Author: Zeeshan Rasheed, ERP Consultant at Namos Solutions
Procurement stands at the forefront of organisational efficiency, and Oracle continues to pioneer advancements in its latest 24B release. As businesses adapt to dynamic market demands, let’s explore additional features that promise to elevate procurement experience:
- Enhanced User Experience & Collaboration: Supply Chain Orchestration’s redesigned pages offer seamless visibility across all devices, enhancing user experience. Simpler B2B setup in Collaboration Messaging Framework fosters smoother interactions with service providers, promoting seamless collaboration.
- Improved PO transmission: Transmit Purchase Orders (POs) as uncompressed PDFs via email, enhancing accessibility for smaller suppliers and streamlining procurement operations.
- Extended Integration & Reporting: New REST resources facilitate seamless data exchange with external systems, covering Purchase Agreements and Supplier Negotiations. Improved Procurement Checklists and reporting features offer enhanced visibility and compliance monitoring for actionable insights.
- Enhanced Purchase Order Management & Order Line Attributes: Users can assign additional supplier contact emails and route orders based on chart of accounts segments, improving communication and workflow flexibility. Additionally, updating attributes on split order lines enhances control over quantities, dates, and shipping locations for improved order fulfilment and customer satisfaction.
- Enhanced Supplier Collaboration: Suppliers can export negotiation data to Excel for offline record-keeping, while automated reminders expedite response collection. Enhanced scoring ensures more accurate evaluation of supplier qualifications.
- Streamlined Contract Management Processes: Set expiration dates and reminders for contract documents directly from your DocuSign account, streamlining contract management processes.
In addition to the aforementioned features, the 24B release of Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement brings forth several notable enhancements aimed at further optimising procurement processes within businesses.
1. Purchasing: Simplified Blanket Purchase Agreement Creation
A streamlined process for creating Blanket Purchase Agreements (BPAs) is introduced, significantly enhancing efficiency. Users can now search for items and their associated manufacturers, manufacturer part numbers, suppliers, and supplier items, and select specific combinations to populate agreement lines. This enhancement enables users to efficiently manage agreement details and ensures accuracy in procurement transactions.
2. Purchasing: Seamless Integration with Product Information Management
Now, you can link master items with partner products straight from BPA imports, boosting the integration between Purchasing and Product Information Management (PIM). With key item details like class, number, and unit automatically fetched from BPA imports, businesses can avoid manual data entry, keeping their procurement records accurate and hassle-free.
3. Purchasing: Enhanced Special Handling Capabilities
Users can now create requisitions and purchase orders requiring special handling with ease. With the ability to capture handling details in special handling descriptive flexfields, organisations can cater to unique procurement scenarios, such as bill-only documents in the healthcare industry.
4. Supplier Model – Extending Next Generation Supplier Self-Service Registration
Customising the supplier registration process is now simpler with the extension of Next Generation Supplier Self-Service Registration. By using Business Rules from Oracle’s Visual Builder Studio, users can adjust company details, contacts, and addresses pages to fit specific needs based on factors such as country and industry.
5. Sourcing – AI-Powered Negotiation Cover Page Creation
With the integration of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), creating negotiation cover pages becomes effortless. Users can now leverage AI Assist to author cover page text by simply entering key details such as title, synopsis, item categories, and significant dates. AI Assist utilises information from the draft negotiation to suggest content, streamlining the negotiation creation process and improving efficiency.
6. Advanced Round Management in Sourcing
In sourcing, there are now improvements to round management. One notable upgrade is the ability to check previous round scores during award analysis. This helps category managers better understand supplier evaluations, making it easier to decide on awards.
Additionally, suppliers can now refresh auction pages in real-time during the final hour of the auction, improving their chances of winning bids.
7. Streamlined Large Negotiations
In large negotiations, suppliers now have the flexibility to enter zero prices in their responses, facilitating the offering of items for free or services for products under warranty, thereby enabling buyers to seize cost-saving opportunities.
Additionally, the Large Negotiation feature allows users to process requisitions with large volumes of lines in a single negotiation, saving considerable time and effort. By automating the allocation of awarded lines to purchasing documents and requisitions, organisations can enhance efficiency and accelerate procurement processes.
8. Streamlined Contract Authoring Process
Now, it’s possible to create supplier contacts directly from the Parties tab of the contract. This improvement speeds up the contract creation process by removing the need for supplier managers to handle contact creation. Contract managers can efficiently add contacts within the contract UI, saving time and improving overall efficiency.
In summary, Oracle Cloud Fusion Procurement’s 24B updates streamline operations, enhance efficiency, and offer flexibility in configuring procurement processes, ultimately driving productivity gains for businesses.
If you’re as excited as we are about new 24B features, please get in touch to discuss how Namos can support you in enabling and utilising these features.
