In this post, we’ll take a more detail look at Order Processing. The order process has 5 main steps. In these steps, you will enter an order, book the order, pick the order, ship the order, and then close the order. Since Order Management relies heavily on the workflow technology, I will show you the workflow status for each step along with the order and line status. Below is a summary of the status for each step:
| Step | Order Header Status | Order Line Status | Order Flow Workflow Status (Order Header) | Line Flow Workflow Status (Order Line) |
| 1. Enter an Order | Entered | Entered | Book Order Manual | Enter – Line |
| 2. Book the Order | Booked | Awaiting Shipping | Close Order | Schedule ->Create Supply ->Ship – Line |
| 3. Pick the Order | Booked | Picked | Close Order | Ship – Line |
| 4. Ship the Order | Booked | Shipped | Close Order | Fulfill – Deferred |
| Booked | Closed | Close Order | Fulfill ->Invoice Interface ->Close Line -> End | |
| 5. Close the Order | Closed | Closed | End | End |
Step 1. Entering an Order
Let’s assume that all the master data (customers, items) have been entered and that the basic Order Management configuration is in place. To enter the order header information, you will need to know :
1. Your customer’s name or number
2. Your customer’s bill-to and ship-to addresses
3. The order type you wish to use
To enter the order line information, you will need to know :
1. The item number
2. The quantity
3. The selling price (either by using a price list or by manually entering the price)
4. The shipping warehouse
Once the order is entered and saved, there are two workflows that are triggered. The “Order Flow – Generic” workflow is the workflow associated with the order header and the “Line Flow – Generic” workflow that is associated with the order line. The header workflow (Order flow – Generic ) will move from the “Enter” node to the “Book – Order Manual” node. This tells us that the workflow is waiting for us to click the “Book Order” button. The line workflow (Line Flow – Generic) starts the “Enter – Line” status.
At this point, your order header and order line status will be “entered”.
Step 2: Booking the Order
When you have completed entering all the order lines, you can book the order by clicking the “Book Order” button on the Sales Order form. This will perform a check on your order and, if everything is ok, it will change the order header status to “Booked” and the order line status to “Awaiting Shipping”.
During the booking process, both workflows (order and line) perform some activities. The order workflow moves from the “Book – Order Manual” node to the “Close – Order” node. The “Close – Order” node will wait for the lines to be closed and for the month-end to pass. The line workflow moves from the “Enter – Line” node through the “Schedule – Line” and “Create Supply – Line” nodes to the “Ship – Line Manual” node. This updates the sales order line with a scheduled ship date.
After the order is successfully booked, you are ready to perform the pick release.
Step 3: Picking the Order
When pick release an order, the shipping module moves the item from a sub-inventory to a staging area. This transaction is called a delivery. Think of a delivery as the act of driving a forklift to a certain row, rack, and bin in the warehouse, picking up the item, and then delivering it to an area on the shipping dock.
The information you need to perform a pick release are the order number and the current location of the item (subinventory / locator). The picking process will change the status on the order line to “picked” and will interface a move order to inventory. This move order will decrement the on-hand inventory in the pick from location and increment the on-hand in the staging area. The picking process does not change the status of the order or line workflows.
Once all the items are picked and placed on the truck, you are ready for the next step – ship confirming the delivery.
Step 4: Shipping the Order
In order to ship a product, you must ship confirm the delivery. This is done in the shipping module by opening the shipping transaction form and then opening the Confirm Delivery window. Once the delivery has been successful confirmed, the order line status will change to the “shipped” status. The order line workflow will move to the Fulfill – Deferred node. After the interface trip stop has run your on-hand inventory will be decremented by Sales Order Issue transaction. In 11i, the Sales Order Issue would also debit your Cost of Goods account. In R12, the Sales Order Issue debits your Deferred Cost of Goods account.
After another workflow runs, the order line workflow moves from the Fulfilled Deferred node through the Fulfill, Invoice Interface, and Close line nodes to the End node. This will create AR invoice lines for your shipment and put them in the AR Open Interface table. This workflow also changes the order line status from “Shipped” to “Closed”.
Step 5: Closing the Order
Once all the order lines have been shipped (or cancelled). You can change the status of the order to “closed”. This will prevent any changes to the order and allows the Order Management programs to run more efficiently (since they are only looking at open orders). If you do not want to manually close the order, you can wait until month-end and the “Order Flow – Generic” workflow will close it for you.
This completes the steps in the Order Process and now you are ready to sell more products!
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