iProcurement item search

Hi All,

We are in R12.1.1 & currently we have more than 36K items in our inventory and we have mapped the existing purchasing categories into shopping categories too.

But in order to make these items visible under iProcurement item search do we need to update the category for every item ? or can we do it from the back end?

Because we are searching for an item in iProcurement and it does not appear in search what we do is to update its assigned category once and re-query, then it appears.

Any solution to be done to this? Since for a newly defined item it works perfectly