Oracle Order Management: Creating A Program of Compliance, Governance, and Good UX

Ensuring compliance and governance is crucial for any organization. Oracle Cloud’s systems provide robust tools for making certain that business processes comply with regulatory requirements and for establishing and maintaining effective governance.

This is the third installment in our series on utilizing Oracle Order Management to gain efficiency in your supply chain operations. Catch up on parts one and two, covering supplier drop shipments and end-to-end drop shipment automation.

Why is Compliance and Governance Important?

Compliance ensures that your organization is always operating within the legal, regulatory and corporate requirements for your transactions.  Oracle Order Management and Procurement applications can each be implemented with specific compliance solutions.

• Within Oracle Order Management, activate Global Trade Compliance to enable screening for export compliance at order submission and/or downstream fulfillment. Compliance checks can be made against several compliance types including restricted parties, sanctioned territories and trade controls.  Standard Order Management features including processing constraints and approval workflows can be configured to drive whether and how the sales order or line may proceed based on screening results.  This is a global solution that can impart appropriate controls based on government borders.
• Within Oracle Procurement, Supplier Qualification Management can help you manage the compliance of your supplier base with company policies. Through online survey questionnaires, you can collect and manage supplier data that may qualify them for future proposal requests for example.

An effective program of compliance would contribute to the reduction of financial risk from trade violations and supplier disruptions while increasing supply chain throughput and performance.

Oracle Cloud systems also provide tools for governance.  In terms of managing the relevant data and processes, security and risk, and strategic alignment toward value realization, examples from Oracle Order Management and Procurement include:

• Order Management orchestration processes and definable tasks and statuses, order processing constraints, approval flows, and pauses or holds
• Procurement approval processes, document types, product catalog categories
• Drop Ship Change Orders for synchronizing sales order and purchase order line activities
• Security roles and data access privileges for security and risk management
• Fusion Analytics Warehouse for performance against operational and strategic goals and value delivery

This ensures that all business processes are aligned and functioning as expected. By ensuring compliance and governance, you can significantly reduce the risk of legal issues and improve the overall efficiency of your operations.

Enhancing User Experience

Oracle Cloud applications provide a user-friendly interface that enhances the overall user experience.  Features include home page “infolet” graphics with drilldown to transaction detail; user customizable searches that can be collapsed when not in use; a well-arranged global header with easy access to work notifications, watch lists, and navigation favorites; and a detailed view of sales order fulfillment line information including references to the linked drop ship procurement document line.  This ensures that all users can easily access and use the systems, improving overall efficiency.

To supplement the standard Oracle Cloud UI, Oracle Application Express (APEX) is a low code application development platform that can be used for creating a dashboard-style user interface.  With click-through graphics for drilling down to report results, APEX adds actionable buttons so that users can perform functions directly on one or more business transactions at a time.  APEX allows a much more tailored experience by arranging features as needed for optimum business processing.

Fig 3.  Example layout for an APEX user interface

Specific benefits from a recent APEX implementation for Oracle Order Management include:

• One-click to release a paused sales order or multiple orders
• Direct return-to-vendor capability, vs the two step RMA-RTV process in Fusion UI
• Ability to submit multiple drop ship orders at one time
• Ability to fulfill a drop ship sales order in “bulk”, with quantities prepopulated
• Click-through report graphics to actionable transaction data

The supplemental dashboard ensures that all users can easily access and use the systems. It also ensures that all information is easily accessible, improving the overall efficiency of your operations.

Starting with 24D, Oracle Order Management Cloud is embedding improvements to its UI that are making it easier to transact by simplifying data entry and manipulation.  Currently APEX offers a very good solution for tailoring the UI to best suit your user needs, while Oracle rolls out further enhancements in its future releases.

Conclusion

By going deeper into the features of Oracle Cloud Order Management and Procurement you can gain greater speed and accuracy for your implementation.   At the same time, taking a broader perspective across adjacent applications will help you to provide a more effective business process flow that is truly end to end.  Completing the picture with a robust solution that incorporates compliance, governance, and a satisfying user experience will lay a solid foundation for the road ahead.

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