Oracle E-Business Suite Advanced Procurement

I guess so much has been said about Oracle E-Business Suite Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) in my last blog.

As name clearly indicates, Oracle E-Business application is a suite of applications and a company can choose to implement all modules in one go or implement a single module at a time. Whatever the choice of company is, it depends on how it needs and how much it can afford.

Anyway, one of the modules in the Oracle E-Business Suite is the Advanced Procurement Module.

Procurement is the act of acquiring goods or services at best possible total cost of ownership. Also considered in procurement is having the right quality and quality of the good or service, doing procurement at the right place and time for the benefit of the organization.

The Oracle E-Business Suite Advanced Procurement also comes as several modules.

The iProcurement module helps control spending of employee through a self service requisitioning function. This module is web enabled with shopping system which can allow end users like employees create, manage and monitor orders while a central control is managed by the purchasing department. With iProcurement, it can be easy for the business organization to implement policies in pricing agreements because all transactions can be reflected.

The iSupplier Portal module is an enterprise wide application responsible for structuring all supplier communication via a secure internet based portal. Dynamic companies sometimes find correspondence through phones and emails a waste of time and proned to errors. The iSupplier Portal provides update information related to the business such as purchase orders, delivery information, and payment status. Through the iSupplier Portal the company and the suppliers can exchange communication related to requests, ship notices, payments, and profile data.

The Procurement Contracts module helps create and enforce better purchasing contracts in an error free fashion. This module lets a company take control of contract life cycle starting with authoring to closeout.

The Purchasing module streamlines processes related to purchase orders and at the same time strengthens compliance of company policies. It efficiently automates purchasing making it easy for buyers to transact and improve management of supply base. This module has a rich store of policy of supplier information.

The Supplier Network module connects customers and suppliers using intenet based models. It features message setup, transformation and routing services so that online administration can be a breeze.


The Services Procurement module helps an company gain complete control of services spending by helping manage services procurement with an online step by step process.

The Sourcing modules facilitates online collaboration and negotiation with other organizations to make information exchange regarding sourcing requirements and contracts a lot easy.


The Daily Business Intelligence for Procurement is a rich web bases reporting and analysis tool that can help spot opportunities for company savings and track performance of suppliers. Because it is web based, decision makers can easily access information from anywhere. It also has security features to ward of potential cheats.

So there it goes. Tomorrow is another day and another innovative software solutions from the E-Business Suite.

The Oracle E-Business Suite Product Lifecycle Management

As promised, I will blog today about the Oracle E-Business Suite Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) which is actually a set of applications which work in collaboration to help business organizations effectively manage all activities related to products innovation and development. These product related activities include from product conceptualization to retirement.

Because product development and management is a fairly complex area, there needs to be a unified data model which will guide the company in having a single and accurate view of the product. This will ensure that that company can accelerate introduction of new products while maximizing its value throughout the entire life cycle as well as future investments.

Business organizations have different product requirements depending on the industry they are operating. Oracle's E-Business Suite has tailored its PLM to suit the needs.

For instance, Oracle has these keen observations as the basis for tailoring their PLM to specific industries:

• In life sciences, the rate of growth in the investment required to bring a drug to market is outpacing growth in the return on marketed drugs.
• In consumer electronics, it is not uncommon for lifecycles to be as short as a few months, with extremely narrow product introduction windows–a delay in product introduction could have significant impact on company performance.
• In complex manufacturing industries, as the outsourcing trend accelerates, ensuring consistency and secure collaboration across company and geographic boundaries becomes a pre-requisite to on-time, on-cost product delivery.

Oracle PLM has a feature to integrate and support both manufacturing and service industries. This will make a company have the correct information and analysis tool needed to find the right bets and maximize captured value from services and products.

Oracle PLM's Analytics can help companies strategically allocate resources and make smart decisions. The Analytics tool is so advance that it can work in collaboration with other modules across the enterprise to reduce cost throughout the value chain.

One can configure the company products to meet the demands of the customers using Oracle PLM. The information about product attributes can be taken from the costing analytics. PLM's configuration feature can provide customer and designers with a catalog of profitable options.

Although investing in Oracle E-Business Suite Product Lifecycle Management means spending money on buying the software, it could also actually mean a reduction in the company's IT cost because of the Oracle architecture advantage.

Oracle, world leader in database software and enterprise resource management (ERP), can make possible a superior integration of both Oracle and non-Oracle systems. This way a company can have a single definition of suppliers, customers, partners, services and products. With one source of information, decision making can be made faster.
E-Business Suite Product Lifecycle Management also protects a company's intellectual property by using role based views so only certain employees can view certain information.

In tomorrow's blog, I will try to write other innovation software applications within the E-Business Suite. For now, I hope you well in all your business and personal endeavors.

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.