Changes to confirmed sales order because of business issues, such as low stock availability or pricing ammendments, can cause Customer concerns or complaint and lead ultimately to financial loss for the Company.
So there may be a requirement to record what attributes of an order were changed, when and by whom.
To address this issue the Order Management team introduced a rules based approach – simply called- Audit History.
This allows the Implementers, by defining simple rule hierarchies, to define which attributes (e.g. shipment date/ order qty/ payment terms) need to be tracked for changes, by whom and when necessary via Business events – what parties to inform of changes.
These changes are recorded in Order Management audit tables which are load on a regular basis by running the concurrent program – Audit History Consolidator. The results can then be review via the audit History report or on line via the View Audit history form.
Below is a screen shot showing a simple rule that would record changes to payment terms once the order had been booked.
Conclusion
These rules can be set up at any time to provide insight into changes made to any of the order entry fields.
If you want to stop such changes from happening on a more permanent basis then there are processing constraint rules which are designed, just for that requirement. Once again these constraints use a rules based approach to stop an attribute from being changed by either the system or the end user at key points in the order processing cycle.
 | David Barnacle joined Oracle University in 2001, after being the lead Implementer, of a very successful European rollout of the e-Business suite. He currently trains a wide family of applications specializing in the supply chain and financial areas. He enjoys meeting students and likes to learn how each Customer will configure the software suite to meet their own challenging business objectives. |