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