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Tuesday 30 June 2015

Quick Interview Questions on ASCP



1.     What is the difference between ASCP and MRP?
            ASCP allows users to perform holistic planning by taking into consideration multiple organizations in an EBS instance where MRP plan considers only one inventory organization and multiple plans needs to be created for multiple organizations. ASCP allows constraint planning thereby taking into consideration supplier, organization capacity whereas MRP only facilitates unconstraint planning.


2.     What is the difference in running an ECC and EDD plan?
            ASCP plan with Enforce capacity constraints option ensures that all capacity constraints are honored which might result in demand due date getting pushed in to future.
ASCP plan with Enforce demand due date constraint option ensures that demand due date is given the priority and plan would overload Supplier or resource capacities to honor the Demand due date.


3.     What is the role of Memory based planner?
            The planning engine’s Memory Based Planner calculates the planned order demand due dates for dependent demands based on the actual requirement date with respect to lead-time. It saves the calculated requirement date based on the lead-time value for subsequent calculation.


4.     Explain the process of data collection?
            The data collection process consists of the Data Pull and the Operational Data Store (ODS) Load. The collection process lets you collect across Oracle Application Versions.

The two types of collections process are standard and continuous.
·         Standard collections process: Using the standard collections process, you can
manually run three types of collection methods including a complete refresh, a net change refresh, or a targeted refresh on specific business entities.
·         Continuous collections process: The continuous collections process is an automated process of data collection that efficiently synchronizes the data on the planning server by looking up the sources. If you opt for continuous collections, the system automatically determine the type of collection that needs to be run on entities selected by you. The continuous collections process collects data from the sources with the least user intervention. The Continuous Collections concurrent program performs continuous collections.


5.     What is the architecture of ASCP?
      Oracle Advanced Planning Suite has a component architecture that separates the transaction data and associated processing (for example, inventory receipts and order entry) in a source instance from the planning calculations done in a destination instance. This allows planning calculations to be done on a different physical machine than the machine that performs transactions and results in better system response. It also allows planning calculations (demand planning, inventory planning, supply planning and order promising) to be applied simultaneously to information from across multiple source instances, which is useful when transaction information for a global supply chain is spread across multiple instances.


6.     What is the purpose of exception messages?
·         The planning engine issues exception messages (exceptions) to:
·         Alert you to a situation that may need your intervention, for example, a past due sales order
Recommend that you perform an action; for example, change the date of a supply order. The planning engine issues certain exceptions for all plan types and others for only certain plan types. The planning engine only issues exceptions against items and resources that have exception sets assigned to them.


7.     What is meant by Hub and Spoke Planning?
      Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning provides you with the option of using
demands from all planned orders during hub and spoke planning. When you use your plans as demand schedules to other plans, the planning engine considers all planned orders in the source plan as demands and explodes down the bills of material creating demands for the lower level components.

      Hub and spoke planning uses a multi-plan approach where you can plan across
the supply chain at the top level and then release planned orders to a lower level
manufacturing plan for all MRP planned items. The top level plan includes only end items or end items with critical sub-assemblies, and typically only the final assembly plants. The lower level plan (MRP) is at the component level and includes the final assembly plants and the component manufacturing plants. Hub and spoke planning is a commonly used term for this type of subset planning.


8.     What is the difference between component substitution and End item substitution?
      Oracle ASCP supports two types of substitution: component substitution and end-item-level substitution.

      The term end-item refers to the finished good or saleable product. End-item-level substitution is an acceptable business practice in many industries. It is often possible to fulfill customer demand on time when the requested item is not available by substituting a more functionally rich product. Substitution is also done to use up existing inventory of older, functionally equivalent items.

Component substitution refers to substitution of component of BOM with another component.


9.     What is purpose of setting Demand Priority rules?
      Demand Priority rules guide the constraint plan in terms of identifying supply for demand based on the user defined rule.

      Demand quantities that are pegged to planned order supplies are considered in internal priority order. Demands with higher internal priority get the first opportunities to take up available resource and material capacities; demands with lower internal priorities can only use remaining resource and material capacities and are therefore more likely to be satisfied late.


10.  How is organization security maintained in ASCP?
      Organization security restricts plan information access to authorized individuals. Oracle ASCP allows users to associate job responsibilities to organizations for security purposes. This ensures that you see/change planning data in an organization only if you have a job responsibility associated with the organization.

Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning Overview


Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP) is the main planning engine Oracle is offering, it has advanced features than the traditional MRP module. Its plans the supply (POs, Requisitions, work orders) based on demand (forecasts, sales orders).

ASCP functional features:
  • Global Planning engine: ASCP can plan one inventory organization or all inventory organizations, it can consider all inter-plant supply/demand in one process.
  • Mixed modes of manufacturing: ASCP can support discrete, process, project & flow manufacturing in one plan.
  • Detail planning: ASCP can do short-term detail planning as well long term aggregate planning in one shot.
  • Constraint based planning: Traditional MRP is unconstrained, it plans for the future and raises exceptions if there are any constraints. Constraint based planning can be done by either capacity as a constraint or meeting demand is an constraint.
  • Optimzed Planning: Based on buisness rules setup, ASCP can plan the the output to optimize the criteria given by users.
  • Multiple versions of Oracle: The planning instance support multiple source ERP instances which are running on a different versions of Oracle (R10.7, R11, R12).
  • Plan Simulations: Planners can simulate the changes and review impact without actually making the necessary changes.
Data Collections: Data collections are set of programs that collect the base data (items, boms, routings, onhands, sales orders, purchase orders etc) from source ERP instance into planning instance to perform the supply chain planning.

Oracle ASCP Collection Methods




There are three ways data can be collected into Oracle ASCP or APS or Value Chain Planning suite.

1) Standard Collections:
  • Complete Refresh: In this all existing collected data will be purged and new data is imported.
  • Targeted Refresh: Similar to Complete Refresh but for each object. You can selectively choose which objects require completed refresh, only those targeted objects will be refreshed.
  • Net Change refresh: Imports only the changes that happened since last refresh. This methods work for supply / demand changes.
Objects supported under Net change mode.
  • Sales Orders
  • Reservations
  • Master Production Schedules demands
  • Master Demand Schedules demands
  • WIP Component Demands
  • WIP repetitive item demands
  • Forecast demands
  • User demands
  • Master production schedule supplies
  • User supplies
  • Purchase Order Supplies
  • On-hand supplies
  • Work orders in Oracle WIP
  • Resource availability
  • Supplier capacity
  • Bill of Material
  • Routing Operations
  • Components needed for Routing
  • Resources attached to Routing
  • Resource requirements for WIP Jobs
  • Resources for WIP Jobs
  • Items
  • Item categories
  • Capacity
Not supported objects for Net change Method
  • Category sets
  • Default item category
  • Simulation sets
  • Department resources
  • Resource shift setup
  • Hard reservations
  • Projects or project tasks
  • UOM
  • Sourcing rules
  • Bills of Resources
  • Calendars
  • Shipping networks
  • Parameters
  • Planners
  • Suppliers
  • Resource Groups
  • Demand classes
  • Available To Promise rules
  • Trading Partners
2) Continuous Collections:
Continuous collections systematically decides whether to run targeted refresh or net change based on a given threshold value (parameter). It runs based on snapshot data.

3) Legacy Collections:
This method is useful to import data from non-oracle ERP systems. Data is imported from flat files or from staging tables. Oracle provides the templates for each data/transaction objects, if data uploaded in that format, oracle imports data into planning server.

Monday 29 June 2015

Oracle Order Management – Internal Sales Order (ISO)


Internal Sales Order (ISO):


Internal Sales Orders (ISO) are used to transfer material from one inventory to another inventory across the Operating units within the same company.
IR ISO Setups to be performed in Oracle Inventory, Oracle Purchasing & Oracle Order Management Modules.

 

Setups for IRISO:

Oracle Inventory Module

S no
Setups
1
Item Definition
2
Inventory Location Creation
3
Inventory Creation
4
Attach Location to the Inventory
5
Shipping Networks
6
Intercompany Transaction Flow

 

Oracle Purchasing Module

S no
Setups
1
Document Type Creation for IR
2
Approval Hierarchy for IR
3
Receiving option
4
Purchasing option

 

Oracle Order Management Module

S no
Setups
1
Internal Order Transaction type
2
Internal Org as Customer
3
Shipping Parameters

 

IRISO Prerequisites:

1. Item definition:
       Inventory Item, Stockable, Transactable, Reservable - enabled in Inventory Tab
       Purchased, Purchasable – enabled in Purchasing Tab
       Shippable, Internal Ordered, Internal Orders Enabled & OE Transactable – enabled in OM Tab
2. Item assigned to requester & Shipping orgs
3. Shipping Network is defined for both orgs
4. Intercompany Transaction Flow is defined for both orgs
5. Internal org are created as customers
6. Internal Sales order should be created

 

IRISO Flow:

1. Internal Requisition (IR) created by the Requester
2. Internal Requisition (IR) approved by the Approver
3. “Create Internal Orders” concurrent to be triggered
4. “Order Import” concurrent to be triggered
5. Internal Sales Order (ISO) is created
6. Internal Sales Order is picked & shipped by Shipping org
7. Material is received by Requester org

 

Internal Sales Order - Data Flow:


Extracted from CSB's Blog on ISO
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