Oracle launches serious plug and play supply chain extensions

The four are: Oracle Manufacturing Operations Centre, Oracle Demand Signal Repository, Oracle Advanced Planning Command Centre and Oracle Service Parts Planning. According to Oracle vice president of applications Jon Chorley, the objective is faster time-to-value. And he adds that these are extension applications – meaning they can be implemented without upgrading core ERP systems – and that includes third party systems, such as SAP. “These new products further demonstrate our commitment to enable the transformation of the extended supply chain into flexible, information-driven value chains for our customers,” says Chorley. “Six leading manufacturers participated in our pilot for more than a year. The results were amazing: sales for the pilot suppliers across the 16 categories grew an aggregate of 23.5% year-over-year, vs 12.2% growth for the categories as a whole, and total margin dollars rose 19.3% for all items included in the pilot versus a year ago.” What’s the difference this time? Chorley explains that it’s about enabling a new level of genuine collaboration and flexibility at all levels – starting with the classic disconnect, shopfloor to operational ERP. “Given the number of systems often involved, it’s difficult to get a coherent way of meshing information between shopfloor and ERP and using it to improve efficiency, so Oracle Manufacturing Operations Centre is aimed at manufacturing operations management,” he says. “We’ve used the S95 industry standard for collecting data from shopfloor and merging it with ERP in a contextualised manner – and then put analytics on top. “So there’s a set of OPC connectors to enable users to bring information from shopfloor equipment and systems into the data model. The contextualisation engine then means they can add business context – so, for example, not just units, but married to order number, customer number, priority and so on. And the analytics mean they can look at statistics, such as OEE, capacity utilisation, where failures are – rework, set up, whatever.” It’s a similar story with Oracle Demand Signal Repository, the objective being to help users get better visibility and analytics, but into that other big challenge – consumer demand. “It’s complicated because there are sales forecasts, syndicated data, POS data... If users had a better demand picture then they would have more effective sales relationships with retailers. It would be more proactive and effective. “So our product captures all that data from a variety of sources and collects it into a single model. They can clean it up, rationalise it, report on it – collaborate with retailers… Initially, this is for manufacturers, but it reaches out to the retailer in a very collaborative way. And we’ve also been able to bring to bear flexible technology components and analytics.” As for the other two, Demantra, acquired by Oracle some 18 months ago, features strongly in its Advanced Planning Command Centre module, which caters for strategic and operational planning on the supply and demand sides – again with analytic dashboards, but also with the ability to define scenarios and create workflows needed to automate optimum solutions. And similarly, Service Parts Planning is, as you might expect, about supply and demand of spares, taking into account, for example, criticality – everything service managers would need. “If you marry that to Oracle’s capabilities in terms of managing field service and parts associated with that, and we have a very comprehensive solution for all companies trying to drive revenue out of that side of the business.”