Oracle has enhanced the execution, collaboration and intelligence
functionalities in its supply chain management solution to allow
companies to streamline the supply chain and cut costs while
boosting customer service.
The Oracle supply chain management capabilities, which are
scheduled to be available next month as part of the supplier's
e-business suite, span a broad range of business areas, including
order management, planning, procurement, manufacturing, fulfilment,
maintenance and service.
"It's really key that companies can integrate their internal
business process with those of their trading partners," said Don
Klaiss, Oracle senior vice-president of application development.
"Our whole focus has been to provide an integrated set of business
applications that allow companies to continue to automate more and
more of their internal business processes. We've also spent a lot
of time building new collaborative tools, so no matter what area
you are in the supply chain, you can tie your trading partners in
to your processes."
For supply chain execution, Oracle has added a warehouse management
product built on a configurable, rules-driven architecture that is
designed to easily adapt to a company's specific business processes
and a transportation solution to support enterprise efforts to
prepare and monitor shipments.
Oracle's service management solution now includes an advanced
scheduler to optimise field service engineer assignments and a
wireless field service product to allow service workers to send and
receive information rapidly.
On the collaboration front, Oracle will offer planning, sourcing
and manufacturing solutions to extend and improve trading partner
interactions through portals and messaging, Klaiss said.
The planning solution is designed to create more accurate plans by
enabling companies to share inventory plans and identify supply and
demand mismatches, while the sourcing offering links sourcing,
procurement and intelligence to reduce operational costs.
Manufacturing partners can use the enhanced manufacturing solution
to exchange a variety of operational details such as schedules,
materials availability, capacity, quality results, shipments and
invoices from a common portal.
Built on a single, common data model that stores data in one
central location, Oracle's supply chain intelligence offering is
designed to drive continuous process improvement via pre-built
reports and analytics delivered through personalised
portlets.
"It's a set of management portals and reporting capabilities that
are all role-based for different users in a company," Klaiss said.
"The only way you could get this functionality in the past was to
construct and maintain separate datawarehouses, which was really
expensive.
"We now have the ability to build packaged, role-based management
tools that can be installed directly in the same system as your
transaction applications without degrading performance," he added.
"This allows us to deliver a whole new class of management tools in
the business intelligence area that hasn't been possible to do
other than in a datawarehouse."