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.

Last week I was invited to attend Oracle’s Supply Chain Executive Briefing.  This is an annual event that brings together various supply chain industry analysts to meet and dialogue with the senior management team involved with Oracle’s supply chain management applications. Through my persistence and prior relationships with the Oracle industry analyst community, I’ve managed to be the one and only independent supply chain blogger invited to be a participant in this event, for which I am honored.

The agenda included a review of 2009 for Oracle SCM, as well as some interesting dialogue related to the challenges and successes of selling supply chain management software in such a tough economy.

The most interesting agenda item, however, was a live panel where select Oracle SCM customers talked about their deployments of Oracle’s various supply chain software offerings.  There are not many software vendors who have the courage to conduct an unrestricted live customer panel before an audience of industry analysts, and Oracle should be complimented for its openness to provide such a panel.  There were many nuggets of learning and common themes that came from the panel which I will share in this posting.

The panel was balanced among CIO’s and senior functional business analysts.  Industries represented included a rather large and well known food cooperative, a medical device manufacturer,  a manufacturer of printing devices and a generic pharmaceuticals manufacturer.  Each panelist described his/her business along with the significant supply chain challenges that needed to be overcome. 

Challenges were those rather commonly reflected in this economy, mainly to solve a particular burning tactical problem:

• Getting more intelligence on product demand and incorporating a demand signal repository
• Adapting more readily to a rapidly changing supply chain environment
• Improving fill-rate performance
• Enhancing the Sales and Operations planning with broader access to upstream and downstream information
• Transitioning from low volume-high mix to higher volume-low mix supply chain
• Incorporating more offshore manufacturing in overall planning processes

Lessons learned and what would you have done differently statements were the biggest nuggets of all.  They were:

• Get the most from the technology you already have. If you don’t have the technology, select a technology vendor that can provide the complete capability.
• Insure that vendors demonstrate proof-of-concept with extracts of live data.
• Target 2-3 months for initial implementation; minimize any disruption to the business.
• Scope the implementation to what you can initially manage, move on from the baseline in 6-12 week cycles.
• Determine if the vendor has done the heavy lifting in insuring manageable integration to existing applications.

What I continually find in these customer panels is that technology does add value for supply chain management, and  you, the consumers of this technology are getting much savvier in evaluation, selection and deployment of technology. 

Oracle’s SCM executives noted that in 2009 sales cycles were very elongated.  The reason is somewhat obvious.  In today’s economy, where cost is critical and resources are perilously lean, a decision to bring in additional technology to address a burning tactical or operational problem had better be right.   Technology buyers are much more knowledgeable about their business process and information technology deployment plans, and vendors are responding. 

 Bob Ferrari