutes.

When importing your requisitions and generating your Purchase Orders you have the option to group on a couple of parameters. The most used is the “Supplier” parameter. This will group all your requisitions into a single Purchase Order to your supplier. Per line the quantity per ship-to address will be listed. This way you have the ability to send your supplier for example once a day a complete order containing all the required goods from orders from that day.
In short, when you have setup your drop shipment process correctly and it is implemented in a good way this can save you lots of time and work in your day to day work and will keep your customers satisfaction on a higher level due to the fact that you can process their orders even do you do not have it on stock but source the goods via Oracle E-business suite directly from the warehouse of you supplier.

Handling hazardous goods with Oracle

Companies handling dangerous and/or hazardous goods are required to closely monitor those goods and keep up with legislation for purchasing, handling, storage and sales. To be able to correctly track those kinds of goods Oracle E-Business suite give you the ability to give a product a hazard class.

Several standards of classifying goods exist, however, the leading standard is maintained by the United Nations Committee of Experts on the Transport of Dangerous Goods. This standard is recognized by most countries and used to classify goods. The major exception on this is the classification used in the United States which uses NA (North America) numbering principle which is maintained by the United States Department of Transportation. Even do it is in principal a different standard the numbering is exactly the same as the numbering system UN numbers. UN numbers are also referred to as UN IDs, four-digit numbers that identify hazardous substances, and articles (such as explosives, flammable liquids, toxic substances, etc.).

In Oracle E-Business suite the UN Number of a item can be inserted and associated to the official Hazard Class. This enables users to identify items and hard classes and enables them to act upon them. Certain items are, for example, not allowed to be stored next to other items; you are only allowed to stock a certain amount per warehouse. All of those rules can be setup and will require the numbering and classification as basis. Also Oracle provides methods to report upon hazard classes so you will be able to report on the amount of flammable stock in a warehouse or the amount of radioactive stock in a certain sub inventory.

Even do Oracle directly refers to the UN number you are not limited to UN number system, you are completely free to create the logic and values behind this system based upon for example local legislation or company classifications. Handling dangerous and/or hazardous goods requires good and solid rules of handling; Oracle E-business suite is helping with a good out off the box framework which enables you to correctly implement those rules within your organization.

Oracle query available quantity

When you like to know the available quantity of a item in Oracle E-Business suite you will, as a user, go to the Item Supply/Demand form in the On-Hand, Availability menu in Inventory. There are other screens however this is one of the most used as I have experienced.

However, in some cases you would like to have a query giving you the available quantyity of a item. Rananthaus, a tech. lead and project manager from California, pointed me to MTL_ONHAND_QUANTITIES. The query below which I wrote will give you the available quantity of an item per organisation, sub-inventory. You can use this query to build upon and enrich your application. I have tested it on a 11.5.10 instance, if you deploy it on an other version please do send me a mail or comment so I can blog that this is also working on other versions.

SELECT
        QUA.INVENTORY_ITEM_ID,
        QUA.ORGANIZATION_ID,
        QUA.SUBINVENTORY_CODE,
        SUM(QUA.TRANSACTION_QUANTITY)
FROM
        MTL_ONHAND_QUANTITIES QUA
GROUP BY
              QUA.INVENTORY_ITEM_ID,
              QUA.ORGANIZATION_ID,
              QUA.SUBINVENTORY_CODE    

Oracle Concurrent Request phase and status

A concurrent request within Oracle EBS always has a status and is in a phase. The phases and status are linked and only a limited number of combinations are possible. The phases are: PENDING, RUNNING, COMPLETED and INACTIVE.

you can have the following statuses within the PENDING phase:
- Normal: Request is waiting for the next available manager.
- Standby: Program to run request is incompatible with other program(s) currently running.
- Scheduled: Request is scheduled to start at a future time or date.
- Waiting: A child request is waiting for its Parent request to mark it ready to run. For example, a request in a request set that runs sequentially must wait for a prior request to complete.

For the RUNNING phase you can have the following statuses:
- Normal: Request is running normally.
- Paused: Parent request pauses for all its child requests to finish running. For example, a request set pauses for all requests in the set to complete.
- Resuming: All requests submitted by the same parent request have completed running. The Parent request resumes running.
- Terminating: Request is terminated by choosing the Cancel Request button in Requests window.

For the COMPLETED phase you can have the following statuses:
- Normal: Request completed successfully.
- Error: Request failed to complete successfully.
- Warning: Request completed with warnings. For example, a request is generated successfully but fails to print.
- Cancelled: Pending or Inactive request is cancelled by choosing the Cancel Request button in the Requests window.
- Terminated: Request is terminated by choosing the Cancel Request button in the Requests window.

For the INACTIVE phase you can have the following statuses:
- Disabled: Program to run request is not enabled. Contact your system administrator.
- On Hold: Pending request is placed on hold by choosing the Hold Request button in the Requests window.
- No Manager: No manager is defined to run the request. Check with your system administrator. A status of No Manager is also given when all managers are locked by run-alone requests.

Error Number 3 Purchase Order

I am currently working on setting up a test system for Oracle XML gateway which should forward purchase orders in Oracle purchasing with the XML gateway as a XML EDI message to an other Oracle E-Business suite system. Because we have been testing all kinds of setup for this project which also includes changes to configuration files on UNIX level I have stopped and started the system a couple of times to be sure that changes would be picked up.

During the last stop start session somehow the workflow manager and the concurrent managers where not coming up again. The first thing we noticed that after approving a purchase order the order “disappeared”. After some searching we found out that not everything was up and running so I started all the processes in the Oracle Applications Manager.

However when reviewing the notification list we found that all the purchase orders who have been approved during the time the background processes where down where in a status of “PO Approval Error” stating as details “Document Manager Failed With Error Number 3 while processing Standard Purchase Order 310”.


Checking metalink note 1074838.6 on this error is stating: The document is left in status IN PROCESS. The WFSTATUS.sql output file shows that the process failed at node Open Document State during Verify PO and defaulted to Document Manager Failed.

And we found that this is indeed the case. To resolve the troubled purchase orders you can go into the notification and use the retry option. When using this the purchase order will be approved and will follow the normal workflows as you have set them up.

Oracle Deal Management

14-April-2008 Oracle unveiled Oracle Deal Management which is designed to help companies increase profit by giving sales professionals a tool enabling them to optimize the deal process, control price erosion and consistently make better pricing decisions on every negotiation. Oracle Deal Management is a part of Oracle Fusion Middleware and will be interacting out-off-the-box with for example Oracle's Siebel CRM 8.0, Oracle E-Business Suite 11.i.10 and Release 12.

For more information about Oracle Deal Management check out the product website on the oracle site.

Oracle SOA Invoice processing

Oracle released a new whitepaper where they discuss the development of a SOA Invoice Processing in a Service-Oriented Environment. The “whitepaper” is a step by step guide on how to develop the code and all the surroundings needed for the environment to work correctly. This is a great introduction to the SOA technology stack and the Oracle Enterprise Service Bus. Development is done in java with Oracle jDeveloper.

Oracle Price Break, Point or Range.

Oracle Advanced Pricing, price breaks, using Point or Range type? Price Breaks, simply put price breaks are a method of applying discounts. If you order 6 items you get a 5 percent discount, if you order 13 items you get a 10 percent discount and if you order 31 items you get a 15 percent discount.

The range is:
0 till 10 you get 5 percent discount.
11 till 20 you get 10 percent discount.
21 till 50 you get 15 percent discount.

The question of point and range is to determine what to do if you order for example 16 items, this falls in the range of 10 percent discount. The question now is do you get 10 percent discount on the price of 16 items or do you get 5 percent discount on 10 items and 10 percent on 6 items?

A point price break will determine the range and apply the discount for this range on the entire quantity of items. A range will determine what quantity will fall in what range and apply the discount per range, so in the above example you will get the 5 percent discount on 10 items and 10 percent on 6 items.

To create a Price Break Header modifier in Oracle Advanced pricing you navigate within the Oracle Order Management Super User responsibility (you can access this from various other responsibilitie. ) and navigate to “Pricing” – “Modifiers”. Here you can create a Modifier of the “Discount List” type.

The “Modifier type” on the line you have to create is from the “Price Break Header” type. In this example we have set the “Pricing Phase” to “List Line Adjustment”. We also have set the “Product Attribute” to “Item Number” so this line will only apply for the item given in the “Product Attribute Value” field, for this example we have picked a item named “Alfa-radio”. “volume type” is set to “Item Quantity”, Break Type is set to “Point”, “operator” is “Between”, “UOM” is “Each”.

In the “Price Breaks” tab you have to define the “Adjustment Type”. This can be a Discount, which we will pick in this example or you can select a “Surcharge” for those cases you like to add cost to the price.

Now we have to define the ranges, if you click on the “Define Details” button you will be presented with the “Define Modifier Details” Screen. Here we can setup the ranges and the appropriate discounts that fall into the ranges.

After this is set the modifier will be available, if you enter for this item an amount within one of the ranges the appropriate discount will be applied in the order. In this example we have used a point modifier and not a range so you will see that all the items will have a discount defined in the range where the point resides. So only ONE type of discount in percentage will be applied and not ranges of discount.

FRM-40367 Query/Where function

An old and almost forgotten option in Oracle forms is the query/where function. This allows you to give your own “where” or “where and” clauses in your form. In basics you also could escape your select statement and do a SQL injection.

The intended functionality of the query/where is that you can write your own query for the form where you will not be limited to the fields that are represented in the form itself. You are basically limited to the columns of the tables that are noted down in the hardcoded part of the query. For example you could query for a user in the “system administrators” “users” screen by user_id which is standard not an option.

After you invoked the query/where screen and enter the following extension to the query: “user_id = 2071” if you want to view the information from the user with id 2071.

Because of the potential danger of SQL injection Oracle has removed this functionality, however as we are used to with Oracle it is not really removed only turned off. Meaning we can turn it on again which can be a big relieve when trying to figure something out in a test environment. Oracle has disabled this option by setting in $APPL_TOP/PUBTST21.env the following line:

FORMS60_RESTRICT_ENTER_QUERY="TRUE"


When you change the TRUE value to FALSE and restart forms you will have the possibility to use the query/where option. You can use this by going to a forms screen and go to query mode (F11) now place a ‘:’ or ‘&’ character into one of the fields and execute the query (Ctrl + F11). Now you will be represented by a free query field as shown in the screenshot below.

An indication that the value of FORMS60_RESTRICT_ENTER_QUERY is still set to TRUE is that if you try to execute a search with one of the mentioned characters you will get a FRM-40367 error. FRM-40367: Invalid criteria in field XXX in example record.

APP-PO-14376 error

When trying to receive some goods you can come across the error message as shown below in text or in the screenshot above here. There are a couple of possible reasons for this error message to appear. You have entered a date that is not in a open GL (General ledger) period, also known as a accounting period. It can be that you have made a mistake by entering the date, the second is that the date is correct however the period is not yet opened.

APP-PO-14376: Please enter a GL Date within an open purchasing period.

Cause: You provided a GL date that is not within an open purchasing period.

Action: Enter a date that is within an open period.

Or use the Control Purchasing Periods window to open the period corresponding to the date you entered. If you're using encumbrance/budgetary control, also open the GL period in the Open and Close Periods window.

If the date you entered is a valid date and the period is still closed you will have to open Purchasing GL period. You can do so via the Purchasing Super User responsibility. From here go to Setup - Financials - Accounting - Open and Close periods. You will be able to open or close a GL periode. After this is done you should be able to receive goods without any error message.

Oracle: Uncosted Transactions

When trying to close a inventory period you might end up having some problems due to “Uncosted Transactions”. Uncosted Transactions are an indication you still have records pending in the mtl_material_transactions table. Normally the “Cost Manager” should clear this interface table and take action upon the records in the table. It could however that this concurrent process is somehow stopped or encountered an error during runtime.

To check this you can query the concurrent requests to see if a concurrent request named “Material cost transaction worker” is running. If this is not the case you most likely have a number of records in the mtl_material_transactions table. You can use the query below to check this:

select count(1)
from mtl_material_transactions
where costed_flag in ('N', 'E')
order by creation_date;

You will have to do some cleanup work before you can restart the process. First make sure the Cost Manager is NOT running. Now you have to check if there are error records. A error record is indicated by a “e” in costed_flag, you can use the query below to check the error records. You first have to solve the root cause of the error and than restart the Costing Manager.


select request_id, error_explanation, error_code, costed_flag
from mtl_material_transactions
where costed_flag in ('E')
order by creation_date;

After you have solved all the root causes of the error records you also have to take some action on the non processed records which are identified by the letter “N” in costed_flag. You will have to run the update statement below to set all those ready to be processed again.

Update MTL_MATERIAL_TRANSACTIONS
set COSTED_FLAG = ‘N’,
set TRANSACTION_GROUP_ID = NULL
where COSTED_FLAG = ‘E’ or COSTED_FLAG = ‘N’;

After you have taken those steps you can restart the Cost Manager again. Under the Inventory responsibility navigate to Setup – Transactions – Interface Managers. You have to set the frequency of the cost manager and start the cost manager from the Tools menu with the Launch Manager option. This should solve your problems. For more information you can check on Metalink note304313.1 and 105647.1 for more information and background details.

Receiving transaction status Pending

When receiving goods in Oracle Inventory INV the lines will be stored in the RCV_TRANSACTIONS_INTERFACE table so a concurrent process can act upon the data in the table and make the needed changes to for example the current availability. In some cases it might happen that the transaction status stays on “Pending” when the Processing Mode is “Immediate”.

In those cases you can “forward” those records by doing the following steps:

Update rcv_transactions_interface rti
set processing_mode_code ='BATCH' ,
processing_status_code = 'PENDING' ,
transaction_status_code = 'PENDING',
processing_request_id = NULL,
validation_flag = NULL
where rti.interface_transaction_id in (17583, 17584);

After you committed this update statement you have to run the “Receiving Transaction Processor” concurrent request. The reason for the lines to be stuck can be for example that rvctp was not invoked because the concurrent manager was down.

Promotional goods in Oracle QP

Companies using Oracle E–business suite can request to have a promotional goods for a defined period of time. Meaning if you buy product A you will get product B as a free promotional item.

In this example we will setup E-business suite in a way that if you buy product “Nokia-E61i” you will get 1 “Nokia-E61i-headset” for free even do the Nokia-E61i will have a list price of 25 euro’s on the pricelist.

First step is to create both items in the item master and assign them to one or more transaction organizations. After that we will create a price for both items on the appropriate pricelist.


Now we will create a new Modifier for the promotional goods with the type Promotion. On the modifiers summary we create a line with the modifier type Promotional Goods in combination with a start-date and a end-date to make sure that the promotion action will end on the correct day. Also set the Automatic flag on line level and header level and make sure you set “Product Attribute” and “Product Attribute Value” as shown in the screenhot.

Now we have to add the promotional item, the headset which you will get for free when you order the main item, the phone. By clicking on the “Define Details” button you will get the screen where you can add the Get product. Besides the Item we also will define that the Application Method is “new price” and the associated value is 0 meaning that a new price will be set to the price 0.

With all this set, when we enter a order for item “Nokia-E61i” a order line for 1 EA “Nokia-E61i-headset” for price 0 will be added automatically to the order.

Rounding factor can not be modified

When trying to change round precision in Oracle E-business suite under Oracle Advanced Pricing (QP) I received a “Rounding factor can not be modified”. The value of “Round to” stated -2 even do the prices where shown with a five digit precision. Trying to change it to -5 and back to -2 or any other combination resulted in this error.

Metalink not 264446.1 provided the solution. It stated a different error message “The rounding factor has to be greater or equal to -2” but the solution was to change the profile option of “QP: Unit Price Precision Type” to standard instead of Extended.

Customer item numbers in Oracle Inventory

When dealing with large customers it is possible that your customer is demanding that he can order goods from you by using there own item numbers which can be quite different from the item numbers you are used to work with.

To enable your order entry desks, using Oracle e-business suite, to quickly enter order by making use of the customer specific items there is a option to make a mapping between the internal item numbers and the customer item numbers in Oracle Inventory.

To do so you first have to setup a Customer Item Commodity Code for to group the customer items for a specific customer in a group so you can keep control over it. You can find the “Customer Item Commodity Codes” under the Inventory responsibility by navigating to Setup – Items – Customer Item Commodity Codes.


After setting up the commodity code you navigate to Items – Customer Items – Customer Items. Here you can create “dummy” item numbers which represents the item numbers your customer likes to use. Later we will link those customer item numbers to the internal item numbers.


After creating those customer item numbers you will have to link the customer item numbers to your internal item numbers. To do so navigate to Items – Customer Items – Customer Item Cross References. Here we can make the link between the 2 item numbers so the customer item numbers will become useful in the rest of the application.