Oracle Corp. 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 company announced Thursday.
Scheduled to be available next month as part of the Oracle E-Business Suite, the new Oracle Supply Chain Management capabilities span a broad range of business areas, including order management, planning, procurement, manufacturing, fulfillment, 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 build 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 new warehouse management solution 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 optimize field service engineer assignments and a wireless field service offering to allow service workers to rapidly send and receive information.
On the collaboration front, Oracle will offer new 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 leverage the enhanced manufacturing solution to exchange a variety of operational details such as schedules, material 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 new supply chain intelligence offering is designed to drive continuous process improvement via pre-built reports and analytics delivered through personalized 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 data warehouses & which was really an expensive project to do. 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. This allows us to deliver a whole new class of management tools in the BI area that hasn’t been possible to do other than in a data warehouse.”
