[David_Young]

Hi,everybody,Mr/Ms

I am not very familiar with OTM except know some very high level concepts like item,transportation mode,service provide,order base,order release etc.But I am confusing about is that when we need to input this things.In other words.I hope some guys to give me an introduction about the implementation flow.I will give an scenario for example,I am a retail company,and I have three supplier AS,BS,CS.aslo I have three global customers AC,BC,CC.each month I will buy some things from my supplier and I will send the purchase order to them,likewise,I will get the order from our customers every month.when need I input my order in the OTM?This is the first question.


The second question is that whether there exist technology consultant for customzation,if I want to become this type of guys,what skills I need to master?

And the other question is what the difference between the 'ITEM'and the 'SKU'?

The last question is like EBS, the OTM are divided into some modules,like financial,WMS,etc,or a man need to master the all aspect knowledges.

A lot of questions,thank you all very much to answer for me.

[ravintag]

hi David,

Let me try to answer your first question by illustrating the below scenario:

A retail company is procuring material from AS, BS and CS. What it necessarly does is it sends Purchase orders to all the three suppliers before hand with details of items, suppliers, destination delivery etc. which is equal to a Order base in OTM with multiple lines or ship units.

When the supplier AS is ready with despatch part of his material as first week dispatch that part of the order becomes order release.

AS would inform the carrier to pick up the order release material which inturn becomes a shipment for the carrier to handle. which means a shipment is created in OTM and all milestones of the shipment are lodged in the application thru carrier's application which will inturn give visibility of the shipment / order to the retail company, its supplier AS and its customer AC if it is finally destined to AC.

The above is one of the ways or utilities of OTM and it cannot be restricted just with that it has power planning tool which means it can meet requirements of carrier with respecting to their consolidation of various order releases and gives them economies of scale.

It would be too lengthy to discuss all those functionalities of OTM.

To answer your second question - i am a functional consultant so i leave it unanswered.

third question - ITEM refers to an object like nuts.. whereas SKU refers to Stock Keeping Unit i.e., the bin or box you use to store the nuts (Items) in the warehouse.

Last question - with respect to OTM you can master in technical aspects or functional aspects and if it is functional aspects then you need to master all the modules like financial, SCEM, etc..

hope i answered some of your doubts.

[bmj_23]

Big questions,

1. If you are in a real life implementation, then take your clients real life business scenarios and gather the relevant business data (modes, service providers, rate offerings, rate records, items, example orders etc) and then walk through an example business process of how the client handles that today and how they would like to handle that in the future using OTM. If you are looking for a check list of the data you need to enter in OTM, then just work through the Power Data Menu items to start with and enter data that seems relevant to you.

2. Customisation in OTM means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Most technical consultants I work with have skills in XML integration design, XSL transformation, SQL and embedding that within automation agents...

3. The Item and Packaged Item data is used on order releases. The SKU data is not. Originally the SKU data was just used for reference and inventory visibility purposes but in later releases, this has been extended to include some workflow around SKU data. If you are in a "standard" implementation, probably OK to ignore the SKU data for now.

4. The OTM product, in my opinion, is not modular. It is a very integrated application which requires people that can understand the overall application and what can and what cannot be done in the standard application. As with most applications, there is no easy route to learn that - just long hours sat in front of a key board figuring out a) how the software works and more importantly b) how that can be applied in the real world.

[David_Young]

Thanks you both,you two really shed light on the OTM learning for me.I think I need some time to catch it.