Unassigning Order Relases from PlannedShipments from BPEL

[krishna.chari]

Hi,
I am new to OTM and my background is Fusion and BPEL.
We are in a go-live situation and any information from you will really help.
We are using Fusion/BPEL to integrate the EBS-OTM with the Warehouse RedPrairie systems. We have successfully implemented BPEL interfaces for integrating EBS/OTM for Order Releases and PlannedShipments.

Now, we are trying to finalize ShipmentActuals process.

If the Warehouse was unable to ship the orders as planned in OTM, we have the requirement to update this via BPEL. So, if all the orders were not shipped as per the PlannedShipment,
1. Drop/unassign order releases from Shipments in OTM ( in Proof of Delivery )
2. Add/assign orders to the Shipments it was shipped with in OTM.

Does OTM support this functionality ? I understand that through the front-end it is possible to unassign/delete Order Releases from a Shipment that is in Proof of Delivery.
Is this functionality exposed through a Web Service, or API levels ? I have a BPEL Process that receives data from the Warehouse system. I am not sure how I should update the original plannedShipment in OTM to drop the order releases that was shipped as part of a different shipment.
Thanks
Krishna

[AlejandroBarba]

Re: Unassigning Order Relases from PlannedShipments from BPEL

Hi Krishna,

We looked into that functionality for a similar process some years ago but shamefully we never got to implement it but the on-line help for "Shipment Interfaces (INS)" provides you information about how to remove or add ship units to Shipments using the interface.

It seems like you will need to remove the ship unit first and then in a second transaction add the ship unit to the right shipment. I do not think you can do it all with one single transaction but it might be worth trying.

Hope this helps,

Alejandro B.

[chrisplough]

Re: Unassigning Order Relases from PlannedShipments from BPEL

Alejandro,

Good point and thanks for the Help reference - I didn't think to look there.

The part I couldn't remember was whether you had to delete the shipment, make the adjustments and re-tender, re-plan -- or if the adjustments could be done post-planning without backtracking.

--Chris

[krishna.chari]

Re: Unassigning Order Relases from PlannedShipments from BPEL

Thank You AlejandroBarba and Chris for taking the time to respond.
I looked at shipunits - but seemed like there can be several ship units for an order release. That means we will first have to locate all the ship units for the order release and then unassign each of them. There can potentially be upto 400 ship units - so looking for a higher level API/interface which I can invoke and which will in turn take care of the shipunits.
On the OTM application front-end, I am able to select "Unassign Order Release" after selecting an Order Release ID. Trying to see if they have exposed this as a public external interface/API.
Thanks
Krishna

[chrisplough]

Re: Unassigning Order Relases from PlannedShipments from BPEL

Krishna,

I understand your concern and the number of ship units does make the initial approach difficult. I know the functionality you're referring to (Unassign Order Release), but am not aware of any external APIs that allow access to this. I've reviewed my integration docs/notes and have still come up blank. Unless they've added something in a recent CU update, then I don't believe that it's possible.

Has anyone else seen a way to access this functionality externally?

Thanks,
Chris

[bmj_23]

Re: Unassigning Order Relases from PlannedShipments from BPEL

Hi - I have implemented the two scenarios that you mention (Drop/unassign order releases from Shipments in OTM and Add/assign orders to the Shipments in OTM) using the ActualShipment XML.

Basically, once shipments are planned, a PlannedShipment XML is sent to the clients ERP system and once the goods are shipped, an ActualShipment XML is sent back from the ERP to OTM to update the number of ship units that were actually shipped along with the actual weights of those shipments.

To do this integration design correctly required a pretty good understanding of the shipment ship unit database layout, how that relates to order releases / order release lines / order bases and shipments as well as the various transaction codes that are available to update / delete / add / modify shipment ship units on existing shipments using the ActualShipment XML API.

I understand that you may have 400+ shipment ship units - but do you really need that many ? Appreciate its quite late in your design / integration, but is that not going to cause other performance issues with that many ship units ?

If you do really can have 400+ ship units on a shipment, I think you may face other issues in your design...dont forget, you can have either 1 ship unit with a count of 400, or 400 ship units with a count of 1...big difference though in the design and you want to make sure you have got that right.

Either way, the business scenarios you have outlined have been implemented before but its a little more complex (unfortunately) than having a "unassign order release" action available via integration.

Get some advice from an experienced OTM technical consultant that has done that before would be my advice. We didnt do that in our project and it introduced considerable delays.

[krishna.chari]

Re: Unassigning Order Relases from PlannedShipments from BPEL

Hi - I have implemented the two scenarios that you mention (Drop/unassign order releases from Shipments in OTM and Add/assign orders to the Shipments in OTM) using the ActualShipment XML.

Basically, once shipments are planned, a PlannedShipment XML is sent to the clients ERP system and once the goods are shipped, an ActualShipment XML is sent back from the ERP to OTM to update the number of ship units that were actually shipped along with the actual weights of those shipments.

To do this integration design correctly required a pretty good understanding of the shipment ship unit database layout, how that relates to order releases / order release lines / order bases and shipments as well as the various transaction codes that are available to update / delete / add / modify shipment ship units on existing shipments using the ActualShipment XML API.

I understand that you may have 400+ shipment ship units - but do you really need that many ? Appreciate its quite late in your design / integration, but is that not going to cause other performance issues with that many ship units ?

If you do really can have 400+ ship units on a shipment, I think you may face other issues in your design...dont forget, you can have either 1 ship unit with a count of 400, or 400 ship units with a count of 1...big difference though in the design and you want to make sure you have got that right.

Either way, the business scenarios you have outlined have been implemented before but its a little more complex (unfortunately) than having a "unassign order release" action available via integration.

Get some advice from an experienced OTM technical consultant that has done that before would be my advice. We didnt do that in our project and it introduced considerable delays.

Thank You for your reply. It was very helpful. Do you have any samples that can give me a quick start on this ? Oracle is escalating my request to see if they can provide a new API for this.
It is too late in the game for me to get into number of shipunits as this is driven by EBS Shipping Execution and OTM. The BPEL/middleware layer does not make decisions pertaining to this. What I want to do is integrate this in the best way I can through Fusion. Then if there are problems while testing like performance, I will have more of a justification to call for going over the design and even calling for changing some aspects.
Any samples, documents,links will GREATLY help and be greatly APPRECIATED.
Please respond as quickly as you can as I am on a very tight deadline here.
Thank You
Krishna

[krishna.chari]

Re: Unassigning Order Relases from PlannedShipments from BPEL

Just thought this will be helpful to others who are trying to integrate as well. Oracle Consulting suggested this solution which seems a lot cleaner for my purposes.
Set up an agent in OTM that will listen for changes to a fields on the order release. Eg: External status or ref number identifier of the Order Release. The agent will pick up values such as UNASSIGNED etc. When this value is set, the agent can unassign the order release frm the associated shipment.
From BPEL, update the Order Release, setting the status/ref number to "UNASSIGN" or some other user-configured value.
This seems to be a cleaner approach from an external program point of view.
Hope this is helpful.
Krishna

[bmj_23]

Re: Unassigning Order Relases from PlannedShipments from BPEL

Krishna - check the details of your scenarios...

If you want to remove a complete order from a shipment, then the solution of creating an agent to listen for an update to a refnum or a status value may work (depends on the status of the shipment I think).

I thought your scenario was to remove selected shipment ship units from the same order release on the same shipment...I dont think the workflow outlined above will work in that scenario...that is what the ActualShipment XML integration is designed to do.

In short, I dont think you can create workflow to remove (or modify) a specific shipment shipment unit (or the details of that shipment ship unit) on a shipment using the standard automation agents. You will have to verify that.

Speak to someone in Oracle consulting that has implemented that integration touch point would be my best advice. There are not a lot of folks that will have done that, but get to the people that have.

[chrisplough]

Re: Unassigning Order Relases from PlannedShipments from BPEL

Krishna,

On the Oracle side, there is one consultant I know of with considerable experience. I don't want to give his contact details away without his permission, but he worked on the GE Healthcare EBS / OTM implementation and if you ask around about that, you'll be able to find him.

Other than that - we've been the other consultancy with significant experience doing EBS / OTM integration. Working with a couple of clients out in CA and working with Lucidity on a client in Texas. So far, they've all required significant customization, in order to meet their business needs.

The difference is that the customizations were all done within the BPEL layer (which we have the ability to change via code), rather than the OTM XML APIs, which only Oracle can update/change.

Thanks,
Chris

[jeff.depaul]

Re: Unassigning Order Relases from PlannedShipments from BPEL

Thanks Chris,

Some additional context on the above issue which might be helpful to others facing similar challenges and as to why this approach was taken (it is implemented & works beautifully by the way) for removing the order from the shipment.

I am the tech lead for the project Krishna is working on and we are in the final stages of integrating EBS & OTM using Fusion 10.1.3.3. The approach of having to update all 400 ship units actually stems from the fact that our company has multiple packaging or UOMs for the same item shipping from different DC's. In EBS, this requirement is handled using multi-org functionality. The seeded integration shipped with the EBS/OTM product however, completely ignores multi-org setups for items. In fact, EBS items are "duplicated" in OTM since the item IDs are truely unique (by Org) although the item name is not.

So, our design on Item synch in Order Release needed to accomodate via the ship unit level. We concatenate the Org and UOM to the item iteself to overcome this limitation and keep items "Org specific".

The real issue is that true multi-org functionality (as designed in EBS) does not exist within OTM v.5.5 CU2. Would be very interested if there is any buzz of future releases supporting this requirement - does anyone know?
-Jeff