Setting Up Serial Number Control in Oracle Inventory

Oracle Inventory provides robust serial control for your organization. Before you start using serial number control, you must set the item attributes and organization parameters:

• Setting Up Serial Number Control for an item :-
  We establish serial number control for an inventory item when you define it on the Item Master. If we don’t want to control serial attribute at Master Organization level we can set at child / transaction organization. You can choose from No control, Predefined, At inventory receipt, or At sales order issue.
  • No Control – If set to ‘No Control’, item will be termed as Non-Serial controlled
  • Predefined – If set to ‘Predefined’, serial number will be set for item before its used. In this case we generate the serial number first and then use it.
  • At Inventory Receipt – If set to ‘At Inventory Receipt’, serial number will be generated when the device is received into that organization. This is mostly used in Service/Repair business.
  • At Sales Order Issue – If set to ‘At Sales Order Issue’, serial number will be generated when we ship device for the organization. Serial Number will be generate based on the prefix and suffix setup.

Serial Number Restrictions for Transferring Between Organizations

Oracle Inventory places certain restrictions on serial controlled items that we transfer between organizations where the serial control in the source and destination organizations is different. The following tables explain the expected results that occurs in source and destination organization.

Direct Inter organization Shipment

Source Org / Destination Org	At Receipt or Predefined	At Sales Order Issue	None
At Receipt or Predefined	Allowed, serial moved to destination	Allowed, serial number created as sales order issue	Allowed, serial entered at issue and set to issued from stores in source organization. No serial received in destination organization.
At Sales Order Issue	Not allowed	Allowed, serial number dynamic entered at issue	Allowed, no serial created or moved.
None	Not allowed	Allowed, serial number created at sales order issue	Allowed, no serial created or moved

Understanding MTL_SYSTEM_ITEMS_B.SERIAL_NUMBER_CONTROL_CODE

Oracle Inventory provides complete serial number support for inventory transactions. We can enable serial number control for specific items in your inventory organization. For items under serial number control, we assign unique serial numbers to individual units and thereafter reference the same serial numbers each time you perform material transactions

There are various level of serialization control Oracle Inventory provides. If we query mtl_system_items_b.serial_number_control_code it provides items serialization status. Here they are…

Serialization Code	Meaning
1	No Serial Number Control
2	Predefined Serial Numbers
5	Dynamic Entry at Inventory Receipt
6	Dynamic Entry at Sales Order Issue.