This document will continue to evolve as existing sections change and new information is added. All updates appear in the following table:
| Date | Update Version | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 06 OCT 2017 | Update 17D | New features delivered in update 17D. |
| 11 AUG 2017 | Update 17C | New features delivered in update 17C. |
| 07 APR 2017 | Update 17B | New features delivered in update 17B. |
This document will continue to evolve as existing sections change and new information is added. All updates appear in the following table:
| Date | Feature | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 06 OCT 2017 | Created initial document. |
This guide outlines the information you need to know about new or improved functionality in this update.
DISCLAIMER
The information contained in this document may include statements about Oracle’s product development plans. Many factors can materially affect Oracle’s product development plans and the nature and timing of future product releases. Accordingly, this Information is provided to you solely for information only, 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 remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.
This information may not be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates. Oracle specifically disclaims any liability with respect to this information. Refer to the Legal Notices and Terms of Use for further information.
Forecast Unique Demand Segments
Segment products, customers, channels, etc., based on their demand characteristics to improve the overall forecast accuracy. You can now evaluate various forecasting profiles for demand segments to get a tailored and improved statistical forecast for a segment’s demand.
Assess the impact of events, such as product discounts, sales and marketing tactics, and business interruptions on the forecast through visual analysis and breakdown of the forecast into its constituent parts. Along with the existing capability to foresee the impact by causal factors, you can also gauge the magnitude of change caused solely by an event.
Maintain Audit Trail on Measure Updates
Audit the chronological trail of manual data edits to improve accountability and understand the reasons for changes.
Aggregate Data for Non-Key Customers
Organize planning data by key customers and non-key customers. You can now focus your supply chain planning analysis and issue resolution on the most important customers.
Import Data at Aggregate Levels
Load data at an aggregate level. The application automatically disaggregates the external data to the more granular stored level. Loading data at an aggregate level minimizes the effort required for data preparation.
Collect and Manage Planning Data More Efficiently
Manage data in Oracle Supply Chain Planning Cloud intuitively and efficiently with enhanced collections mechanisms.
Schedule the technical process involved in running a plan. You can now schedule and run the planning process at a convenient time without affecting your day-to-day planning activities.
Aggregate Data for Non-Key Customers
Organize planning data by key customers and non-key customers. You can now focus your supply chain planning analysis and issue resolution on the most important customers.
Import Data at Aggregate Levels
Load data at an aggregate level. The application automatically disaggregates the external data to the more granular stored level. Loading data at an aggregate level minimizes the effort required for data preparation.
Collect and Manage Planning Data More Efficiently
Manage data in Oracle Supply Chain Planning Cloud intuitively and efficiently with enhanced collections mechanisms.
Schedule the technical process involved in running a plan. You can now schedule and run the planning process at a convenient time without affecting your day-to-day planning activities.
Monitor Planning Processes and Improve Planning Data Quality
Review messages encountered when running a plan, such as errors, warnings, and other information and act on them to improve plan data quality.
Maintain Audit Trail on Measure Updates
Audit the chronological trail of manual data edits to improve accountability and understand the reasons for changes.
Plan for Rework and Transform Work Orders
Create a more accurate plan by taking potential supply and anticipated demand requirements into consideration for materials originating from work orders of the type rework and transform.
Collaborate with Suppliers by Start Dates of Forecasted Orders
Collaborate with suppliers on the date they need to start manufacturing so that a component is available on time for your downstream manufacturing processes.
Publish Detailed Order Information to Suppliers
Publish the expected and firm demand on the supplier site by displaying the demand by status. The integration with Oracle Supply Chain Collaboration Cloud now offers this capability.
Analyze Configure-to-Order Model Forecast and Sales Orders Together
View forecast for the configure-to-order model and the actual sales orders for the model together on the Material Plan page. This was not possible earlier because the order management processes created a transient item identifier based on the options selected.
Publish Order Forecast to Oracle Supply Chain Collaboration Cloud in One Step
Publish the order forecasts from a plan from Oracle Planning Central Cloud or Oracle Supply Planning Cloud to Oracle Supply Chain Collaboration Cloud in one step. You can execute this step as a plan action, or from the Supplies and Demands page or from the Items page. Additionally, you no longer need to save the plan to be able to publish the order forecast to Supply Chain Collaboration.
Maintain Audit Trail on Measure Updates
Audit the chronological trail of manual data edits to improve accountability and understand the reasons for changes.
Aggregate Data for Non-Key Customers
Organize planning data by key customers and non-key customers. You can now focus your supply chain planning analysis and issue resolution on the most important customers.
Import Data at Aggregate Levels
Load data at an aggregate level. The application automatically disaggregates the external data to the more granular stored level. Loading data at an aggregate level minimizes the effort required for data preparation.
Collect and Manage Planning Data More Efficiently
Manage data in Oracle Supply Chain Planning Cloud intuitively and efficiently with enhanced collections mechanisms.
Schedule the technical process involved in running a plan. You can now schedule and run the planning process at a convenient time without affecting your day-to-day planning activities.
Monitor Planning Processes and Improve Planning Data Quality
Review messages encountered when running a plan, such as errors, warnings, and other information and act on them to improve plan data quality.
Define material planners without associating them with a specific organization. This feature simplifies the management of material planners in Oracle Planning Central Cloud and Oracle Supply Planning Cloud, a core setup task required for the proper analysis and execution of a plan.
Plan for Rework and Transform Work Orders
Create a more accurate plan by taking potential supply and anticipated demand requirements into consideration for materials originating from work orders of the type rework and transform.
Collaborate with Suppliers by Start Dates of Forecasted Orders
Collaborate with suppliers on the date they need to start manufacturing so that a component is available on time for your downstream manufacturing processes.
Publish Detailed Order Information to Suppliers
Publish the expected and firm demand on the supplier site by displaying the demand by status. The integration with Oracle Supply Chain Collaboration Cloud now offers this capability.
Analyze Configure-to-Order Model Forecast and Sales Orders Together
View forecast for the configure-to-order model and the actual sales orders for the model together on the Material Plan page. This was not possible earlier because the order management processes created a transient item identifier based on the options selected.
Publish Order Forecast to Oracle Supply Chain Collaboration Cloud in One Step
Publish the order forecasts from a plan from Oracle Planning Central Cloud or Oracle Supply Planning Cloud to Oracle Supply Chain Collaboration Cloud in one step. You can execute this step as a plan action, or from the Supplies and Demands page or from the Items page. Additionally, you no longer need to save the plan to be able to publish the order forecast to Supply Chain Collaboration.
Maintain Audit Trail on Measure Updates
Audit the chronological trail of manual data edits to improve accountability and understand the reasons for changes.
Aggregate Data for Non-Key Customers
Organize planning data by key customers and non-key customers. You can now focus your supply chain planning analysis and issue resolution on the most important customers.
Import Data at Aggregate Levels
Load data at an aggregate level. The application automatically disaggregates the external data to the more granular stored level. Loading data at an aggregate level minimizes the effort required for data preparation.
Collect and Manage Planning Data More Efficiently
Manage data in Oracle Supply Chain Planning Cloud intuitively and efficiently with enhanced collections mechanisms.
Schedule the technical process involved in running a plan. You can now schedule and run the planning process at a convenient time without affecting your day-to-day planning activities.
Monitor Planning Processes and Improve Planning Data Quality
Review messages encountered when running a plan, such as errors, warnings, and other information and act on them to improve plan data quality.
Define material planners without associating them with a specific organization. This feature simplifies the management of material planners in Oracle Planning Central Cloud and Oracle Supply Planning Cloud, a core setup task required for the proper analysis and execution of a plan.
This document will continue to evolve as existing sections change and new information is added. All updates appear in the following table:
| Date | Feature | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 11 AUG 2017 | Created initial document. |
This guide outlines the information you need to know about new or improved functionality in this update.
DISCLAIMER
The information contained in this document may include statements about Oracle’s product development plans. Many factors can materially affect Oracle’s product development plans and the nature and timing of future product releases. Accordingly, this Information is provided to you solely for information only, 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 remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.
This information may not be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates. Oracle specifically disclaims any liability with respect to this information. Refer to the Legal Notices and Terms of Use for further information.
Calculate Channel-Specific Planning Percentages
Configure to Order manufacturing has grown in complexity leading to many planning challenges. Manufacturers frequently encounter situations where the planning percentages for the options vary based on demand class (a construct typically used to model different customer channels). This new feature set allows you to:
- Calculate planning percentages based on history derived on the demand class in addition to item and organization. You can optionally choose to manually override these calculated planning percentages.
- Use planning percentages to explode the model forecasts down to the dependent demand forecasts.
Additional enhancements in Oracle Supply Planning Cloud allow you to use both the model and exploded option forecast to plan effectively.
These improvements enhance customer satisfaction by allowing you to offer extensively customizable products, while still being able to fulfill orders at the intended service levels with minimal impact to inventory holding costs.
Use Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud Measures in Oracle Demand Management Cloud
To execute on your sales and operations plan you will want visibility into the sales and operations plan in your tactical demand management process. For example, you would want to see your sales and operations planning (S&OP) consensus forecast when manually adjusting the demand forecast in Oracle Demand Management Cloud, based on new information available between S&OP cycles.
With this release, you can view S&OP plan measures while using Demand Management by exporting measures from Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud to Demand Management. This visibility allows demand planners to make tactical adjustments to plans while respecting decisions made during the S&OP process.
Compare Plan Versus Actuals In Real Time
Sharing key information from planning applications, combined with real-time execution data, such as orders, with a wider audience is critical to escalate and solve business issues. With this release, you can create and run your own reports using Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence with additional measures that reflect the current consensus forecast. Additionally, this data can be combined with the sales data from Oracle Order Management Cloud. This allows planners and executives to monitor the plan against the actual realized orders without data latency. Planners and executives can also make expedient decisions that do not have to wait for the next run of the planning processes to refresh the data.
Manage Data Using Sales Organization Dimension
A forecast from the sales team is a key input to the demand management and sales and operations planning (S&OP) processes. The ability to import, view, or edit the sales forecast and related data at a granular level, such as a regional manager’s level or even an individual sales representative’s territory level is usually required as part of the demand management and S&OP processes.
In this release, a new sales organization dimension is available for representing the Sales Territory hierarchy of a company. You can manage sales forecasts down to the individual territory level and view forecasts with other data, such as sales orders and forecast accuracy. You can set up the data for this hierarchy in Oracle Sales Cloud as part of the Internal Organization hierarchy definition or collect the data using flat file interfaces.
With this feature, planners can pinpoint problems, discuss forecasts with sales colleagues, and fine-tune forecasts as needed.
Use Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud Measures in Oracle Demand Management Cloud
To execute on your sales and operations plan you will want visibility into the sales and operations plan in your tactical demand management process. For example, you would want to see your sales and operations planning (S&OP) consensus forecast when manually adjusting the demand forecast in Oracle Demand Management Cloud, based on new information available between S&OP cycles.
With this release, you can view S&OP plan measures while using Demand Management by exporting measures from Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud to Demand Management. This visibility allows demand planners to make tactical adjustments to plans while respecting decisions made during the S&OP process.
Compare Plan Versus Actuals In Real Time
Sharing key information from planning applications, combined with real-time execution data, such as orders, with a wider audience is critical to escalate and solve business issues. With this release, you can create and run your own reports using Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence with additional measures that reflect the current consensus forecast. Additionally, this data can be combined with the sales data from Oracle Order Management Cloud. This allows planners and executives to monitor the plan against the actual realized orders without data latency. Planners and executives can also make expedient decisions that do not have to wait for the next run of the planning processes to refresh the data.
Plan for Configured Product Fulfillment Using Drop Ship
Configure to Order (CTO) manufacturing processes have grown in complexity leading to many visibility and planning challenges. For example, contract manufacturers can fulfill CTO orders by shipping directly to the customers. Usually, the contract manufacturer requires visibility into the expected demand not only of the model, but also the options. This enables contract manufacturers to effectively fulfill their obligations related to lead times. This set of Oracle Supply Planning Cloud enhancements in conjunction with the Oracle Demand Management Cloud enhancements allows you to:
- Consume the forecasted demand for the options with the sales orders that specify the same option (explode then consume)
- Plan for the net expected demand of the model and options that will be shipped directly from the contract manufacturer to the customer
- Collaborate with the contract manufacturer on the model and option order forecasts using Oracle Supply Chain Collaboration Cloud
These improvements enhance customer satisfaction by allowing you to offer extensively customizable products, while still fulfilling orders at the intended service levels with minimal impact to the inventory holding costs, and utilizing the most efficient fulfillment method.
Plan for Configured Product Fulfillment Using Drop Ship
Configure to Order (CTO) manufacturing processes have grown in complexity leading to many visibility and planning challenges. For example, contract manufacturers can fulfill CTO orders by shipping directly to the customers. Usually, the contract manufacturer requires visibility into the expected demand not only of the model, but also the options. This enables contract manufacturers to effectively fulfill their obligations related to lead times. This set of Oracle Planning Central Cloud enhancements in conjunction with the Oracle Demand Management Cloud enhancements allows you to:
- Consume the forecasted demand for the options with the sales orders that specify the same option (explode then consume)
- Plan for the net expected demand of the model and options that will be shipped directly from the contract manufacturer to the customer
- Collaborate with the contract manufacturer on the model and option order forecasts using Oracle Supply Chain Collaboration Cloud
These improvements enhance customer satisfaction by allowing you to offer extensively customizable products, while still fulfilling orders at the intended service levels with minimal impact to the inventory holding costs, and utilizing the most efficient fulfillment method.
This document will continue to evolve as existing sections change and new information is added. All updates appear in the following table:
| Date | Feature | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 07 APR 2017 | Created initial document. |
This guide outlines the information you need to know about new or improved functionality in this update.
DISCLAIMER
The information contained in this document may include statements about Oracle’s product development plans. Many factors can materially affect Oracle’s product development plans and the nature and timing of future product releases. Accordingly, this Information is provided to you solely for information only, 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 remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.
This information may not be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates. Oracle specifically disclaims any liability with respect to this information. Refer to the Legal Notices and Terms of Use for further information.
Oracle Demand Management Cloud is a modern and comprehensive supply chain planning application for accurately sensing, predicting, and shaping customer demand for a broad range of industries. Demand Management is especially well-suited to companies that need to analyze and segment market demand, manage demand variability, handle frequent product introductions, or plan demand of configured products and options.
Demand Management‘s comprehensive analytics, social collaboration and mobility features enhance your insights and promote teamwork, wherever you are – in the office or on the move. Part of a broader Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud, Demand Management seamlessly integrates with:
- Oracle Supply Planning Cloud
- Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud
- Oracle Planning Central Cloud
- Oracle Order Management Cloud
- Other Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud services
Demand Management brings multiple demand signals together to help you better understand demand for your products, channels, segments and anticipate customer needs. Built-in analytics reveal demand patterns and identify changes in real time so you can respond to them.
Manage Multiple Demand Signals
To better understand customer demand, you need to capture, align, and analyze both internal business data and external market information.
You can use Demand Management to:
- Bring in a variety of internal (for example, shipments and bookings) and external (for example, market and syndicated data) demand signals relevant for your industry. The internal demand signals can be collected automatically from Oracle SCM Cloud or imported by way of flat files into predefined measures. The external demand signals can also be imported by way of flat files into custom measures with desired dimensionality.
- View and compare the demand signals in a consistent unit or currency of your choice at any level in the hierarchy. Various internal sales and marketing stakeholders, as well as your key customers, can access the same information that is tailored to their specific needs.
- Understand demand trends and relative contribution of various demand signals to enable revenue growth programs for specific products or product categories.
- Monitor changes in demand signals real time via exceptions and thresholds to understand recent customer behavior and initiate suitable remedial action.
This allows you to get better and timelier visibility to changes in customer demand.
To gain deeper insights into demand trends for specific products or customer segments, you need comprehensive analytics and visualization tools, which can summarize business conditions, uncover in-depth trends, and help you conduct further analysis to see which segments are out-performing or under-performing.
You can use Demand Management’s analytics capability to quickly analyze demand signals and also get in-depth views using a personalized user interface, which includes:
- Summary analysis – A row of infotiles in the plan summary view provides an at-a-glance summary of the health of your demand plan and one-click access to charts and graphs that can help you uncover demand insights. For example, ‘forecast comparison’ highlights gaps between shipments and sales forecasts, ‘forecast MAPE (mean absolute percentage error)’ identifies areas of poor accuracy, and ‘history comparison’ identifies disconnects between bookings and shipments. You can easily configure these infotiles, charts, and graphs to get a focused view with your selection of measures, performance indicators, and hierarchy levels. To investigate further, you can navigate from the summary charts into multidimensional analysis workbenches.
- Multidimensional analysis workbench – You can readily use preconfigured pivot tables and graphs with common hierarchies, measures, exceptions, and calculations to analyze large data sets. You can slice and dice the data further to look into details and reveal patterns, for example, identifying which SKUs have significant demand changes year-over-year or week-to-week. You can also compare demand signals to better understand customer behaviors, for example, if bookings history is slightly ahead of shipments in recent weeks, that might indicate a demand uptrend. This analysis is possible by way of preconfigured worksheets, for example, ‘history analysis ’, ‘forecast analyses’, ‘statistical analysis’, and so on. To personalize the workbench to meet your needs, you can:
- Create new worksheets or reuse existing ones.
- Include data visualization tools, such as tree maps, charts, and line and bar graphs in these worksheets to facilitate easy problem identification.
- Customize measures, calculations, and exceptions to support your analysis.
- Configure navigation between charts and graphs to guide navigation and speed up identification of detailed problem areas.
- Assign user access permissions and maintain data security, so users can only see or edit data that matches their privileges.
With the aid of the intuitive user interface, you can analyze demand signals quickly and proactively anticipate customer needs.
Your internal organization is also an invaluable source of demand information and their inputs need to be captured alongside all demand signals.
Using Demand Management:
- Sales, marketing and other stakeholders can manually enter or upload their forecast. They can also enter forecast on the go, using mobile devices. Such input can be provided at any level in the hierarchy. As an example, sales can enter a forecast at customer account and item level, while marketing can enter data at product category and month level.
- Demand planners can start a social conversation with select focus groups to get qualitative input in a specific business context.
- Participants in demand management process can annotate the data with notes to document changes and assumptions.
By capturing all interdepartmental forecasts, you get different perspectives of the forecasts, which helps drive a collaborative demand planning process.
Demand Management accurately predicts your product’s forecast by incorporating cause-and-effect correlation of demand to external and internal influencing factors and tribal business knowledge into history-based statistical forecasts.
Generate Statistical Forecasts
To anticipate customer demand, you need an automated way to generate baseline forecast, by leveraging multiple demand signals and using data-driven statistical algorithms.
You can use Demand Management’s forecasting engine to automatically detect demand patterns, trends, seasonality, and intermittence for every demand signal. The engine cleanses historical demand signals, such as shipments and bookings, to detect outliers and fills in missing data to minimize forecast error. The forecasting engine can predetermine the hierarchy levels where the forecast is statistically significant and can blend different forecast models to produce a more reliable statistical forecast. Forecast is regenerated for each product and location during every planning cycle and proactively adjusts to changing market conditions.
You can also correlate forecast to a number of predictive causal factors and leading indicators, such as price, seasonality, holidays, and weather. You can also use other measures relevant for your business as causals and immediately see their impact on the forecast.
Although the statistical forecasting engine is self-maintained, with one-click, you can simulate changes and model forecasting scenarios. Using the sophisticated statistical engine, you can:
- Visualize constituents of the generated statistical forecast, including the baseline, trend, seasonality effects, and the contribution of individual causal factors.
- See how multiple forecast methods contributed to the blended forecast. You can get a detailed view of the combined forecast and the individual forecast method contributions side-by-side.
- Change forecast configurations to derive a statistical forecast more attuned to your needs.
- Vary the length of history used, change sensitivity of trend detection, and enable intermittency or select forecasting profiles based on shipments, bookings, or other measures.
The simplicity of one-click statistical forecasting combined with the sophistication of predictive correlations offers you a good baseline demand plan.
Establish a Robust Demand Plan
You need to enrich the data-driven statistical baseline forecast with business insights to make it more realistic.
Using Demand Management, you can incorporate additional business insights by adjusting the forecast at any level in the hierarchy by way of tailored views of the multidimensional workbench. To facilitate quick edits, you can adjust forecast across various weeks as a percentage increase or decrease, value increase or decrease, or set to a particular value. You can also use custom exceptions, for example, ‘forecast to order comparison’ to see instances where the forecast does not cover open orders, and make adjustments if required. The adjusted forecast can be intelligently disaggregated to the required level using historical or other proportions. The manually entered forecasts are monitored independently of the statistical forecasts to maintain data accuracy for measurement purposes. You can disable manual entry for the time periods where it is not advisable to change the forecasts.
Besides the powerful editing capability, you can put qualitative comments in notes, to help other users understand your assumptions and reasons for the modifications. You can associate notes with a plan, data in a plan (such as items, organizations, or customers), or in a pivot table that contains planning combinations.
With the ability to incorporate business insights, you can quickly develop a robust demand plan.
Forecast Configure-to-Order Products
Forecasting for configure-to-order products is a two-level planning problem. That is, create forecast for pick-to-order (PTO) and assemble-to-order (ATO) models, and then derive demand for options or features of those models based on attach rates (known as planning percentages).
With Demand Management, you can use existing attach rates specified in the bill of material, input the attach rates manually, or predict attach rates based on the historical trend in options’ mix. The models’ demand, option’s model-dependent demand, and options’ independent demand are calculated when you generate the statistical forecast and when you run the plan on demand. You can have these demands calculated real time when you modify demand for base model or option demand and the attach rates. A special bill of material view shows the model, option classes, and options in a hierarchy, along with the associated forecast.
By calculating detailed forecasts for your product mix and configurations, you can better understand customer preferences, and can better position finished good and options’ inventory to meet their needs.
To achieve continuous improvements to your demand plan, you need to measure your forecasts versus actuals, and identify areas for improvement.
Demand Management enables you to:
- Understand the plan’s overall performance by measuring forecast accuracy in a variety of ways, including mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), mean absolute deviation (MAD), and forecast bias, measured for any of the demand signals.
- Get an aggregate understanding of the forecast accuracy for your previous plan, and then use visualization to drill down into product segments that would need additional attention and analysis.
- Determine root causes by reviewing the historical forecast error analysis (waterfall report), which shows how archived forecasts compare to actual results. The waterfall report focuses your attention on the categories and customers where accuracy is deteriorating and requires more investigation.
- Inspect the constituents of the forecast, and reconfigure forecast parameters to resolve issues.
- By measuring forecast accuracy, and resolving the root cause of accuracy issues, you can achieve higher forecast accuracy and as a result, higher customer service levels and lower inventory.
To shape demand and profitably achieve revenue goals, you need to optimize new product introductions, simulate forecast scenarios, collaborate with stakeholders, and synchronize demand plans.
To execute your new product introduction strategy, you need the ability to accurately forecast new products and successfully plan the launch for chosen customer segments or geographies.
Demand Management enables you to:
- Forecast new products either based on history of a like product or directly use the forecast of a like product.
- Make volume adjustments and specify the percentage of history or forecast needed to meet the product launch requirements.
- Customize your product launch by setting the launch date, the customer zones or specific customers, and product categories or specific items.
- Use the New Product Information summary analysis to gauge the contribution of new product revenue to the overall product portfolio and determine whether it meets corporate targets.
- Collaborate with marketing, reconcile with their forecasts, and incorporate any other executive feedback to fine-tune the new product forecast.
By forecasting new products and collaborating with other stakeholders, you can better align inventory, launch products successfully, and prevent out of stocks situations.
To understand the impact of business decisions, you need what-if analysis capability to see how influencing factors can have positive or negative impacts on demand and key business performance metrics, before finalizing forecast changes.
Demand Management enables you to:
- Run an unlimited number of forecast simulations to see impacts of changes in the price, running a marketing campaign, shift in weather, demand upside request, and so on.
- Simulate how changes to forecasting models and parameters have an immediate impact on the statistical forecast.
- Simulate changes to attach rates or change the independent option forecast for configure-to-order items.
- Simulate the impact of introducing new products in particular geographic areas.
- Perform side-by-side analysis of any number of scenarios, and see the impact on operational and financial objectives.
By simulating and understanding the impact of your decisions, you can make confident decisions, and in turn, meet your business objectives.
Collaborate On and Synchronize Demand Plans
To have your organization march towards an agreed upon demand plan, you need the ability to reconcile forecasts, resolve issues by collaborating with stakeholders, and escalating issues to executives, as necessary.
You can use Demand Management to facilitate reconciliation and agreement of cross-functional forecasts by using the following capabilities:
- Forecast reconciliation – You can view a forecast captured from cross-functional teams at both aggregate and at the most detailed level (which has been automatically disaggregated). You can:
- Compare forecast at the plan level, and show the variance over a period of time or across different product segments.
- Leverage built-in exceptions, such as ‘deviation between sales and final shipments forecast’ to reconcile the sales forecast with your estimates.
- Use custom exceptions and calculations to find more specific issues that fit your evaluation criteria.
- Use conditional formatting to identify which specific weeks or items have a problem at a glance.
- Forecast review and approval – You might need to involve executives and other stakeholders to get additional guidance on strategic issues. The demand plan is readily available in Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud’s Demand Review section. Anyone who has access can indicate the action items and resolution expected from all stakeholders. You can make forecast adjustments based on executive decisions and approve the plan for use by supply planning.
By collaborating with stakeholders from different departments and jointly resolving forecast discrepancies, you can achieve a one-number forecast and plan the inventory needed to meet customer demand.
Additional Demand Management Enhancements
Integrate with Supply Chain Management Cloud and Other Sources
To reduce implementation timelines and reduce total cost of ownership, you can use prebuilt integration between Demand Management and other Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud applications. You can also incorporate data from other external data sources.
Features in this release allow you to:
- Collect data from Oracle SCM Cloud products
- Prebuilt integration to seamlessly get product, customer, and other master data as well as sales orders into Demand Management.
- Targeted data collection where data represents a business entity, or use net change data collection, importing data that changed since the last run.
- Filters to collect a subset of the data. For example, to reduce the number of items collected, you can filter according to the organizations being planned, or to reduce the order history collected, you can filter according to date ranges.
- Load data from external data sources - To improve decision making in Demand Management, you can import data from other sources by way of flat file integration. You can upload forecasts (if you use another system for forecasting), include sales forecasts, marketing forecasts, and external causal factors. You can also input customers, product hierarchies, shipments, and bookings.
By integrating with Oracle SCM Cloud and external applications, you and other stakeholders have visibility to all required data in a single place to drive the business process, resulting in an accurate demand plan.
Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud new in Release 13, provides a complete sales and operations planning (S&OP) solution for aligning organizations around an integrated operating plan to meet their strategic business goals. Using rich analytics and simulation capabilities, companies can monitor performance, simulate alternative what-if plans, and respond to changing market conditions. Sales and Operations Planning’s powerful process support and collaboration capabilities enable companies to reach consensus across Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Operations. Sales and Operations Planning’s integration with other Oracle Supply Chain Planning Cloud applications means that you can drive S&OP strategic decisions seamlessly into tactical planning and execution processes.
Analyze to Make Better Decisions
Sales and Operations Planning offers comprehensive analytics capabilities, exception management features, Microsoft Excel integration, and waterfall analysis so that you can evaluate plan performance relative to your targets and how your plans are changing over time.
Analyze Plan Performance with Best Practice S&OP Dashboards, Layouts, and Reports
S&OP is an executive management process requiring a big picture view of how a company is doing with respect to its business goals, and at the same time, requiring very detailed analysis in support of the process. Often S&OP software tools fail to cover the necessary spectrum from detailed analysis to high-level management reporting. As a result, you often must do extra work creating summary reports to present in S&OP review meetings.
Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud addresses this problem with a set of configurable S&OP graphical dashboards, layouts, and detailed reports supporting different levels of analysis during the S&OP process. For each of the five standard stages of S&OP -- product review, demand review, supply review, financial review, and executive review -- a summary dashboard is available with a ribbon of graphical KPI (Key Performance Indicator) charts across the top for monitoring performance. You can click on each KPI to see more detailed charts and tables, with links to even more detailed and editable pivot table reports. Example KPIs by review stage include:
- Product review: New Product Vitality, Days of Cover for End of Life Items
- Demand review: Unconstrained Plan versus Forecast, Stakeholder Forecast MAPE
- Supply review: Demand and Supply, Resource Overloading
- Financial review: Plan versus Forecast, Gross Margin
- Executive review: Revenue and Margin, Unmet Revenue
By combining rich summary graphical views with detailed analysis capabilities, you can monitor overall company performance, drill down into detail to understand the root cause of performance shortfalls, and change plans accordingly.
Configure Analytics to Meet Your Unique Needs
While Sales and Operations Planning comes with numerous predefined reports and charts, most companies have unique needs that require analysis tailored to their businesses.
With the Oracle solution you can make a variety of configurations, such as:
- Configure the layout of the screen to meet your preferences. You can identify multiple tables and charts to be displayed on the screen to facilitate holistic analysis. For example, you might configure the screen to analyze the material plan and the resource plan at the same time.
- Configure planning dimensions and hierarchies. You can quickly analyze large data sets through a common set of planning dimensions and hierarchies (such as product, customer, geography, zone, resources, supplier, and time) that support aggregate data analysis.
- Configure tables for multidimensional data analysis. You can analyze demand, inventory, and supply data measures in a single table to enable consistent views, comparison, and analysis, including alternate units of measure and monetary value.
- Configure measures. Sales and Operations Planning comes with numerous seeded measures (such as, consensus forecast, and projected available balance) to support S&OP best practices. Predefined measures are available in the subject areas of Demand Analytics and Forecasting, Inventory Analysis, Overall Plan Health, Manufacturing Efficiency, Supply Chain Costs, and Profitability. However, you can add custom measures to meet unique customer needs. You can configure goals, conditional formatting, and edit locking for all measures.
- Create new data analysis worksheets. You can create new worksheets using data visualization tools like treemaps, sunburst charts, line graphs, bar charts, and tables or use existing worksheets as the baseline to construct variants that meet specific planning needs. You can share these variants with other users or make them private.
- Configure guided navigation. You can define which worksheets you can drill down to with context from an existing worksheet or graph element (for example, right-clicking on a resource in the top overloaded resources chart and navigating to the resource plan table in order to diagnose the source of the problem).
- Configure favorite lists, saved query criteria, and analysis sets. You can reduce the time required to bring the right data into worksheets for further analysis.
With the above configuration capabilities, you will have the ability to enable an S&OP process that is tailored to the unique needs of your organization.
Manage by Exception to Focus on What’s Most Important
S&OP processes can often get bogged down by addressing too many issues in too much detail. To be most effective, you must focus on those issues that will yield the biggest bang for the buck. Management by exception is key to doing so.
Sales and Operations Planning allows you to identify variances from performance thresholds so you can focus on the most important issues. You can define exception criteria for seeded measures and custom measures for graphic display. Exception detection is run immediately upon running a plan. Features include:
- Configure the reporting on exceptions. You can specify the hierarchy levels and the thresholds for reporting on exceptions. You can configure which users or roles receive notifications.
- Configure exception sets. Identify the exceptions that are important for your plan in an exception set. Only these exceptions are calculated and reported.
- Analyze plan exceptions graphically. Review the exceptions and directly drill down from the exception to relevant data to understand the circumstances behind the exception and formulate an action plan to resolve it.
With these exception management features, you can focus on those issues with the biggest potential impact on your key performance indicators and overall business results.
Integrate with Microsoft Excel
Most S&OP data analysis can be done within the Oracle solution. However, there will be times when you want to analyze data in a spreadsheet. You might also want to bring external data into the Oracle solution.
Sales and Operations Planning allows you to use Microsoft Excel to analyze, edit, and update planning data. For instance, you can:
- Analyze plans offline. Download data from a table for offline analysis.
- Import financial plan data. Populate financial forecast and budget data in an Excel template and then load the data into Sales and Operations Planning.
With the ability to export and import data to and from spreadsheets, you can take advantage of the inherent flexibility of spreadsheets and analyze while offline. You can also include external data, such as financial data, into your analysis.
Understand How Plans Have Changed Using Waterfall Charts
With every S&OP planning cycle, your operating plan will change. It’s important to understand how the plan has changed. You also want to be able to compare past plans with actual performance. What’s needed is a set of reports to automatically make such comparisons.
Sales and Operations Planning provides waterfall analysis to compare current plan data with previous plan data. For example, you can easily toggle the display in a supply review table or graph to show changes in planning data for production plan, supplier capacity required, total supply, resource requirements, and projected available balance measures to observe where changes have occurred. Using the same waterfall capability, you can compare actual history with past plans.
With these waterfall analyses, you have visibility as how to realign your business with each new S&OP plan. By comparing plans with actual performance, you can pinpoint problem areas in your planning process.
Align the Enterprise with Best Practice Process Management and Collaboration Features
Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud helps you follow a best practices S&OP process to collaborate and reach consensus among sales, marketing, finance, and operations so that your entire organization is marching in step to meet its business goals.
Enable Best Practices with S&OP Process Management
Many companies’ S&OP processes fall short of recognized best practices, resulting in disappointing business benefits. Even companies that have defined a best practices process often struggle to automate the process with spreadsheets or S&OP software applications.
Sales and Operations Planning is designed to help your company quickly adopt a step-by-step best practice approach to S&OP. Each user has a personalized starting page outlining the overall S&OP calendar and progress to date, tasks assigned to them, and a contact list of colleagues involved in the S&OP process. From this page, users can navigate to tabs for each of the five standard stages of S&OP -- product review, demand review, supply review, financial review, and executive review. Each of these tabs provides the following:
- A seeded and editable list of standard tasks for each of the five stages, with the ability to associate each task with an owner, due date, status, and relevant dashboard or report to carry out each task.
- A contact list of colleagues involved in each stage.
- A list of action items assigned during that stage.
- A list of decision items that are being escalated for discussion in a review meeting.
With these features, Sales and Operations Planning helps companies quickly adopt a best practice S&OP process that will help them achieve the greatest possible benefits.
Arrive at a Consensus One-Number Enterprise Operating Plan
In your S&OP process, you will want to design an operating plan that everyone can agree to. What’s needed is a way to gather input from key stakeholders, turn this input into an unconstrained consensus forecast, and have that forecast as the basis for your constrained operating plan.
Sales and Operations Planning combines multiple stakeholder forecasts from sales, marketing, and operations, all developed according to the product and location hierarchies most meaningful to each stakeholder group. A weighted average is determined using configurable percentage weightings that you can override. The resulting final unconstrained consensus forecast from the demand review process becomes the basis for developing a constrained operating plan that everyone can agree to. With this consensus planning feature, you can come up with a one-number plan with buy-in from the organization and maximum possible accuracy.
Collaborate with Stakeholders on Plans Using Oracle Social Network
Resolving issues requires effective collaboration on a communication platform that provides the right context, history, and tools, and connects people without introducing another standalone social networking tool. In this release, you can use Oracle Social Network to leverage the power of social collaboration that is directly built into Sales and Operations Planning to:
- Stay connected with plans and planning cycles to get updates.
- Start a conversation and collaborate in real time and in multiple threads with key stakeholders.
- Resolve planning issues and share recommended practices through social collaboration.
All communications are maintained with the proper business context and team engagement using Oracle Social Network, effectively closing the collaboration gap.
Ensure Continuity and Provide Accountability Using Planning Notes
During the S&OP process, there is a need to document decisions made, changes to the plan, and the assumptions, risks, and opportunities associated with those decisions and changes. With such documentation, you can understand why decisions were made and who made them.
Using Sales and Operations Planning, you can attach notes to objects such as plans, product categories, organizations, and customers, or in a table containing specific planning combinations. For example, you can attach a note to a shipment forecast for an item-organization in a specific week so your peers know the assumptions behind the forecast change. Documenting such qualitative information ensures S&OP participants understand the context behind the plan. It also provides accountability for actions made during the S&OP process, so that, for example, if a boost to planned demand turns out to be a mistake, there is a record of why the change was made in the first place.
Act by Creating New Plans and Connecting Plans with Execution
To determine the right plan, it is often necessary to simulate alternative what-if plans, and then determine and select the best one for execution. Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud provides aggregate planning and simulation capabilities so you can evaluate different plans to balance supply with demand and meet your business objectives. Seamless integration among S&OP, tactical planning, and execution systems ensures that the S&OP process starts out with the most up-to-date information. Strategic decisions you make during the S&OP process can easily be driven back into your tactical planning systems for execution.
Plan at an Aggregate Level for Strategic Time Horizons
For long-term strategic planning, you will want to plan at an aggregate level to address big picture questions related to issues such as resource and workforce needs and adequacy of procurement and transportation contracts. It’s important to plan at an aggregate level so you are not overwhelmed with unnecessary detail, and thus slowing down the planning process with unnecessary complexity.
Tactical planning is often done at an item, site, and daily level, with a typical time horizon of three to 18 months. With Sales and Operations Planning, you can plan at an aggregate level, for example, at the product category and month level, focusing on critical components and resources over strategic time horizons that are typically 18 months to five years out. With aggregate planning capability, you can address long-term strategic planning quickly and effectively and help your organization have the right capacity to profitably meet its long-term goals.
Run Quick Demand Simulations to Reflect Changed Assumptions
While the demand forecast is sometimes taken as a given at the outset of the S&OP process, you might want to update the forecast to reflect changing assumptions, such as a change in pricing. In that case, you will want to update the demand forecast from within the S&OP application. If you subscribe to either Oracle Planning Central Cloud or Oracle Demand Management Cloud, Sales and Operations Planning allows you to run demand simulations from within Sales and Operations Planning, using the forecasting capabilities of those other services.
In contrast to rerunning the demand forecast in a separate demand application and bringing it back into the S&OP application, the ability to run demand simulations within the S&OP application gives you a seamless user experience. It also has the benefit of reducing data latency and speeding up your S&OP analysis by minimizing the movement of demand plan data between applications.
Run Rapid Supply Simulations to Balance Supply with Demand
During the supply review stage, you will want to run alternative what-if supply plans within the S&OP application to balance supply with demand in the most profitable way. Long plan runtimes will limit the number of alternatives you can consider. What you need is the ability to run what-if plans as quickly as possible.
With Sales and Operations Planning, you can run supply simulations from within the application with quick in-memory processing. You can model supply scenarios to accommodate an increase in demand, or see the impact of changes to any of the following supply parameters:
- Resource availability for a planning resource in an organization
- Supplier capacity available for a supplier item
- Purchasing cost, to evaluate changes in supply chain costs
- Item lead times
- Item prices to evaluate changes in revenue
- Safety stock to evaluate changes in projected inventory
- Sourcing percentages
- Usage quantities and effective dates in the bill of resources
With rapid supply simulation available in Sales and Operations Planning, you can be more responsive to changing demand conditions and easily evaluate multiple supply plan alternatives so that you can pick the most attractive one.
Select the Best Plan with Plan Over Plan Comparison
In order to evaluate what-if plans, you need to be able to easily compare plans, such as an alternative plan with the current operating plan, or one alternative plan with another. Sales and Operations Planning supports the ability to compare plans side by side. Comparison measures calculate the differences between plan values to highlight changes so you can consider the pros and cons of each plan. With plan-over-plan comparison, you can quickly and easily determine which alternative plan yields the best business results.
Link Tactical Planning with S&OP
To link your tactical supply chain planning with your S&OP process, you will want to use your tactical plans as the starting point for S&OP. Sales and Operations Planning is integrated with Oracle’s Supply Chain Planning Cloud tactical planning applications. You can view demand and supply measures from Oracle Planning Central Cloud, demand measures from Oracle Demand Management Cloud, and supply measures from Oracle Supply Planning Cloud. Then, you can do aggregate analysis of this information directly in Sales and Operations Planning. With this integration, your S&OP process starts off with the most accurate information, ensuring that decisions reflect the most current information about your business.
Link S&OP Plans Back to Tactical Planning
After you have an approved S&OP strategic plan, you will want this plan to drive your tactical supply planning applications for S&OP plan execution. Because Sales and Operations Planning is integrated with Oracle Planning Central Cloud and Oracle Supply Planning Cloud, the approved S&OP demand forecast can automatically become the demand schedule for planning supply in those latter two applications. These applications spread and consume the aggregate S&OP forecast. With integration between S&OP and tactical planning applications, you can drive strategic decisions made as part of the S&OP process seamlessly into tactical planning processes so that strategic decisions are executed upon.
Integrate with Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud and Other Sources
To reduce implementation timelines and reduce total cost of ownership, you can use prebuilt integration between Sales and Operations Planning and other Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud applications. You can also incorporate data from other external data sources.
Collect Data From Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud Applications
If you are using Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud applications, you will want the ability to integrate those applications with Sales and Operations Planning. Because Sales and Operations Planning is integrated with Supply Chain Management Cloud, you can:
- Use prebuilt integration to seamlessly obtain product, customer, and other master data as well as transactions data into Sales and Operations Planning.
- Use targeted data collection where data represents a business entity, or you can use net change data collection, importing data that changed since the last run.
- Use filters to collect a subset of the data. For example, to reduce the number of items collected, you can filter according to the organizations being planned; or, to reduce the order history collected, you can filter according to date ranges.
By integrating with Supply Chain Management Cloud, you and other stakeholders have visibility to all required data necessary for an effective S&OP process.
Integrate with Your Existing Third-Party Systems
If you are not using Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud applications, you will want to integrate Sales and Operations Planning with existing systems. Sales and Operations Planning supports loading external data such as master data, hierarchies data, and transactions data by way of flat files. Types of data imported by way of flat files include:
- Production history
- Inventory history
- Backlog history
- Financial forecast value
- Budget value
- Supplier sales forecast
- Manufacturing forecast
- Custom measures
With this integration, you can use Sales and Operations Planning seamlessly with existing systems.
Oracle Supply Planning Cloud enhances operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. With Supply Planning, you can plan item, material, and component supply, monitor supply performance, and respond to demand, availability, and resource issues as they occur. Supply Planning builds upon Oracle Planning Central Cloud, Oracle’s Cloud-based foundation for supply planning. With Supply Planning, you can review supply and demand changes and simulate actions to minimize risk and cost. You can also significantly improve both the speed and the quality of decisions using social collaboration, embedded analytics, and intelligent recommendations, since supply planning presents complex supply chain information in a simple and business focused format. Seamless integration with other Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud applications bridges the gap between planning and execution by automatically triggering material transfers, manufacturing work orders, and purchase requisitions based upon your actions in Supply Planning.
Your transition from Oracle Planning Central Cloud to Oracle Supply Planning Cloud plus Oracle Demand Management Cloud is seamless. Your existing Planning Central plans are automatically available for viewing, editing, and rerunning within Supply Planning (and will produce the same planning results.) The tables and graphs that you configured for use within Planning Central can be easily reconfigured for use in Supply Planning as well. Similarly, your favorite page layouts of tables, graphs, and planning analysis views from Planning Central can be reused within Supply Planning.
The fundamental objective of supply planning is to reduce inventory levels while increasing customer service levels by planning your entire supply chain. Supply Planning supports this across a variety of production models and fulfillment strategies.
You want to create supply plans that convert current and expected demand forecasts into a supply plan that reduces inventory while preventing out-of-stock situations. This action is a complex balancing act that requires a combination of powerful numerical techniques together with abilities to clearly communicate the plan results and the issues to be resolved to the planner. Oracle Supply Planning Cloud contains an advanced supply planning engine combined with advanced analytical and visualization capabilities. These capabilities allow you, the planner, to quickly identify situations across your entire supply chain where there is supply-demand imbalance and to rapidly resolve them.
Features in this release include:
- Model global supply chain. Plan for the entire supply chain using flexible sourcing rules while taking into consideration calendars for shipping, receiving, and manufacturing.
- Spread and consume demand forecasts. Use the forecasts from Oracle Demand Management Cloud, Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud, or other sources; spread forecasts when the granularity of demand planning time buckets is at a higher level than that of supply planning and consume these forecasts with sales orders to obtain the net demand picture.
- Recommend new supplies and reschedule or cancel existing supply orders. Supply Planning plans to the schedule date on the order and recommends new supply orders, rescheduling or cancelling existing supply orders after netting orders from forecasts and using the lead times on the item. The recommendations include purchase orders to source material from a supplier, transfer orders to move material from another organization in your supply chain, and manufacturing orders to manufacture the product. The dates calculated for replenishment respect various calendars including shipping, receiving, and carrier schedules.
- Respect business rules related to supply. Supply Planning honors effectivity dates on components, expiration dates on inventory lots and reservations of on-hand inventory, work orders, purchase orders, and transfer order to sales orders.
- Automate calculation of resource requirements. Plan and analyze resource requirements taking into account the work definition in Oracle Manufacturing Cloud. The combination of the manufacturing calendars and resource exceptions allows Oracle Supply Planning Cloud to recognize resource availability and report exceptions when requirements exceed capacity.
Calculate and Plan Safety Stock
Safety stock is a hedge against unexpected variations in demand that might otherwise impact customer service levels, but as such, it is a cost to be minimized. Supply Planning can calculate the required buffer stock and ensure that the projected inventory balance over time is not less than the calculated or specified inventory stocking levels. You can:
- Automatically calculate safety stock levels. Supply Planning considers demand variability when it calculates safety stock. To arrive at the safety stock levels, Supply Planning uses MAD (mean absolute deviation forecast error), MAPE (mean absolute percentage error), or arrival rate forecast errors, and the service levels that are defined for an item at a facility or alternatively a common service level for the entire plan.
- Manually set safety stock levels. You can manually set safety stock levels for an item, either in the Product Information Management work area or in Supply Planning, when an automated calculation is not appropriate. Supply Planning can also use a “days of cover” paradigm to calculate a safety stock level that varies according to time. Additionally, you can import safety stock levels if you calculate them elsewhere.
Tailor the Scope of Plans to Your Business Needs
Control the scope of planning to match your business needs. Easily change the scope to adapt to changing business conditions.
- Create named plans. Create a named plan and identify the locations and items, along with the hierarchies that you will use for data analysis.
- Define planning scope. Plan supply based upon sales orders and one or more forecasts (demand schedules) from Oracle Demand Management Cloud, Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud, or external systems. Alternatively, you can use a manufacturing plan to plan detail below a leveled production plan.
- Enforce fine-grained access control. Restrict access to individual plans based upon user, and limit access across plans to the data within a planner’s scope of responsibility.
Plan for Configure-to-Order Products
Planning for configure-to-order products introduces special considerations related to the dependent demand of product options and the different methods of fulfilling configured products. To attain high customer service levels while reducing the inventory of finished goods and components, Supply Planning in a configure-to-order environment allows you to:
- Consume forecasts for models. Consume orders for the configured product from model forecasts.
- Plan component requirements. Derive the demand on lower level options and option classes according to planning percentages. The planning percentages can either be defined in the work definition or determined based on historical ordering patterns of options when using an integrated demand and supply plan.
- Plan resource requirements. Derive the resource requirements according to planning percentages defined on the work definition. This allows you to identify potential resource overloads by deriving the load on the resources required to manufacture the assembly that might be dependent on selected options.
- Identify supplier capacity overloads. Gain visibility to potential supply issues at supplier sites by consuming the supply requirements for the configured items from the supplier capacity defined at the model level.
- Plan option-dependent lead time. Ensure that options are available to manufacture the configured product at the planned time by offsetting the required component lead times.
Plan for Multiple Fulfillment Strategies
Modern businesses use a variety of fulfillment strategies, such as contract manufacturing, drop-shipment and back-to-back order flows, which are often interchangeable based on customer or order-specific situations. While this approach can deliver flexibility and cost advantages, it further complicates the planning problem. To fully support these strategies in an optimal way, Supply Planning allows you to:
- Plan for contract manufacturing. Plan outsourced manufacturing locations as if they were in-house manufacturing plants. Plan for supply, taking into consideration work-in-process and on-hand inventory at the contract manufacturer so customer service levels remain high. Plan for the components you supply to the contract manufacturer. Automatically create the documentation that is required to manufacture the product at the contract manufacturer when you release the planned supply orders.
- Plan for drop shipments. Consume drop-shipped orders from the forecast, and honor supply reservations for them. Plan the transit time between the supplier and customer site, taking the supplier, supplier shipping, carrier, and customer receiving calendars into account.
- Plan back-to-back orders. Consume the back-to-back orders from forecasts, and honor supply reservations for them. Plan the transit time between the supplier and the receiving organization, taking the supplier, carrier, receiving organization, and customer calendars into account.
- Plan for outside processing operations. Plan for supply using the appropriate lead times required for processing material at a third party, based upon the manufacturing work definition.
- Support expense destination transfers. Consider expense destination transfers as independent demand, so all demand is accounted for in the planning process.
Monitor Supply Chain Performance
The prior generation of supply planning systems has required a great deal of specialized skills combined with “tribal knowledge” to identify and resolve issues. Supply Planning is designed to reduce the need for insider knowledge, improve planner productivity, and reduce the time required to identify and prioritize supply chain problems.
Monitor Plan Performance at the Aggregate Level
With Supply Planning’s visual summaries of plan data, you can evaluate enterprise plan performance at a glance and clearly reveal trends and highlight deviations from enterprise goals. With Supply Planning, you can:
- Review a plan summary. Model future business performance and narrow down issues at a high level, with one-click access to supporting charts and graphs that can help you understand the root cause.
- Use seeded info tiles to explore your plan. Access seeded info tiles that present a snapshot of plan performance, including revenue, margin, forecast attainment, demand at risk, inventory turns, lead time compression, utilization, capacity, excess inventory, and obsolescence.
- Use configured info tiles to explore your plan. Create your own info tiles representing plan performance. In addition to using predefined metrics, you may also derive plan performance metrics using measures that are unique to your enterprise.
Use Guided Navigation to Analyze Root Causes
To reduce the time required to analyze the root cause of issues and support corporate reporting tasks, you can use over 50 prepackaged tables and graphs that you can change to suit your requirements. With Supply Planning Cloud, you can:
- Analyze root causes. Drill down from aggregate-level info tiles to detailed worksheets that help you understand the issue better. All the seeded worksheets provide in-context navigation to related data to validate any hypothesis you may have.
- Analyze, update, and review forecast changes. View and update data at multiple levels of the hierarchy through the seeded Forecast Analysis worksheet.
- Analyze, update, and review supply and demand in aggregate time buckets. Understand where and when supply and demand is out of balance with the seeded Material Plan worksheet. You can clearly see projected supply and demand trends in aggregate time buckets, including forward looking inventory positions.
- Optimize resource usage. Review resource requirements and availability with the Resource Plan worksheet. This table helps you understand resource utilization over time and take remedial action for over-capacity and under-capacity situations.
- Analyze, update, and review supply and demand in detail. Analyze demand and supply pegging at the most detailed level (sales orders, purchase orders, transfer orders, and planned orders) using the Supplies and Demands screen.
- Analyze supply pegging. Easily visualize how supply at multiple levels is pegged to demand using the Supply Pegging screen. The pegging analysis allows you to easily understand demand separated out on various dimensions such as time, order types, or customers and visualize the pegging of not just the top level assemblies but also the associated components.
- Analyze plan master data. Analyze items, item structures (bills of material), work definitions, resources, resource capacity, resource requirements, supply chain bills, suppliers, and supplier capacity through other worksheets.
Supply Planning’s build plan allows you to simultaneously view resource and material requirements in the context of demand for an assembly on a time-bucketed basis, thereby reducing supply and resource bottlenecks. The build plan allows you to:
- Get a 360 degree view of supply and demand. Review time-bucketed supplies, demands, and resource utilization for any assembly or subassembly and its related components and resources.
- Understand the imbalance in component supply. Highlight the supplies (of components) offset in time for a selected demand.
- Review order details. For the selected aggregate demand or supply quantity in any bucket, identify the individual orders that make up the quantity in the bucket.
- Focus your view. Configure the layout of the analysis to show only the components, resources, and the measures that are of interest aggregated in time buckets such as weeks or months selected by you.
Configure Embedded Analytics and Navigation to Suit Your Needs
Increase your productivity with a visual, fully configurable user interface. With Supply Planning, you can:
- Configure the workspace to organize your analysis. Choose which tables and charts to display on the screen to facilitate holistic analysis, for example, analyze the material plan and the resource plan at the same time. This allows you to analyze and manage aggregate and detail information in one screen without having to switch back and forth.
- Configure planning dimensions and hierarchies. Quickly analyze large data sets in terms of common planning dimensions and hierarchies (product, customer, geography, resources, supplier, and time). View data measures at any combination of dimensions, at any hierarchy level.
- Configure tables for multidimensional data analysis. Combine demand, inventory, and supply data measures in a single table to enable consistent views, comparison and analysis, including alternate units of measure and monetary value.
- Create new data analysis worksheets. Create new worksheets using data visualization tools like tree maps, sunburst charts, line graphs, bar charts, and tables or use existing worksheets as the baseline to construct variants that meet specific planning needs. You can share these variants with other users or make them private.
- Configure navigation between charts and graphs and enable guided navigation. Define which worksheets you can drill down to with context from an existing worksheet or graph element.
- Configure favorite lists, saved query criteria, and analysis sets. Reduce the time required to bring the right data into worksheets for further analysis.
Tailor the User Interface to Your Enterprise Standards and Processes
To adapt the system to your specific requirements, you can personalize the user experience using Oracle Page Composer. This tool allows you to change and update the style of field labels, adjust column sorting in tables, and show or hide fields. For example, you can change the label on a field from “Item” to “SKU,” or hide certain plan options so planners can’t select them. The resulting user experience is tailored to your enterprise standards and processes, improving accuracy, efficiency, and user acceptance.
Analyze Plans Using Your Own Measures and Hierarchies
Align your planning activities with your business objectives by incorporating the business metrics that matter to your business in the planning process and analyzing using custom hierarchies. With Supply Planning, you can:
- Create new measures. Create new measures that are the result of mathematical operations on other measures, or completely independent data measures whose data is manually entered or imported by way of flat files.
- Aggregate measure data. Control the aggregation of these measures from the lowest levels of its data dimensions.
- Disaggregate measure data. Control how Oracle Supply Planning Cloud disaggregates data down to the lower levels along the different hierarchies when data is manually entered at aggregate level.
While Supply Planning contains a great many tools to display and analyze data, many planners also make use of spreadsheets for both offline analysis and to update the plan data. To seamlessly support this interaction you might:
- Analyze your plan offline. Download data from any table for off-line analysis.
- Edit the plan and synchronize changes back to the system. Edit the downloaded data and make mass updates in Microsoft Excel™ and upload changes back. This capability is available for data downloaded from the Supplies and Demands screen and items.
Respond to Changing Conditions
However good your plans are, things change and you need to respond to the changes in demand and supply. Quick and efficient response to these changes requires you to evaluate what-if situations, identify further opportunities to improve performance, and to prioritize actions to minimize disruption and maximize business impact. Supply Planning was designed specifically to deliver these capabilities.
Simulate Changes and Identify Opportunities
Simulation of different scenarios allows you to investigate different courses of action when encountering supply chain issues. With Supply Planning, you can:
- Simulate changes to the supply chain. Identify best course of action for longer term supply chain issues by simulating changes to your sourcing rules.
- Simulate dynamic changes to plan data. Compare baseline and simulation plans to evaluate the impact of plan changes. Make changes to supply and demand dates and quantities, item attributes that affect planning, item structures (bills of material), work definitions, resource attributes (including resource availability), operation-resource attributes, and supplier attributes (including supplier capacity) at aggregate and detailed level and monitor its effect on the plan.
- Apply simulation edits consistently across planning scenarios. Define simulation sets to manage plan changes on an ongoing basis or apply them to multiple named plans. You can associate a simulation set with any affected plan that requires evaluation, and copy any changes you make in a plan into a simulation set. Simulation changes include supply and demand dates and quantities, item attributes that affect planning, item structures (bills of material), work definitions, resource attributes (including resource availability), operation-resource attributes and supplier attributes (including supplier capacity).
- Analyze demands at risk. Identify the most important orders that are at risk of being late. Oracle Supply Planning Cloud prioritizes recommended supply order changes based upon their demand impact. You can accept some or all of the recommendations and then rerun the plan to ensure that there are no other issues before releasing changes back to the execution system.
- Simulate hot demand. Understand the impact of accepting a hot demand by injecting the simulated order into the plan and seeing the effects on resources and material requirements.
- Simulate order pull-in. Assess the feasibility of pulling in existing orders to meet corporate financial targets.
Plan comparison allows you to holistically measure and judge the effect of changes by copying a plan to a simulation plan and then comparing the effect of changes with the baseline plan. With Supply Planning, you can:
- Compare aggregate plan metrics. You can compare two plans and understand what changed at an aggregate level. For example, you can compare metrics, such as revenue, demand at risk, exception count, and so on.
- Compare plans at detail level. You can query the supplies and demands when something is different between two plans using the Order Comparison screen. For example, you can compare the baseline plan with the simulation plan and filter to show only those orders where the suggested due date changed by more than a specified number of days.
All plans generate exceptions. Without effective exception management, the planner can be buried in a mass of minutiae without the tools to identify and resolve the “keystone” issues. Oracle Supply Planning Cloud has exception management that enables you to set performance thresholds, directing you to those which are the most important. With Supply Planning, you can:
- Configure the thresholds for reporting on exceptions. Report on over 20 types of predefined exceptions, based upon thresholds that you specify.
- Configure exception sets. Identify the exceptions that are important for your plan in an exception set. Only these exceptions are calculated and reported.
- Summarized exception reports. Use summarized reports of exceptions on items, resources, suppliers, and customers to understand where and when planning exceptions are occurring.
- Analyze plan exceptions. Directly drill down from exception summary views to relevant data to understand root causes and formulate action plans. Navigation options include the Material Plan, Supplies and Demands, and Exception Details screens, all of which you can configure to your requirements.
- Configure your own exceptions. Identify variances of the plan from performance thresholds for situations that are unique to your business. For example, you can set up a new exception that alerts you when the percentage of demand that is at risk of being late exceeds a threshold you set. You can set custom exception thresholds on any measure.
Prioritize Work Orders with Ready-to-Build Status
Typically, it is undesirable to release a work order to the shop floor if all of the material will not be available. To improve shop floor productivity by prioritizing planned work orders for release that meet this criteria, Supply Planning provides information on the quantity as well as the percentage of the recommended planned order quantity that can be built using on-hand stock. You can then decide whether to release the work order at all or to release only the quantity that can be built using on-hand component inventory.
Informed planning decisions require an understanding of the constraints faced at a supplier site. Supply Planning, in conjunction with Oracle Supply Chain Collaboration Cloud, allows you to publish a statement of requirements as determined by the plan to a supplier and receive a commitment against this forecast. This commitment is recognized as supplier capacity in Supply Planning. Planners can then monitor requirements against this commitment and be alerted when requirements exceed supplier capacity.
Collaborate with Stakeholders on Plans Using Oracle Social Network
Resolving issues requires effective collaboration on a communication platform that provides the right context, history, and tools, and connects people without introducing another standalone social networking tool. In this release, you can use Oracle Social Network to leverage the power of social collaboration that is directly built into Supply Planning to:
- Start a conversation centered on a named plan. Planners can start a conversation centered on a plan.
- Start a conversation centered on an identified order. To resolve issues around a particular work order, transfer order, purchase order, sales order, or purchase requisition, you can start a conversation on a selected order and obtain feedback from the extended community.
- Add comments. You can add a comment to an Oracle Social Network conversation on the plan when working in Supply Planning.
All communications are maintained with the proper business context and team engagement using Oracle Social Network, effectively closing the collaboration gap.
Collaborate with Other Planners Using Notes
Planning decisions are often complex and require additional information to be stored as the issues are discussed and resolved with the planning community. The notes capability in Supply Planning allows you to annotate key data changes to help other users understand your assumptions and reasons for changes. You can associate notes with a plan, with items, organizations, or customers referred to in a plan, or with a table containing specific planning combinations. For example, you can attach a note to a shipment forecast for an item-organization in a specific week so your peers know why the forecast was changed.
Integrate Planning and Execution
The Achilles heel of many planning systems is the ineffective way that they are integrated with the execution system. To reduce implementation timelines and the total cost of ownership, Supply Planning comes integrated and ready-to-use with the other Oracle Cloud applications for both collections and the release of make, buy, or transfer supply orders. You are also able to incorporate supplementary data from other data sources.
Collect Data from Oracle Cloud
Reduce implementation complexity and latency between execution and planning systems using predefined mappings and a multithreaded process to speed up data synchronization. With Supply Planning, you can:
- Import data with preconfigured integration. Use data required for planning from Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud, including Oracle Product Master Data Management Cloud, Oracle Manufacturing Cloud, Oracle Procurement Cloud, Oracle Inventory Management Cloud, and Oracle Order Management Cloud.
- Reduce planning cycle time by optimizing data collections. Perform both targeted collections that import all data representing a business entity and net change collections that gather only the data that has changed since the last run, as needed. You can also collect a subset of the data by using filters to specify the data to be collected. Examples of filter criteria include reducing the number of items collected based on the organizations planned. Another example is reducing the order history collected based on date ranges.
Collect Data from External Data Sources
Most enterprises have a variety of demand fulfillment systems they must plan, including from systems other than the Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud. You can load the external data from other systems so you can plan for the facilities managed on these external systems by way of flat files. Key data that can be loaded from other systems include:
- Reference data. Organizations, currencies, units of measure, calendars, shipping networks, and items.
- Order management data. Open sales orders.
- Manufacturing data. Routings, resources, work orders, and related manufacturing data.
- Inventory data. On-hand inventory and transfer orders between locations.
- Purchasing data. Suppliers, supplier sites, item suppliers, purchase orders, and purchase requisitions.
Integrate with Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud
Best practice sales and operations planning process requires seamlessly integrating and exchanging demand and supply plan data between the sales and operations planning (S&OP) process and detailed demand and supply planning. With Supply Planning, you can:
- Use a demand schedule from Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud or from Oracle Demand Planning Cloud to plan supply.
- Have visibility to the supply plan Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud.
- Use a measure, such as planned orders from a named plan, and use that data in Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud.
Integrate with Oracle Demand Management Cloud
Best practice demand and supply planning process requires seamlessly integrating demand plans as drivers to the supply planning process. You can include the demand schedules from Oracle Demand Management Cloud in your supply plan. Alternatively, you can have a single plan for both demand and supply planning, allowing you to monitor and manage demand and supply plans in one single named plan.
Integrate with Oracle Global Order Promising Cloud
Oracle Global Order Promising Cloud maintains a real-time picture of all available sources of supply. As orders arrive, Global Order Promising selects the best fulfillment location based upon current and future supply availability. Future supply might also include planned manufacturing work orders or planned purchase orders that have not yet been released or executed. To provide more accurate promise dates that include this planned supply, Oracle Supply Planning Cloud can provide this information to Oracle Global Order Promising Cloud.
Release Recommendations to Execution
When you are satisfied with your supply plan, you can release its planned orders to execution, so they take effect. With Supply Planning, you can:
- Automatically release orders for execution. Release orders to execution when the supply planning cycle completes based on predefined parameters.
- Manually release orders. Change key information such as due dates and quantities prior to release.
- Export Plan. Export new planned orders and changes to a file in a predetermined format that can then be integrated with your enterprise systems not on Oracle Applications Cloud.
Report Using Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence
With Supply Planning, you can run planning reports without incurring the lead time involved in the extract-load-transform processes required with traditional business intelligence applications. You can create reports and analyze live planning data. The following capabilities are available in Supply Planning:
- Prebuilt reports. Use predefined summary reports for orders to be released for execution, build plan, and exception summary.
- Custom reports. Create your own reports on live data using intuitive graphical tools.
Oracle Planning Central Cloud is an integrated demand and supply planning solution that combines forecasting, inventory, and supply planning with a multidimensional analytics framework. This framework enables you to simultaneously balance supply and demand and derive management insight for your extended supply chain.
This release contains important additions to Planning Central to better plan, monitor, and respond to changing conditions in the supply chain and enhanced integration for execution of plan.
Enhance Planning for Configure-to-Order Products
Effective planning of configure-to-order products is challenging due the different methods of fulfilling the order and the variable nature of the dependent demand. To attain high customer service levels, while reducing the inventory of finished goods and components when using a configure-to-order model, the following capabilities have been added to this release of Planning Central:
- Plan pick-to-order products. Forecast for the pick-to-order model. Consume orders for the configured product from model forecasts and plan component requirements.
- Plan resource requirements. Derive the resource requirements according to planning percentages defined on the work definition. This derivation allows you to identify potential resource overloads on resources whose use may be dependent on selected options.
- Identify supplier capacity overloads. Gain visibility to potential supply issues at supplier sites by consuming the supply requirements for the configured items from the supplier capacity defined at the model level.
Plan for Multiple Fulfillment Strategies
Most businesses now use a combination of insourced and outsourced fulfillment strategies, which complicates the planning process. To reduce cycle times, deliver an excellent customer experience, and increase revenues using a variety of fulfillment strategies, this release adds the support for the following scenarios:
- Plan for outside processing operations. Plan for supply using the appropriate lead times required for processing material at a third party, based upon the manufacturing work definition.
- Support expense destination transfers. Consider expense destination transfers as independent demand so that all demand is accounted for in the planning process.
Collaborate with Stakeholders on Plans Using Oracle Social Network
Resolving issues requires effective collaboration on a communication platform that provides the right context, history, and tools, and connects people without introducing another standalone social networking tool. In this release, you can use Oracle Social Network to leverage the power of social collaboration to:
- Start a conversation centered on an identified order. To resolve issues around a particular work order, transfer order, purchase order, sales order, or purchase requisition, you can start a conversation on a selected order and obtain feedback from the extended community.
- Collaborate in real time and in multiple threads with key stakeholders.
- Resolve issues and share recommended practices through social collaboration.
All communications are maintained with the proper business context and team engagement using Oracle Social Network, effectively closing the collaboration gap.
Integrate with Oracle Supply Chain Collaboration Cloud
Informed planning decisions require an understanding of the constraints faced at a supplier site. Planning Central, in conjunction with Oracle Supply Chain Collaboration Cloud (a new Oracle SCM Cloud service delivered in this release), allows you to publish a statement of requirements as determined by the plan to a supplier and receive a commitment against the forecast. This commitment is recognized as supplier capacity in Oracle Supply Planning Cloud. Planners can then monitor requirements against this commitment and be alerted when requirements exceed supplier capacity.
Integrate with Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud
Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud (new in this release) has been designed to enable a best practice sales and operations planning (S&OP) process. To support this process, Planning Central seamlessly integrates demand and supply plan data with Sales and Operations Planning. You can use a demand schedule from Sales and Operations Planning to plan supply and also have visibility to the supply plan in Sales and Operations Planning. As part of your S&OP process, an S&OP analyst can select a measure (such as planned orders) from a named plan and proceed to use the data in the S&OP plan.
Collect Data From External Data Sources
Most enterprises have a variety of demand fulfillment systems they must plan, some of which may be from systems other than the Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud. You can load the external data from other systems to plan for the facilities managed on these external systems by way of flat files. Key data that you can load from other systems include:
- Reference data. Organizations, currencies, units of measure, calendars, shipping networks, and items.
- Demand planning data. Booking and shipment history, price lists, causal factors, and external forecasts.
- Order management data. Open sales orders.
- Manufacturing data. Routings, resources, work orders, and related manufacturing data.
- Inventory data. On-hand inventory and transfer orders between locations.
- Purchasing data. Suppliers, supplier sites, item suppliers, purchase orders, and purchase requisitions.
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