PLM and the Oracle E-Business Suite

Yesterday I blogged about Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and how giant enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendors are trying to development their own implementations of PLM.

To begin with, many IT professionals and business decision makers who have implemented ERP applications have exclaimed that the PLM is one of the best things which has come along in the Oracle E-Business suite since the descriptive flex field (DFF).
Oracle Product Lifecycle Management was known before by different names like Engineering Online and Advance Product Catalog. Compared to the Oracle Inventory or Engineering Modules, this products can changed documents in an HTML interface there is become a lot easier to manage items master and BOM's because with HTML, managing can be done using a web browser. The Oracle PLM has many functionalities which did not exist before in the Oracle E-Business Suite such as being able to ad more information to a part number using dynamic item attributes or ability to mass load items through Microsoft Excel and WebADI.

Before we go into details about PLM and the Oracle E-Business Suite, I would like define some common terms.

PLM Item Catalog – this could be considered the main component which is organized by the Catalog groups of the Inventory Module in order to extend definition into a hierarchy. Such hierarchy can have nodes called “Item Catalog Category” (ICC).
Item Catalog Categories (ICC) – This is the node or catalog group wherein all items in the item master are assigned. Only one item can be assigned to an ICC. In order to have a PLM functionality, an item must be assigned to the item master. ICC in PLM is the same as the Catalog Group in Oracle Inventory.

Catalog – In PLM, Catalogs are the Category sets in the Inventory Modules but there is a difference. In the PLM, there is added security feature which is not found in Oracle Inventory even if they have the same category.
Operational Attributes – This refer to attributes existing only the mtl_system_items table. These operational attributes could neither be created nor deleted from the system as they come with Oracle when it is shipped and there are used in defining items for other modules. Typically, they exists as mapped groups to a module in Oracle like Inventory, Purchasing, Order Management, WIP, Planning, and other modules.

PLM User Defined attribute groups – These groups form one of PLM's major functionality advantages. Users of Oracle EBS who want additional ability for adding information to an items and then use the same added information for defining, searching and integrating data can use these groups in customization. The attributes should be defined withing a group or tied up to an ICC.

One of the good things about PLM is its security feature, which, needless to say, is very important when dealing with business data. In PLM, Roles are objects based on their functionality. The role can be defined against an item, group, change inventory, ICC and just about any object within the Oracle EBS/PLM. Privileges, like in other applications, refer to the allowed function a user can have. Groups are a related cluster of user assigned to certain sets of privileges. For example, a group could be customers groups, accounting group, supplier group and many other divisions in the company.

Now that some vital terms are defined, tomorrow we will go into details of the functionalities of Oracle PLM.