SAP centralises data management as Oracle targets
manufacturing
The ongoing Oracle/PeopleSoft takeover battle is moving towards a
conclusion, and SAP is no longer under the acquisitive eye of
Microsoft. As a result, attention is focusing on the major
enterprise software suppliers' new products and strategies to
support their users.
SAP moved towards giving its enterprise resource planning users
more powerful management tools earlier this month when it acquired
A2i Technology, marking a trend of slow and steady product
development among ERP suppliers.
Master data management (MDM) is SAP's strategy to help users
deliver information consistently across the business and IT
systems. The goal is to improve decision-making, translate
opportunity costs into gains and reduce the cost of IT
maintenance.
Through the acquisition of A2i, SAP aims to bolster its Netweaver
platform by incorporating A2i's xCat technology into its MDM
module, which will be available this autumn.
SAP also plans to add an integrated global data synchronisation
capability to MDM, geared towards the retail and consumer product
verticals. This will help firms develop and deliver products more
efficiently and meet their customers' demands more quickly, said
Sunil Gupta, SAP's director of business development for MDM. "The
ability to manage your master data is the foundation of that," he
said.
The new version of MDM will feature high-performance search
capabilities, for example, to search global product inventories;
intelligent image and document management; and print
catalogue-publishing capabilities. It also has tools for IT
professionals to produce better web-based electronic catalogues for
sellers and procurers.
Gupta said the global data synchronisation capability would help
manufacturers track product data across the globe. "The challenge
has been that [an organisation's data management] infrastructure
has been a mish-mash of products which are not highly flexible and
have a high maintenance cost."
Meanwhile, SAP competitor Oracle has confirmed that the next
release of its E-Business suite would have improved support for
manufacturing, healthcare, aerospace and utilities when it becomes
available later this year.
Version 11.5.10 will offer a range of new functions for specific
industries, including support for transportation planning and
transactions based on radio frequency identification tags in
manufacturing.
Debra Lilley, deputy chairwoman of the UK Oracle User Group, said
the user community has had little information about release of the
E-Business 11.5.10 suite, apart from a sneak preview to the user
group about the financial product set in May.
"Some simple, but much-wanted enhancements such as supplier bank
detail masking for security, are finally on their way. Financials
is a very mature product set of the E-Business suite and Oracle
will have concentrated their developments on the newer areas such
as customer relationship management and healthcare," said
Lilley.
"Users will need to weigh up new functionality against the cost of
an upgrade. There is always a reluctance to be the first to move,
but there will be an improved early adopters programme where many
problems should have been rectified," said Lilley. She added that
Oracle is expected to preview E-Business 11.5.10 in September at
Oracle OpenWorld and release it by November.
As Oracle continues to fight for its takeover bid for PeopleSoft in
the US courts, AMR analyst Nigel Montgomery warned that both
companies face other challenges, "Oracle has done a lot of work on
its own software. PeopleSoft is still going through a transition.
It is only a year since it took over JD Edwards and has yet to
settle."
Last week, Oracle and the US Department of Justice submitted their
closing arguments in the US government's month-long trial to block
Oracle's hostile takeover of PeopleSoft.
The Department of Justice is seeking to block the £4.1bn takeover
bid on the grounds that it would stifle competition in the market
for human resources and financial management software that is used
by large corporations, and that this would lead to higher prices. A
verdict is expected in August or September.
Montgomery said that although the big three enterprise resource
planning suppliers get much of the attention, organisations should
examine the products of other suppliers.
One such supplier is SSA Global, which focuses on manufacturing,
services and the public sector. SSA sells ERP, performance
management, CRM, product lifecycle management and supply chain
management applications. It has about 13,000 customers in 90
countries. In June, it acquired Arzoon, a logistics and supply
chain firm, and this month it bought Marcam, an ERP firm for
process manufacturers.
"SSA Global fulfils an important role. There are a lot of companies
which are more con-servative. They can have evolutionary growth
[with SSA] rather than having the implementation [of SAP's ERP
systems]," said Montgomery.
"There are some strong supply chain players such as Quantiq and TXT
e-solutions that provide a wrapper around other systems. TXT has a
fantastic planning engine and is strong in the fashion industry. It
is working with SAP and others rather than going up against
them."
Green shoots of recovery for ERP
IT managers have had less money to spend on new enterprise
resource planning systems in recent years, making it tough for ERP
suppliers. "For the past two years suppliers have concealed what
business they have been doing as they were not making many business
sales," said AMR analyst Nigel Montgomery. "When the backbone sales
dried up, there was a tendency to lump customer relationship
management and supply chain into sales figures [to make them look
bigger]." But Montgomery said that things were about to change.
"For the past few years, end-users have concentrated on logistics,
warehousing and transportation. There is now an upsurge in demand
for planning and visibility tools and complex [supply chain]
planning." AMR called this a "demand-driven supply network", and
SAP called it a "consumer-driven supply chain", said Sunil Gupta,
SAP's director of business development for master data
management. This is where the user looks back at the supply chain
from the customer, taking into account their requirements. AMR sees
ERP and manufacturing resource planning declining in favour of
demand-centric supply chains, said Montgomery.
Oracle updates e-business suite
Debra Lilley, deputy chair of the UK Oracle User Group, said the
user community is looking forward to the technology changes as much
as the feature enhancements in the forthcoming release of Oracle's
enterprise resource planning suite, E-Business 11.5.10, which is
due out later this year. "Over the life of 11.5.10 there have been
enhancements of the technology stack. Many functional enhancements
are built on these, and will, therefore, not be compatible with
earlier versions," said Lilley. For example, enterprise planning
and budgeting, which is to be released with 11.5.10, will only be
back-ported to 11.5.9 as it uses the advanced Olap features of
Oracle 9i/10g and the improved application server. "The
architecture of daily business intelligence changes to give
performance improvements to those users who are still using an 8i
database. The support status changes in December and users may
decide that moving to 11.5.10 at the same time as upgrading their
database is a good option." Lilley said other infrastructure
changes included the new integration repository, where external
systems can access the E-Business suite more easily.