A department is an area within your organization that consists of one or more people, machines, or suppliers, where you want to collect costs, apply overhead, and compare load to capacity. You assign a department to each operation in a routing, and assign resources that are available for that department.

When you define a department, you specify any department overhead costs and the resources that are available. You can enter multiple resources for each department. For each resource, you can specify the shifts that the resource is available. For each resource shift, you can also specify capacity modifications that change the available hours per day, units per day, or workdays.

   To define a department:

1. Navigate to the Departments window.

2. Enter a name for the department unique for the organization.

3. Optionally, enter a department class. See: Creating a Department Class.

4. Enter a location for the department.

5. Enter a project expenditure organization.

6. Optionally, enter an inactive date on which you can no longer assign this department to routing operations.

7. Enter the Scrap Account in order to charge the departments that have scrapped material. This field is displayed for Shop Floor Management enabled organizations.

8. Enter the Estimated Absorption Account to estimate the expected scrapped material. This field is displayed for Shop Floor Management enabled organizations that have enabled estimated scrap accounting. See: Defining Parameters, Oracle Shop Floor Management User's Guide.

9. Choose the Rates button to view the overhead rates for the department.

10. Choose the Resources button to assign and update resources to the department.

    Note: If you have Oracle Warehouse Management installed, the Departments form is used to group resources that may be needed together, to perform tasks. For example, a warehouse may define a refrigerated picking department, which has all the machine and manual resources associated to it that are required to perform a refrigerated picking task. A warehouse can also use a picking department, or a generic task department with all resources associated that are used for warehouse task management. See: Set Up Departments, Oracle Warehouse Management Implementation Guide.