1. Implementing Manufacturing and Supply Chain Materials Management
  2. Lot and Serial Descriptive Flexfields

Lot and Serial Descriptive Flexfields

Lot and serial descriptive flexfields provide you with the ability to create user-defined extension fields on the lot and serial pages. You can use descriptive flexfields to track additional information about a lot or serial number that's important and unique to your business.

Lot and serial descriptive flexfields can be context sensitive, where the information the application stores in the descriptive flexfield depends on other values entered in other parts of the UI. You can configure lot and serial descriptive flexfields so that you capture only those lot and serial attributes that you want or need.

The lot or serial context of an item specifies which lot or serial attributes need to be maintained for each item. For example, lot-controlled food products could include attributes such as best by date, grade, and age. While, lot-controlled textile products may include attributes such as length, thickness, and style. By specifying a context for the lot and serial attributes, you collect only those attributes that are appropriate for each item.

Lot and serial attributes populate when creating new lot and serial numbers. The receiver can default and override the descriptive flexfield attributes if required. When you receive against an existing lot, you may view, but not update the attributes of the existing lot. You can assign contexts to item categories allowing all lot-controlled items in a particular category to have the same context.

This topic provides information about these aspects of lot and serial descriptive flexfields:

  • Global lot attributes

  • Lot and serial attributes

  • Attribute types

Global Lot Attributes

To ensure the consistency of lot attribute values across organizations, you can enable lot attributes as global attributes. The values of global attributes must be the same across organizations. You can update a global attribute. However, if you update a lot that exists in other organizations, then the attribute values are updated in the other organizations too.

Lot and Serial Attributes

Lot and serial numbers each have two different sets of attributes that you can use when defining a lot or serial descriptive flexfield.

  • Lot Numbers: standard descriptive flexfield attributes based on table INV_LOT_NUMBERS

  • Lot Attributes: additional descriptive flexfield attributes based on table INV_LOT_ATTRIBUTES

  • Serial Numbers: standard descriptive flexfield attributes based on table INV_SERIAL_NUMBERS

  • Serial Attributes: additional descriptive flexfield attributes based on table INV_SERIAL_ATTRIBUTES

You can view the lot and serial descriptive flexfields on the Record Lots and Serials page.

You define descriptive flexfields using INV_LOT_ATTRIBUTES and INV_SERIAL_ATTRIBUTES just like standard descriptive flexfield attributes. The difference is that you can also use the context for the INV_LOT_ATTRIBUTES and INV_SERIAL_ATTRIBUTES to default descriptive flexfield context values for an item or item category. You can't do this with INV_LOT_NUMBERS and INV_SERIAL_NUMBERS.

Attribute Types

There are three types of stored attributes. To help simply building the descriptive flexfields, attributes are stored in the date, number, and character fields.

This table shows the available date attributes:

Date Attribute

Description

Best by date

Date when the item quality becomes less or diminishes.

Change date

Date when an attribute of the lot or sub lot was last changed.

Used by WMS only.

Maturity date

Date the lot matures and is ready for use.

Origination date

Date the lot is created. This is usually the date of manufacture. For example, the default origination date for a WIP completion is the date the job completes.

Retest date

Date the material needs to be retested to re-verify the quality. For example, you define an item descriptive flexfield to track how often to retest an item. This item attribute is used to default the retest date.

You can define up to ten distinct date attributes for any given lot or serial that contains information captured for the item. This information is stored in the D_ATTRIBUTE1 through D_ATTRIBUTE10 columns on the INV_LOT_NUMBERS and INV_SERIAL_NUMBERS tables.

Here are the available character attributes:

  • Color

  • Territory_code (country of origin)

  • Date code

  • Grade

  • Place of origin

  • Supplier

  • Supplier lot number

You can define up to twenty distinct character attributes for any given lot or serial number that contains information captured for the item. This information is stored in the C_ATTRIBUTE1 through C_ATTRIBUTE20 columns on the MTL_LOT_NUMBERS and MTL_SERIAL_NUMBERS tables.

Here are the existing numeric lot attributes:

  • Age (in days)

  • Length

  • Recycled content

  • Thickness

  • Volume

  • Width

There are advantages to using numeric attributes in lot and serial descriptive flexfields. For example, if an allocation rule requires a calculation based on age, you can use the value in the age descriptive flexfield from this calculated field instead of computing the age at the time of performing the allocation or similar task. Storing these values ahead of time, for use in calculations, improves the performance during execution.

It's recommend that the unit of measure attributes (length UOM, thickness UOM, volume UOM, and width UOM) for each of the dimension attributes (length, thickness, volume, and width) be implemented together.

Here are the existing numeric serial attributes:

  • Cycles since new

  • Cycles since repair

  • Cycles since overhaul

  • Number of repairs

  • Time since new

  • Time since repair

  • Time since overhaul

You may define up to up to ten distinct numeric attributes for any given lot or serial number that contains information captured for the item. This information is stored in the N_ATTRIBUTE1 through N_ATTRIBUTE10 columns on the MTL_LOT_NUMBERS and MTL_SERIAL_NUMBERS tables.

You can specify default values for attributes when configuring the contexts. The attributes of the material received, (if for an existing lot), are inherited from the existing lot.

You can populate lot and serial attributes for these transactions. You can also update lot and serial attributes in the Manage Lots and serial Numbers UI.

  • Purchase order receipt

  • Miscellaneous receipt

  • WIP completion

  • Work-orderless completion