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

In anyone’s lifetime, there are just a few events that can be characterized as ‘once in a lifetime’.  This weekend, both my wife and I experienced such a thrill. The weekend featured the Boston Portsmouth Air Show, with the main headliner being the famous U.S. Navy Blue Angels.  But that was not the only awesome highlight of this show.

I was fortunate to receive a very gracious invitation from Oracle, that was featuring noted stunt pilot, Sean Tucker, as part of the Team Oracle presence and billing at the show.  When my wife and I checked in at the Oracle chalet, we were asked if we wanted to volunteer to be part of a designated team of  ‘pole holders’.  Naturally we sought clarification of what that meant. Among his numerous talents as an experienced pilot, Sean Tucker performs a maneuver during his exhibition where he flies about 15-25 feet above the main runway, between three sets of Oracle bannered poles tethered together by a colorful ribbon. ‘Pole holders’ hold these poles as Sean flies past at a few hundred miles-per-hour.

After this explanation, I looked at my wife who to my surprise, immediately stated, “Absolutely, sign us up.”  I replied “Don’t we want to talk about this?”, but she was hearing none of that.

After a rigorous safety briefing, Sean’s able team explained to the team of designated pole holders that we were to walk about a half-mile out to the main operating runway with our poles.  They then explained that the next queue would be to raise our poles and extend the ribbon from pole-to-pole.  As a final stunt, Sean would fly his plane  (noted in the attached picture) under each of the extended poles. He would then loop around the field and make a second pass, this time, cutting all three ribbons with his wing tips.  “With his wing tips.. O…K…?”

As all our team members walked out to the runway, all I could think of was all those numerous warnings that I heard on airliners when taxing to and from boarding gates.  “Please keep your seat belts fastened because we are on an active runway.”  We only had our two feet on this runway!

After taking a deep breadth, we watched Sean perform a magnificent demonstration of stunt flying and then the command came, “Raise your poles.” As Sean’s bi-plane approached, my first thought was that I hope that he was having a good day.  The plane dipped, and under the banner he flew in a flawness manner.  The noise was daunting, but the ‘rush’ was incredible.  Next came the turn for the second pass and my wife and I held that pole in a white knuckled grip.  We braced ourselves as the red blur approached, and to our astonishment, we hardly felt any pull as the ribbon was severed at 25 feet off the ground.  Incredible and a thrill of a lifetime!  Unfortunately, I was not able to bring my Flip videocam to capture the moment,

As we were walking back the crowd gave us very gracious applause.  My wife turned to me and exclaimed, “Aren’t you glad we volunteered”.  “You bet!!! Yahoo!!!”

Our thanks go out to Team Oracle for this fabulous experience and to the organizers of the Boston Portsmouth Air Show for organizing a truly awesome event.

Bob Ferrari

Last week, we called attention to a Business Week article that noted that business changes occurring in high tech and possibly other industry supply chains.  Supply Chain Matters commented that traditional planning based on historic trending, forecasting and traditionally longer planning cycles may not be sufficient to plan supply chain needs in the ‘new normal’ of business recovery.

Certain Oracle customers have already recognized this need, and Oracle has responded by announcing today the general availability of the Oracle Rapid Planning.

Interesting enough, this application sits on top of Oracle’s or other existing supply chain applications allowing planners to respond quickly to changes that may be required across the supply chain. 

I was briefed on Friday by Oracle executives Roger Goossens and John Bermudez last week about the features of this new application.  They indicated that feedback provided from an Oracle supply chain customer council indicated the need to respond to events that occur within inter-planning cycles, where the need for immediate answers to business opportunities or business change becomes critical.  An example would be if a customer wants to move-up and existing order or a new prospective customer wants to place an opportunistic order for goods.

The basis of this application is to snapshot the entire planning database at any given point in time, store that information in a totally memory resident architecture, and be able to run super-fast simulations of a planning scenario.  The application itself is stand-alone, and can be utilized in either an Oracle, or other ERP or APS environment, for instance SAP.  The technology leverages Oracle’s latest Fusion middleware which comes bundled in the licensing of the application. Software deployment is flexible, either from a traditional behind the firewall licensed version, or hosted options. The user interface also takes advantage of Oracle’s latest simplified, spreadsheet-like user and graphical interfaces. Another interesting note for this application is that it leverages simulation capabilities from Demantra’s sales and operations planning (S&OP) technology.

This application may be especially of interest to Oracle’s former JD Edwards’s customers with older versions of supply chain planning that may want to take advantage of Oracle’s newer planning technology without having to take the drink of Oracle’s full suite of supply chain applications, including templates for supply review, allocation decisions or capacity review.

Oracle was somewhat vague on the pricing aspects of the overall application except to indicate that the pricing is based on Oracle’s current pricing model that pegs size of the organization or supply chain as a reference.  Current customer references are limited to existing beta customers, and may increase over time.  At Oracle’s recent user’s conference, one customer who indicated use of this application was Amway.

As industry supply chains enter post recession recovery, the need for more rapid, event-driven planning will become more apparent.  For that alone, Oracle’s timing on the release of rapid planning is opportunistic.  How attractive this application becomes will be based on Oracle’s customer education and pricing of Rapid Planning.

 Bob Ferrari

Disclaimer: This author has received no compensation or consideration for neither authoring nor publishing this blog posting.

I had the opportunity to virtually attend the Oracle Applications Unlimited Live Show yesterday, and I came away with two impressions.  First, with the current climate severely impacting both business travel and training opportunities, I was very excited about the potential of “virtual conferencing” technology to fill this void.  Second, Oracle continues to impress with their product development, acquisition and marketing strategies related to supply chain management.

So lets begin with Oracle first.  My sense was that this event was yet another outreach from Oracle to test market acceptance of virtual conferencing.  While the overall number of the presentations was very limited, along with virtual exhibitors, the experience for me had lots of potential.  The primary keynote delivered by Ed Abbo, Oracle’s SVP of Applications Development was a great opportunity to again sense the overall direction for Oracle in their applications effort, as well as the opportunity for live chat.  Rick even offered viewers a look at smaller application tools that can aide in people and group productivity, in a time of lean people resources. Unlike past years, the presentation was pragmatic, offering customers and prospects ideas on how technologies can aide businesses in crisis.

I viewed another presentation delivered by Rick Jewell, SVP of Supply Chain Applications Development.  Similarly, the messaging was grounded to today’s realities for Oracle’s technology’s potential in helping companies to minimize product and supply chain costs, optimize inventories, and make more informed decisions.  The notions of stand-alone applications that can be installed in non-Oracle environments, quick implementations and ROI have been blended into product development and go-to-market strategies.  If you paid very close attention, you can literally pick-up on the continued emphasis on customer testimonials and proven results, as well at time-to-value, and oh yes, how these applications can be installed in SAP environments.  I continue to be impressed by Oracle’s supply chain marketing strategies, and other supply chain technology- related marketers should, in my view, look at Oracle as the benchmark for getting clear and succinct product messaging communicated. I’ve commented previously on the impressive depth and breadth of Oracle’s supply chain suite.

The platform for delivering this event was On24, a San Francisco based virtual conferencing provider.  The New York Times provided a recent technology write-up featuring this vendor, along with a listing of other vendors providing virtual conferencing technology offerings.  I found the experience to be quite seamless in terms of my connection, as well as intuitive. Just like a live show, I could visit an auditorium to view the presentations, the exhibit hall booths to view specific demonstrations, and a networking café to connect with other attendees.  In my interaction, I did not sense a lot of other attendees participating in live chats.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve experienced virtual conferencing. Virtual conferencing can be sterile and lacks the opportunity for real human connection.  There is no substitute foe eye to eye contact. But heck, in this economy, it’s a technology that has encountered the “perfect storm” of business needs. Today, many large global companies are taking advantage of this technology, and I believe my fellow marketing professionals should also be taking a hard look at this form of technology, especially over the coming months.  Public relations and professional service organizations should also take note.

Virtual conferencing vendors with smarts should be striving to provide more affordable services for smaller companies who also need these alternatives. These vendors need to be especially sensitive to the reality of lean marketing, travel and training budgets, and should have ala-carte choices for various forms of conferences or trade shows.

If Oracle was looking for a vote of confidence in this delivery medium, I vote yes.

 Bob Ferrari

I was invited by Oracle’s Supply Chain Analyst Relations team to participate in an SCM Analyst Summit briefing last week. Various Oracle executives shared product and strategy updates on the applications and industry support strategy that now make up the Oracle SCM applications suite.  The briefing also served as a preview to announcements expected to be made at the upcoming Oracle Open World 2008 conference that is being held from September 21-25 in San Francisco.

Since 2001, I for one have been impressed by Oracle’s vision for SCM, and each year that I participate in these update briefings, I am continually impressed with the overall progress that is being made by the Oracle teams.  A potent suite of applications continue to be assembled and matured, to bring application, database, and information integration together on a cohesive platform. Also, with the JD Edwards offering, both large as well as mid-sized supply chain organizations have budget and functionality choices for supply chain process support needs.

The Oracle strategy for supporting supply chain management of late involves a two-prong strategy of coupling market competitive functionality with a platform that can support a services-oriented integration of information across the various applications  Readers may be familiar with the fact that Oracle has not been shy about augmenting its supply chain functionality via acquisition, and the applications of Agile for supporting  PLM, Demantra for S&OP and demand management, and G-Log for transportation have each been augmented to Oracle’s existing supply chain suite of applications for planning, procurement, fulfillment, warehouse management, collaboration, network optimization and business intelligence.  Oracle SCM is more and more being wedded to the Applications Integration Architecture (AIA) which is Oracle’s framework for supporting cross-application business processes. This means that if you are interested in any of the newly acquired SCM applications, they can be implemented on a stand-alone basis, without the immediate need for the entire suite. And to take advantage of this strategy, Oracle has elected to maintain an augmented sales team of specialty representatives representing the applications of Agile, Demantra, OTM (Transportation), in addition to the ERP teams.

I am restricted by Oracle in sharing any of the five product announcements prior to Open World 2008.  I can however inform Supply Chain Matters readers that I was impressed by the progress being made by Oracle, and that this vendor continues to invest in additional customer functionality among its acquired applications.  My notes indicate over 300 enhancements to Agile PLM, 100 enhancements to Demantra, and 40 enhancements to G-Log, now termed Oracle Transportation Management (OTM).  Oracle’s SCM Suite is now at Release 12.1,  and readers who plan to be attending Open World 2008 can anticipate a number of presentations on strategy and direction, as well as a customer panel. I will provide additional commentary for readers during the week of Oracle Open World.

 Bob Ferrari