Oracle Inventory lets you use item catalogs to partition your items into groups that share common characteristics. You can determine in advance what is required to uniquely define an item in each group. You can define your catalogs by setting up as many distinct item catalog groups as you need to partition your items and use unique characteristics within your catalog group to completely describe the items you assign to the group.
Oracle Inventory provides item catalogs to help you quickly locate items based on key characteristics
Business Needs
With Oracle Inventory you can:
· Easily and intuitively search for items based on cataloged characteristics
· Find common existing items when developing an engineering prototype
· Use a standard language of item characteristics to describe your items
· Maintain detailed item descriptions without embedding the descriptions in your item numbers
· Implement group technology
Major Features
- Catalog Groups
Oracle Inventory lets you define catalog groups to match the natural groupings of your items. For example, you can define separate catalog groups for finished goods, sub-assemblies, and raw materials, or break it down further by defining catalog groups by commodity for raw materials.
- Item Characteristics
Each catalog group can have its own set of item characteristics, called descriptive elements. You can define as many descriptive elements as necessary to describe the characteristics of your items. For each descriptive element, you can specify whether an entry for the element is optional, giving you complete flexibility in defining your catalog.
- Item Description Default
You can use descriptive element values as a default item description. You can choose the descriptive elements you want Oracle Inventory to use to build your item descriptions. This gives you consistent descriptions for all your items, again helping you to quickly and easily identify any item.
- Item Aliases
You can specify any number of aliases for items that belong to a catalog group.
- Item Search
Once you have cataloged your items, you can use the item catalog to quickly and easily find any item. You can search by one or more descriptive elements to quickly retrieve all items with the specific characteristics you specify.
Example
Companies in the same industry can communicate effectively while referring to items without naming their items identically because item cataloging could provide a standard language in referring to items. For e.g. Companies that manufacture computer monitors communicate effectively (because the items they manufacture are in the computer monitor catalog group) but they do not need to name their items identically. E.g. in the manufacture of shoes, the different catalog groups could be leather shoes, synthetic rubber shoes, etc.
A detailed description of what an item is could be stored without embedding the meaning in the item number.
You can search for items by their description –
You can update the description of an item at any time with the values of the descriptive elements
You can find common existing types of items
You can provide prompt service for you customers if they dont know the names of the items but know how the items look
References
Oracle Metalink
Oracle.com
Inventory User Guide
