Oracle Procurement Management: Enabling Efficient End-to-End Drop Shipment Flows

This is the second installment of our series on utilizing Oracle Cloud’s Order Management and Procurement options to streamline your drop ship business operations. In part one of our series, we gave an overview of going beyond the standard drop ship configurations to achieve greater automation benefits.

In this article, we will take a broader view. We’ll discuss deriving overall process efficiencies through features available in downstream applications.

In Figure above, stars represent further opportunities for automation

A smooth and efficient end-to-end flow can be a key differentiator for your business model.  Savy supply chain and financial leaders will look further downstream from Oracle Order Management and Procurement applications to derive even more efficiencies, ensuring that drop-ship business operations overall will be seamless and hassle-free.

Use Oracle Order Management to actively monitor the progress of drop shipments through the Manage Fulfillment Lines and Manage Return Fulfillment Lines user interface.  Starting with Oracle Cloud Release 24B there are enhanced capabilities for splitting drop ship lines into partial shipments, making it easier to disposition the remaining quantities while minimizing the need for cancellations.

Use Oracle Receivables to speed up the time to account for drop ship revenue and costs by configuring the Receivables transaction source for autocompletion of transactions and by scheduling Create Accounting process to automate posting to the ledger.

Use Oracle Payables to ensure that the payables invoice can be matched to the drop ship purchase order and will automatically validate and approve.

Taken together, these features can result in an effective end-to-end solution for supplier sourced sales orders, allowing for better planning and coordination with suppliers and more streamlined business operations.  It also ensures that financial transactions are accurately recorded and processed in a timely manner.

Providing Accurate Master Data

Accurate and up-to-date master data is crucial for ensuring that your operations run smoothly.  Equally important is that your master data is properly classified and categorized to facilitate rules-based automation and accounting.

Within Order Management, you may design your processes using features including order types, line types, orchestration processes, and transformation rules to maximize automation while accommodating specific needs by customer, product, or line of business.   For your processes to complete successfully, customer classifications, product attributes, product categorizations, organization structures, and account mapping sets must be accurate to drive correct system behaviors and provide robust financial and operational reporting.

For drop shipment scenarios, be sure to test a representative mix of master data with variations by order/return type, customer, product, or other relevant entity as early as your timeline will allow, to affirm that system transactions will generate the expected tax and accounting entries and dates.  By ensuring that your master data is accurately configured and converted correctly, you can significantly reduce errors and improve overall efficiency.

Conclusion

Adding automation is an excellent way to integrate more efficiency into your order management and procurement practices. Oracle Order Management has features that can help your drop ship processes improve and scale to meet the expanding needs of your business.