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AMR Gives High Marks to New Oracle MES
A recent report from AMR Research gives Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 high marks for its new MES (Manufacturing Execution System) capabilities.
The new features are "a tangible reflection of the company putting its investments where customers want them and enhancing the products they already own," says Colin Masson, AMR research director. "With an official launch of Release 12...the timing for an assault on the MES market with ERP-based manufacturing execution and intelligence application couldn't be better," he adds.
According to AMR's studies, manufacturers prefer to buy their applications from large software application vendors, and for a majority of the buyers AMR surveyed this means ERP vendors.
Masson says that the Release 12's MES capabilities shown at last fall's Oracle OpenWorld demonstrated "highly configurable role-and site-based features" that should "worry pure-play MES independent software vendors (ISVs)—particularly those offering transactional, paper-on-glass MES products, or application frameworks."
Masson believes that the MES features in Release 12 will provide a compelling incentive for manufacturers wanting to avoid the costs and complexities surrounding integration and governance that come with complexity bundling together best-of-breed MES products.
"With manufacturing now being the largest driver for ERP investments, Oracle MES is also poised to be a key differentiator in the hotly contested small and midsize business (SMB) market, where new customers place an even greater premium on ease of deployment, usage, and maintainability," Masson believes.
"Like many overnight successes, Oracle MES has actually been a long time in the making and builds on one of Oracle's best-kept secrets, Oracle Manufacturing," Masson says. "It provides support for several styles of manufacturing, and for each mode they have best-in-ERP-class inventory, production, quality management, costing, and scheduling models that rival those of MES vendors."
Oracle is poised to deliver traditional paper-on-glass MES functionality with Release 12, in addition to other benefits. These include a single data model that offers a closed-loop approach to managing procedural and product quality and eliminates problems associated with reconciling different data sets and enforcing rules from site to site, according to the AMR director.
He also highlights the new release's next-generation EMI (Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence) capabilities. "This is all about adding business context to manufacturing data for operational performance management," Masson says. Sharing common equipment, manufacturing process, product definition, and planning/scheduling models negates the need to build composite applications that map and bridge the gaps between models in different application domains, he explains.
"When you add the intellectual property from Siebel Analytics, the presentation and analysis of this common data model will be elevated to new levels," he says. "Oracle has all of the building blocks to deliver a full operations intelligence capability."
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