When you upgrade to R12, you will notice a Material Status field on the organization parameters, item, lot, locator, and sub-inventory forms. You’ll also see it on the Material Workbench when you query on-hand quantity. The Material Status field will allow you to control which transactions can be performed against that item. I think the best way to describe how material statuses work is to show you an example. Below are some screenshots from a Vision database.
Because material status is associated with sub-inventories, lots, serial numbers, and on-hand quantity, I first looked at the status of some sub-inventories. I noticed during the R12 upgrade, Oracle defaults the material status to “Active”.
Note: During the R12 upgrade, Oracle will seed the following material statuses:
- Active
- Active : Available for Reservations
- Active : Available for Netting and Reservations
- Active : Available for Netting
- Active : Not Available for Netting, ATP and Reservations
- Active : Available for Netting and ATP
Now let’s look at an upgraded Vision instance. After I opened the Subinventories form, I found a couple of finished goods sub-inventories. One, FS-D, is used to hold defective items. Right now, other than the name, there is no restriction on how these items can be used. Someone could accidently pick and ship one of these defective items to a customer. Because the upgrade defaults the material status, you can see that all the sub-inventories have a status of “active”.
Subinventories Status
If you query the on-hand quantity in the Material workbench form, you can see the allowable transactions for an item by clicking on the status button. The “active” status has no restrictions and you can perform all material transactions against items with this status.
You can see when I go to the misc. issue form, I’m able to see and select items that subinventory.
On Hand Availibility - Status
But if you want to use a material status to prevent certain transactions (like picking and shipping), then you can update the default status for the sub-inventory.
Material Issue on Active Material Status
The RN_Defective status will prevent items in this sub-inventory being shipped on external sales orders. I added the “perform miscellaneous issue of material” transaction to the disallow list to show you how Oracle prevents transactions. Before I change the sub-inventory status, I want to show you that I can select items from this sub-inventory in the Misc. Issue form.
Material Status Definition
Now, let’s go back the Subinventories form and update the status. Now all the material in this sub-inventory has a status of “RN_Defective”. This will prevent us from performing the transactions in the disallowed list.
Change Subinventory Material Status
If I go back to the Misc. Issue form, you can see that the FG-D sub-inventory is not available in the list of values.
Material Issue on Defective Material Status
If I query the on-hand quantity, you can see the status is also changed. If I want to change the status level from sub-inventory to on-hand, I need to run the “Activate Onhand Level Material Status Tracking” program. This program will take the sub-inventory status and assign it to the on-hand level.
Query Material By Subinventory After Status Change
Run Activate On-hand Level Material Status Tracking
Now when I query the on-hand quantity, you see that the on-hand status is “RN_defective”.
Material Status After Activate On-Hand Tracking
If you want to change the on-hand status for a specific item, I can use the Update Status feature in the Tools menu to change the status back to “Active”. Now even though the item is in a sub-inventory with a default status of “RN_Defective”, these on-hand units have a status of “Active”.
Changing Material Status
Changing Material Status
Query Material By Subinventory After On Hand Status Change
An additional feature with material status is the ability to query on-hand quantity by status.
Query Material By Subinventory
