GT Nexus and Kinaxis have announced a strategic partnership directed at providing a cloud-based unified planning and execution platform for enterprise customers and business process outsourcing (BPO) service providers. This partnership is directed at combining the capabilities of both companies – the planning and simulation “brains” of the Kinaxis platform with the inter-enterprise B2B execution network of GT Nexus. The Kinaxis RapidResponse® Control Tower providing supply chain planning, demand management, S&OP, supplier collaboration, is to be coupled with the GT Nexus platform that provides real-time visibility to orders, inventory, shipments and commerce transactions from order point to final delivery and payment.

Kinaxis has been searching for a means to connect this provider’s supply chain planning and response capabilities directly to a B2B network platform and this partnership has the potential to provide broader appeal.

Supply Chain Matters will feature more in-depth commentary after securing more information related to this partnership.

Bob Ferrari

Disclosure: Kinaxis is one of other named sponsors of the Supply Chain Matters blog.

Supply Chain Matters thought it would be great idea to conduct interviews reflecting on the different current perspectives of supply chain control tower concepts.  This Part Two posting is a continuation from Part One.

Our goal is to include technology and service providers, as well as functional experts closest to this area.  To kick off this series, we conducted an interchange with Infosys senior consultants regarding current trends in this area. Participants and prime contributors in the responses were:

Gopi Krishnan GR, Practice Manager – Business Application and Services, Retail CPG, Logistics and Life Sciences, Infosys

 Arun Kumar, Principal Consultant – Business Application and Services, Retail CPG, Logistics and Life Sciences, Infosys

 We continue in this posting with Gopi and Arun responses to two other questions.

 Question 3: Typically, how are supply chain control tower capability needs being expressed:

a.   The need for more timely decision making capabilities or supply chain business intelligence vs. broader visibility

b.   An extension of supply chain planning capabilities regarding the overall picture of demand or supply or products?

c.    An extension of supply execution capabilities regarding purchase orders, replenishment and exception occurrences?

d.   Combinations of the three above?

It is a combination of all 3. In fact, the nearest abstraction would be a flavor of near real-time Business Intelligence (BI) solution. A SCCT is a function of accurate forecasting, rapid execution, and actionable insight that leads to superior decision making. Depending on the level in which you want to expand the SCCT scope, the issues being addressed can be (a)the planning to execution gap (b) the intra-execution gap (between various execution functions) or (c) inter-enterprise gap (in terms of functional flows or handshakes across organizations or entities).

Question 4: What general advice does Infosys share regarding the best approach for undertaking a supply chain control tower initiative.

The primary challenge for organizations today is to lower costs, improve service levels, enhance visibility and effectively synchronize the demand-supply equation. The SCCT is an effective tool to address these challenges. It must however be noted that we continue to advocate a ‘crawl-walk-run’ approach instead of trying too many things at the same time.

 How do we start off on the SCCT journey? A lot of parallels can be drawn to the classic six sigma improvement techniques (DMAIC comes to mind) adapted to the SCM context. The three key pillars for this initiative would be Visibility, Control and Responsiveness.

 Visibility can be attained via streamlining the business processes to address current inefficiencies followed by defining and right-sizing of metrics. Instead of trying to measure, monitor and track everything across the supply chain, the organization could define limited operational KPIs and cross-functional metrics to begin with and expand as they go along.

 At the Control level, the organization is setting up the right metrics and measure/monitor/track key parameters across the supply chain based on critical KPIs that can be expanded as they go along (to include more cross-functional metrics). At this stage, we are still referring to upper or lower control levels for each parameters and the ability to stay predictable.

Responsiveness is where the customers see the difference in terms of enhanced customer experience. These could be events which are routine (like a truck delay) or much broader in scope – even at the level of supply chain risk management as a response to unforeseen and potentially catastrophic events. Thus responsiveness goes beyond actionable insights and can include outcomes from what-if predictive modeling to drive better decision making.

 For each of these steps, organizations can stay within their span of control or expand beyond traditional boundaries to look at the extended supply chain.

 The technology approach for the SCCT logically requires the same four steps to be enabled. The additional – but an overarching requirement – is the design of a scalable and flexible integration platform to extract the necessary information from underlying systems (within an enterprise) and message files (from external partners). This would require harmonization both at a process level and at a master data level.

This concludes part two of this Infosys dialogue on SCCT readiness.  If readers have specific thoughts and/or needs in this area, or if your organization wants to contribute to this education series, please send us an email: info <at> supply-chain-matters <dot> com.

 Bob Ferrari

 Disclosure: Infosys is one of three other named sponsors of the Supply Chain Matters blog.

With the current rapid base of business and the growing complexity of global based supply chains, many companies are beginning to re-define the needs for broader visibility, more timely decision-making and predictive process capabilities regarding supply chain business processes. These needs are more frequently being expressed in the context of supply chain control tower (SCCT) capabilities. Our goal in 2012 is to provide more reader education reflecting on this new evolving area of interest.

 In this context, Supply Chain Matters thought it would be great idea to conduct interviews reflecting on the different current perspectives of SCCT today.  Our goal is to include technology and service providers, as well as functional experts closest to this area.  To kick off this series, we conducted an interchange with Infosys senior consultants regarding current trends in this area.

Participants and prime contributors in the responses were:

Gopi Krishnan GR, Practice Manager – Business Application and Services, Retail CPG, Logistics and Life Sciences, Infosys

 Arun Kumar, Principal Consultant – Business Application and Services, Retail CPG, Logistics and Life Sciences, Infosys

 We thank both Gopi and Arun for their participation and thought exchange and we believe our readers will benefit from these perspectives.

Question 1: In your travels, have you observed supply chain and IT executives seeking more information and education on supply chain control tower concepts?

The terminologies around this concept are still crystallizing, but the need is certainly there. Some call it Control Tower, some others name it Operations Center, some others prefer the term Command Center, regardless of the terms used, the need is certainly felt for some kind of overarching approach to get a hold on end-to-end supply chain visibility and control.

What makes supply chain the best candidate for creation of a Supply Chain Control Tower (SCCT) is the incredible heterogeneity in terms of business functions (eg) Demand Planning, Procurement, Transportation, Warehousing etc., exponentially growing to the sub-functions (load planning, route planning, carrier selection, rate calculation engines etc. with Transportation) further exponentially growing to the IT applications (various packages and custom apps) and the data entities owned/managed by these apps.

 This multi-tier complexity directly prevents any kind of unified visibility directly impacting the speed of decision making taking. Converting the islands of data to some kind of actionable insight is at the core of the need for an SCCT.

Where this is still nebulous is in the definition of what exactly constitutes a tower and what levels of granularity/aggregation of information is possible. This means devising suitable cross-functional metrics, aggregating data near real-time and designing dashboards that extend beyond mere alerting capabilities. Incidentally, while intra-organizational and cross-functional metrics are a good start, we believe that the true value of an SCCT would be unleashed once it transcends organizational boundaries.

In short, an SCCT can span from alert management (more commonly known as SCEM or supply chain event management) all the way to an aggregator of information across a complex supply chain, spanning multiple organizations, thus enabling better actionable insight for the entities that hold larger balance of power within those supply chains.

Are current interest levels coming mainly from the IT, supply chain functional, or both?

We see interest from both the IT & functional areas.

 Functional teams obviously benefit from better visibility and enhanced alerting mechanisms. Hence it comes as no surprise to us that they are strong advocates of the supply chain control tower. This also frees them up from the need to span across multiple applications (sometimes for the same function) while being able to gain the right insights and act upon them as things happen.

 IT teams see the control tower as being beneficial in a different way. Until now, IT departments followed the ‘get common systems and platforms first before deriving insight’ approach. The rationale was that common systems and platforms aid the capture of data in standard formats and make it easy to infer. But it has been well-established that getting on to common systems is a never ending journey. Hence IT teams look at SCCT as an evolutionary platform for aggregating information from multiple sources in a disciplined and cost effective manner. With cloud adoption increasingly being a reality, platform standardization might be an easier option from a change management perspective compared to sun-setting multiple applications. Provided the new platforms become mobile and social-enabled, business teams should be ready to onboard themselves.

Question 2: Is the current interest level coming from specific industry sectors?

It is fair to assume that more the complexity, the greater the need for an SCCT.

One of the dimensions to evaluate complexity is the geographical spread of the supply chain. Hence supply chains that involve geographical diversity will benefit (Hi-Tech Manufacturing & Electronics). Similarly, variances can exist in terms of application landscape, business function, typical span of order life cycles or even the complexity of the supply chain in terms of the number of actors performing an end-to-end integration function.

Of late, the roles of the principal players in the supply chain (with reference to relative supply chain power) and underlying systems in a supply chain have also contributed to the interest, Retail being a good example. In the past, retailers ordered inventory from suppliers, received them into warehouses, moved inventory to stores and completed sales transactions with customers who walked into these stores. But today’s omni-channel approach has greatly expanded the role of the principal players. Today’s customers can place an order via the web, kiosk or call center. The retailer needs to look at inventory across the all fulfillment nodes to determine the best fulfillment approach. In some instances, the retailer may choose to drop-ship items directly from suppliers. It is likely that the organization engages in 3PLs to facilitate a wider reach. Last minute emergencies may result in delayed shipments, unplanned back orders or damaged goods. In addition, customers now expect that the retailer keeps them informed on the progress and status of the order at all times.

 All of this mandates the collection and assimilation of information in near real-time across customer service, warehousing, 3PL, transportation and procurement teams. The information resides in a diverse application landscape (legacy, package, custom etc) with communication occurring in multiple formats (portals, EDI, XML, flat files, email etc). Terrific opportunities exist for an SCCT concept in such a scenario.

This concludes part one of our dialogues on SCCT readiness.  In part two, we pose two additional questions regarding how such needs are being communicated by functional teams as well as Infosys advice on how to best approach the deployment of SCCT.

Bob Ferrari

Disclosure: Infosys is one of three other named sponsors of the Supply Chain Matters blog.

This commentary continues our series of Supply Chain Matters impressions from this week’s Oracle Industry Analyst World Spring event held at the company’s corporate campus in Redwood Shores California.

In our previous Dispatch One commentary we focused on general impressions of Oracle’s current direction in technology and support for customer IT solution needs. Our Dispatch Two commentary provided impressions and an information update related to Oracle SCM applications support.

In this Supply Chain Matters dispatch, we focus on some highlights of Oracle’s transition to Fusion powered SCM, the ability to provide core SCM applications in a cloud or SaaS environment.

Fusion SCM is being designed and incrementally deployed to leverage five underlying core frameworks:

• Data model and services
• Business process support
• Analytics and calculation
• Integration services
• Data model extensibility

The applications that will be deployed on the outlined technology stack in a phased rollout strategy over the next 12-18 months.  Some applications are already in co-existence mode while others will be re-architected or introduced in a cloud offering. Oracle executives are quick to note that customers are not asking for a “big-bang” rollout, but rather an evolution over time which IT and functional organizations can absorb. The deployment strategy is also industry targeted, with high tech and consumer electronics as the initial objective, followed by other manufacturing and service focused industries.

Highlighted applications currently in phased rollout include:

• Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO) being designed to support B2B and B2C commerce fulfillment needs involving multiple backend systems.  This application has strong interest for Cross-Channel commerce fulfillment needs that are evident in current Retailer business support environments.
• Product Master Data Management Hub to support regulatory compliance, product catalog or product portfolio analysis needs.
• Inventory and Cost Management to support multiple channel fulfillment needs.

Down the road, Oracle SCM customers can anticipate additional Fusion elements related to Value Chain Planning and supply chain orchestration support functionality.

We also had the opportunity to have some conversation with Oracle executive David Hope Ross regarding Oracle strategies in supporting procurement process needs.  There are interesting opportunities at play related to leveraging Oracle’s engineered systems components to procurement business process needs. These include continued leveraging Endeca information discovery tools in supplier management and analysis, and areas of P2P process and electronic invoicing support.  Business analytics will also have increased potential for analyzing procurement spend trending in direct and indirect services.

The most interesting takeaway for Supply Chain Matters was the summation of certain Oracle customer feedback forums that indicate the readiness to consider some deployment of SCM support applications in a cloud or hosted environment if certain service and uptime conditions are assured. This reinforces a new and different deployment phase that can well manifest itself in the one, two or possibly three year time horizon. This is a significant threshold for supply chain technology and Oracle and possibly a couple other enterprise class vendors will lead in this space.

In a later posting, we will provide some other takeaways and summary impressions after we have had the opportunity to absorb our over 40 pages of briefing notes.  There was no shortage of interesting content in these two days of briefings.

Bob Ferrari

©2012 The Ferrari Consulting and Research Group and Supply Chain Matters blog.  All rights reserved.

Disclosure: Oracle has no current financial or sponsorship interests in this blog or our consulting services business

In our previous dispatch commentary we provided general impressions from this week’s Oracle Industry Analyst World Spring event being held at the company’s corporate campus in Redwood Shores California.  In this Supply Chain Matters dispatch, we focus on briefing highlight elements of Oracle’s supply chain management support strategies.

Rick Jewell, Oracle’s senior vice president of supply chain applications development delivered an update on supply chain applications strategy, some of which we can share, and some we cannot because of non-disclosure agreements.

The core attributes of Oracle SCM remain, namely:

• Providing a complete suite of supply chain management support.
• Being ERP agnostic, including the support of other major ERP backbones via open applications integration architecture.
• Providing modular applications that can be matched or mixed to customer needs.

The core Value Chain Planning (VCP) grouping of applications has undergone 8 point releases in the last 3 years. Four new planning applications have been added including service parts planning.  The Oracle Rapid Planning application has been augmented with integration to S&OP support, inventory optimization and collaborative planning needs.

Oracle Value Chain Execution has also undergone its share of enhancements including 95 new releases to Oracle Transportation Management (OTM) since the acquisition of G-Log.  By the end of the year, OTM is planned to include mobility support for information and business function access across smartphone and mobile platforms. Oracle Warehouse Management has added 42 new features including 2 industry specific solutions. Oracle Global Trade Management is a recent addition to this grouping.

Oracle Supply Chain Management’s 12.2 Release was described as imminent and includes some rather interesting new functionality including an expanded Advanced Planning Control Center, an equivalent to support for an executive-level S&OP process.  It is designed to bring together the product hierarchy dimensions of Demantra S&OP with supply and distribution planning capabilities.  The new release will also feature some long overdue simulation capabilities for Oracle Rapid Planning to support intra-day simulations of supply and demand plans.  The 12.2 release was also positioned for Oracle enhancements related to support of asset intensive industry SCM needs.

Oracle PLM and Product Value Chain comes under the umbrella of Oracle’s SCM and includes PLM/PDM support utilizing Agile PLM and Agile PLM for Process. Since the original acquisition of Agile, Oracle indicates that there have been over 500 customer-driven enhancements added.  A neat new feature is the ability to analyze the product development pipeline or simulate product demand scenarios from PLM within an overall S&OP process framework. One other highlight of Product Value Chain is the addition of enterprise quality management functionality, soon to be enhanced with the addition of some Endeca powered information discovery capabilities. Jewell was not shy in naming recent Oracle customer acquisitions in competing with SAP.

Another important highlight to share with our readers is the current direction concerning Oracle’s Fusion or cloud-based SCM offerings. Fusion is the Oracle strategy to allow applications to run in a public/private cloud as well as on-premise.

Dispatch three will address this element of Oracle’s direction.

Bob Ferrari

©2012 The Ferrari Consulting and Research Group and Supply Chain Matters blog.  All rights reserved.

Disclosure: Oracle has no current financial or sponsorship interests in this blog or our consulting services business.

Our commentary this week comes from the Oracle Industry Analyst World Spring event being held at Oracle’s corporate campus in Redwood Shores California.  This is an event designed to showcase Oracle’s various product and industry marketing strategies with the broader community of technology influencers. In past years, invitations to participate in this event were reserved strictly to the traditional industry analyst firms such as Gartner, IDC and Forrester, for which there is considerable representation, over 80 according to conference organizers.  This year, Oracle elected to expand its outreach and has included more of us who serve as independent analysts and technology influencers.  We therefore begin this commentary by expressing our thanks to Oracle for their outreach and inclusion of Supply Chain Matters in this event.

The main messaging theme for Oracle focuses on engineered systems and applications and the theme was emphasized in many of the presentations delivered.  In fact, we were pleasantly surprised both with the progress that Oracle has made in its various technology elements but also in the current breadth of technology being offered to the market.  In our view, the notion of engineered systems is not just marketing buzz but rather a comprehensive collection of strategies directed at engineering IT hardware, database infrastructure, middleware and software to work together. For readers not completely up to speed with Oracle, the current products spectrum now spans:

• Applications
• Middleware
• Database
• Operating system
• Servers
• Storage

Oracle President Mark Hurd expressed the company’s approach as helping customers to make overall IT simpler to digest and deploy, in essence, take away the complexity burden for customers. An Oracle Exadata development executive expressed this notion as being a “point-of-view” company, one that offers customers a choice of capabilities tailored to a belief in broadly engineered and tuned components of computing, database and software.

Over these past two days we have observed executives that were much more up-to-speed on rapidly shifting needs in simplifying IT response, harnessing more insights from data.  More importantly, there is substance behind the PowerPoints along with a strategic plan that ties all product development efforts toward a concerted group of market strategies. In our view, the traditional Oracle will certainly not shy from commanding a good share of a customer’s wallet, but the value proposition and the technical depth of the solution offerings are far broader and somewhat compelling for the market to ignore.  Oracle’s ongoing initiatives are sure to add more dynamics to the competitive landscape of enterprise technology vendors in the months to come.

All of this should have an important significance in the area of supply chain management support applications and business intelligence needs, where scope and complexity often rule the landscape, and where timely IT response to solving continuous business process needs is critical.

In our subsequent commentaries will be focus more on the various supply chain, business analytics and B2B commerce aspects related to Oracle’s initiatives.

Stay tuned.

Bob Ferrari

©2012 The Ferrari Consulting and Research Group and Supply Chain Matters blog.  All rights reserved.

Disclosure: Oracle has no current financial or sponsorship interests in this blog or our consulting services business.