Oracle Apps R12 Purchasing New Features

1.    Professional Buyer’s Work Center 

·        Speeds up daily purchasing tasks by providing buyers with a central launch pad from where they can efficiently perform their daily tasks, such as:

v  Viewing and acting upon requisition demand

v  Creating and managing orders and agreements

v  Managing contract deliverables

v  Running negotiation events, including auctions and RFxs

v  Managing supplier information

·        Tightly weaves Oracle Purchasing with other products in the procurement family, such as Oracle Sourcing, Oracle Procurement Contracts, and Oracle Services Procurement. Buyers can now easily navigate from purchasing to sourcing documents, and vice-versa, using a single, friendly user interface.

2.  Demand Workbench

·   Buyers can access the catalog and favorites to find negotiated alternatives to non-catalog requests. While authoring orders and agreements, buyers can use the catalog or favorites to quickly add items, thereby accelerating the document creation process. The enhanced catalog access provides easy access to pre-negotiated items. This reduces spending by leveraging negotiated pricing.

3.  Document Styles

·        It allows buying organizations to control the look and feel of the application to match the needs of different purchasing documents. Through reusable document styles, deploying organizations can enable or disable various Oracle Purchasing features, thereby simplifying the user interface. This helps people to use familiar name to Purchasing documents.

v  When a purchasing document is created using a style, disabled features are hidden to simplify the user interface. For example, organizations can create a document style for a specific commodity, such as temporary labor. This document style optimizes field labels and display for that commodity, simplifying purchase order entry by hiding regions/attributes that are only relevant for goods purchases.

4.  Procurement of Complex Services

·        Is an integrated solution for Oracle Services Procurement used to model complex work contracts that involve advanced payment terms. These contracts tend to have high dollar values, often running into several millions of dollars. They also tend to be long lead time contracts, sometimes extending over multiple years. These contracts are characterized by progress payments that are governed by the complex payment terms, and which are released based on completion of work.

v  The business flow can originate with a services request which the buying organization determines needs complex payment terms to manage and fulfill. The sourcing process allows negotiation of the complex payment terms and these are carried forward to the Contract after the award.

v  The Contract, once approved and signed off by the involved parties is now in a state ready for execution. The Supplier can report progress on the work specified on the Contract, which the buying organization can certify as complete. Subsequently, payments can be processed for the progress made on the contract. The payment terms specified on the contract are used to compute the payment due to the supplier.

5.  Public APIs are modified

·     Support Multi-Org Access Controls (MOAC). Public APIs take Operating Unit as a parameter. Operating Unit is an optional parameter. If it is not provided, the default operating unit from setup is used to set the desired context.

v  PO Change API – POXCHN1B.pls

v  Cancel PO API – POXPDCOB.pls

v  Price Control API – POXPCPRB.pls

6.  Maintain Sourcing Rules/ASLs for Agreement Items

·        Prior to this release, system-generated sourcing rules and ASLs were only created at the time of blanket agreement approval. These rules were enabled for all organizations, which might not have mirrored actual business processes.

·        In this release, you create sourcing rules and ASL entries for a specific inventory organization. You can create these rules for agreements that you manually create, or for agreements that you import through the open interface.

·        In addition, the dependency of rules creation with the approval process has been removed. As a result, you can create rules for existing agreements that have already been approved. This concurrent program allows you to automatically create rules for all of the operating units in which a blanket agreement is enabled.

7.  Support for Contract Purchasing Users

·        In this release, contingent workers can perform the same actions as requesters and buyers who are employees. These actions include creating requisitions, purchase orders, and receipts. In addition, contingent workers can approve both requisitions and purchase orders.

·        Now the question is what the benefit of this:

v  Companies can outsource their procurement functions to third parties, allowing them to focus on their core competencies.

v  For the many companies that utilize the services of contingent workers, these workers can raise requisitions on their own behalf.

v  Companies can meet compliance requirements because they no longer have to define contingent workers as employees for contingent workers to perform their jobs.

8.  Auto-Approval Tolerances for Change Orders

·        (Purchasing : Tolerances and Routing > Change Order) Auto-Approval Tolerances are defined on Setup screen or in Workflow Attributes. Once a Purchasing Document is submitted for approval, in the Approval Workflow a check is done to ensure that all changes are within tolerance. If they are then main approval is bypassed otherwise the document is routed through main approval process in workflow.

9.  Model Complex Pricing for Blanket Line Items

·        R12, Oracle Purchasing provides an additional option to model complex pricing for Blanket line items. In this release Oracle Purchasing has built integration with the Oracle Advanced Pricing product. Oracle Advanced Pricing provides a set of tools in the form of price lists, formulas and modifiers to model complex pricing scenarios. This integration may eliminate the need for existing Oracle Purchasing customers to incorporate custom code into the product in the form of the custom pricing hook.

·        The integration with advanced pricing allows dynamic calculation of prices providing significant additional flexibility to complement the existing blanket agreement functionality. Companies can now accurately price all requests and a purchase, thus reducing their dependence on the supplier’s billing capabilities.

10.      Mass Re-pricing of Purchasing Documents 

·        Was available from 11i, in R12 it is improved a lot. You can now be able to re-price orders in batch using the existing “Retroactive Price Update” concurrent program even if the orders were not sourced from Blankets.

·        This Concurrent Program is now capable of re-pricing transactions based on pricing rules defined:

v  On Oracle Advanced Pricing Price Lists/Modifiers

v  And on Custom Pricing Hooks

11.      Advanced Approval Support for Requisitions:

v  Parallel Approvals

v  Support for Viewers

v  Position Hierarchy Support