Oracle PLM - An Experience

When it comes to implementing any Oracle modules for your client, you definitely look for information/help all over the web. When implementing Oracle PLM for my client, i had to go through a similar search and trust me nothing was readily usable or worthwhile. Nothing was helpful enough for me to understand and implement the module for my client. So i decided to pen down my learnings w.r.t this module for the benefit of others.Trust me you will not find them on any other blogs/whitepapers.

Details:
Oracle Apps Rel - 11.5.10 RUP6 with PLM Family Pack E, Rollup patch - E13

** Some basic understanding of the module is required to understand the below points **

• The New Item Request (NIR) is only for Engineering Items and not for Production Items.
• The New Item Request (NIR) can have only one line/item on it. You cannot put multiple items on the it.
• The lifecycle process in Oracle PLM is pretty cumbersome. The promotion of phases for items has to be done at each of inv.orgs including the item master org. There is no automatic way of progressing the lifecycle for the item in all the inv.orgs. [We had to cut down the no. of phases from 5 to 2 because of this big limitation].
  
• Operational attributes/Item Master attributes cannot be updated during item creation using the New Item Request (NIR) workflow. Only user-defined attributes (UDA) can be updated. [This is a serious gap/flaw in the product].
• The so called Role based security does not apply to Operational attributes. [Another major flaw in the product]. A workaround that we used to fix this issue was to use function security and exclude the specific attribute groups from the specific custom responsibilities.
• The HTML based change order although highlighted in the user/implementation guides as similar to the existing 'Engineering Change Orders' is NOT true. There is a lot of difference between the HTML & Forms flavor. The best part of all, the HTML screen eventually takes the user to forms only.
  
• The HTML based change order does not give any warnings unlike its Forms counterpart when the same revised item is put on an another ECO. [I have an Oracle SR for this issue].

--Check out this space for more updates...