Oracle Inventory Management

With Oracle® Inventory Management you can improve inventory visibility, reduce inventory levels and execute inventory operations. All of your material in each line of business and stage of the inventory life cycle can be tracked in a single system. Increased transparency will reduce the need for local buffer stocks, and inventory will be located where it previously wasn’t known to exist. Carefully combining ease-of-use with sophisticated and broad functionality, Oracle Inventory Management supports customers with basic materials management needs as well as those with highly-complex requirements.

Improve Inventory Visibility

Oracle Inventory Management allows you to consolidate your disparate inventory tracking and control systems into a single, global inventory management solution for material in every stage of the product life cycle across all of your types of business. Improve Inventory Visibility with End-to-End Inventory Life cycle Support Oracle Inventory Management supports efficiently determining whether you have the inventory you need and where it is – whether it is in transit, in receiving, in storage, staged for shipping, or consigned. Inventory information may be efficiently managed for a wide range of material including components, ingredients, finished goods, spare parts, returns, scrap, and rotables. Multi-dimensional inquiries support inventory analysis by location, product, lot, serial, or material status.

Consolidate Inventory Systems with Multi-Mode Inventory Support

Oracle Inventory Management eliminates the need to run different inventory systems across your enterprise. The requirements of a wide range of business models are supported including those of distributors, discrete manufacturers,engineer-to-order manufacturers, lean manufacturers, process manufacturers, and repair/maintenance organizations. Your inventory visibility improves greatly when you don’t need different inventory systems for each of these types of business.

Quarantine Recalled Material using Product Genealogy & Material Status

Efficient and accurate product genealogy and traceability are important for companies to mitigate the risk and exposure in product recall situations, in addition to satisfying the basic controls required by regulators. Oracle Inventory Management captures and maintains in a multi-level composition history which component lots and/or serials were used in each lot or serial-controlled end product, from supplier receipt through production and customer shipment. If you identify a quality issue with a specific component lot, you can efficiently identify the locations of all of the end product in which that component was used. That material can be quarantined by updating the status of the material.

Reduce Inventory Levels

Oracle Inventory Management gives you a variety of tools to reduce your inventory levels. The more accurate your inventory levels and efficient your replenishment, the less safety stock you need to hold. Consigning material from suppliers allows you to reduce the amount of inventory you need to own. All of these help you reduce your inventory carrying cost and improve your bottom line.

Reduce Inventory Levels with Flexible Replenishment Management

Multiple inventory replenishment methods allow you to reduce your inventory carrying costs without compromising fill-rates and customer satisfaction. Oracle Inventory Management will support your transformation to a lean enterprise including support for pull-based replenishment using Kanban cards. Now you can use Kanban replenishment in all of your facilities, not just your manufacturing plants. Inventory levels may also be replenished using min-max and reorder point planning. Replenishment counts and PAR replenishment counts allow you to refill non-quantity tracked stock locations. Flexibly defined sourcing rules determine whether the material will be purchased from a supplier, produced in manufacturing, or transferred.

Reduce Owned Inventory with Supplier Consignment

Consigning inventory from suppliers allows your organization to defer the transfer of ownership from shipment to use. You purchase only the inventory that you actually need and reduce the time you carry the cost of the inventory. Through a holistic procure-to-pay solution, all aspects of your consignment process are managed including maintaining consignment agreements, sending consumption advice, and optionally self-billing your suppliers. Consumption of consigned material is efficiently managed through automatic consumption when issuing to manufacturing, selling to customers, or transferring within a facility. Collaboration with suppliers is enabled through the Oracle iSupplier Portal. Supplier consignment can be used in combination with the Value Chain Planning feature Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) for those organizations that want to outsource inventory replenishment.

Increase Inventory Accuracy with Cycle Counting and Physical Inventory

Regular inventory control counts increase your inventory accuracy. Higher inventory accuracy improves fill-rates and reduces the amount of inventory you need to carry. You can focus on counting the most important items more frequently through classifying them based on a variety of criteria, such as value or usage. When discrepancies are found between the system and the actual quantity, these discrepancies are routed to supervisors for approval. Hit/miss and exact match metrics provide managers with better visibility to the inventory accuracy trends and issues. In addition to periodic cycle counting capabilities, Oracle Inventory Management also offers full physical inventory counting functionality for those organizations whose auditors mandate full warehouse counts for reporting purposes.

Execute Inventory Operations

Oracle Inventory Management helps you your inventory operations through setup and maintenance tools as well as robust material transaction support.

Track Material Attributes using Status, Lot, and Serial Control

Oracle Inventory Management supports capturing and maintaining a range of material attributes. Lots and serials may have attributes such as country of origin and grade. You can ensure that obsolete material doesn’t get shipped to customers or that quarantined material does not get issued to manufacturing using user-definable material statuses on a location, lot, serial, or on-hand quantity.

Fulfill Globally with Intercompany Invoicing

Oracle Inventory Management supports the requirements of both global sales organizations and global supply chains. As your business operations expand, you will have more customers and facilities in different regions. Oracle Inventory Management supports fulfilling your order from any organization regardless of whether the material is purchased, manufactured or shipped from your distribution center. The proper intercompany invoices to reimburse the facility that supplied the product will be generated, including when the material has been purchased and shipped directly to customers from a centralized procurement organization. If your business model involves selling through intermediate legal entities, multiple levels of intercompany invoices will be automatically generated.

Efficiently Manage Numerous Facilities with Organization Hierarchies

As your business grows, it becomes a challenge to set up and maintains hundreds of inventory organizations in the system. You can efficiently create new organizations through copying the setup of an existing organization, including the locations, items, bills of materials and routings. Organizations that are logically related may be grouped into an organization hierarchy to aid in viewing aggregate inventory balances and to ease maintenance. Closing your inventory periods becomes as easy as a single click for all of the inventory organizations within a hierarchy. Oracle Inventory Management provides you with tools to efficiently manage large and growing businesses.

Oracle E-Business Suite—The Complete Solution

Oracle E-Business Suite enables companies to efficiently manage customer processes, manufacture products, ship orders, collect payments, and more—all from applications that are built on unified information architecture. This information architecture provides a single definition of your customers, suppliers, employees, and products—all important aspects of your business. Whether you implement one module or the entire Suite, Oracle E-Business Suite enables you to share unified information across the enterprise so you can make smarter decisions with better information.

Key Features

• Support discrete inventory, process inventory, and spare parts in a single solution
• Track global inventory balances and transact in dual units of measure
• Optionally deploy to distributed execution systems, such as distributed warehouse Management systems or third-party logistics providers
• Track product genealogy and transaction history
• Restrict material transactions  using user-defined status controls against locations, lots, serials, and on-hand
• Flexibly define, capture and maintain the lot and serial attributes