Support for Counter Sales in Oracle Order Management

An Oracle White Paper August 2004 Revised June 2005

Support for Counter Sales in Oracle Order Management

EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW

In many businesses whose main line of work is not primarily retail, there is often a need to support a limited retail-like operation. Some businesses have small showrooms where they sell directly to walk-in customers, while others have a small stockroom at some of their sites where they sell over the counter to customers, or employees. For such businesses, a full-blown retail solution is not something that is justifiable. They do, however, need to be able to use their order management system in a streamlined way to quickly and efficiently handle such orders. We call this process Counter Sales, indicating that the Sales Order is handled over the counter. This paper shows you how you can model this process using Oracle Order Management with release 11i10.
INTRODUCTION

Often many businesses have a small retail operation wherein customers can walk in, pick up a few items from a display or showroom area, and then walk over to a counter to pay for the items. In other businesses, customers might walk up to a counter and order a few items, which are then picked from the back room or adjacent stock area and delivered to the waiting customer. In all cases, the customer is waiting while this process takes place, so speed and ease of use is critical. The customer often pays for the order before he walks out, and so there is a need for some type of receipt to show what merchandise was taken and what has been paid for. This is a common part of the business for Wholesale Distributors as well as for some companies that manufacture product. This is not a full-blown retail scenario requiring point-of-sale and merchandising solutions. Some companies call this a cash and carry operation. We are calling this process counter sales, to emphasize that this type of order is typically handled over the counter. Keys to making this business process work are speed in processing, as the customer is typically waiting at the counter, ease and speed in producing the required documents, be it a sales receipt or a pick document, flexibility in handling different types of payment, and finally the ability to handle changes to the order or returns over the counter.

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This paper attempts to explain how this business process can be implemented in Order Management using standard functionality and workflows, and offers some insight into putting it to use.
BUSINESS NEEDS

Oracle Order Management and the Oracle eBusiness suite provide you with the features you need to meet and exceed your requirements around Counter Sales. With release 11i10, you can: Enter orders quickly with a minimum of keystrokes. Find existing customers or enter new ones with a minimum of data. Accept multiple types of payment, including cash, checks and credit cards in addition to selling on account. Print a quick simple pick document, for cases where stock has to be picked from an adjacent stockroom or back room. Print a simple sales receipt, showing the items ordered, the quantities and prices, and the payment tendered. Bypass the standard picking and shipping process, while maintaining inventory control. Handle returns over the counter. Interface the order to Receivables, for revenue and collections purposes.

MAJOR FEATURES

To satisfy the above business needs, Oracle Order Management supports the counter sales business flow with the following set of features:
Quick Order Entry

In release 11i9, Oracle Order Management introduced the Quick Sales Order form a new highly-configurable user interface that has been extremely well received in the field. It contains many folder enhancements that allow implementers to hide tabs and data that is not needed, and create buttons for frequently used actions. For counter sales, you can create a simple order entry interface with only the most basic information exposed to the user. You could create a button to print the quick sales receipt and another button for printing a simple pick document if that is needed. Using defaulting rules, you can default most of the information needed to book an order, so the salesperson at the counter need enter only the most basic information who is the customer, and what are they buying and how are they paying for it. You can create a special order type for counter sales, using a bill-only flow, and have that order type default for the counter salesperson.

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Find Customer and Add Customer

The Quick Sales Order form gives authorized users easy access to finding existing customer information as well as entering new customer data. The Find Customer right mouse menu selection opens a small find window that can be customized via folder options to show only the find criteria that you want to use. Order Managements Add Customer window is accessible from the right mouse menu or as an action (or a button). It can be used to quickly create new customer records with a minimum of data. If you need to enter more data for a customer than Add Customer supports, you can access Receivables Quick Customer form from the right mouse menu - choose Advanced Add Customer.
Multiple Payments and New Payment Types

With release 11i10, Order Management has the ability to accept payment information at the line level or to accept and collect down-payments. Order Management lets you pay for orders with a variety of payment instruments, including one or more credit cards, cash, check or on account. For counter sales scenarios, established customers might typically pay on account, with or without a PO. New customers might pay with credit cards or cash. Order Management has a new window to allow you to enter payment information at the header or at the line level, including credit card data, and to get the authorization from your payment processor using integration with iPayment.
Quick Simple Pick document

For counter sales, a document is sometimes needed to direct the stockroom or warehouse personnel to pick items from the adjacent stockroom. The full functionality of Oracle Shipping Execution, with Move Orders, Staging, Picking, Packing, and Shipping is not really needed for these cash and carry orders. Instead a simple list of the items on the order is generally sufficient. Sometimes it is also needed to print the stock location on such a document depending on the size of the stockroom and the number of items stored there. Oracle Order Management provides the ability to preview and print documents formatted using the XML Publisher tool. Using it, you can create a template for a simple pick document. You can attach that template to your counter sales order type. Then during order entry, when you want to print this pick document, you invoke Preview and Print from the Actions menu or button, and the document will first display on the computer screen and then can be printed either using the printer icon or File > Print. For more details on this, please refer to the section on Preview and Print documents, in Order Management Users Guide, Release 11i.

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Simple Sales Receipt

A new document was added to Order Management with release 11i10 the Quick Payment Receipt. It is intended to be a simple sales slip for use in over-the-counter sales environments. It prints a simple list of items, quantities and prices with totals and amount due after prepayment received. It can be invoked in a number of ways it can be produced for an individual order by using the Actions button or the right mouse menu from the Quick Sales Order form. If you have an order type that you always want to print a quick receipt for, you can put the Payment Receipt workflow activity into the order level flow following Booking, and then the receipt will print effortlessly and automatically as soon as the order is booked. This document is a simple report built using the Reports tool, and the layout can be easily customized to fit the customers desired format. This document is just a simple paper receipt and should not be confused with the AR receipt transaction that is created for prepayments.
Flexible Flows

Order Management utilizes workflow to model business processes. For counter sales, companies can use the seeded bill-only flow with inventory interface to streamline the process flow. This flow bypasses the traditional pick-pack-ship operations, which are designed for companies that are physically shipping product, while including the inventory interface activity so that inventory is properly accounted for as well as the invoice interface to ensure that revenue and receivables are properly accounted.
Over the Counter Changes and Returns

The typical bill-only with inventory interface order will proceed to inventory interface and invoicing and then to closure very quickly upon Booking. This is fine for a true bill-only scenario, but since the order closes so quickly, there is not the opportunity to change or cancel any information on the order. Some companies, especially in the building trades, have a common situation where the customer picks up product on the way to a site, and returns at the end of the day to return unused or unneeded product. To facilitate this process, users can modify the bill-only with inventory interface flow to introduce a delay step before inventory interface, to postpone running the inventory interface and invoice interface until the end of the business day. That way, if the customer comes back to the showroom or depot to return product, the original order can be opened, modified as needed, or lines cancelled as required before the order closes. A new quick receipt can be printed to document the latest state of the order. This same technique can be used to allow changes to counter orders that are picked from a back room sometimes once the merchandise is presented to the customer,

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he may realize he really needs a different color or style than he originally asked for. The counter salesperson can modify the order, print another pick document to pick the changed list of items, and then, once the customer is satisfied, print the sales receipt while waiting until the end of the day for the remaining steps of the flow to be executed. Workflow has standard Wait activities that can be configured and put into a subprocess. You can configure a Wait activity to wait a certain interval (like 12 hours) or for a particular time of day (like 10PM) and then put that activity into your line workflow before Inventory Interface to delay that processing. For returns that happen after the day of sale, you can use the standard OM return flows for example, Return Credit with Receipt. You will have to receive the items back into inventory using the PO Receipt form, just as you would for items returned in the more standard RMA process.
SET UP

The following setup should be done to facilitate counter sales in Oracle Order Management.
Create Folders for Quick Sales Order Form

Create a header folder for the Quick Sales Order form that has only the fields you need to quickly enter your order. Hide the Others tab if there is nothing on that tab that the user needs to input or view. Create buttons for Add Customer, Payments, Preview and Print, Print Payment Receipt, as you feel necessary using the Quick Sales Orders extended folder features. Create a lines folder for the Quick Sales Order form showing only the lines fields you need, for example, item, quantity, UOM and price. Hide all the remaining lines tabs unless there is something on one of them that your user especially needs to input or view. A sample screenshot is shown below, with new header and line folders created for showcasing this scenario. Save these folders as public folders, and assign them to be the default folders for the responsibilities or users that will perform counter sales.

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Create Layout Template for Pick Document

If you need to produce a simple pick document (for the case where someone has to pick the products from a back room, rather than the customer selecting the items from a store), then you should consider modifying the seeded Sales Order Document layout template to create a pick document. You can modify the existing layout to rearrange data, add your own logo, etc. and save that new template using the XML Publisher responsibility. See the Appendix of this white paper for stepby-step instructions for doing this. If you need to print a stock locator or subinventory on the pick document, you will need to do a little more work. The subinventory is a sales order line attribute and can be printed fairly easily on the new template. To print the stock locator from inventory, it is necessary to add that attribute to the view used by the XML document. How to do this is documented in detail in the XML Publisher Users Guide. We hope in a forthcoming Order Management release to seed a template for a simple pick document that includes these inventory fields, to make this step easier to accomplish. Oracle XML Publisher is a new product delivered with the Oracle E-Business Suite. It provides a template-based, easy-to-use publishing solution. It provides a new approach to the customization of report publishing by integrating familiar desktop word processing tools with existing E-Business Suite data reporting. It is based on standard, well-known technologies and tools so that you can rapidly develop and maintain report formats. For instance, you can create a template in Rich Text Format (RTF) format. You can therefore create report designs using your standard word processing applications design features and XML Publisher will recognize and maintain the design. During design time, you can add data fields and other markup to your template using XML Publishers simplified tags. These tags associate the XML report data to your report layout. In addition to your word processing applications formatting features, XML Publisher supports other advanced design features such as conditional formatting, dynamic data columns, and dynamic table of contents. You may instead choose to create your template in PDF format and apply the XML Publisher markup. PDF template is not recommended for documents that will require frequent updates to the layout. For more information on how to create and update layout templates, please refer to the Oracle XML Publisher Users Guide, Release 11i.

Create Flows

If you want to always automatically print a Payment Receipt (sales receipt) for your counter sales orders, you can add the Print Payment Receipt workflow activity into

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the order level flow that you will use for the counter sales order type. Add it to the order flow right after Booking. If you want to delay the Inventory Interface activity, insert an appropriate wait activity in the line workflow. In a forthcoming release of Order Management, we plan to seed a workflow for Counter Sales with the Payment Receipt activity and a wait, to make this implementation step easier.
Create Order Type

Use Order Managements Define Transaction Type form to create an order type to use for Counter Sales. Here are some attributes to consider when you create this order type: The default transaction phase should be Fulfillment, since these orders wont have a negotiation phase associated with them. Order category would be either Order or Mixed, depending on how you want to process returns. Attach the order flow you created above, if you did that, by selecting it from the LOV for the Fulfillment Flow attribute. If you have created a simple pick document, attach that template to the order type using the Layout Template attribute. Default order line type should be a bill-only with inventory interface. Decide whether you want credit checking to be done for those customers who pay via an account. If you want to do this, set a credit check rule for Ordering. You might have a specific price list to be used for counter sales if so, place it on the order type as a defaulting source. On the Shipping tab, you might want to specify the warehouse location of the particular facility, also to be used for defaulting. Attach appropriate line types and flows using the Assign Line Flows button.

Profile Options

The following OM profile options can be used to control what counter salespersons can do: OM: Add Customer set to ALL to allow user to add new customers, addresses and contacts at the counter. OM: Credit Card Privileges set to ALL to allow user to get access to the complete credit card information, else set to LIMITED. If you arent accepting credit cards over the counter, set to NONE.

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PROCESSING ORDERS USING COUNTER SALES MODEL Sales Order Process

Entering orders in a counter sales environment can be easy and straightforward. Here are the steps for the case where the customer has the goods in hand: 1. 2. Or 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Add a new customer using the Add Customer functionality invoked from the right mouse menu, the Action list or a button. Order type, price list, payment terms and warehouse default into the order Enter the items and quantities on the Sales Order line as usual. Ask how the customer is going to pay for the items, and choose the appropriate payment type. Book the order using the Book button. The Sales Receipt will print automatically. Give the customer the receipt, and the customer leaves with the merchandise. Inventory interface and invoice interface occur at end of day, making all the appropriate accounting entries. Open the Quick Sales Order form, with the folder you defined for counter sales. Find an existing customer using the Find Customer icon and keying identifying information, such as phone number, address, name, etc.

Sales Order Process (With Back Stockroom)

Here are the steps for the case where the customer comes to the counter to place an order for goods that have to be picked from a back Stockroom: 1. 2. Or 3. Add a new customer using the Add Customer functionality invoked from the right mouse menu, the Action list or a button. Open the Quick Sales Order form, with the folder you defined for counter sales. Find an existing customer using the Find Customer icon and keying identifying information, such as phone number, address, name, etc.

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Order type, price list, payment terms and warehouse default into the order Enter the items and quantities on the Sales Order line as usual. Ask how the customer is going to pay for the items, and choose the appropriate payment type. Book the order using the Book button. Print a quick pick document using Action -> Preview and Print. The Pick document you defined as a template will print. Stockroom worker locates the items that are on the pick document, and brings them to the counter for the customer.

10. Counter salesperson collects the payment and prints the Sales Receipt. 11. The customer is given the receipt, and he leaves with the merchandise. 12. Inventory interface and invoice interface occur at end of day, making all the appropriate accounting entries.
Change Process

For counter sales situations where the merchandise is picked from a back room, there is a need to be able to make order changes after booking but before the order interfaces to Inventory and Receivables. For example, when the customer sees the product, he may realize it is the wrong color or size, and so might want to change the order. Or the customer might want to add a few items to the order before paying for it. In these cases, the flow is the same as above through step 9. Then the following would occur: 1. Customer decides he needs to make a change. If he decides he doesnt want something that was picked, the counter salesperson can just cancel the line in question and take the merchandise back. If the customer wants to order something different or in addition to what they have in hand, the counter salesperson can add one or more lines to the order. The salesperson can print the pick document again, manually highlighting the new or the modified lines so they can be picked. In any case, once the customer has the items he wants to purchase, and the order correctly reflects that information, the counter salesperson collects the payment and prints the receipt. The customer is given the receipt, and he leaves with the merchandise. Inventory interface and invoice interface occur at end of day, making all the appropriate accounting entries.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

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Same Day Return Process

For counter sales situations where the customer returns to the counter the same day to return some merchandise, the following could be done: 1. 2. Customer comes back into the store with the merchandise he wants to return and hopefully with the receipt from when he purchased the goods. The counter salesperson queries the order in the Quick Sales Order form and cancels or reduces the line quantities in question and takes the merchandise back from the customer. The counter salesperson prints a new Quick Sales Receipt, showing the new state of the order and gives it to the customer. End of process.

3. 4.

There are no inventory transactions generated, since the initial sale had not yet processed through Inventory Interface. Regarding payment, if a credit card was used, the original authorization is still valid and will be used to collect the new (lower) order total. If cash was collected, then cash will have to be refunded. If payment was on account, then, since invoicing had not yet happened on the original order, only what was not returned passes to AR.
MISCELLANEOUS TIDBITS AND TROUBLESHOOTING Can you use Scanners or Bar Code Readers?

Yes, it is standard Oracle functionality that you can attach a scanner or bar-code reader to your PC and use it to scan in the bar code on an item. Position the cursor in the item field of the Quick Sales Order form, and scan the items bar code. You can use defaulting rules to default the item quantity to 1, so you could scan an item, tab down, scan the next item, tab down, etc. to very quickly input all the items your customer brings to the counter.
Identifying or Creating Customers?

Counter sales are typically not the same as the common B-to-C retail operation, in which you wouldnt really care to identify or input customer information. Counter sales customers are generally established customers with whom you are already doing business, and if they are not, you most likely want to collect information about the new customer so you could solicit more business from them in the future. So using Find Customer to locate existing customers, or Add Customer to create records for new ones, are the recommended ways to handle customer data. If on the other hand, you dont want to track walk-in customers, you could set up a generic counter customer and use that customer as the default on your counter sales transactions. That generic customer could be set up with the default price list for walk-in customers, and any other defaults you wish to establish for such customers. If you accept credit cards as payment from walk-in customers, youll

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need to input the cardholders name when you enter the credit card information, as it is required for iPayment risk management. Keep in mind that if you do this, the LOV for credit card will list all previous cards used for this 'generic' customer.
Scheduling and Backorders

Should you schedule and reserve counter sales orders? It depends. If the items are in a showroom and the customer picks them up themselves, there is obviously no need to schedule and reserve or check availability. The stock can be kept in a nonreservable subinventory, and that subinventory can be defaulted to the lines using defaulting rules. If the items have to be fetched from a back stockroom, then it becomes more complex. Youll probably want to reserve such order lines at entry, using Autoschedule, so youll know right away if the stock is available. To achieve this, you can turn on the reservation time fence, and also autoscheduling. You may also probably modify the folders to make the reserveable quantity be visible at-a-glance. Then, once a line is entered, you could tell immediately if there is reserved quantity, before printing the quick pick document. If stock is not available, you could use the upsell/cross-sell functionality to suggest substitutes, or you could offer to backorder and ship the original product when it becomes available. Most counter sales customers want the products right away and wont want to backorder, but if they do, you have a few options. You could select a different line type for those lines, or you could put those lines on another different order of a different order type that had a picking/shipping flow. Oracle Order Management allows you flexible options as to how to process these exception flows youll have to set up your procedures and flows according to how you want to deal with these situations.
Locator Control?

What if the item youre selling is under locator control? The Inventory Interface activity does not currently support items under locator control unless the reservation is done (in advance) at the locator level. You can handle that by adding a custom activity in the Sales Order Line workflow after booking/scheduling activities, that would fetch the locator and create the reservation using the locator. You can use the documented Inventory Public API's to create reservations.
Handling Returns

Wouldnt it be easier to handle returns by having a return flow with the Inventory Interface, instead of having to keep the order open to do cancellations? Ideally, yes, however the current Inventory Interface activity handles only outbound order lines it only does inventory issues, not receipts. There is an enhancement request outstanding to modify the Inventory Interface to be able to handle receipts, but that enhancement has not yet been scheduled for a release. Once that becomes available, the flow for Counter Returns will be much simpler.

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FEATURE AVAILABILITY

The Quick Sales Order form is implemented with Order Management Release 11i9. Find Customer and Add Customer have been implemented in earlier releases. The Preview and Print function using the XML Publisher is available with Order Management Release 11i10, as is the Quick Payment Receipt document and the multiple payments feature.

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CONCLUSION

Oracle Order Management can be configured, not customized, to facilitate the process of taking and fulfilling over-the-counter sales. Using the processes explained in this white paper, you can create and fulfill counter sales orders in a seamless nearly hands-off fashion that meets the needs of Wholesale Distribution and users with similar small retail operations. We welcome your feedback and comments on this white paper. Please let us know if you find the information in this paper to be useful and what we can do to improve this process for the future.

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Appendix 1: How to make simple modifications to an existing XML Publisher Template: 1. 2. 3. 4. Log in to Oracle E-Business Suite Choose the XML Publisher Administrator responsibility Select the Template Definitions link To copy an existing template so you can modify it, first search for the template you want using the Search Criteria. You can find all the Order Management templates by putting Oracle Order Management in the Application argument and clicking GO. Find the template you want to copy and click on the Duplicate icon at the far right of the row. The Copy Template page opens with the code, name and applications attributes pre-filled. You can change any of the 3 attributes that are shown if you want to. Then press Apply to create the new template. The View Template page opens, and you can download the template to your local drive by clicking the Download icon. Next open the document on your local drive (MS Word can be used to edit RTF documents) and make whatever changes you want to make. You can move around the fields that are already there, change the logo, etc. Pay special attention to the gray shaded areas in the template those are form fields that indicate where data from the order is substituted. Save the document. Next click the Update icon (pencil) on the View Template page. The Update File page opens and you can use the Browse button to find the file on your local drive that contains the updated template. Press Apply button. When the upload is complete, youre back on the View Template page. You can preview your document by clicking the Preview icon. If you want to make more changes, repeat steps 8 thru 10. Youre done. Now you should be able to attach this template to an OM order type and try it out on an order of that order type.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

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Support for Counter Sales in Oracle Order Management July 2004, revised June 2005 Authors: Charlene Chandonia Balaji Narasimhan Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 Web: www.oracle.com This document is provided for informational purposes only and the information herein is subject to change without notice. Please report any errors herein to Oracle Corporation. Oracle Corporation does not provide any warranties covering and specifically disclaims any liability in connection with this document. Oracle is a registered trademark, and Oracle Order Management is a trademark(s) or registered trademark(s) of Oracle Corporation. All other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Copyright Oracle Corporation 2004 All Rights Reserved