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Prebuilt BI Gives Buyers New Weapons for Controlling Costs
Starting this month, Oracle Supply Chain Analytics–a comprehensive prebuilt application for real-time business intelligence–now supports Oracle E-Business Suite 12, to be followed later this year by SAP BW support.
These prebuilt applications bring powerful, enterprisewide BI to procurement professionals–part of a growing trend toward providing real-time analytics to business users to give them the latest information to perform their jobs better.
The impact will be significant. Procurement-savvy BI tools can quickly give buyers a bird's-eye view into current status. For example, procurement managers can view their requested spend for the current quarter, what spending has already been committed, and what already-purchased products and services remain in the pipeline.
But having a view just into procurement isn't enough. "Procurement increasingly touches almost every other area of the company; procurement analytics really need a broader view rather than just some reports of historical spend," says Joe Thomas, Oracle senior director of BI applications.
With the enterprisewide view provided by Oracle Supply Chain Analytics, procurement professionals can look to inventory systems to see what suppliers have the best records for on-time deliveries. But that's not the whole story. What if an on-time supplier also posts defect rates 10 times higher than competitors? "The inventory application doesn't track that kind of performance, so getting that total picture is essential," Thomas says.
Giving the procurement staff enterprisewide views offers advantages during strategic sourcing, where it is commonplace for procurement executives to discover that 10 divisions of their company order the same part separately and pay 10 different prices from a supplier. "You not only have better information about how suppliers are performing, but you can get immediate savings even before it's time to negotiate contracts," Thomas says.
How can procurement departments see that big picture? The answer is an underlying unified data model, like the prebuilt model available with Oracle Supply Chain Analytics. Data unification means analysts can pull information not only from the procurement applications, but also from related systems, such as financials and even call center customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
Oracle Supply Chain Analytics also provides prebuilt interfaces to Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, and SAP applications, in addition to a universal adapter for integration with programs from other vendors.
In addition to expanded support for Oracle E-Business Suite and other applications, Oracle expects to deliver new supply chain analytics tailored for process and discrete manufacturing in 2008, he adds.
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