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Oracle PLM and the Item Catalog

July 19th, 2006

One of my major projects at work the last few months has been to get the Oracle Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tool up and running. Oracle PLM has also been known as Advanced Product Catalog, but the PLM name seems like it will stick.

The central piece of Oracle PLM is the Item Catalog. The Item Catalog is a hierarchy of all of the items in your company: finished goods, raw materials, everything with a part number. The idea behind the Item Catalog is to create a natural hirearchy of those items. The Item Catalog hierarchy is made with Item Catalog Categories. Now, to those of you familiar with catalogs and categories from the Inventory module, forget everything you’ve learned about them (well, almost everything — they do tie into PLM eventually). However, semantics are important here, the center of PLM is the Item Catalog, which creates a hierarchy of items using Item Catalog Categories (ICCs).

When creating the Item Catalog hierarchy and defining the ICCs you will use, it is important to keep the end in mind. The hierarchy created with the Item Catalog Categories allows for inheritance, and many of the key functional areas of PLM get tied back to the hierarchy. For example, if you want to keep track of the paper size for your printed materials, you can put the Paper Size data element at the Printed Goods ICC and have it inherited to the Brochures ICC and the Posters ICC which belong to the parent Printed Goods ICC. Any items under Brocures or Posters will have a data element for Paper Size because of inheritance.

One key rule to remember is that an item can belong to one and only one Item Catalog Category.

It’s easy to create ICCs to mirror your product lines, but is that the right way to do it? One question to ask is, will Item A have different data requirements than Item B? If it does have different data requirements, it should be in another ICC. Using the data question is a good way to determine the structure of the Item Catalog. At the top of the chain, you should also consider creating a top level ICC. That way if you have any all-encompansing rules or data that is spread across all items, you can attach it at that top level and have it inherited by the lower ICCs.

Having a properly structured Item Catalog will pave the way for a successful implementation of Oracle Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).

Entry Filed under: Oracle

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