JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Inventory Management enables sell-side Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) and consigned inventory. It is embedded within the JDE EnterpriseOne order-to-cash business process.

Joseph E. Joseph, Product Manager for Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, presented the high-level business value of this standard solution and explained how customers can migrate from their custom solution to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Outbound Inventory Management.

The presentation walks through:

• Benefits of continuous innovation, delivery and adoption
• Outbound Inventory Management overview
• How to migrate from your custom solution
• Key takeaways
• Call to action

Benefits of Continuous Innovation, Delivery and Adoption

Continuous innovation is achieved through continuous delivery and adoption of new features. Continuous delivery is when a software vendor continuously delivers new features, functionality and capabilities on a frequent and regular basis. It could be incremental or cumulative. On the other hand, continuous adoption is when customers then continuously deploy and adopt those new features, functionality and capabilities on a regular basis. Customers can choose to adopt what features meet the needs of their particular business model. The basic idea behind this is to add value to your business by adopting new features, functionality and capabilities.

Some of the drivers and benefits of leveraging continuous adoption include opportunities to adopt new features, become more productive, move to digital, and modernize your system. With continuous adoption, the line of business (LOB) gets access to new features from JD Edwards on a regular basis. This can help improve end user productivity and engagement with modern user experience and citizen developer tools. It also allows organizations to leverage the digital platform and modernize their JD Edwards environment.

Some additional benefits of continuous adoption include:

• Staying current on the platform
• Ease of maintenance
• Savings for reduced customizations

Continuously adopting new features allows customers to leverage the latest and greatest that JD Edwards has to offer.

Outbound Inventory Management Overview

Outbound Inventory Management Overview is an out-of-the-box solution from Oracle that enables the continuous adoption model by eliminating customizations. It is available in both Apps 9.1 and 9.2.

This system is an integral part of supply chain management and order management processes. It enables sell-side Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) and consigned inventory in the order-to-cash process. Suppliers can use it with the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Inventory Management and Sales Order Management systems to manage inventory at their customers’ locations.

With Outbound Inventory Management, there are benefits for both suppliers and customers. There are reduced inventory management costs for customers, increased sales and profitability for suppliers, and ultimately an improved collaboration between the suppliers and their customers.

Outbound Inventory Management supports both Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) with or without consignment. In VMI with consignment, a supplier creates an agreement with a customer that says you will ship a specific volume of inventory to the customer’s location based on demand. After the inventory is shipped to the customer’s location, the supplier does not create an invoice—meaning that ownership is not transferred to the customer. Payment for the goods is not made until the inventory is consumed, and the supplier and customer can work together on reporting the consumption details back to the supplier. Once the consumption report is applied to the supplier’s system, two things happen:

1. An invoice is created.
2. A replenishment order is created based on the contractual agreement between the supplier and the customer.

In VMI without consignment, the supplier still agrees to ship a specific volume of inventory to the customer’s location based on demand. However, unlike in VMI with consignment, ownership of the goods is transferred to the customer at the time of shipment. The supplier will create an invoice for payment at the time of shipment. The responsibility of the supplier is to maintain and track inventory levels. The supplier and customer will still collaborate to report inventory consumption, and once the consumption is reported, the supplier will create a replenishment order to replenish inventory at the customer location.

How to Migrate from Your Custom Solution

You can easily migrate to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Outbound Inventory Management by following these steps:

1. Apply the Electronic Software Update (ESU).
2. Modify the solution using JD Edward’s no-code, low-code frameworks to satisfy your unique industry requirements.
3. Test and ensure that it satisfies your business requirements.
4. Start migrating your customers in batches.

When migrating from your custom solution to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Outbound Inventory Management, there is a simple checklist that you should follow.

The checklist includes:

• License Outbound Inventory
• Upgrade your system
• Evaluate features
• User training
• Roll out

From a licensing perspective, there are two different SKUs. There is the base Outbound Inventory Management solution and One View Reporting for Outbound Inventory Management. In order to leverage Outbound Inventory Management, you need to have a license for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Sales Order Management. For One View Reporting for Outbound Inventory Management, you will need a license for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne One View Reporting Foundation.

As far as upgrading your system, Outbound Inventory Management is supported on both JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1 and 9.2. If you are not yet on one of these releases, you will need to upgrade in order to take advantage of Outbound Inventory Management. Even though it is supported in both releases, the recommendation is to upgrade to 9.2 in order to leverage the solution. For update packages and ESUs, follow these instructions based on what release you are on or upgrading to:

Existing customers on JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.2:

• Upgrade to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Applications Release 9.2 Update 3 or
• Execute the pre-defined query from change assistant
• JD Edwards > 9.2 > Distribution > Sales > Outbound Inventory Management
• Refer to Doc ID 2181850.1 for more information

Customers upgrading to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.2:

• Upgrade to code current release: Applications Release 9.2 Update 3

Existing customers on JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1:

• Execute the pre-defined query from change assistant
• JD Edwards > 9.1 > Distribution > Sales > Outbound Inventory Management
• Refer to Doc ID 2181850.1 for more information

In addition, you may want to evaluate features that can assist with solution modernization, configuration, order entry, consumption, outbound availability, One View reports, and leveraging frameworks. You may want to look into UX One and out-of-the-box UX One pages, Outbound Inventory Branch Plant, Outbound Inventory locations, Customer agreements in Outbound Inventory Agreement Master, processing options and agreement selection for order entries, consumption reporting, Outbound Availability, and One View Reporting.

There are also some resources on www.learnjde.com that you can leverage for user training. They are great for implementation specialists, business analysts, and power users. Some of these resources include:

• OIM Implementation Guide
• UX One Deployment and Development
• UX One User Roles Guide
• OIM Overview Doc ID 2056248.1
• FAQ Doc ID 2157334.1
• Overview Presentation: Outbound Inventory Management
• Tutorial: Outbound Inventory Management
• Tutorial: Frequency Schedule Replenishments for Outbound Inventory
• Tutorial: Outbound Inventory Consumption
• OBE (Oracle by Example): Reporting Outbound Inventory Consumption Using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

For roll out, there are a few examples from what customers who have implemented Outbound Inventory Management. One example includes:

• Going live with only a few VMI customers
• Running the old system for other customers
• Gradually migrating more customers
• Eventually removing the custom solution

Call to Action

Moving forward, customers should adopt the out-of-the-box Outbound Inventory Management solution and leverage frameworks to personalize and extend it to meet their business needs. Leveraging frameworks provides customers with better solutions, faster rollouts, lower TCO, increased satisfaction, and easier upgrades.

The presentation ended with a call to action. Customers should evaluate and then propose Outbound Inventory Management as part of their next upgrade or stay current strategy. Plan to migrate your custom solution to Outbound Inventory Management and look to www.learnjde.com for additional information.

For more information about JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Outbound Inventory Management or how you can migrate to it, check out the full presentation and additional Quest resources attached below.