Oracle takes sales and operations planning to a new holistic level

"That's on the supplier side, in terms of their ability to stay in business, and on the demand side. Manufacturers need to be able to predict situations and use insight into changing patters to drive their businesses," he says. Hence Oracle's release of software that addresses both the strategic and tactical supply chain issues – underpinning what he describes as a new era of S&OP (sales and operations planning). "It's about managing and aligning business in challenging economic times and looking at the supply chain as an area of investment to position your company well, and to control and manage costs – but also to exploit the coming upturn," says Chorley. However, this appears not to be S&OP as we know it. Says Chorley: "People used to talk of S&OP as a social engineering exercise so that people would talk to one another nicely and come up with an aligned plan. But to make it effective, you need a tool and in infrastructure that helps them to collaborate in real time." And he paints a picture of people constantly interacting, using a common system with a common set of services and information that becomes intrinsic to everyone's roles. "That way, everything is reflected in the S&OP plan, and so are all actions and so is all communication." For Oracle then, S&OP should not just be about getting good demand insights and linking those into production and the supply side. To work smoothly in today's environment, it needs to be taken further into financial and business performance. "It also needs to integrate new product development into the process so that you don't build an S&OP plan that is then blown as soon as someone introduces new product." All of that, says Chorley, is now anchored in Oracle's Value Chain Planning solutions that have arisen largely out of acquisitions in recent months and years. And he mentions Oracle Transportation Management, Demand Management (coming out of Demantra) and most recently the Agile PLM (product lifecycle management) piece. "One of the great advantages of our solution is that it's very modular. So whether a company is using Oracle, SAP or any other solution, it can quickly deploy these solutions to create value. That's why we talk about complete open and modular approach," says Chorley. And he says that message is getting through. "We are continuing to see good demand. It is a challenging environment. It's very important that you can present the value proposition and ROI argument. But people are looking to make targeted investments and our experience is that the battleground is in the supply chain."