• Extending its best-in-class offering for manufacturers, Oracle today announced the delivery of four new advanced supply chain planning products: Oracle(r) Manufacturing Operations Center, Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center, Oracle Demand Signal Repository and Oracle Service Parts Planning.
• These solutions are part of Oracle's overall "Information-Driven Value Chains" strategy for Supply Chain Management, which helps companies maximize value by connecting and optimizing their supply, demand and design chains. Organizations can leverage real-time information to predict market requirements such as demand as well as risks, adapt to dynamic business conditions, and align operations globally across the extended value chain. As a result, companies can effectively drive operational excellence, accelerate innovation, and manage risk and compliance.
• These releases deliver on Oracle's application strategy to provide complete ERP, CRM, SCM and industry solutions that help businesses be more competitive. To accelerate customers' time-to-value, Oracle is delivering multiple new offerings as readily consumable extension applications that may be implemented without requiring an upgrade of the core operational systems. As well as furthering Oracle's vision of the Information-Driven Value Chain, these products are also built on Oracle's open, standards-based architecture and work with existing systems including Oracle Applications, SAP or other ERP offerings.

Predict, Adapt and Align with Advanced Value Chain Capabilities

• Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center increases the visibility and alignment between shop floor and ERP systems by managing the real-time data flows from shop floor systems and equipment, and transforming this into valuable business information. Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center connects these disparate systems by using a standards-based extensible data model to act as a common repository. Here, shop floor data can be captured, normalized and combined with the business context from the associated ERP system. Manufacturers can then monitor activity in near real-time, identify and predict the business implications of any exception conditions, adapt to those issues and report detailed status back to the ERP or external systems.
• Oracle Demand Signal Repository addresses a critical challenge of predicting global demand in a complex consumer value chain. Oracle Demand Signal Repository captures and manages downstream demand data from a wide variety of sources such as stores, retail distribution centers, and other data sources to build a picture of demand that is aligned across the value chain. Included is out-of-the-box integration with Oracle's best-in-class demand management solution, Oracle's Demantra for improved forecast accuracy as well as open connectivity capabilities to syndicated and downstream data, and to other demand management solutions. This enables customers to more rapidly integrate data sources and improve their ability to predict and shape demand, regardless of their back-end planning system.
• Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center is an innovative and powerful way for business executives and managers to analyze, manage, and leverage information and insights across their extended value chain. By combining in one integrated system role-based analytical dashboards, business planning scenario management, and automated process and task management, companies can better align decision-making and streamline the transformation of information into action. Built with components of Oracle Fusion Middleware such as Oracle BPEL Process Manager for enabled process and task management, Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus for analytics and drawing on the established strengths of Oracle's Advanced Planning suite, Oracle Advance Planning Command Center provides the robustness, security, flexibility and ease of use that companies need to leverage the full power of the Information-Driven Value Chain.
• Oracle Service Parts Planning helps companies decrease spare parts inventory while increasing first-time fill rates and service levels, thereby improving service related profits. This has never been more important given that many original equipment manufacturers (OEM) are looking to their after-market business as a key source of value creation. Oracle Service Parts Planning enables manufacturers to predict demand across the different types and criticality of service parts, align and monitor the most profitable service supply chain, and optimize the replenishment and redistribution of these parts across the extended service value chain.

Supporting Customer Quotes

• "With many manufacturing companies embarking on integrating shop floor data acquisition devices to back-end ERP systems, we think that Oracle is on the right track in building the Manufacturing Operations Center product to address this void," said Nat Parameswaran, Director, Business Solutions (SCM), United States Gypsum Corporation (USG). "With Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center, Oracle will be able to streamline shop floor integration and provide real-time operational intelligence. As a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) member, we support Oracle's strategy in this space."
• "We have been looking for solutions that will help us streamline and refine our shop floor integrations while delivering real-time operational intelligence," said Chris Jackson, Senior Manager of Manufacturing Systems, Pella. "After working as a key design partner with Oracle on this project, we believe that the Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center can be that solution."

Supporting Analyst Quotes

• "Manufacturers need flexible, highly nimble value chains that not only integrate with third party networks, but enable them to quickly respond to a crisis as well as effectively adapt to new market opportunities. This fuels not only their competitive edge - but drives stability and bottom line growth," said Bruce Richardson, AMR Research Chief Research Officer. "With today's product announcements on the Information-Driven Value Chain, Oracle is moving in the right direction - delivering open, standards-based offerings that provide the flexibility manufacturers need to compete in today's global market."
• "The manufacturing performance and visibility market has emerged over the last several years from a few startup software suppliers focusing on OEE to a critical function that has attracting most enterprise and operations software suppliers," explained Bob Mick, VP Emerging Technology, ARC Advisory Group. "Based on what we have seen so far, Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center has all the basics that a solution in this space would need - an extensible manufacturing data model, real-time access to plant floor data and pre-built dashboards and KPIs. But perhaps the most interesting aspect is the way Oracle is leveraging operations-appropriate Fusion Technology to raise the bar, while at the same time paying close attention to deep manufacturing requirements."

Supporting Executive Quotes

• "Over the last few years Oracle has developed a portfolio of leading supply chain solutions," said Jon Chorley, Oracle Vice President, Product Strategy. "These new products further demonstrate our commitment to enable the transformation of the extended supply chain into flexible, Information-Driven Value Chains for our customers."
• "We are very excited to launch Oracle Demand Signal Repository," said Jeff Wexler, Oracle Vice President, Retail and Consumer Goods Product Strategy. "Six leading manufacturers participated in our pilot for more than a year. The results were amazing: sales for the pilot suppliers across the 16 categories grew an aggregate of 23.5% year-over-year, versus 12.2% growth for the categories as a whole and total margin dollars rose 19.3% for all items included in the pilot versus a year ago."

General Availability

• Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center, Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center, Oracle Demand Signal Repository and Oracle Service Parts Planning are scheduled to be generally available in May 2008 as a part of the Oracle Advanced Planning and Scheduling Feature Pack Release 12.1. These products can also be purchased individually for use in heterogeneous environments.

Supporting Resources

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Related Resources

About Oracle

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle's products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.