Order Maintenance, Claims, Binding - Acquisitions Overview Module

Owned by Jennifer Koerber (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Apr 14, 2020 by William Walsh
9 min read

This is the fifth section of the Acquisitions Overview module to the Alma Overviews course. The video is at the top of the page, followed by the script.

In this video, you'll review:

 

Now, let’s look at Order Maintenance tasks. Many of the tasks under the umbrella of Order Maintenance happen from the POL’s row action item list in the search results, or from the Purchase Order Lines Details screen. Let’s begin by looking up the POL we want to work with.

 

Tasks under the Row Action Item List icon

In the persistent search bar, I’ll choose Search Type of Order Line, then I’ll go ahead with a PO Line number for a continuous order (2447162-1).

Now, I get a search results list of one. Let’s look at the options in the row action item list.

Cancelling a POL

First, Cancel. From here, you can cancel an order, but at Harvard the best practice is not to cancel an order, but to close it.

Why? In Alma, if you cancel a POL that is the only order on that purchase order (including all migrated orders from Aleph), Alma will delete the PO line’s inventory – both the holdings and the items – unless that inventory has been received or activated. If the POL has a bib and holdings record, but no items yet, cancelling the POL will delete the holdings record as well.

This is most important for unreceived, predicted items, such as serials issues. For these materials, always close an order rather than cancel it.

So, on to Closing Orders

Closing a POL

Alma will automatically close one-time orders after they have been received and paid for.

You can manually close a one-time order if the status is Waiting for Invoice, if needed.

Closing orders is slightly more relevant for continuous orders like serials or standing orders, like Bon Appetit.

All you have to do is click on Close and then Confirm, and Alma will close the POL and related Purchase Order (if this POL was the only order on it) and release any encumbered funds. When you close a POL, the holdings and items remain untouched.

Reopening a POL

Once you close a POL, this option in the row action item list will change to Reopen, so you can click on that to reopen the order.

Reopened orders go immediately into review, and you may need to edit the Acquisition method, price, or other details if these have changed. Once the updates are completed and the order is approved, it will either be sent to the vendor or simply changed in Alma as needed.

Deleting a POL

You might notice, there is no option to Delete this PO: it was only Cancel or Close. There are two reasons: its status and the presence of existing items.

Only POLs with the following statuses can be deleted:

  • In Review
  • Manual Packaging
  • Auto Packaging
  • Deferred
  • Cancelled
  • Closed

Second, a POL cannot be deleted if it is linked to an invoice line or if one of the POL’s resources has been already received. This is to maintain the financial audit trail for materials. If you need to close the order that has invoice lines or received materials, choose Close – don’t look for Delete.

Tasks on the PO Line Details screen

For the next few order maintenance tasks, we need to get to the PO Line Details screen. This time, we’ll search for a one-time order (POL-35181), and from our row action list, click on Edit.

Here on the POL Details screen, we have a number of choices:

Changing Vendors

There are two ways to change the vendor for an order:

Replace (only) Vendor will change the vendor and nothing else, and will not send a new order to the new vendor. Use this if there’s no reason to send another order, that the old order is still valid. To use this option, a one-time order must be in a status of Sent or Waiting for Invoice; continuous orders must be Sent, Waiting for Renewal, or Waiting for Manual Renewal.

Change Vendor, in contrast, will change the vendor and send a new order to that new vendor. This new order will be packaged into a new purchase order and deleted from the previous purchase order. If that POL was the only order on that purchase order, the entire PO will be deleted. To use this option, a one-time order can only be in a status of Sent (nothing yet received or activated); continuous orders can be Sent, Waiting for Renewal, or Waiting for Manual Renewal.

In either case, all you have to do is click the button here, choose a new vendor, and Alma will handle everything else unless there is an error, same as with the original order.

Changing a POL’s Bibliographic Reference

You can also change the POL’s bibliographic reference. The bibliographic reference is the brief bib description that we saw earlier, that you can see on the Description tab. Changing the bib reference does not mean changing the bib record a POL is linked to, or the holdings or items. Changing the bib reference is useful when an order was made on a provisional or stub bib record, but there is now better information available on the bib record that can be added to the POL description.

This feature is relevant for title-based PO lines, and cannot be performed on cancelled PO lines.

If you click on Change Bib Reference, Alma will perform a repository search that will help you find the correct updated bib information. There may be only one result, in which case click on it, or there may be more than one, in which case find the one you want and click on that. In this case, we have only one. If I click anywhere in that row, Alma will update the information accordingly in the POL bib description, on the Description tab.

Relinking a POL to a Different Bibliographic Record

Another thing you can do from the Purchase Order Lines Details screen is to relink the POL to a different bib record. This will move the corresponding items and holdings to that new bib record. You might do this if your item matched an existing bib record better than the one imported for the order, or if the POL is linked to a bib record for single volume that’s actually part of a multivolume work with a separate bib record.

Relinking works in the same way as changing the bib reference: click on Relink, perform the search to find the bib record you want to link the order (and its holdings and items), and click on that result in the list. In addition, when you relink the bib record, the bib reference on the Description tab will automatically update to the new information as well.

The Relink option is only available for PO lines with the following statues:

One-time orders must be Sent, Waiting for Invoice, In Review, Deferred, Ready, Auto Packaging, Manual Packaging, or Closed

Continuous orders must be Waiting for Renewal, Waiting for Manual Renewal, In Review, Deferred, Ready, Auto Packaging, or Manual Packaging.

Again, all of these details are listed in the functional documentation about Acquisitions on the Alma wiki.

Now, let’s look at claims and binding.

Claims

Putting a claim on an order – for an unreceived or damaged item or serials issue, for instance – starts by sending a communication to the vendor from the POL Details screen:

  1. Click on the Communications tab, then Start Communication.
  2. Choose the Type of Claim. Note that your email address will be attached to this claim, not the ordering or owning library’s.
  3. Add the POL number to the Subject
  4. Edit the body to include all the relevant information about why you’re submitting a claim. If you drag the corner down, you can see everything that Alma has already added. Alma provides information about the order, so add in what item or issue you’re claiming.
  5. You could add an attachment, either of a previous email exchange saved as a PDF, a paid proforma invoice that’s been scanned, or an image of a damaged item.
  6. The Notes field is for internal Harvard use, it will not be sent to the vendor. You might describe what the attachment is or include internally-relevant details.
  7. When you’re done, click Send.
    1. It says Failed to send email to vendor because we are in the Sandbox, where these direct lines of communication have been turned off. In Production, this would not happen, and the communication would simply go through.

When the vendor replies via email, it will go to your email address, not here in Alma. You can capture that email as a PDF or copy the text and add it as a Response to this claim communication by clicking on the row action list and clicking Add a Response. Here, I could paste in the body of the response or upload a PDF of an email exchange, or just add a Note. Then, Save that as a response.

Now, if you click on the communication, you’ll see both the original communication and then the response that I added.

Finally, let’s change gears completely and review the basics of the records portion of binding materials, another frequent Order Maintenance task. Again, the hands-on training mentioned at the end of this video will have more details.

Binding

You’ll need to start from an editing-focused list of the items you’re going to bind together. You can get there from the Receive Items list, from the bib record for the title, or from an individual item record – whatever makes sense for your workflow. We’ll go from the bib record.

  1. Search for the title of the items that I’m going to bind together. So, a Physical Titles search for Bon Appetit.
  2. Look for the title in the list. From my list of results, I see the Schlesinger library copies are right here.
    1. If there is only one holdings record for the title, you can click on Items to see the list of items and proceed with the next step.
    2. If there are multiple holdings records (like on my first title here – there’s Schlesinger in-library use only, Schlesinger Library HD, and Countway), you must click on vew all Holdings and view only the items for that holdings record. This lets Alma know you’re dealing with just that library’s holdings.
    3. I’ll go ahead and click on Holdings, an now for Schlesinger Library, I’ll click on View items.
  3. Once you get to a list of items for that title that are attached to a single holdings record, you will see the tickyboxes off to the left of each item and additional options here below the summary at the top. This means you’re in the correct list of items to bind, because you can see Bind items as a choice.
  4. Now, click on the tickyboxes next to all of the items you are going to bind together. We will go ahead an do the first half of 2018, so item #1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
  5. Click on Bind items.
  6. Alma will step you through the process from here, including creating a Work Order for the binding process. For more on Work Orders, watch the Work Orders Overview module.
    1. First, it’ll have you Review selected items to bind into one volume, then you can click on Next. It’ll have you generate a work order for binding, so Technical Services, then the work order department is Schlesinger Technical Services, and now you can go into Binding and Create.
    2. “Binding the selected items will withdraw them from the system.” This is true! Once you confirm the Work Order, Alma will automatically delete all of the individual item records and create a new item record for the bound item. Click Confirm.
  7. The next step will be to go through the Physical Item Editor for that new bound item record and update the barcode, the item policy, the enumeration and chronology, and any other fields that need changing.
  8. Click Save and you’ll return to the items list.
  9. Your new item will have a status of Item not in place and a process type of Acquisition Technical Services / Tech Services Work Order. (Note: Prior to 2020, this was solely Tech Services Work Order. Ex Libris changed the display without notice. In an item, under General Information, the process type still displays as Tech Services Work Order. Elsewhere, it is listed as Acquisition technical services.) I can find it by getting to Item not in place, and then choose a sort routine of Process Type, so it’s sorting by process type. Now we can see that today, we have our Item not in place with an Alma barcode. This is our new bound item.
  10. If I go ahead and hit Edit, get to the Physical Item Editor, Material type is Issue (Bound), and now I can change the barcode, the item policy, and anything else that I need to change.

At this point, you could edit the holdings record in the Metadata Editor to reflect the new bound volume. Go to View all holdings, find the holdings record, and click Edit in the row action list.

This has been an overview of Order Maintenance. For more information about Order Maintenance and more details for all the actions in this video, view the Order Maintenance section of the Alma functional documentation or the hands-on training script for Order Maintenance.

Our next video will focus on specific concerns for serials, or Continuous Orders.