Document History

This document will continue to evolve as existing sections change and new information is added. All updates appear in the following table:

Date	Update Version	Notes
06 OCT 2017	Update 17D	New features delivered in update 17D.
11 AUG 2017	Update 17C	New features delivered in update 17C.
07 APR 2017	Update 17B	New features delivered in update 17B.

Update 17D

Revision History

This document will continue to evolve as existing sections change and new information is added. All updates appear in the following table:

Date	Feature	Notes
06 OCT 2017		Created initial document.

Overview

This guide outlines the information you need to know about new or improved functionality in this update.

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in this document may include statements about Oracle’s product development plans. Many factors can materially affect Oracle’s product development plans and the nature and timing of future product releases. Accordingly, this Information is provided to you solely for information only, is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

This information may not be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates.  Oracle specifically disclaims any liability with respect to this information.  Refer to the Legal Notices and Terms of Use for further information.

Inventory Management

Manage and Distribute Shipping Documents

Manage and distribute shipping documents by various methods using shipping document sets and rules. Define how shipping documents are grouped and distributed based on shipping attributes, organization, subinventory, job role, and user.

Escalate Self-Service Receiving for Items Not Received

Define flexible escalation and action rules for self-service requisitions when items have not been received.  Allow requesters to determine when to escalate to buyers that items are missing.

Capture Serial Numbers at Pick

Identify and assign serial numbers on items at the time of picking. This facilitates the packing of serialized goods into containers prior to staging for shipment.

Pack into Packing Units at Pick

Pick material directly into packing units or shipping containers at the time of picking to facilitate shipping activities.

Enable Inline Electronic Records and Electronic Signatures for Inventory Management

Enforce the capture of an inline electronic signature immediately upon creation and update of inventory transactions.  You can sign off on a miscellaneous transaction, put away, receipt, receiving transaction correction, and ship confirm and maintain your electronic records for compliance with regulatory requirements.

Cancel Transfer Orders Automatically

Automatically cancel backorders on transfer orders as they are released, picked, or shipped in the fulfillment process.

Use Flexfields in Your Warehouse Management System or Third-Party Logistics Provider Integrations

Use enhanced third-party logistics provider and warehouse management system web services to support flexfields.

Send Item Cost in Transaction Manager Web Service

When using the transaction manager web service for miscellaneous transactions, you can send the unit cost for items.

Calculate Minimum and Maximum Inventory Replenishment Thresholds

Automatically compute minimum and maximum inventory replenishment policy thresholds using shipment history and policy parameters specified using a replenishment profile.

Cost Management

Analyze Cost Rollup and Component Usage Details

You can generate spreadsheet extracts and build reports according to your business needs in the two new Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence cost roll up and where used subject areas.

Update 17C

Revision History

This document will continue to evolve as existing sections change and new information is added. All updates appear in the following table:

Date	Feature	Notes
11 AUG 2017		Created initial document.

Overview

This guide outlines the information you need to know about new or improved functionality in this update.

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in this document may include statements about Oracle’s product development plans. Many factors can materially affect Oracle’s product development plans and the nature and timing of future product releases. Accordingly, this Information is provided to you solely for information only, is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

This information may not be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates.  Oracle specifically disclaims any liability with respect to this information.  Refer to the Legal Notices and Terms of Use for further information.

Inventory Management

Oracle Inventory Management Cloud offers a complete materials management solution that allows your company to successfully manage the flow of goods: inbound, within the warehouse, and outbound.  This functionality optimizes the flow of material so that it meets customer demand in a cost-effective manner.

Distribute Shipping Documents

Shipping documents are required to accompany all types of shipments in a variety of fulfillment scenarios from shipments originating from a warehouse to those being managed by trading partners.  In previous releases, you could generate shipping documents for your warehouse shipments using Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher.

In this release, you can generate shipping documents for other kinds of shipments, such as:

• Drop shipments:Send shipping documents to your customer for orders that ship directly from your supplier to your customer.You can also generate Advanced Shipment Notifications (ASN) for drop shipped orders to notify your customer of upcoming shipments coming directly from your supplier.
• Returned goods:Send shipping documents to your customer or carrier to accompany goods to be returned.

To support the distribution of shipping documents to trading parties such as carriers, customers, and suppliers, shipping documents can be attached to the shipment and then made available using the Shipment Advice web service.

In the complex world of global trade, many countries require specific approved document formats and specific document processing protocol to ensure shipping documents are not fraudulent.  There are a variety of requirements around sales invoices, shipping documents, auditing requirements, and reporting.

Increase Visibility with New Transactional Business Intelligence Subject Areas

You can increase your visibility into your Inventory locations and receiving areas with improvements in the Oracle Fusion Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) subject areas and enhancements in the key performance indicators and data elements.  OTBI is a user-friendly, robust business intelligence toolset used for real-time reporting of your business transactions.

In this release, there are several enhancements to the inventory subject area in OTBI, and there is a new OTBI subject area for cycle counting, which includes key performance indicators for cycle count accuracy.

In the Receiving subject area in OTBI, the following new elements are included:

• Notes to receiving agents
• Buyer
• Supplier
• Purchase order scheduled quantity

There are new OTBI Subject areas and attributes for:

• Cycle Counts
• ABC classification assignments
• ABC classification and item value analysis

View Item Supply and Demand

When you have a product shortage, need to expedite an order, or just need to phase out a product, you need a quick summary of on-hand quantity, incoming supply, and out-going demand of select products.  In this release, the Review Item Supply and Demand page gives you a time-phased view of on-hand quantity as well as details on all types of demand and supply to quickly assess the situation and take action.

Mass Cancel Transfer Orders

Automated replenishment is often used to improve the efficiency of your warehouse and supply locations, especially for high volume, low cost items like nuts, bolts, and bandages.  Automated internal transfer orders can be triggered by Oracle Supply Chain Planning, minimum (min-max) replenishment settings, or PAR inventory processing.

When there is insufficient quantity to fulfill these transfer requests, a backorder or shortage condition results, and you may not want to manage the backordered transfer requests for some items and locations. 

You can use this new process to strategically select and cancel (kill) remaining quantity on partially fulfilled transfer requests.

Define ABC Classifications by Item Cost

ABC Classification in inventory is a ranking system used to identify and group items based on their usefulness to you in achieving your business goals.  The importance of items and their ABC classifications varies by company, but managing the overall cost of inventory is often the most important.  Oracle Inventory Management lets you create ABC Classification Sets of items based on the item cost.   

A criterion for item cost is available on the Manage ABC Classification Sets page when creating ABC Classification Sets of items.  ABC Classification Set criteria include:

• Item Cost
• Current On-hand Quantity
• Current On-hand Value
• Historical Usage Value
• Historical Usage Quantity
• Historical Number of Transactions
• Previous Cycle Count Adjusted Value
• Previous Cycle Count Adjusted Quantity

Once the ABC Classification Set is created, you can view the item cost with the item on the View ABC Classification Set Items page.

Cost Management

Enter and View Dates in Legal Entity Time Zones

The transaction date of inventory and manufacturing transactions determines the accounting date and period in which those transactions are booked. In prior releases, the accounting date and the accounting period for the transactions were determined using the transaction date stored in the cloud server time zone. This can cause a problem in inventory organizations whose associated legal entity expects the transactions to be accounted in a time zone that is different from the server time zone. In such a case, some of the transactions created on the first or last day of the accounting period may not be booked to the desired accounting period.

In this release you can choose whether cost transactions are accounted in a period using the transaction date in the server time zone or the organization’s legal entity time zone. The elected time zone is used in determining the accounting date and accounting periods, displaying the time zone associated to the dates in the costing UIs, standard cost definitions, cost rollup and period end validations.

Define Standard Costs for Externally Sourced Configured Items

When a configured product is sold and its manufacture is outsourced to an external manufacturer who drop ships it to the customer, defining a standard cost for that product is a challenge as configured products have a large number of possible combinations of options and their item numbering is assigned only during the configuration process. 

In this release, you have the choice to cost the configured items using an actual or standard cost method. To facilitate an efficient and timely completion of the cost definition process for a configured item, the cost accounting system automatically defines and publishes a standard cost when the purchase order for the item is approved. The standard cost of the configured item from the external manufacturer is the rolled up sum of the standard cost of its included options. This process requires no user intervention and allows for the immediate cost processing of the item when it is logically received. 

Define Standard Cost Overhead for Configure-to-Order Models

Cost accountants typically add overhead costs to the material and resource costs of configured items.

These overheads allow for the absorption of indirect costs, such as depreciation and supervisory labor costs, to the direct material and resource costs directly charged to a configured item that is internally manufactured.

In this update, you can define applicable overhead for a standard costed configure-to-order (CTO) model item. The model overhead is applied to configured items created from the model’s work definition. This provides you with a more efficient and timely way to define overheads for configured items.

Align Standard Costs for Drop Ship Receipts

When purchased items are drop shipped from the supplier to the customer they are not physically received in an inventory organization. Instead a logical receipt and issue is created in the inventory organization in order to account for the movement and the cost related to the purchase/sale transactions.

In prior releases you could only cost logical receipts of drop shipped items using an actual-based cost method. In this release, you have the option to cost them at actual or at standard using its current standard cost. This aligns the valuation of logical receipts with the valuation options used to cost physical purchase order receipts. 

Use Sales Representative Cost Center as Source for Account Rules

The performance of sales organizations and their sales representatives are often measured on the basis of gross margin targets (revenues less cost of goods sold) for items sold to customers. In order to provide sales management with accounting reports of this performance metric, the cost of goods sold (COGS) amounts for a sale are booked to the cost center that is credited with the sale.

In this release, the cost center associated with a fulfilled sales order is used to derive the cost of goods sold account. A new cost center source is added in subledger accounting allowing you to account for COGS transactions in the desired cost center. This capability allows sales management to accurately measure sales, cost, and gross margin by cost center account. 

Analyze Manufacturing and Inventory Cost Details

Ad-hoc cost planning and execution reporting and analysis for cost accountants and business users is performed through the available Oracle Fusion Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) subject areas for Fusion Cost Management. This reporting covers cost information related to standard costing of items, costing of inventory and manufacturing transactions, supplier accruals, gross margins, and cost processing exceptions. 

In this release, you can generate spreadsheet extracts and build enhanced reports according to your business need in the following Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence subject areas:

• Receipt Accounting
• Cost Accounting
• Item Cost
• Inventory Valuation
• COGS & Margin Reporting
• Work Order Costs

Manage Cost Processing and Period End Exceptions

The timely and accurate reporting of an enterprise’s financial results is contingent on an efficient and effective close of accounting periods for organizations throughout the enterprise. The ability to quickly identify and correct cost processing exceptions on a daily basis ensures that all inventory and manufacturing transactions are duly processed and accounted in the desired accounting period.  

In this release, you can generate spreadsheet extracts and build enhanced reports according to your business needs in the following Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence subject areas:

• Receipt Accounting Period Close
• Cost Accounting Period Close  

Raise Business Event on Standard Cost Update

When you define and publish standard costs in the cloud, there is often a need to share these standards with their other legacy or ERP applications used to manage other related aspects of their business. To facilitate relevance in financial reporting, standard costs of manufactured products and purchased components need to be kept in sync across their disparate systems.

In this release, Fusion Cost Management provides system integrators with an event framework that is used to notify subscribing business application of standard cost changes in Fusion Cost Management. When you perform a cost update that results in changes to the standard cost of your components or assemblies, a business event is raised and the subscribing application receives a notification of this change. When the previously scheduled Export Standard Costs costing process runs, an XML formatted document is exported to a content server and the document can then be retrieved and the revised standard costs can then be imported into the external business system.

This integration allows you to efficiently align your cost standards across disparate business system in a timely and cost-effective manner.

Fiscal Document Capture

Capture and Validate Import Fiscal Documents

Tax authorities require that companies check supplier fiscal documents to ensure that they have correctly calculated and reported prices, charges, and all applicable federal, state, and municipal taxes related to a purchase receipt. In this release, you can capture and validate an import fiscal document against transfer order shipment and transfer price details. 

Interface Import Fiscal Document Details to Receiving

A transfer order can only be received after successful validation of its associated fiscal document. On completion of the validation, information is interfaced to Fusion Receiving which automatically creates a transfer order receipt that can be delivered to an inventory or expense destination.

Capture Return Fiscal Document

When goods are returned to the seller and the seller creates and approves a return material authorization (RMA), the customer or seller generates a sales credit fiscal document that must accompany the transported goods from the customer to the seller’s location. Key information from this sales credit fiscal document must be validated before the returned goods can be received into inventory.

In this release, you can capture and validate information from the sales credit fiscal document and interface this information to Fusion Receiving which creates an RMA receipt for the returned goods.

Capture Fiscal Document Issued by Third-Party Warehouse Provider

When goods are fulfilled from a third-party warehouse location and shipped to the seller’s customer, the warehouse generates a fiscal document that informs fiscal authorities that custody of the goods has been transferred from the warehouse to the seller. Periodically, the seller captures these custody transfer fiscal documents in their system for fiscal reporting purposes. No inventory or inventory transactions are generated.

 In this release, you can capture and validate fiscal documents issued by third-party warehouse providers that are used for fiscal reporting.

Supply Chain Financial Orchestration

Use Original Transfer Price for Referenced Sales Order Returns

When customer returns happen, it is important to be able to credit not only the customer, but also any organization that was involved in the original sale. In this release, when goods are received against a referenced return order, the system credits all the organizations along the financial route at the transfer price that was used for the original sale:

• The goods could be originally shipped from one of your internal warehouses or drop shipped direct from a supplier.
• The credit is done up to the point of receipt, irrespective of whether the goods are received at the original shipping warehouse, or at any organization that was in the original financial flow. This gives you flexibility to accept returns at your customer facing facility, your shipping facility, or anywhere in between. For example, if you ship goods from your warehouse in France direct to your customer in the US, but sell the product from your French Legal Entity, to your Irish Legal Entity, to your US Legal Entity and then to your customer, you can receive the return at a warehouse in the US, Ireland, or France, and the system reverses the flow only up to the point of the receipt.
• The intercompany credit memo references the original intercompany invoice, giving you traceability back to the original transaction.

Pass Supplier Site and Sales Order Type for Use by Intercompany Receivables Invoice Processing

Supply Chain Financial Orchestration interfaces many attributes to the intercompany receivables invoice in order to generate and process the intercompany invoices along the financial route.  In this release, the following enhancements have been made to this interface:

• In order to support an accurate tax calculation on the intercompany invoices, the ship from address must be available on the intercompany invoice.  In the previous release, if goods were shipped from your internal warehouse, the warehouse ID was passed into the intercompany receivables invoice and used for calculating tax, but no value was passed for inbound purchases delivered to one of your warehouses or drop shipped to your customer.  In this release, for global procurement and drop ship purchase orders, the supplier purchasing site on the purchase order is passed in as the ship from site to the intercompany receivables invoice, enabling you to configure appropriate tax calculations for shipments originating at a supplier site.
• Some companies use order type on sales orders to differentiate internal vs external purchases, or service vs new sales. This order type can affect the intercompany accounts used when accounting for the intercompany invoices. In this release, sales order type of the original sales order is passed to the intercompany receivables invoices. This sales order type can be used in the subledger accounting rules to derive account distributions for the intercompany invoices.

Use Source Order Attributes When Calculating a Transfer Price

Transfer pricing rules can be complex, and the way the transfer price is calculated can depend on a diverse set of attributes.  Many of these attributes are defined as part of the financial route, but others are attributes of the source document (for example, order type, customer country, or custom flex fields on the order line).  In the previous release, you could use the advanced pricing capabilities of Oracle Fusion Pricing to calculate the transfer prices based on business attributes of financial orchestration routes and a few select attributes of the source order (such as, customer or supplier) that were passed to pricing by Oracle Supply Chain Financial Orchestration.  However, companies did not have access to the source document number and line, so they could not retrieve other source order attributes they may need to use in their algorithms.

In this release, Supply Chain Financial Orchestration exposes the source document order number and line to pricing.  This provides companies flexibility to write their own pricing algorithms that call services to retrieve any additional information from the source document that they might need for their transfer price calculations.

Enable External Applications to Retrieve a Transfer Price for a Sales Order Shipping Flow

Companies that use Supply Chain Financial Orchestration, often also use a global trade compliance system to manage their trade and customs documentation and processes.

In cases where the financial flow is separate from the physical flow, it is necessary to be able to pass the transfer price to an external trade compliance system in order to be able to create the proper commercial invoice, based on who owns the goods at the time of export or import. 

In this release, Supply Chain Financial Orchestration creates an event when the transfer pricing calculations are complete for any sales order shipment transaction. The event contains a reference to the originating sales order fulfillment line ID, the transfer price value, and the currency of the last node in the financial flow. You can configure Oracle Integration Cloud Service to pick up the event and then pass the transfer price on to Oracle Global Trade Management or any other system to use in the creation of the commercial invoice for import at the final destination.

This enables companies to generate proper commercial invoices and other customs documentation for sales orders without manual intervention, saving both time and money when transacting complex flows.

Streamline Organization Setups Along the Financial Route

In order to support intercompany invoicing and accounting transactions when shipping across countries, you need to create logical trade organizations in all business units along your financial routes. In most companies, this means setting up an inventory organization in all customer facing business units, even if these business units never carry any physical inventory. In the previous releases, you set up these organizations as inventory organizations and all items sold from that business unit were assigned to these logical inventory organizations, even though those items are never physically stored in those organizations. This resulted in a large maintenance burden because you had to setup and maintain the items in a large number of trade organizations that never transact any inventory. 

In this release, the items no longer have to exist in the logical trade organizations.  The actual inventory organizations in the flow are used to derive the key item attributes of Item Expense Flag, Primary & Secondary UOM.

As a result, companies can greatly reduce their item setup and item maintenance burden.

Validations in Financial Orchestration Flow (Brazil Organizations only)

In Brazil, there are specific requirements for supply chain accounting and documentation for movements of goods into, within, and out of the country.  When there is a financial route associated to an internal transfer and the buying business unit is in Brazil, the following requirements must be met:

1. Ownership must transfer on shipment
2. Currency on the invoice and other fiscal documents must be BRL
3. Tax must not get calculated

To support these requirements, validations are added when saving an internal transfer type financial orchestration flow, such that the following must be true for any node in the flow where the receiving business unit or the buying business unit is in Brazil:

1. The assigned documentation and accounting rule must indicate that the currency option is set to Buying node, and the ownership change event for the forward flow is set to Interorganization Shipment.
2. There must be a transaction business category assigned as a sell side tax determinant on the financial route. You should procedurally use the same transaction business category (CFOP) whenever the destination is Brazil. The transaction business category is passed to accounts receivable and then on to tax. Oracle Fusion Tax is configured so that taxes are not applicable for that CFOP.

These validations ensure that a financial flow that is triggered by an internal movement of goods into Brazil comply with the Brazil’s requirements for ownership change and invoicing.

Update 17B

Revision History

This document will continue to evolve as existing sections change and new information is added. All updates appear in the following table:

Date	Feature	Notes
07 APR 2017		Created initial document.

Overview

This guide outlines the information you need to know about new or improved functionality in this update.

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in this document may include statements about Oracle’s product development plans. Many factors can materially affect Oracle’s product development plans and the nature and timing of future product releases. Accordingly, this Information is provided to you solely for information only, is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

This information may not be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates.  Oracle specifically disclaims any liability with respect to this information.  Refer to the Legal Notices and Terms of Use for further information.

User Interface Enhancements

Successful inventory and cost management business processes rely on your ability to aggregate, analyze, and act upon key insights that drive timely and reliable business decisions. You need highly visual, analytically driven, and timely information at the forefront of the applications you use every day. This release introduces a revamped home experience page and work area landing pages that provide visual, insightful, and actionable information for your inventory and cost management business processes.

Analytic-Driven Infolets on the Home Page and Work Area Landing Pages

The new home experience and application work area pages provide modern user interface components called infolets. An infolet is a self-contained, interactive container that helps you quickly visualize high-level information, review relevant details, and proceed to action. Because infolets are role-based, you see only what is relevant to your specific role. Progressive disclosure of details is available to you by expanding or inverting the infolet as needed. You can also rearrange the layout of your infolets or hide the ones that you do not need.

Infolets are available to you at two levels:

• Home experience infolet page: This page exists at the same level as your springboard page (where you access your application icons). You can click the page controls (indicated by dots at the top-center of the home page) to access a set of logically grouped infolets aggregated from multiple application work areas.  If you have all the relevant roles, you are able to view infolets on the home experience infolet page that aggregate critical information for your entire source-to-settle business process.  
• Infolet-based landing pages: An infolet-based work area landing page contains infolets specific to a single product work area. You can access a work area page by clicking an icon button on the springboard, an icon button in the springboard strip, a work area name in the Navigator, or an infolet on a home experience infolet page. The redesigned work area landing pages present information quickly and clearly to draw your attention to actionable content, which is key to your productivity. Infolet-based work area landing pages have easy-to-read analytic tiles that users can rearrange and configure to meet personalized needs. The tiles also provide additional metrics and improved usability. This design allows all users to monitor the part of the operation that best meets their own role or interest.

Where applicable, infolets pertinent to individual infolet landing pages of application work areas are covered in the following product sections in this document:

• Inventory Management
• Cost Management
• Supply Chain Financial Orchestration

The following table summarizes the infolets grouped on the home experience infolet page for inventory and cost management:

Product	Infolet	Infolet Description
Inventory Management	Shipments by Priority	Displays the top five priorities, in terms of volume of shipments.
Inventory Management	Open Shipment Lines	Displays shipping lines that haven't been shipped, are open today, and have been open the past 30 days.
Inventory Management	Shipment Exceptions	Displays all of the shipment-level exceptions. For example, Shipment Lines on Hold, Pick Release Warnings, Shipment Lines on Hold for Update, Packed Lines not Interfaced, and Shipping Cost Interface Processing Errors.
Cost Management	Inventory Valuation	Displays the current value of on-hand inventory in all organizations.

Inventory Management

Oracle Inventory Management Cloud offers a complete materials management solution that allows your company to successfully manage the flow of goods: inbound, within the warehouse, and outbound. This functionality optimizes the flow of material so that it meets customer demand in a cost-effective manner. New features introduced in this release include:

• Support planned transportation shipments. Receive transportation planning information and optionally release sales orders going out on the same transportation shipment together for picking. Allow transportation management to reduce freight costs by calculating the optimal grouping of order lines onto customer shipments and transportation shipments.  Support releasing sales orders that are going out on the same transportation shipment together for picking and staging in shipping. 
• Screen for global trade compliance. Avoid paying penalties and delays at customs by ensuring that all of your outbound shipments comply with global trade regulations. Perform a final global trade compliance screening of the material actually picked before shipping. Ensure required shipping and export documents accompany the shipment.
• Capture quality inspection plans. Selectively inspect material based on sampling plans or skip lots and capture quality inspection plans during receiving. Optionally, raise a nonconformance event and analyze quality exceptions in Oracle Quality Management Cloud.
• Streamline asset creation and return process. Streamline your asset creation and update process by automatically updating Oracle Installed Base Cloud upon shipments to and returns from customers. In addition to increasing efficiency, this update also ensures that Installed Base always has up-to-date and accurate customer asset information when creating and managing service contracts in Oracle Enterprise Contracts Cloud. 
• Support product genealogy. When a failure occurs with a product or component, you want to identify the source and scope of a failure, what other items might be impacted due to a relationship or common origin, where the item has been during its lifecycle, and what occurred at each location or event. Inventory Management provides the required tracking information for receiving and quality inspection, inventory, and shipping transactions for Oracle Manufacturing Cloud to identify a lot controlled or serialized product’s current location, its complete transaction history, and associated lot or serial numbers of its components or parents.
• Support and monitor materials used in outside processing. For companies outsourcing portions of their manufacturing process, control and visibility of assemblies is crucial. In this release, Inventory Management has been enhanced as part of the larger outside processing feature to shipping material to and receiving material back from suppliers that perform outside processing services. 
• Support and monitor materials used in maintenance. Warehouse operations must support fulfillment, reverse logistics, manufacturing, and also maintenance of assets. In this release, Inventory Management now supports issuing materials to maintain assets, return of any unused materials, and recording scrap. 
• Support fiscal document capture. In Brazil, taxes are levied on the movement of goods and not on the sale, as is customary in other countries. For this reason, a fiscal document (also known as nota fiscal), which is a legal document, must accompany goods during their shipment. For inventory organizations in Brazil, Inventory Management offers support for fiscal documents associated with inbound shipments from suppliers and outbound internal material transfers and returns to vendors.  Receiving integrates with the fiscal document capture capability to capture and validate the fiscal document prior to receipt. Shipping integrates with the fiscal document generation capability to request a fiscal document and ensure the fiscal document has been approved by the fiscal authorities before shipping. 

Quickly Assess Key Metrics and Exceptions

As a warehouse manager or inventory manager, you often have a broad set of key processes to monitor and tasks to perform in a wide variety of areas. It can be time consuming to navigate to all of the required tasks to approve and manage exceptions. Spikes in materials management activities or exceptions can be difficult to identify and can lead to disruption of smooth fulfillment operations.

Inventory Work Area Landing Page

In this release, a new infolet-based landing page is available. Infolets display key information that is relevant to the user roles accessing an application and are the top-level navigation to application tasks allowing for quick assessment of the current state of operations and exceptions and easy access from the infolet to the transaction pages to manage them.

The Inventory landing page provides key inventory and materials operations information including on-hand inventory value and expected receiving, cycle counting, picking, and shipping activities required.  Exceptions, such as rejected materials received and shipping exceptions, are highlighted. Additional customer shipment information is highlighted, such as shipments by carrier and shipments by priority.  You can invert or expand the infolet to get more details on the information and drill down into transactional pages to act upon the information.

As a warehouse manager, the most important activities are to keep warehouse operations running smoothly. Visibility to the expected materials management activity load, status of key processes, and approvals and exceptions requiring attention are critical. The ability to quickly and easily view relevant and actionable information and exceptions allows the warehouse manager and inventory manager to spend more of their time focusing on daily tasks.

Additional Inventory Management Enhancements

Accept, Fulfill, and Support Tracking of Optimized Transportation Shipments

Companies have made strong gains in terms of optimizing their operations within their functional silos of order management, transportation planning, and inventory management. However, optimal support for the end-to-end order fulfillment process is often lacking.

With this release, Oracle Order Management Cloud and Oracle Inventory Management Cloud have been enhanced to support the end-to-end order fulfillment process and can use transportation systems, such as Oracle Transportation Management Cloud. Enhancements to Inventory Management include the capability to:

• Receive transportation planning information. Based on how fulfillment lines and quantities have been grouped into transportation shipments and pick-up or delivery stops, customer shipments to be delivered at a particular delivery stop are built accordingly. 
• Support releasing sales orders going out on the same transportation shipment together for picking and staging in shipping.   
• Publish shipment confirmation details of both the customer shipment and the material shipped. 

These enhancements allow transportation management to reduce freight costs by calculating the optimal grouping of order lines onto transportation shipments and pick-up or delivery stops.  With Inventory Management, you have the ability to:

• Accept and execute an optimized transportation plan to support the end-to-end order fulfillment process. 
• Publish actual shipment details back to transportation systems to improve visibility. 

Screen and Validate Customer Shipments for Export Trade Compliance

Outbound shipments that do not comply with global trade regulations (such as shipping to denied parties) can result in you paying penalties. Delays at customer sites can result when international shipments don’t have the necessary shipping and export documents accompanying the shipment. 

With this release, Order Management and Inventory Management have been enhanced to support the end-to-end order fulfillment process and can use export trade management systems, such as Oracle Global Trade Management Cloud. Enhancements to Inventory Management include the ability to:

• Perform a final global trade compliance screening of the actual material picked before shipping and validate all information is in order for shipment export.
• Verify the required shipping and export documents accompany the shipment.

The ability for you to use global trade management solutions and verify that outbound shipments comply with export trade regulations is critical to your global supply chain strategies. Specifically, this feature assists you in avoiding delays in shipments at customs and paying fines for noncompliance. 

Request Internal Material Transfers

Movements of material between locations of an organization have the same need for full shipping support as sales orders and receiving support as purchase orders. Modeling these transfers as sales orders at shipping and purchase orders at receiving can lead to significant challenges for you in keeping the two business documents in sync when changes occur.   

Internal material transfers are designed to support the movement of material between locations of an organization with a single transfer order document with full shipping and receiving support. With this release, internal material transfer support is enhanced as follows:

• Casual requesters can request material by way of the normal purchase requisition processes, thus taking advantage of robust requisition approvals, budgetary control, and encumbrance accounting. If an internal transfer flow exists in Oracle Supply Chain Financial Orchestration Cloud, then the transfer price is displayed to the requester. If no financial flow exists, the cost is used as the transfer price.
• Material manager requesters have a new, specialized request page within Inventory Management designed to give them the required visibility and control when making a transfer request.

Full shipping and receiving support significantly increases your warehouse productivity and reduces errors associated with the shipping of material to be internally transferred and received at the destination location.  

Selectively Inspect Material and Collect Inspection Results with Quality Inspection Plans

Is your company’s strategic direction at risk due to quality issues of real or potential impact?  Unfortunately, the potential impact posed by a given issue is not always clear at the moment of discovery. Therefore, organizations require effective quality tools to guide team members through quality processes and controls in order to implement safe and effective solutions.

Quality inspection plans and results are available with Inventory Management.

Supported features include:

• Selective inspection of material based on a sampling size or skip lot frequency
• Data collection using quality inspection plans to complete the receiving process
• Optional generation of an action in Oracle Quality Management Cloud to perform further analysis and corrective action when a quality inspection results in nonconformance to the quality specifications.

NOTE: Additional capabilities for quality issues and actions require Quality Management. For more information about Quality Management features, see the Oracle Product Lifecycle Management Cloud New Feature Summary document for Release 13 (update 17B).

Quality Management delivers a unified platform for enabling quality visibility, collaboration, and execution through quality control techniques and closed-loop quality management.

Reconcile Inventory Balances From External Warehouse Management Systems or Logistics Service Providers

Does your company use an external warehouse management system or outsource your warehousing to logistics service providers? If so, you are aware of the substantial integration required to coordinate support for purchase order receipts, returns to vendors, internal material transfers, inventory transactions, and sales order shipments. 

This release of Oracle Inventory Management Cloud expands upon the core integration framework delivered in a recent release to also support receiving inventory balances. You can periodically receive snapshots of inventory balances from your external warehouse management systems and logistics service providers and use this information to reconcile inventory balances.      

Inventory Management supports a central integration framework across Oracle Purchasing Cloud, Oracle Order Management Cloud, and Inventory Management to support the interactions between an external warehouse system or logistics service providers.

Integrate and Enrich Your Materials Management Processes

One of the key benefits of working in the cloud is rapid implementation. Oracle Inventory Management Cloud provides a rich set of web services that you can use to integrate with other Oracle, third-party cloud, and on-premise applications that support your supply chain.

New integration features in this release include:

• Integrate applications. Oracle SCM Cloud solutions that integrate with Inventory Management are: Oracle Installed Base Cloud, Oracle Quality Management Cloud, and Oracle Maintenance Cloud. 
• Integrate web services. Use web services to integrate with and enrich your inventory operations. You can use web services to integrate with external systems, such as Oracle Transportation Management Cloud (for transportation management), or Oracle Global Trade Management Cloud (for export trade management) or mobile inventory applications, or PAR Location Management solutions. New and enhanced web services include: creation and management of subinventories and locators, on-hand balance query, on-hand reservations, material status updates, internal material transfer creation and management enhancements, management of customer shipment lines, and customer shipments.

The ability to support a wider variety of web services and integration methods reduces integration costs and implementation times to external systems.

Cost Management

Oracle Cost Management Cloud delivers a flexible and unified platform for your product costing, standard cost estimation, landed cost management, and supply chain accounting activities. Cost Management facilitates managerial accounting control and execution in your procure-to-pay, plan-to-produce, and order-to-cash business flows.

Cost Manufacturing Work Orders

In current competitive business environments, the delivery of quality products at the lowest possible cost is a key factor in the long-term viability and profitability of your business. This release provides support for additional manufacturing work order types, allowing you to track and report the manufacturing costs of your rework and transform activities. You can now:

• Rework orders for product that had previously been completed to inventory.
• Transform work orders to upgrade or downgrade an existing assembly to transform it into an assembly with a different item number.
• Track the financial performance work orders by charging them to separate work order valuation accounts.

Rework Work Orders

In this release, you can track and report the manufacturing costs incurred as a result of your assembly rework activities. In a rework work order, you remove a damaged component and replace it with a new component bearing the same item number. The material and resource charges for the process are generally captured and costed in the same way as regular manufacturing work orders. The return of damaged or obsolete components from the work order to inventory is performed using a new material negative issue transaction from the work order. This component return transaction is costed at the plant standard cost or current actual cost of the item, depending on the case. You can also reverse this issue transaction by performing a material negative return transaction. You can define material overhead rules using the new material negative issue and return transactions. You can also create subledger account rules referencing these new transactions.

Transform Work Orders

In this release, you can track and report the manufacturing costs incurred as a result of your transform activities on the shop floor. You can create and charge transform work orders to upgrade or downgrade an assembly. The costing of a transform work order is the same as that of a rework work order. However, the work order completion to inventory references a different assembly item number than the assembly item number being upgraded or otherwise transformed in the work order.

Quickly Assess Key Metrics and Exceptions

As a cost accountant, the most important activities are to track key processes and the current status of the key costing-related metrics. The ability to quickly and easily view relevant and actionable information allows the cost accountant to focus on daily tasks.

Cost Management work area landing pages provide key cost accounting information, such as monitoring cost, process job statuses, inventory, and work-in-process valuations, cost levels of receipts, and reported exceptions. This release delivers new infolet-based landing pages that replace the work area-based navigation in earlier releases. Infolets display key information that is relevant to the specific roles accessing an application and are the top-level navigation to application tasks. Users with the cost accountant role have access to the Cost Management work area landing pages as described in the following subsections. 

Receipt Accounting Work Area Landing Page

At any time during the day, the cost accountant needs a quick and effective way to monitor and manage exceptions that require immediate action and to review key cost metrics. This release adds a new Receipt Accounting landing page that displays key information related to receipt accounting and landed-cost management filtered by bill-to-business unit. The infolets on this page include:

• Cost of receipts. Ring chart that shows the detailed cost of items received in the last 7 days. 
• Unmatched accrual balances. Bar chart that shows the current amount of accrued receipts not matched to supplier invoices.  
• Accrual write-off. Amount of supplier accruals written off in the last 7 days. 
• Trade operations status. Count of active landed cost trade operations that are in draft, open, and on hold statuses.
• Exceptions. Count of current receipt accounting processor exceptions. 
• Open charge invoice associations. Bar chart that shows the count by status of invoice line associations in landed cost trade operations.
• Charge line status. Ring chart that shows the count by status of landed cost trade operation charge lines.
• Recent processes. Activity list that shows the date, time, and completion status of scheduled processes submitted in receipt accounting and landed cost management.

Cost Accounting Work Area Landing Page

This release adds a new Cost Accounting landing page that displays key information related to inventory and manufacturing cost accounting filtered by cost organization.

 The infolets on this page include:

• Inventory valuation. Ring chart that shows the current balance amounts of asset, expensed, and consigned on-hand inventory.
• Current work in process balances. Ring chart that shows the current balance amount of work orders that have been released, completed, and are on hold.
• Cost rollup. Counts of items that did or did not successfully complete in the last cost rollup.
• Transaction status. Count of transactions that have been interfaced to costing but not yet costed, and transactions that have been costed but not yet accounted.
• Gross margin. Amount of revenue, cost of goods sold (COGS), and gross margin that have been cost-processed in last 7 days.
• Work order costs. Amount of work order scrap, scrap percentage, and work order variance in last 7 days.
• Recent exceptions. Count of exceptions raised in last submitted cost accounting scheduled process.
• Purchase price variance. Bar chart that shows the amount of positive, negative, and total purchase price variances in last 7 days.
• Recent processes. Activity list that shows the date, time, and completion status of scheduled processes submitted in cost accounting.

Fiscal Document Capture Work Area Landing Page (Brazil Organizations Only)

This release adds a new Fiscal Document Capture landing page that highlights fiscal document completion status and exceptions requiring attention filtered by bill-to-business unit. The infolets on this page include:             

• Fiscal document life cycle. Bar chart that shows the count of currently open fiscal documents by life cycle status.
• Fiscal documents by business flow. Bar chart that shows the count of currently open fiscal documents by business flow type.
• Requiring revalidation. Ring chart that shows the count of fiscal documents that must be resubmitted for validation.
• In process. Count and amount of fiscal documents that are open and whose validation has not yet completed.
• Deliveries pending. Count of deliveries from suppliers that are pending fiscal document validation.
• Interface errors. Count of transaction errors by error type encountered in the loading of XML-formatted fiscal documents.
• Recent processes. Activity list that shows the date, time, and completion status of scheduled processes submitted in fiscal document capture.

Additional Cost Management Enhancements

Include Outside Processing Services in Your Work Order Costs

The purchase and use of outside processing services from third-party vendors is often a significant part of the cost of your manufactured items. Outside processing is where a job step is performed for a fee by an external vendor, and as such, involves manufacturing and procurement as well as costing. In this release, you can include the costs of outside processing services in your work order costs, providing you with a more accurate measure of the costs of your manufactured items. Cost rollup, work order costing, and subledger accounting now support the cost accounting of outside processing items in global procurement, purchase order receipt, and return-to-vendor business flows. You can add outside processing items as material requirements in the work definitions of your assemblies; and when applicable, you can perform a cost rollup that includes the standard cost of outside processing services from an external vendor.

An outside processing service item is received at its purchase order price and delivered to the work order operation in which it is defined as a material requirement. You can adjust the cost of the received item, when applicable, to account for retroactive purchase order price changes and invoice price variances. You can optionally define landed-cost charges for an outside processing item and apply these charges to the cost of the received item. You can also define material overhead rules that include outside processing items, allowing you to apply overhead to the cost of delivered outside processing items. 

A work order’s valuation includes the cost of outside processing items that are charged to one or more of its operations. Completions to scrap and completions to inventory include the cost of outside processing service items charged to the work order. You can view outside processing item costs in existing item cost and cost distribution pages, and then analyze their costs in existing Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) subject areas. You generate and review accounting entries for the work order costs of outside processing items in the available subledger accounting pages.

Expanded Support for Internal Material Transfers

The efficient and cost-effective flow of materials and goods between locations in your supply chain is a prerequisite to the optimal performance of the modern supply chain. This release provides flexibility in the costing of internal material transfers, adding support for additional capabilities that include the costing of internal receipt deliveries to multiple charge destinations and transfers to inventory destinations. In addition, several internal transfer receipt-to-expense destinations scenarios are supported as described in the following subsections.

• Use budgetary control with receipt performed in destination. You create a commitment when a requisition is initiated in Procurement; however, Receiving does not create an obligation when the transfer order is created. On internal receipt of transfer order items at the destination, the costing system liquidates the commitment and books an expenditure.
• Use budgetary control with no receipt performed in destination. You create a commitment when a requisition is initiated in procurement. On completion of the internal shipment, the costing system creates a virtual receipt, liquidates the commitment, and books an expenditure.
• Perform encumbrance accounting with receipt in destination. The costing system optionally creates encumbrance accounting on receipt of the internal transfer in the destination organization to reverse the commitment created in the requisition.
• Perform encumbrance accounting with no receipt in destination. The costing system optionally creates encumbrance accounting on completion of the internal shipment to reverse the commitment created in the requisition.

Analyze and Report Manufacturing and Landed Costs

The profitability of your warehouse and manufacturing operations depends in large part to the availability and reporting of cost performance and benchmark data related to those operations. This release adds a new OTBI subject area to support analytical reporting of landed-cost charges included in purchase order receipts. A new subject area is also added to support analytical reporting of manufacturing work order costs, including those related to standard, maintenance, rework, and upgrade work orders.

Share Product Costs Across Applications in the Cloud

Information generated by cloud applications is commonly required for use in other cloud and on-premise applications. In this release, the current cost of your components and assemblies can be shared by applications within and outside of Oracle Applications Cloud. You can use a cloud-enabled web service to get the current cost of an item in an inventory organization or plant.

Support Regulatory Accounting in France

To comply with the statutory financial accounting mandates in France, an additional set of accounting entries are required when material is received or issued in an inventory organization. In France, a supplemental set of accounting entries expense the entire value of goods received and post a contra entry to bridging accounts. These entries create supplemental accounting and do not change the original set of accounting templates used to create accounting in prior releases.

Manage Inbound Fiscal Documents (Brazil Organizations Only)

In Brazil, the calculation and payment of trade-related taxes are managed and enforced through the use of legally prescribed fiscal documents (known as nota fiscal). Fiscal documents are required for sale and purchase business transactions between parties and also for movements of goods between physical locations in the country. A fiscal document identifies the parties involved in a buy-sell or transfer business transaction, lists the items involved, and provides details of the amounts of federal, state, and local taxes that apply. A fiscal document is generated by the seller of goods and services or an organization sending materials or goods to another physical location. An organization that buys material or goods from a supplier is prohibited from taking legal title or otherwise receiving those items until the fiscal document generated by the seller of those items has been verified. In addition, taxes specified in the fiscal document must have been validated as accurate and conforming to Brazilian fiscal reporting requirements.

In this release, Oracle Fiscal Document Capture Cloud allows you to capture and validate fiscal documents from external and internal suppliers and to transfer that information to receiving for receipt creation and to payables for invoice creation. The following business flows are provided in this release for companies that provide financial and other business services in Brazil:

Inbound Business Flows:

• Purchase order receipt and delivery of materials to inventory and expense destinations
• Purchase order receipt of materials drop shipped by supplier
• Purchase order receipt of enterprise assets to expense destinations
• Capture and validation of fiscal documents with no purchase order
• Purchase order receipt with budget checking and encumbrance accounting
• Internal receipt of materials (simple transfers)
• Import of materials (not for resale)
• Capture and validation of freight fiscal documents 

Outbound Business Flows:

• Sale of services (see the Oracle Financials Cloud New Feature Summary)
• Return of materials to vendor
• Internal shipment of materials (simple transfers)
• Generation of fiscal documents for imported materials (partner solution)
• Internal transfer of enterprise assets (see the Oracle Financials Cloud New Feature Summary)

NOTE: For more information, see the Oracle Financials Cloud New Feature Summary document for the description of features related to the generation of fiscal documents. 

Use Localized Attributes for Brazil Organizations

To comply with fiscal regulations, purchases from suppliers can’t be received until their associated fiscal documents have passed validation. Brazil inventory organizations must prevent the manual creation of purchase order receipts because their receipts are automatically created based on information interfaced from Fiscal Document Capture. To facilitate this, the manual creation-update of receipts in such organizations is disabled.

Capture of Fiscal Documents

The inbound fiscal document validation process begins with the capture of the information contained in a supplier’s or other issuer’s fiscal document. A fiscal document is typically received from the issue in a structured XML-formatted file, which you can load into and transform using Oracle Collaborative Messaging Framework Cloud. In cases where the supplier only provides a printed copy of the fiscal document, you can enter and edit the fiscal document information directly using the new Manage Fiscal Documents page. Collaborative Messaging Framework allows communication with Secretaria de Estado da Fazenda (SEFAZ), the Brazilian fiscal authority, to confirm the validity and status of the received fiscal document.

Validate Fiscal Documents

Tax authorities require that companies check supplier fiscal documents to ensure that they have correctly calculated and reported all applicable federal, state, and municipal taxes related to a purchase receipt. In this release, inbound fiscal documents are validated to ensure that the business transaction details are accurate and that the applicable taxes have been correctly calculated. Integration with Oracle Tax Cloud allows you to compare the rates and amount of taxes specified in the issuer’s fiscal document to the rates and amounts determined as applicable and calculated in Oracle Tax Cloud. 

Validate Fiscal Documents Prior to Delivery

When purchased materials are shipped, the supplier generates and transmits a sales fiscal document to the buying organization. As a result, fiscal documents are typically received before the ordered items are delivered to the buyer. On receipt and capture of the fiscal document, you can perform a predelivery validation, comparing the items and prices of the items listed in the fiscal document against the items and prices specified in the purchase order. A predelivery validation of taxes is also performed against purchase order item quantities and prices. Differences in item prices or taxes are flagged and the fiscal document is placed on hold pending investigations and resolution of any price and amount difference.

Validate Receipts

When purchased materials are delivered to the buying organization’s location, the delivered item quantities are counted and compared to the items quantities specified in the purchase order. Differences in delivered quantities are flagged, and the fiscal document is placed on hold pending investigations and resolution of the quantity differences.

Request Complementary Fiscal Documents

The complementary fiscal documents feature allows a supplier to correct errors in the calculation of taxes discovered during the validation of the fiscal document related to a purchase receipt. In this release, when the fiscal document capture tax comparison process determines that the supplier has under-reported applicable taxes in its fiscal document, the fiscal document specialist contacts the supplier to request a complementary or adjusting fiscal document that includes the differential amount of taxes. The original and complementary fiscal documents are then referenced in the validation process. You can specify the upper and lower quantity, price, and tax amount tolerances beyond which you want Fiscal Document Capture to flag an exception.

Interface Fiscal Document Information

The information in a fiscal document that passes validation is used to create a receipt in receiving, an invoice in accounts payable, and a cost in receipt accounting that includes all applicable taxes and charges. When the inbound fiscal document passes validation, Fiscal Document Capture interfaces the information to receiving, payables, and cost management.

Fiscal document information is transferred to the receiving open interface, which allows automatic creation of a purchase order receipt, and to the payables invoice interface, which automatically allows creation of a supplier invoice. Information is also transferred to cost management, which costs and accounts for the receipt transaction inclusive of the applicable charges and taxes.

Generate Freight Fiscal Documents

Fiscal authorities require that freight charges incurred in the purchase of items be allocated and added to the cost of the items after they are received. When freight charges are the responsibility of the buying organization, the freight company generates a freight fiscal document and sends this document to the buying organization, typically on a monthly basis. To comply with the freight cost regulations, this release allows you to capture and validate a freight fiscal document which is used to adjust the receipt cost against which the specific freight charges apply.

Supply Chain Financial Orchestration

Use Interactive Infolets in the Financial Orchestration Work Area Landing Page

The Financial Orchestration work area has a new landing page with interactive graphs and metrics. These graphs and metrics provide the status of financial flows in-process, highlight the orchestration exceptions that need attention, and list recent updates to the financial flow definitions. The interactive graphs allow you to drill down to monitor the financial orchestration page to have a detailed view of the transactions in context. This new experience enables the supply chain controller to have a quick glimpse of the progress of the financial orchestration execution and issues that need resolution.

Select and Access Favorite Financial Orchestration Flows

In prior releases, setting a favorite was managed through the Favorites and Recent Items toolbar, which required a few extra clicks. In this release, you can easily establish financial orchestration flows or drop ship financial flows as favorites with a click on the Star icon that appears next to the object title. One click identifies the object as a favorite (solid yellow star), and one click removes it from favorites (empty star). Establishing a favorite provides you with easy access to revisit those objects by opening your Favorites and Recent Items list and clicking on the title.