Oracle "Hearts" Asian Manufacturing

Dec. 17, 2008

This popped up in a newsletter from ARC. Seems the other big gun in ERP, Oracle, has discovered there's gold in them there manufacturing hills--at least in Asia. Below are excerpts from the report

Oracle's Highlights Its Application Strategy for Manufacturing Industries in Asia

This popped up in a newsletter from ARC. Seems the other big gun in ERP, Oracle, has discovered there's gold in them there manufacturing hills--at least in Asia. Below are excerpts from the report

Oracle's Highlights Its Application Strategy for Manufacturing Industries in Asia

During Oracle's Asia Pacific analyst meeting in Sydney last week, Oracle showcased the range and scope of company's capabilities in enterprise solutions space. Oracle executives presented several new initiatives taken by the company to grow its business in Asia, especially in the industrial segment. Oracle's main thrust is to offer enterprise solutions that are 'Complete, Open, and Integrated' (COI).

Over the years, the company has made many acquisitions which have added some best in class solutions to Oracle's portfolio. Discussions during the meeting clearly highlighted that the company's offerings go far beyond Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, they encompass industry specific applications for PLM, Transportation and Logistics, Production Planning and Scheduling, and Process Optimization Systems. Oracle also provides MES solutions tightly integrated with ERP and supply chain solutions both for discrete and process industries.

With a very broad portfolio of applications, the company delivers Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Packs containing pre-built, out of the box integrations for quick implementation, which will significantly lower the manufacturers' costs & risks. Companies can now create custom integrated business processes across any of the applications using predefined object and service definitions based on an open standard foundation. The message that emanated from the briefings was that Oracle would focus on offering a complete suite of solutions that are less complex for manufacturing companies. The other message that came out loud and clear is that Asia's manufacturing market is central to the company's growth strategy.

Topics presented during the meet on manufacturing included key insights on Oracle's Value chain solutions, such as the Demand Management, PLM and Logistics solutions. Oracle's Demand Management is based on the core concept of a demand-driven supply chain, since manufacturing requires a tricky integration of cash-conversion cycle function modes. Point-of-sale data can funnel into demand planning systems, triggering supply planning programs, eventually pushing data into supplier portals. In a sense, products become bytes of data.

Oracle's PLM solution is based on an end-to-end Design-to-Release business process, which is being delivered as a Process Integration Pack (PIP). This integration supports enterprise processes that connect the Enterprise PLM Record in Oracle Agile PLM with Oracle E-Business Suite Manufacturing. The tool incorporates increased user experience and its enhanced UI includes direct support for engineering design reuse, integrated pop-ups, and significantly reduces context switching. It also includes improved New Product Development Initiatives (NPDI) and integrates with Project Portfolio Management (PPM) applications.

Oracle's Logistics solution delivers robust transportation planning and execution capabilities to manufacturing customers and third party logistics providers. It integrates and streamlines transportation planning, execution, freight payment, and business process automation on a single application across all modes of transportation, lowering transportation costs, improving customer service and asset utilization, and providing flexible, global fulfillment options.

Oracle has done well in incorporating and integrating the host of its solutions into Oracle's overall solution set, as well as significantly strengthening a number of the solution domains and application sets. The outlined broad strategy for Oracle and the applications in the manufacturing solution set included comprehensive integration into its Application Integration Architecture (AIA). The Oracle E-Business Suite Manufacturing family of applications enables users to optimize production capacity, from raw materials through final product, regardless of manufacturing methodology. A unified data model provides a single, accurate window of the manufacturing process. This speeds up the process of configuring customer orders, optimizing subcontracting, and cost, quality and compliance management.

Even though the global financial crisis has hit Asia, the growth story for Asian manufacturing remains relatively strong. Therefore, Asia, with a growing economy and expanding manufacturing industry, provides a good platform for Oracle to penetrate the manufacturing market. Overall, Oracle has added a significant amount of functionality to its manufacturing solution set, along with integration to the entire Oracle E-Business Suite through Oracle AIA. ARC believes that Oracle's COI strategy would appeal to manufacturers seeking collaborative production management solutions.