Approved Supplier Lists (ASL)

Posted on July 20th, 2008 by Sanjit Anand | Print This Post | Email This Post

Approved Supplier Lists in Oracle is the term used to describe a list of items and commodities that have approved sources from a list of suppliers.

In Oracle , while setting up Approved Supplier Lists you can specify the manufacturer of the product, the distributor of the product or a company that both sells and distributes. You must specify the name of the supplier, you can optionally specify the site that you purchase from. For each Approved Supplier Lists, you can specify whether it applies to the whole enterprise or a single facility.

Take a note, there is always one organization which is responsible for negotiating on behalf of subsidiaries and operating units, this is called the ‘Owning organization’.

Moreover ,you need to specify the unit of measure that will be used when creating purchase orders and the method of creating releases against blanket orders, which could be any of the following:

• Manual release through Autocreate
• Automatic release in complete status (i.e. generate and approve PO)
• Automatic release in incomplete status (i.e. generate PO and approve in separate step).

You can also create sourcing documents, supplier scheduling information and planning information for each supplier in the Approved Supplier Lists.
Source documents specify the document type as either blanket orders or quotes. Blanket orders will be used over quotes. The source document may be in an active or inactive status, and items may be sourced from these documents between their effective dates.

Navigation for Approved Supplier List

• PO Super User
  • Supply base
    • N -> Approved Supplier List

Select the organization, then define the supplier for category or Item for which you want to define, and status to approved.

The Business advantage with the Approved Supplier List (ASL)

• You can manage sets approval (certification) status at the appropriate level for your business, that may be yours approve suppliers, distributors, and manufacturers.
• You can eliminate redundant sourcing efforts within departments ,cost centers and across organizations
• You can get facilitate a more global approach to contract negotiation.
• You can define global or local ASL entries.
• You can attach notes and external documents to each ASL entry.
• You can link the primary supplier item number to your internal item number.
• You can also do setup and define your own approval statuses and associate them with specific business rules.
• You can manage procurement activity by preventing purchase order approval or supplier schedule confirmation for certain supplier/item combinations.

Are you planning to do migration from your legacy system

Thats you can… Oracle supports this activity, migration does consist of some pre-requisite activity as set-up from system side:

• Organizations
• Suppliers and supplier sites
• Categories and Items
• Purchasing UOM
• Release Method for POs.
• Custom ASL Statuses set up (Contract, Preferred, Blocked)

Base table

There is only one tables which are going to be populated in the Oracle application Approved Supplier Lists

PO_APPROVED_SUPPLIER_LIST

Migration or Conversion approach

1) Use Purchasing Document Open Interface process

You can import Global Approved Supplier List (ASL) through the Purchasing Document Open Interface (PDOI).

With ASL’s, there are some issues which you need to understand from implication side.

Couple of things you should note:

• The status for an imported ASL is “New”. There should be some mechanism to modify this field to “Approved” to maintain the ASL. There is no method to perform this through the PDOI process. Therefore either a manual process via Data Loader or a direct update to the tables must be performed.
• The Supplier Scheduling attributes in the ASL record are not updated via the ASL. There is no method to perform this through the PDOI process. Either a manual process via Data Loader or a direct update to the tables must be performed.
• Approval Status - Enter the desired status of Approved or Incomplete for Blanket Agreements and Quotations to be created. Set to ‘Approved’

2)DTI method (Direct table Insert)

You need to populate your data into PO_APPROVED_SUPPLIER_LIST table.Details for table structure would be as below:

The minimum validation that you need to take care is discussed briefly in next section.

3) Private API’s

Though Oracle does not have any public api’s to load this but you can get advantage of using these two API’s for managing approval supplier list.

• PO_ASL_THS.insert_row
• Po_Asl_Attributes_Ths.Insert_row
• Po_Asl_Documents_Ths.Insert_Row

For additional reference You can check, irep.

Few Additional tips and information for your validation consideration

1. Derive distinct INVENTORY_ITEM_ID (ITEM_ID in PO_APPROVED_SUPPLIER_LIST) from MTL_SYSTEM_ITEMS_B table based on column ITEM and OWNING_ORG(OWNING_ORGANIZATION_ID)
2. Derive CATEGORY_ID from MTL_CATEGORIES _KFV table based on column CONCATENATED_SEGMENTS and STRUCTURE_ID(CATEGORY in flat file).
   Select structure_id from mtl_category_sets_b where Category_set_id = (select category_set_id from mtl_default_category_sets_fk_v where functional_area_desc = ‘Purchasing’)< /FONT >
3. Validate the Vendor name details from PO_VENDORS table.
4. Validate the existance of VENDOR_SITE_CODE for a particular vendor isn your system, with respect to that Orginazation.
5. Validate ORGANIZATION_CODE and populate ORGANIZATION_ID into OWNING_ORGANIZATION_ID in PO_APPROVED_SUPPLIER_LIST. You should verify ) from ORG_ORGANIZATION_DEFINITIONS table based on column ORGANIZATION_CODE (OWNING ORG in flat file).
6. Derive ASL_STATUS_ID from PO_ASL_STATUSES based on STATUS (STATUS in PO_ASL_STATUSES).
7. Derive MANUFACTURER_ID from MTL_MANUFACTURERS based on MANUFACTURER (MANUFACTURER_NAME in MTL_MANUFACTURERS)
8. Derive ASL_ID for every record inserted into PO_APPROVED_SUPPLIER_LIST from sequence PO_APPROVED_SUPPLIER_LIST_S.

API’s Usage Note :**Don’t use private API’s , unless Oracle is documented, these are mostly used by Oracle development purpose, unless untill you are not aware of the architecture/ process flow, would advice to use some safer method. This post have information that was asked by few readers and only for reference purpose.