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Analytics Get Smarter with New Supply Chain Planning Tool

In a continuing expansion of its technologies for optimizing supply, demand, and value chains, Oracle this month released Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center, a new operational-intelligence tool for advanced supply chain planning.

The real-time control console in the Manufacturing Operations Center increases visibility into shop-floor performance and more closely aligns production systems with enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. The tool also facilitates the wider use of “smart products,” shop-floor equipment embedded with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips that continuously relay information about their operational and maintenance status to the central control panel to avoid unplanned shutdowns and maintain optimum operating conditions.

“The Manufacturing Operations Center strengthens lean strategies by bringing together the information necessary to monitor, aggregate, and align all the operations of a factory floor,” says Stephen Slade, senior director of applications and industries marketing for Oracle. “Any piece of operating equipment can have embedded chips in it to report on operational and condition status such as output rates, vibration, temperature, rotation—the health of motors and pumps. If a machine begins to exceed its technical capacity, you can look at it before it fails.”

Oracle is making the Manufacturing Operations Center available in its Advanced Planning and Scheduling Feature Pack Release 12.1. Companies may also purchase the product individually for use in heterogeneous environments.

Open standards allow the Manufacturing Operations Center to work with ERP applications from a variety of vendors, including Oracle and SAP. An extensible data model acts as a common repository where organizations can capture, cleanse, and combine shop-floor data with information from ERP systems. Manufacturers can then predict the business implications of any exception conditions, take appropriate actions, and report the status back to the ERP applications.

Companies that have had an early look at the product see the potential for it to fill an important niche in the market for shop-floor management tools. "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 [with the Operations Center] to address this void," said Nat Parameswaran, director of business solutions for United States Gypsum Corp. and an Oracle customer advisory board member. "Oracle will be able to streamline shop-floor integration and provide real-time operational intelligence.”

Window and door manufacturer Pella Corporation has been searching for solutions to help streamline and refine shop-floor integration and deliver real-time operational intelligence, says Chris Jackson, senior manager of manufacturing systems at the company. "After working as a key design partner with Oracle on this project, we believe that the Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center can be that solution," he adds.

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