In November 2021, we reviewed the major changes coming with Oracle e-Business Suite Release 12.2.11. This post continues a series that began with details about modern UI changes in Release 12.2.11.
We resume this series by exploring the functional innovations of the new release. Note that Release 12.2.11 is cumulative, so in addition to new updates, it also includes the updates made as one-off patches to earlier 12.2 releases.
Industry-Specific Functions
Much of the time and energy that Oracle invests in product updates is aimed at large organizations with complex challenges. These industry-specific updates focus on particular organization types to solve their specific needs.
On the public sector side, G-Invoicing is a web-based app used to manage buy/sell transactions between U.S. federal agencies from the agreement of terms and conditions through to payment and processing. Oracle has worked with requesting and servicing agencies that run e-Business Suite (EBS) to provide G-Invoicing support for projects and procurement.
On the private sector side, functional updates help organizations like engineering and construction companies with support for project-centric purchases and shared-service support. This update allows one operating unit to make bulk purchases on behalf of many operating units where project work occurs. This enables more efficient and centralized procurement for global projects.
Another update with this release aids in budgetary control for labor and non-labor transactions. Release 12.2.11 enhancements to the Projects: Budgetary Control feature help improve cost control with expanded funds checking so that expenditure commitments are checked against available funds. Users can check funds to validate budget commitments for labor and non-labor costs, plus expenses tracked in external systems.
Cross-Industry Functions
Even disparate industries have similar functions. This set of release updates improves functions shared over a variety of industries.
Supply Chain Management
Returns on Internal Sales Orders: This update allows returns on sales orders within an enterprise to be handled the same as they would for external sales orders. This workflow improvement allows EBS to manage and account for returns on internal sales orders.
Order Management
Enhanced Milestone and Usage Billing: Several 12.2.X releases included better support for ordering and billing combinations including subscription orders, recurring billing, milestone billing, and usage-based billing. In the latest release, milestone billing lets you add and re-sequence billing milestones and attach more information to billing plans using flexfields. Usage-based billing is now more flexible and has added automation for various scenarios and offers better functionality for lease and finance management.
Inventory/Warehouse Management
Rules Using Material Classification: Previous 12.2.X releases introduced support for material classification codes to enable tracking additional attributes for an item, like country of origin or packaging type. Inbound capture of classification codes was added to facilitate inventory tracking and storage based on material classification. The 12.2.11 release added a Warehouse Management Rules Engine to guide put-a-way and pick operations by classification code. For example, you could classify seasonal items and have them put in one warehouse location to help expedite picking.
Process Manufacturing
Distributed Sampling: In 12.2.11, new distributed sampling capability allows users to define subsets or “units” of quality specifications for various product attributes, such as physical, chemical, and visual properties. This capability allows aggregation of quality results across labs and helps improve sampling workflows. This can be particularly helpful for food and beverage, metals, chemical, and pharmaceutical manufacturers which may be subject to stringent regulations for quality control.
Enterprise Asset Management
Enhanced Technician Assignment: Previous 12.2.X releases introduced a Mobile Maintenance app that allows managers to assign work to technicians and allows technicians to self-assign work. A previous release also provided an HTML interface to let managers mass assign work to technicians. The latest update now allows managers to inspect unassigned work order operations and match them to available and qualified technicians.
Time & Labor
Time Entry for Discrete Manufacturing: You can enter a timecard that associates time with Discrete Manufacturing work order operations. This provides consistency for management review and approval processes for managers with workers performing both manufacturing and maintenance time entries.
Additional APIs for Extensions and Integrations
These APIs are new to this release:
- Inventory: Create Sub-inventories
- BOM: Maintain Resources, Standard Operations and Routings
- BOM: Transfer Engineering Items to Manufacturing
- Product Hub: Update Customer Items and Customer Item Cross References
- Product Hub: Manufacturer Part Numbers
- Configured Items: Selective Copy Cross References
- Discrete Manufacturing: Change Order Notifications: Configuration
- Warehouse Management: Multi-Project LPN Consolidation
- Process Manufacturing: Draw Sample
Support for Outbound REST Services
Inbound REST services from APIs available through the EBS Integration Repository are already supported. The new release supports outbound REST services and the ability to associate the invocation of those services with new or existing Business Events for on-premises or in OCI EBS customers via an integrated SOA gateway (rest services framework.)
Continue this series review of Oracle EBS Release 12.2.11 with The New Features of Oracle EBS Release 12.2.11: Operational Efficiency.