Extending the BI Publisher Delivery Manager – Part 4 – Making Delivery Options More Accessible to Users

I’ve been doing a regular series of webinars on the idea of extending the BI Publisher Delivery Manager and there is one concept that I have not had the opportunity to introduce into the presentation as it was just recently released. Essentially, all of these ‘Extensions’ have come in the form of customer requests over the years and their need to take the existing BIP functionality and extend it to fill some gaps. About 3 months ago we got another idea from a prospect now turned customer regarding making delivery options more accessible to users in their everyday jobs. They needed a method to have their users specify delivery options without having to exit the current form they were working on and without having to manually go through the process of submitting a concurrent request.

So what does this even mean?
This customer had a number of order entry employees answering phones, taking orders and entering them into the Sales Order screen within Oracle EBS. As business is so good, they had a finite amount of time to take and enter the order information before moving on to the next call. Between taking the orders, they had a requirement to fire off a sales order acknowledgment and either fax or email it to the customer. While the delivery functionality was certainly possible, the amount of time it was taking to run the Sales Order Acknowledgement concurrent program, determine the address and get it delivered was outside the window of where they needed to be.

So we worked with them to extend the standard functionality of EBS and BIP delivery options and made the delivery options more accessible to the end user. This functionality allows them to skip the steps necessary to submit a concurrent request and address the information from the current transaction they are working on.

Sometimes a picture is worth more than my convoluted words…

Step 1. User fills out Sales Order

Step 2. User clicks on ‘Delivery’ icon

Step 3. Form pops up pre-populated with the customer’s delivery information. User modifies/adds information and clicks submit. This submits the appropriate concurrent request for the user and delivers it accordingly.

So what we’ve done is brought the delivery mechanism to where the user is currently working. No need to exit out of this form and submit a concurrent request manually, no need to go back and try to figure out who the document should be addressed to, its all done in the location where they are currently working. What’s great is that this is not limited to just Sales Order, but any form from within EBS. We are excited about its prospects and interested to hear if anyone else has similar needs from other business processes within Oracle EBS. Have any thoughts of where you could leverage this functionality? Leave me a comment.

This is the 4th, and final, post in a series on extending the BI Publisher Delivery Manager. Please see previous posts here:

Part 1 – Adding Attachments to Fax and Email
Part 2 – Recipients Outside of XML Data in EBS
Part 3 – True Delivery Status