Oracle Apps R12 Purchasing New Features
The 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:
o Viewing and acting upon requisition demand
o Creating and managing orders and agreements
o Managing contract deliverables
o Running negotiation events, including auctions and RFxs
o Managing supplier information
The Professional· Buyer’s Work Center 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.
From the· 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.
· Document Styles is a new
feature in R12. 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.
o 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.
· 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.
o 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.
o 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.
· Public APIs are modified to 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.
o PO Change API – POXCHN1B.pls
o Cancel PO API – POXPDCOB.pls
o Price Control API – POXPCPRB.pls
· Oracle E-Business Tax is a new
infrastructure for tax knowledge management and delivery using a global system
architecture that is configurable and scalable for adding country specific tax
content.
o As the single point solution for managing transaction-based tax,
Oracle E-Business Tax delivers tax services uniformly to Oracle E-Business
Suite business flows through one application interface.
o Oracle E-Business Tax provides a comprehensive solution to
configure, maintain, manage, and access transaction-based taxes. Organizations
will have the ability to effectively address multiple tax needs, from global
tax requirements to local compliance.
o Previously, only basic tax code and tax group based tax
computation capabilities were supported. By integrating with Oracle E-Business
Tax, the Procure to Pay business flow will be able to address complex tax
requirements. Another benefit of the integration is the ability to utilize a
single point tax solution across the E-Business Suite, which greatly simplifies
maintenance and tax management.
o Tax is calculated for the following purchase documents:
Purchase and Internal Requisitions, at the
requisition line level§
Standard and Planned Purchase Orders, at the
PO shipment level§
Blanket and Scheduled Releases, at the Release
shipment level§
o Tax is calculated whenever a purchase transaction is created and
tax is recalculated when any tax determination attributes on the transaction is
updated. So any saved purchase document should have its applicable tax already
calculated.
o In case of upgrading to R12 client may opt to keep using Pre-R12
tax setup or can do some additional setups for using new functionalities.
In release 11i, Oracle Advanced Procurement
Suite supported XSL-FO stylesheet based layout templates. In release 12, you
can use layout templates created in Microsoft RTF and Adobe PDF formats. With
Release 12, buyers can print purchasing documents on demand using any of the
pre-defined layout templates. It also allows buyers to print a purchasing
document in multiple formats·
o Attachment type supported
Notes to Supplier (R12, 11i)§
Long Short text (R12, 11i)§
Files (R12)§
URL (R12)§
· 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.
· 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:
• Companies can outsource their procurement functions to third
parties, allowing them to focus on their core competencies.
• For the many companies that utilize the services of contingent
workers, these workers can raise requisitions on their own behalf.
• Companies can meet compliance requirements because they no
longer have to define contingent workers as employees for contingent workers to
perform their jobs.
· 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.
· 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 an 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 purchases,
thus reducing their dependence on the supplier’s billing capabilities.
Pricing
Hierarchy
• If the
transaction references an item from the item master, the list
price of the item in the item master is first defaulted into the transaction.
• If the
transaction references an approved and active blanket agreement, the pricing
engine then determines the price from the applicable agreement price breaks if there’s any.
• If there
isn’t any price break defined, it picks up the price from the agreement line.
• If there’s
pricing information available in Oracle Advanced
Pricing in the form of
price list lines and/or modifiers, these pricing rules are then applied to
arrive at the net price.
• It is
important to note that if you have defined custom pricing rules in the custom hookprovided, those rules override any other pricing that
the system may have derived.
· Mass Re-pricing of Purchasing Documents was availabel from 11i9, 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:
o On Oracle Advanced Pricing Price Lists/Modifiers
o And on Custom Pricing Hooks
· Advanced Approval Support for Requisitions:
o Parallel
Approvals
o Support for
Viewers
o Position
Hierarchy Support
