David Greiner, Principal Product Manager for Oracle JD Edwards Manufacturing, recently spoke about manufacturing activity rules functionality and demonstrated the added capability to write and review history records in the new Work Order Master, Parts List, and Routing Ledger tables. New fields have been added to the recently delivered Work Order Activity Rules for manufacturing to trigger entries into ledger tables at selected statuses when work order records are added, changed, or deleted. This new Work Order Ledger feature simplifies the tracking of work order changes (header, parts list, or routing) to satisfy auditing or regulatory requirements.

Here is how the JDE Work Order Ledger works:

Before turning on ledger entries, you’ll need to turn on activity rules for manufacturing. Activity rules allow a status flow to be designed. Within manufacturing, you’ve always had the ability to prevent transactions beyond a specified status, but without activity rules, nothing prevented the user from changing the status back in order to complete the transaction. For example, even if a work order was closed and complete, someone could re-open the status to order additional material. This created a data integrity issue. Activity rules prevent these situations.

Status changes are validated against rules, and when a status is specified outside of the status flow, a hard error is generated. You can also lock and freeze work orders. This is all turned on in the manufacturing constants. You will find activity rules set up in shop floor management. JDE used an existing activity rules program and simply added a new processing option to suppress settings that aren’t relevant for manufacturing or servicing warranty management.

Status flow is set up based on doctype and WO type. You may define valid statuses, default next statuses, and up to five more allowed statuses. To avoid getting warning messages every time you add the next status or allowed status, enter all valid statuses in the WO status column first.

You also have the ability to freeze or lock a work order with activity rules. Freezing a work order refers to preventing MRP from generating action messages. For example, once you’ve started labor and material, you can freeze the work order so MRP won’t give action messages. When a work order is locked, the order is frozen. The lock flag differs from the activity rules in that it prevents edits to the header, parts list, and routing.

The work order ledger gives the ability to track changes to satisfy audit requirements. Ledger tables are populated when work order or rate schedule records are added, changed, or deleted. This is triggered by WO status according to new fields in the Work Order Activity Rules. Additionally, there are applications to review data and purge records. Currently, this is only for manufacturing work orders.

You will need to be strategic with how you turn these rules on because it will affect the performance of the system. You may not want to write ledger records if you already set the lock flag. Additionally, keep in mind that some updates—like unaccounted units—take place in these tables automatically.

The work order ledger inquiry applications are within periodic functions G3121 and G3122. They include:

• Work Order Master Ledger (P48019)
• Work Order Parts List ledger (P31119)
• Work Order Routing Ledger (P31129)

Purging work order ledger records use the same naming convention. They are found on the advanced shop floor management menu (G3131). In most cases, users will want to purge ledger records at the same time as purging work orders. New processing options allow this in R4801P. Other purge functions include Work Order Master Ledger (R48019P), WO Parts List Ledger (R3119P), and WO Routing Ledger (R31129P).

To learn more about JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Manufacturing capabilities and Work Order Ledger, check out Greiner’s presentation attached below.