Pension Plan Basics

What are pension plans?




A pension plan is designed to generate regular income for individuals once they retire. Insurance companies offer various pension plans (also called as retirement plans or annuity plans) where a person has to initially invest either a lump sum amount or regular annual installments/ premiums over a period of time in return for regular income either for life or for fixed number of years depending, upon the plan. For example, Rita received Rs. 10L superannuation benefit upon retirement. She was interested in getting regular income out of this fund in order to meet her routine daily expenses. So Rita started exploring her options and stumbled upon the idea of investing her money in a pension plan. Rita researched the different types of pension plans offered by insurance companies and here is what she found:



Deferred Annuity Plan: Under this type of plan, the pension is not paid immediately but deferred for a time period as required by policyholder. If the policyholder survives the term of the policy, then the accumulated amount (consisting of sum assured, guaranteed additions and bonuses) is invested to generate regular income. For example, LIC has Jeevan Nidhi plan which is a deferred annuity plan. Rita concluded that this option is suitable for an individual who is still working and has many more years before he/she retires.



Immediate Annuity Plan: Rita found this plan interesting. This is because this plan can be purchased for a lump sum in return for fixed payments throughout her life. Insurance companies offer various options under annuity plans. There are different categories of Immediate Annuity plans:



Annuity Certain: Here the insurance company pays a fixed sum of money for a certain number of years.



Guaranteed Period Annuity: Under this plan, Rita will be paid pension for a certain number of years as stated in her plan (say 10 years) even if she does not survive this period. So, if Rita dies after 4 years of purchasing the policy, her nominee will receive the pension amount for the remaining 6 years. If she survives through the 10 years then she will receive the pension amount throughout her life.



Life Annuity: Rita will be paid a specified amount regularly through her life. This plan also comes with the option of 'return of purchase price' to the beneficiary upon the policyholder's death. In case Rita opts for this plan, her nominee will get the maturity amount plus any bonus upon her death.



For example, LIC has Jeevan Akshay annuity plan for annuity payable for 5, 10, 15 or 20 years or for the lifetime of policyholder. There is also a life annuity plan where 50 percent of the annuity is payable to the spouse in case of death of policyholder.

Delivery and Trips

When a Trip record and Trip Stop record will be created.

i) Will it be created at the time of Delivery Creation itself?

If you are coming from Pick Release point of view and decide to autocreate delivery, Yes, a Trip and Two stops will be automatically created.

ii) Inbetween Delivery Creation and Ship Confirmation of the delivery?


If you decide to not to create delivery during pick releasing, you will be either autocreating a delivery for the delivery detail in the shipping screen manually or assigning to an existing open delivery. If you choose to do so, you have to either create trip manually from the shipping screen or assign to existing open trip.


iii) After Ship Confirmation?

No, you have to have a trip and minimum of two stops to ship confirm. But, if you have not created the trip for the delivery in the step2, system will autocreate the trip and stop when you perform ship confirmation step.




iv) Inventory updates will occur after Ship confirmation of the delivery or closing of the trips?


Inventory updates will happen only when Interface Trip Stops program is run successfully for the inventory interface component.

USE  View : WSH_DELIVERY_TRIPS_V

Order Header Closing

Use oe_order_close_util

Metalink 133837.1

The header level workflow process 'Close-Order' has a wait function, which causes the header to wait until all the lines on the order 
are closed before progressing the header to a closed status.  This wait function comes seeded with a constant value which sets it to 
defer until the last day of the month.
 
The following example from the omse11i.sql output shows the workflow status:

PROCESS_NAME     ACTIVITY_NAME     RESULT       ACT_STATUS  BEGIN_DATE
Close - Order    Wait              Null         Deferred    31-JAN 00:00:00     

This wait value comes seeded with the Application.
You can view the workflow process 'Close-Order' as follows:

In Workflow Builder, open the workflow definition for OM Order Header.
Under Processes, open up Close - Order.
Here you will notice the Wait function just after the Start function.
Right click on Wait and select Properties.
Under the Node Attributes tab you will see the following:

Wait Mode is a constant set to 'Day Of Month',
Day of Month is a constant set to 'Last'

These values can be changed to cause the workflow to defer for a set number of days, or to progress immediately.  However it is 
recommended that changes to workflows be done by someone proficient in Oracle Workflow. NOTE: These changes should not be 
made to seeded workflow processes. It is advisable that a new workflow process be created and the necessary change made. 
However if the seeded workflow or existing flow is modified, the change will not affect existing orders. Only newly created orders 
will adopt the change.