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.

Supply Chain Matters will be traveling to the west coast this week to attend Industry Analyst World, hosted by enterprise technology provider Oracle. The agenda calls for a series of briefings from various Oracle senior executives on market, industry and product strategies. We will especially be attuned to Oracle strategies focused on supply chain business intelligence, predictive analytics and overall applications strategies.  Considering the current competitive environment among Oracle and other enterprise vendors such as SAP, the timing is ideal.

Stay tuned this week for updates and impressions from this briefing.

In conjunction with Oracle’s JD Edwards Summit being held this week in Broomfield, Colorado, Oracle has announced a second phase of mobile access applications that are being made available for the specific JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications suite.  These include:

• Mobile Requisition Self Service Approval – designed to provide real-time transaction processing access for the review, approval or rejection of requisitions.
• Order Approval Mobile Purchase – Helps enable mobile workers to review and approve purchase orders regardless of physical location.
• Mobile Sales Inquiry – Addresses the needs of sales representatives, service technicians and managers by providing access to sales orders, item availability and item base price on-demand.

Each of these applications will now support smartphone enablement to include the Apple, Android and Blackberry specific platforms.

Supply Chain Matters had the opportunity to speak with Oracle JD Edwards Group Vice-President and General Manager Lyle Ekdahl regarding this week’s announcement, and we were especially interested as to why Oracle elected to have its premiere mid-market ERP offering lead the charge for mobile computing enablement, particularly in supply chain related applications.  Ekdahl’s response was that mid-market companies are just as challenged with reduced staffing and doing more with less, forcing many supply chain functional teams to be much more mobile in their day-to-day business activities.  When the JDE customer councils prioritized areas for needed future enhancements, mobile support was at the top of the list. This week’s announcement is the second iteration from a prior announced support of Apple iPad enablement  made at Oracle Open World last Fall. Ekdahl also noted that there will be several waves of JDE mobile enablement over the next 18 months. He also clarified that each of Oracle’s ERP product lines will have separate rollout strategies relative to mobile enablement.

We still find it interesting that that the JDE suite is currently leading Enterprise Business Suite in this area. Meanwhile, SAP and Microsoft continue to be low-key on their respective supply chain applications mobility strategies and support for customers.

The needs for select mobility enablement among certain supply chain business processes is a growing need and it is interesting to observe how the major ERP providers select processes and applications for mobility support.  Security of information however, will continue to remain a rather important requirement for businesses deploying more mobility features.

Bob Ferrari