Summary: 26C update is all about control: better control leads to better outcomes.
26C Procurement & Inventory Updates
As usual, each quarterly release is exciting and comes with several new features that solve real problems for my clients across multiple industries.
This is not an exhaustive list. These are the updates I consider most impactful, designed to quickly get you thinking about what changes your organization could make.
26C is the most feature packed release in the last year!
The common theme in 26C is control.
Better control over requester guidance. Better control over locations. Better control over supplier and item data. Better control over contracts. Better control over inventory reconciliation, replenishment, and execution.
That is the lens I would use when reviewing this release. Do not just ask, “What new feature did Oracle add?” Ask, “What manual process, bad data issue, or operational gap does this solve?”
Procurement and Self Service Procurement
What if you have a staged requisition and want to check for better-fit suppliers?
A staged requisition means the line is not sourced from a BPA. Traditionally, checking whether there is a better supplier means relying on tribal knowledge, old purchase history, or a buyer’s personal preference.
Worse, because that review can be time consuming, many organizations skip it and proceed with the supplier suggested by the requester.
In 26C, buyers can use AI to review similar purchases and suggest alternate suppliers.
What I like about this feature is that Oracle shows the buyer the confidence levels for each suggestion, and also shows which lines could not be impacted. That transparency matters. AI suggestions are much easier to trust when the user can see where the system is confident and where it is not.
There is a moderate amount of setup involved. In addition to the typical index or setup job required to train the AI tools, you also need to set up the confidence level profile values.
This is one of those features I would test with real staged requisitions, not a generic demo example. The value depends heavily on your purchasing history, supplier data, and whether the recommendations are actually meaningful to your buyers.
What if the requester does not know what they are allowed to buy?
This is one of the biggest problems in self service procurement.
The requester usually knows what they want, but they may not know the procurement policy, approved supplier, correct category, internal source, or whether the purchase is even allowed.
That creates downstream cleanup for buyers, approvers, category managers, and AP.
26C expands the Purchase Requisition Creation Guide AI Agent so it can evaluate procurement policies before performing a catalog search.
That is a big deal.
Instead of showing a requester every possible result and hoping they choose correctly, the agent can first evaluate applicable policy based on details like requisitioning business unit, destination organization, deliver-to location, destination type, item or service details, and one-time location information.
Based on the policy, the agent can:
-continue with catalog search
-display policy guidance
-apply restrictions before searching, including stopping the search
-ask follow-up questions when more information is needed
Oracle’s examples are practical. A laptop replacement policy can block a request if the device is not old enough. A latex policy can restrict certain glove materials based on the delivery location or intended use.
That kind of policy guidance is much more useful at the beginning of the request than after the requisition is already submitted.
What if supplier quotes still turn into manual requisition entry?
Another common procurement pain point is the supplier quote.
A requester or buyer gets a quote as an attachment, and someone has to manually turn that quote into a requisition. That means reading the PDF or Excel file, entering the supplier, item descriptions, quantities, prices, and other details, then hoping the information was keyed correctly.
Oracle has been building toward this with the Quote to Purchase Requisition Assistant, and 26C makes it easier to launch and operate.
There are two updates here.
First, users can launch the Quote to Purchase Requisition Assistant from the Self Service Procurement home page menu. That gives requesters a more direct way to submit a supplier quote for processing.
Second, Oracle now supports an email trigger within AI Agent Studio. Instead of configuring an internet account in a separate UI and scheduling the Process Emails for Procurement Transactions job, administrators can configure the email account directly in AI Studio and link it to the Quote to Purchase Requisition Assistant.
That reduces setup friction and makes the assistant feel more like part of the AI Agent Studio framework instead of a bolt-on.
There are still important limits. Oracle notes that only emails with attachments are processed, quotations in the email body are ignored, multiple attachments are not supported, and only Google-hosted and Microsoft-hosted email accounts are currently supported.
Even with those limits, this is a practical step forward. Quote-to-requisition automation is one of the more compelling AI use cases in procurement because the manual process is painful, repetitive, and error-prone, and most implementations involve a moderate level of “I got this quote and want to order it” type of requisition.
What if your users keep selecting the wrong deliver-to location?
Location management is always a challenge, and I have written articles before about leading practices for keeping the peace between HCM, SCM, and facilities teams, since all of them have a role to play here.
The biggest issue in procurement is that there have been limited control gates over what locations appear. That leads to confused users, bad preferences, and misdelivered items.
I am proud to have played a direct role in this new feature, over multiple conversations with Oracle product development building the business case for both the need and showing how it could be delivered with low development effort.
In 26C, locations have a flag for whether they are a deliver-to site. If you opt in to this feature, only locations marked as deliver-to sites appear in self service procurement!
This involves moderate setup to enable the field using Visual Builder Studio.
I strongly recommend that organizations evaluate and likely opt in to this feature.
The only real prerequisite is that you should be confident about which locations are procurement-eligible, so you can perform the necessary mass updates. Locations can be updated en masse through tools like the Visual Builder Add-in for Excel or More4Apps Excel tools.
The change management is relatively straightforward, too. Existing requisitions can proceed. Users with a non-procurement location selected as their preference are prompted to update it when they next open the application.
What if users can only select valid locations, but still cannot find the right one?
Restricting deliver-to locations is only helpful if users can find the correct location.
26C also improves deliver-to location search in requisitions. Users can search using additional attributes such as location name, location code, address line 1, town or city, postal code, and country code.
The enhanced search is available across pages like Enter Requisition Line, Edit Requisition Line, Edit Requisition Summary, and Edit Multiple Lines.
This is another healthcare-friendly update. In a large hospital or university system, users may not know the exact location code. They may know the building, address, city, or partial name. Better search means fewer wrong selections and fewer downstream corrections.
There is one setup note: the enhanced search is disabled by default and must be enabled in Visual Builder Studio.
What if some locations can receive normal materials, but not special materials?
Another location-related update is the new Receivable Materials attribute on Redwood Locations. I’m similarly proud of this feature, as I lobbied hard for this based on my knowledge of this challenge in both healthcare as well as FDA regulated manufacturing.
This allows organizations to define the types of materials a location can receive and handle.
Examples include:
-radioactive materials
-refrigerated products
-pressurized gas bottles
-flammable liquids
This matters because not every location should be treated the same. Some materials require special storage, handling, safety procedures, certifications, or routing.
Without a structured way to identify which locations can receive these materials, organizations may rely on manual instructions, tribal knowledge, or custom workarounds. That increases the risk of shipment errors, handling issues, and compliance problems.
These attributes are not shown on the page by default. You need to expose them in Visual Builder Studio. So far, it doesn’t look like this is uptaken in procurement in a meaningful way, but once the data is in the system, we can find ways to leverage it in the meantime.
What if healthcare B2B account numbers are hard to troubleshoot?
In healthcare, Oracle previously launched a feature to store B2B Account Numbers for locations. This allows for streamlined PAR location fulfillment without complicated workarounds.
In 26C, Oracle made it easier to see the value directly in the purchase order.
That may sound small, but it matters. When you are troubleshooting a PAR fulfillment issue, you do not want to trust that the system is working somewhere in the background. You want to see the value in the transaction and confirm it quickly.
This one just works. No additional setup is required.
What if users need more context without leaving the page?
When handling issues or following up, you occasionally need more information about the requester, buyer, preparer, or approver. Maybe you need an email address, phone number, department, manager, or work location.
In 26C, that information is displayed in a side panel by default. If you want to hide it, you can do so with Visual Builder Studio on each page.
Similarly, users can now see additional information about locations and suppliers. That information is not able to be hidden.
Self Service Procurement also extends the notes and attachments icon to the My Requisitions page. Users can more easily identify requisitions or requisition lines that have notes or attachments without drilling into every record.
These are small usability changes, but they solve a common problem: users need context, and they do not want to hunt across multiple pages or systems to find it.
What if BPA line descriptions get out of sync with PIM?
Previously, BPA line descriptions were pulled in from PIM at the time of creation and never updated.
This led to challenges when organizations automated PIM updates, because the category and description could get out of sync between PIM and the BPA.
Now, the PIM category and description are available on the BPA as new attributes.
Setup is simple: a quick Visual Builder Studio update to display the fields.
This is cool. It is not a massive process change, but it gives buyers and procurement teams better visibility into item data without pretending the BPA line description is always current.
What if users lose their table personalizations?
This one is simple but welcome.
26C adds the ability to retain column personalizations for table layouts in Self Service Procurement.
Before this update, whether column changes were retained depended on browser settings. Now, column changes such as showing, hiding, and reordering columns can be persisted on the server and retained when users clear cache, switch tabs, switch browsers, sign out, or change form factors.
This applies to areas like shopping search, shopping list views, shopping cart table view, billing distributions, check funds, and project cost distribution.
It’s a simple feature that makes Redwood feel mature and stable.
Honorable mention: AI category suggestions in Redwood Purchase Orders
You already know and hopefully love the feature to suggest best-fit categories at the requisition level. In 26C, this is now available in Redwood Purchase Orders as well.
In addition to the normal setup steps required for requisitions, you also need to use Visual Builder Studio to enable the button on the PO page.
This is worth testing if you have a lot of description-based spend, category cleanup, or buyers manually correcting categories after requester entry.
Suppliers and Sourcing
What if suppliers register with incorrect or fraudulent TIN information?
Suppliers may register with an incorrect or fraudulent TIN.
In 26C, you can leverage Sovos to automatically authenticate TIN information as part of supplier registration workflows. The results are displayed to the approver so they can follow up and take the appropriate action.
This is a practical supplier governance update. It does not eliminate the need for review, but it gives approvers better information earlier in the supplier registration process. The only downside is that is requires a separate subscription with Sovos, but it’s straightforward to configure once you have this.
What if negotiation responses arrive outside Supplier Portal?
Oracle Negotiations has great features for handling responses, but they traditionally require that either the response is submitted through Supplier Portal, or that the negotiation manager enters the responses manually. The amount of effort has been a big hurdle to implementing the responses feature.
Now, you can use an AI agent with an inbox to bring in responses and fill them in, even in a non-standard format.
This is the kind of sourcing feature that could save a lot of administrative time if it works well with your supplier base. Many suppliers still respond the way they want to respond, not always the way the system wants them to respond.
I would test this with real supplier response examples, not a perfectly formatted demo file, but it seems very promising.
Contracts
What if contract negotiation risk is hard to prioritize?
Contract teams are often buried in redlines, spreadsheets, supplier feedback, and internal fallback positions.
The work is manual, and high risk deviations get lost in the noise. If an issue occurs, everyone is finger pointing and the value of the ERP is not maximized.
26C introduces the Contract Compliance Workspace, an agentic app that helps legal and contract teams identify actively negotiated contracts that need attention because of clause deviations and terms risk.
This workspace analyzes negotiation feedback spreadsheets, compares requested changes against the organization’s playbook positions, calculates risk severity, and surfaces contracts that need attention. It supports both buy-intent and sell-intent contracts.
The concern I have is that this does require a relatively structured approach. Instead of redlining in Word, the process moves toward an Excel-based format where each clause is filled out in a field, with the response or alternative captured as a new column.
This may feel clunky to end users. But it is not crazy, and it would make the process more rigid in a way that could support better analysis. It also does require an Agentic Apps subscription.
This is one of the more important 26C features because it points to where Oracle Contracts is heading: a workspace that helps teams prioritize risk and work through negotiation exceptions.
For organizations with heavy contract volume, especially those negotiating from supplier paper or managing lots of exceptions, this deserves a serious look.
But do not underestimate the implementation work. You need the right playbooks, risk scoring logic, contract type setup, and negotiation feedback process. The feature will only be as good as the structure you give it.
What if contract authoring needs guardrails, not just a blank Word document?
A related contracts pain point is authoring itself.
Users often work in Word, but they need guidance on approved fallback language, clause positions, and policy alignment. Traditional Contract Wizard was a good start, but it was very rigid and required significant setup to build the rules and responses.
26C adds the ability to author contract terms using a policy playbook in the Word Add-In. The AI-powered Word Add-In supports authoring contract terms, including adding, modifying, deleting, and redlining sections and clauses. It can also use a policy playbook to suggest clause modifications and fallback positions.
This continues the theme from 26B: Contracts is undergoing a real transformation.
The big opportunity is not Redwood. It is helping legal, procurement, and contract teams move faster while staying inside approved policy boundaries.
What if Word redlining is useful, but collaboration is still a pain?
The Word Add-In is great, but collaboration can still be painful.
No longer, thanks to SharePoint collaboration.
As long as you are a Microsoft shop, you can leverage this with a moderate amount of Azure setup steps, allowing multiple users to collaborate and redline the document at the same time in SharePoint Online.
This is not a quick setup, but it may pay off in spades.
What remains to be seen is the practical flow from SharePoint collaboration, to the Word Add-In with the playbook, to the negotiation process via spreadsheet and agents.
In my experience, clients will pick one or two paths and focus on those, instead of trying to leverage all of the new features.
If you are a heavy Contracts user, 26C is not a minor update.
It is a major release to evaluate. MAJOR.
Product Data Governance
I am including selected Product Lifecycle Management updates here because they matter for procurement and inventory.
Bad item data does not stay in PLM. It flows into requisitioning, sourcing, purchasing, receiving, replenishment, planning, manufacturing, costing, and reporting.
What if new item requests are marked complete before the data is really complete?
Anyone who has worked with item onboarding knows this problem.
A new item request gets created, definition tasks are assigned, users enrich some of the fields, and then someone marks the task complete even though required data is still missing.
26C improves this with Redwood alerts for incomplete definition tasks in New Item Requests.
When a user tries to mark an incomplete definition task complete, Oracle now lists the required definition fields that are still missing for each item in the task. This helps users move faster without sending bad data downstream.
What if catalog and category changes need an audit trail?
Catalogs and categories are foundational product data. They influence item classification, reporting, procurement, planning, and user search behavior.
But when a category changes, a catalog assignment is updated, or an attachment is modified, organizations often need to know who changed it, from what to what, and when. Now, you can!
Users can view catalog and category history from the Product Management History page, search history records, use filters, view old and new values, export history, and configure which catalog and category attributes should be tracked.
Definitely worth turning this on!
What if trading partner item data is too easy to get wrong?
Supplier items, customer items, competitor items, and manufacturer part numbers are some of the most important data elements in product and procurement operations.
They are also easy to mess up, but 26C adds the ability to govern trading partner items using item rules.
You can create assignment, validation, and relationship rules for trading partner items and trading partner item relationships. These rules can automate attribute values, populate extensible flexfield attributes, validate business policies, and enforce consistency.
If you are using trading partner items, I would strongly consider rules for preferred supplier relationships, inactive manufacturer part numbers, required supplier item relationships, and strategic supplier attributes.
What if trading partner item data is sensitive?
Trading partner item data can include supplier-specific, manufacturer-specific, or commercially sensitive information. Not everyone should have the same access.
26C adds access control lists for trading partner items.
Administrators can create teams and permission sets to control who can create, view, manage, delete, or discover trading partner items. Access can be controlled by basic attributes, descriptive flexfields, extensible flexfields, attachments, and relationships.
The “discover” permission is especially interesting. It allows users to identify that a trading partner item exists without exposing the full details.
What if reference organization item security is too hard to maintain?
Many organizations use definition organizations and reference organizations to manage shared product data.
That model is powerful, but security can become repetitive. If access has to be maintained separately in each reference organization, administration becomes harder and inconsistencies are more likely.
26C introduces optimized security for reference organization items.
The idea is simple: manage access at the definition organization level and automatically extend that access to associated reference organizations.
That reduces redundant grants and helps ensure consistent security behavior across item management, structures, categories, relationships, search, integrations, OTBI, import, and bulk processing.
I would test it carefully in a lower environment, especially if you have custom security configurations, reporting assumptions, or integration users that rely on current access behavior. If you are implementing for the first time, build with this security in mind.
What if manufacturing readiness requires duplicate setup?
Product teams may define an approved primary structure, but manufacturing still needs a work definition before the item can be built.
That handoff can create duplicate effort and setup inconsistency which isn’t necessary for basic manufacturing.
26C adds Create Work Definition Automatically from the item structure in Redwood.
When eligibility criteria are met, users can generate a work definition directly from an approved primary structure. Oracle validates prerequisites such as structure type, item type, ATO requirements where applicable, valid work center, and standard operation.
It will not apply to every item or every manufacturing model, but where it does apply, it can reduce manual work definition setup and help standardize the handoff from product management to manufacturing.
Inventory and Receiving
What if Oracle Inventory and external WMS systems drift apart?
This is one of the biggest real-world inventory problems.
Oracle Inventory may be the system of record, but the physical warehouse execution may happen in an external WMS, 3PL platform, or other execution system.
Even with good integrations, balances can drift. Error checking every single transaction on both ends can be difficult with operational volumes.
26C adds the ability to publish inventory on-hand balances to an external execution system using a file-based integration for reconciliation.
This lets you generate a periodic on-hand snapshot file from Oracle Inventory and share it with an external system. The process supports serial-controlled and non-serial-controlled items, creates a CSV-style output, compresses it into a ZIP file, and uploads it to UCM for external consumption.
What if warehouse managers are reacting too late?
Warehouse operations often run by exception, but the exceptions are not easy to see early enough.
Slow-moving inventory ties up cash and space, expiring lots create waste, priorities always changing and shortages discovered under pressure.
26C enhances the Warehouse Operations Workspace with improved stockout and outbound recommendations.
The Item Quantity Monitor now includes a Slow-Moving Item Advisor and Expiring Lot Advisor. These help warehouse managers identify inventory that is aging, not moving, nearing expiration, or already expired.
The recommendations can include actions like transferring inventory, scrapping obsolete stock, rebalancing supply, creating reservations for expiring lots when demand exists, publishing availability to other organizations when there is no demand, moving expired inventory to quarantine, or creating movement requests for disposition.
What if labels and warehouse documents are needed quickly, but printing is clunky?
Label and document printing is a very practical warehouse pain point. Often, the user knows what they need, but not which BI Publisher report or label process to run.
26C introduces the Inventory Label and Document Printing Assistant AI agent.
The agent can generate different label types, including item labels, serial labels, lot labels, location labels, receipt delivery labels, LPN labels, and LPN content labels. It can also generate warehouse reports such as transfer order status, bill of lading, commercial invoice, packing slip, receipt traveler, pick slip, min-max planning, cycle count listing, and physical inventory tag reports.
The best part is that users can request the output in natural language.
For example, a user can ask the agent to print item labels for all items in a receipt or email a packing slip for a shipment.
This is a strong operational use case for AI Agent Studio. It reduces the need for users to know the exact report, parameters, printer setup, or navigation path.
What if PAR levels are based on guesswork or old spreadsheets?
PAR replenishment is especially important in healthcare.
If PAR levels are too low, critical supplies run out.
If PAR levels are too high, stockrooms are overfilled and inventory expires.
If PAR levels are managed manually, the process becomes stale quickly.
26C adds the ability to automatically calculate and review PAR-level values before updating current values.
Oracle can calculate suggested PAR levels and PAR maximum quantities based on historical replenishment data. Users can review the suggestions, override them when needed, and then publish the updated values.
Even better, 26C also extends policy profiles to support PAR replenishment in addition to min-max planning. New Redwood setup pages support Default Classification, Policy Profiles, and Policy Profile Assignments.
This is a meaningful update for healthcare supply chain teams, moving towards stronger statistical modeling and policies instead of just being a system to store levels.
My recommendation: test this with a few high-volume PAR locations first. Compare calculated values to current values, historical demand, stockout history, clinical feedback, and physical space constraints before publishing broadly.
What if supplier barcodes do not match your Oracle barcode format?
This is one of the most practical 26C inventory updates.
In the real world, supplier and manufacturer labels often include barcodes for GTIN, manufacturer part number, supplier part number, or another cross-reference value.
But the person scanning the product may not know the internal Oracle item number.
Historically, if the barcode did not match the expected configured format, users had to manually search and relabel. Time intensive and wasteful!
26C adds the ability to scan a barcode with item number, GTIN, MPN, SPN, or item cross-reference without a barcode format to find items.
The system still checks configured barcode formats first. But if no format match is found, Oracle will search the scanned value against item number, GTIN, MPN, SPN, and item cross-reference values.
If there is one match, the item is populated. If multiple matches exist, users can review the matches and select the correct item without leaving the scanning flow.
This applies to Redwood mobile inventory and receiving transactions such as receiving, inspection, put away, miscellaneous transactions, subinventory transfers, interorganization transfers, cycle counts, PAR counting, physical inventory, and pick confirm.
This is a big deal for healthcare and distribution environments where supplier labels often drive the physical workflow.
My recommendation: this is absolutely worth testing if your organization receives products with supplier or manufacturer barcodes. But the value depends on the quality of your GTIN, MPN, SPN, and item cross-reference data.
What if movement requests need better approval governance?
Movement requests can be routine, but they can also involve high-value, controlled, or sensitive inventory.
In those cases, organizations need approval rules that are flexible enough to enforce controls without making setup unnecessarily painful.
26C adds the ability to use HCM Rules for movement request approval rules.
Existing rules are automatically migrated, and users can configure movement request approvals in the HCM Rules framework through Transaction Console.
This is a good direction because it aligns approval configuration with a more standard and familiar rules framework. It also supports better approval governance for internal material movements.
What if cycle counts should follow the local business day?
Users are always going to default to using their local time zone as a frame of reference, but if a cycle count is generated using UTC-based processing, the count date can shift to the previous day for organizations in certain time zones. That creates confusion for warehouse users and can affect the timing of count sequences.
26C adds the ability to use time zone in cycle count sequences.
When enabled, cycle count dates are defaulted, evaluated, and generated based on the organization’s time zone instead of UTC.
This is not a feature that every organization will care about. But for global inventory operations, it is exactly the type of issue that creates unnecessary confusion.
I would test this carefully with existing cycle count data because Oracle notes that existing date values may shift after conversion depending on how the stored date is interpreted.
Final Thoughts
As usual, the impact of the whole release is more than the sum of the parts. 26C is an incredible release with a strong mix of AI, Redwood and improved process features.
My top 26C testing priorities would be:
- Deliver-to Site controls and enhanced deliver-to search
- AI alternate supplier suggestions
- Self Service Procurement policy guidance agent
- Quote to Purchase Requisition Assistant email trigger
- Contract Compliance Workspace
- SharePoint collaboration for contract redlining
- Trading partner item rules and security
- PAR calculation and policy profiles
- Barcode scanning using GTIN, MPN, SPN, and item cross-reference
- Inventory Label and Document Printing Assistant
The bigger theme is maturity.
Oracle is making the applications more guided, more governed, and more operationally aware.
That is exactly where Procurement and Inventory need to go.